Portraits Of Penge: Twang Guitars and Music Academy
A last minute cancellation threw up an unexpected deep dive.
A short while ago, I finished up a coffee in Blackbird Bakery on Penge High Street and wondered how to spend the next couple of hours after a Portraits from Penge interview had been cancelled.
I walked up and down the high street for a while, before standing and looking at Twang Guitars & Music Academy. I mean really looking. I must have walked by the shop a hundred times but, aside from wondering if they taught the flute (which they do), I never paid it much mind.
Now, with a Portraits from Penge interview slot opening up, I wondered what their story was.
I sat with owner Philip Tindley to talk about the 20-year history of the shop, and what the future holds for Twang.
An Old Chap Selling Guitars Off the Wall
“I came to this shop in 2004,” said Philip Tindley, owner of Twang Guitars and Music Academy. “At the time it was a bookshop that had a guitar shop behind it [in the area we were now sitting in]. Well, I call it a shop… it was an old chap selling guitars off the wall.”
Twang Guitars is a far cry from that now.
Guitars of all shapes and sizes adorn the walls, with the doorbell in constant use as students and customers funnel in and out.
“I ended up getting to know both the bookshop owner and the chap out back quite well, and one night at The Alexandra we were having a drink and he asked me if I’d fancy doing some teaching at the shop. I said yes, and before I knew it the two lessons a week I was doing became half a dozen, and then 27 lessons a week.”
From my brief time talking to Phil this seems very much in character. A man who has turned Twang into more and more over the years, and in doing so has done a huge amount in the local community.
But we’ll get to that.
A Human Touch in Retail
After jamming in The Alexandra and surrendering much of his time to teaching, Phil took on even more. “I had a bit of money (but not an awful lot), but enough to buy a bit of stock. So the old owner and I decided to go into partnership and run a proper guitar shop together.”
Over the next six years, Phil would watch the decline of the bookshop that sat on the original site of Twang Guitars. “You can plot the demise of the bookshop with the rise of Amazon,” said Phil. “Eventually the bookshop shifted to the back of the building, and then the remaining stock was in a box gathering dust.”
That’s not to say the life of a music shop is any easier. Twang is one of the only shops that sell instruments between Crystal Palace and Bromley; an enormous catchment area. “It’s not easy, you know?” said Phil, when I asked him about running the store. “Times are incredibly tough right now for so many people, and as much as I love it, [instruments] are a luxury. It’s not like bread and milk, people are really struggling, and that’s impacting us.”
Part of that cost is being a brick-and-mortar store; rent, bills, wages and so on. “It’s hard for us to trade against the online stores because of that, so we had to find a way to differentiate ourselves. I’ve seen so many people walk away from it all because they couldn’t make it work, they couldn’t carve a niche for themselves vs online stores.”
Phil puts it starkly; “If we were just a guitar shop, we simply wouldn’t be here anymore.”
The human touch on show is the immediate differentiator that struck me about Phil and his team. Walking around the store before our chat, I saw the staff talking to a young couple, the woman looking to get back into guitars after a long time away. They spared no detail, sold only what they needed, and received advice and assurances that you simply can’t get when ordering from a screen.
“I remember when I got my first guitar,” said Phil, as I talked about the attentiveness of his team, “and it was, politely, a piece of junk. It was horrendous, a really poor bit of craftsmanship but I didn’t know any better. I just thought a guitar was a guitar, you know?”
I did, the first guitar I ever owned sounded very similar…
“The folks who sold it to me didn’t care, I gave them £30 and went on my way. Eventually, I met someone who knew a thing or two who said “How can you play this? It’s horrible!” and explained to me what was wrong with it, and what I should be looking for if I bought another.”
That experience has driven both Phil’s and Twang’s ethos as a business. “I vowed when I started this place, that I would never just sell something to someone. I wanted them to feel respected, to feel like they could ask me for my help, and to walk out of the store with something that made them incredibly happy.”
One of the ways Phil made Twang stand out was just that; a dedicated, friendly team of experts helping anyone and everyone who walked through the doors. “We offer discounts for elderly folks,” explains Phil, “and we can get a few people coming in who are a bit lonely. That all ties into our ethos, though. We don’t see everyone who walks into the shop as a customer to sell something to, these are people, and sometimes they might just want to chat about music and have a cup of tea.”
Google Reviews of Twang paint a similar picture, with effusive praise for Phil and his team, echoing everything he’s told me so far. They also talk fondly about our next topic; the music school.
Twang Becomes an Academy
As if it wasn’t difficult enough running a retail business in the face of a tidal wave of online shopping, in 2010 Phil “decided to run a music school” on site. A decision that, I’m sure, has kept Twang open in the intervening years.
“I started to take on a few freelancer teachers at the start,” said Phil, “and now we’ve got 14 people teaching a massive range of instruments all day, every day!”
The group of teachers on the Twang Music Academy website isn't just incredibly talented; the group is also very diverse, which isn't lost on Phil. “We’ve got a lot of women who work here, not just teaching, but also in the store. We haven’t engineered that, but it has given the shop a different feeling from the kind of place I would go into as a kid where it was all big blokes with tattoos and beards! I think the parents find it reassuring and comforting, too.”
That diversity extends to the academy’s students, too, with a 50% split of both boys and girls. “It isn’t just boys playing rock’n’roll, you know? It’s such a great and talented group, with boys and girls playing any and all instruments in there.”
Phil stresses that, if people want it, the academy offers a pathway, not just lessons. “We do recitals for our academy students [the most recent of which was in Greenwich], and we hope to do a few in Penge over the festive period, maybe in Penge Congregational Church, or at Penge-mas?”
Mid-follow-up, he interrupts me, “We’re also putting on a gig at Revolution Records,” before apologising.
Phil’s energy is infectious, and it’s easy to see how his enthusiasm has helped to carry Twang to what it’s become over the years. But where were we?
“Once you start getting these people to perform you see their confidence grow, and their skills develop. Crucially, it gives people something to aim towards.”
While Twang’s students are a wide age range, I’m curious about his work with children and younger people, specifically in Penge’s community.
Leading the Charge for Music
The Alexandra Junior School, a short walk from Penge East train station, is one of several schools in the local area. It also represents the third way in which Twang is different; this is the site of the Twang Music Foundation’s pilot project in the area. From the website, the foundation’s objective is to [the bolded is my emphasis]:
Provide high-quality music workshops, one-to-one music tuition, clubs and summer schools to children and groups of young people who would otherwise not be able to access this vital means of self-expression and discovery.
Provide musical instruments to schools and students.
Host various musical fundraising events, encourage instrument donations and sell merchandise.
It’s hard to overstate how impressive it was talking to Phil, despite his rampant modesty in the face of what he and his team are doing. The Foundation, launched in April of 2023, already has a 51-strong choir at The Alexandra Junior School taken from classes across three-year groups, has already hosted a School of Rock-style afternoon at the school to allow kids to “have a bash on the drums,” and spent time repairing the school’s old instruments, donating 19 of their own guitars in the process to “make it feel like a music room should do.”
Conservative policies in the past 13 years have had wide-ranging impacts on our country, not least on our education system. “First they cut sports,” laments Phil, “and then it’s the arts. That means that kids have even less access to music than they might have done.” For Penge, the arts scene is almost entirely community-driven; with spaces having their funding cut, or not being eligible for any Arts Council funding in the first place. This means that both in schools and their wider communities, theatre, music, painting or any other forms of creative self-expression rely on the good work (and goodwill) of individuals like Phil.
“The sad thing,” said Phil, “is that so many people (adults and kids alike) are chomping at the bit to get involved with music. When kids get involved in music, the parents see a real change in them. It gives them self-confidence, happiness, and gets them excited about learning when so many of them might not be otherwise.”
The benefits of playing music are well-documented, as are the benefits of spending time in groups of like-minded people; and Twang provides people with both. It’s not lost on Phil, though, that both of these things are antithetical to modern life. “Kids have nowhere to go these days,” he said. “They can’t play football in parks, roads are so busy around here they don’t play in the streets like we used to, or ride their bikes, they just get shipped around in cars or are sat home on their phones or playing games online.
It feels like we’re all so disconnected from one another.”
And that is what Phil and Twang are both looking to remedy. Not only them, in fact, but so many people in Penge. There are people looking to support local businesses, those who are trying to promote the arts, who are trying to engage with politics, to build green spaces, or to show off the County’s most impressive street art.
For now, we should be celebrating the efforts of all of those people, Twang included, across Pengemas.
If you enjoyed this piece, please check out my interview with Southey Brewing Co and The Bridge House Theatre. Also, please consider subscribing, sharing this piece, or drop me a comment suggesting a place I could speak to next.
Really great piece, Max.