Thanks to Yasmin Williams, Daniel Donato, and Seera's Meesh, there's veritable proof that Guitar Hero has served as a launchpad for many budding musicians to actually pick up a guitar or bass and form a band.
Inhaler’s Josh Jenkinson is another guitar player to add to that list – and in his case, obsessing over Guitar Hero and eventually picking up the guitar led him to connect with Bono’s son, Elijah Hewson, and join the Irish rockers Inhaler.
“It was Guitar Hero, funnily enough,” he says in the new issue of Guitar World about how he got started on the instrument. “All my uncles played it, and I got addicted to it. I’d be going round to their houses all the time; eventually, I got my own game console, and I couldn’t stop playing it.
“My grandma asked me why I was spending so much time pretending to play the guitar when I could just get a real guitar and try to learn how to actually play,” he adds with a laugh.
“Of course, there is no crossover from playing the game to actually playing a real guitar, so all those thousands of hours I put in didn’t really count for much, though maybe I guess it helped to get a sense of rhythm.”
Lo and behold, his grandma stepped in and booked some lessons for him – and the teacher she found managed to pique his interest from the get-go.
“He just asked me what I wanted to play, and he did that trick of teaching me songs I knew from the start. I’d never done very well at school; I couldn’t buckle down to studying and doing homework.
“I was a bit like that with the guitar for a couple of years – the teacher would [give] me something to learn, but I wouldn’t even work on it until just before the lesson. I’m sure he knew I wasn’t putting the effort in, but then I really started to get into it.”
That’s when things finally clicked. “I started to make serious strides – once I realized that the more you put in, the more you get back out of it. When I really got interested, my uncle’s girlfriend gave me her Encore Strat copy and practice amp. I played that for years.”
Jenkinson, alongside Hewson, has previously talked about why they’re not bothered by the U2 comparisons they often get, and why the latter is neither trying to sound like his dad nor trying to hide the connection.
For more from Inhaler's Josh Jenkinson, plus new interviews with Khruangbin and the Smashing Pumpkins, pick up issue 595 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
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