Here's BRIAN JONES (22) of the Rolling Stones cooling off in the summer of 1966 and showing off his cheekbones and his sitar, both of which he'd used to good effect on the group's latest single 'Paint It Black'. Bri evidently saw himself as the instrumental experimenter in the group at the time, having had a go at piano, sax, clarinet, dulcimer, marimba and koto as well as his better known brace of guitars. He was taught the sitar by an American with the unlikely sounding name of Hari Hari who'd studied with Ravi Shankar for 12 years, and learnt for example that his sitar has five main strings and 11 resonating strings (this varies from sitar to sitar). He tuned the five strings F, G, C, C and C an octave below, and then moved the 'frets' to get a suitable scale. And Brian's poor old fingers took a bashing every time he whipped out the sitar as Hari had insisted he pluck the instrument with fingers rather than the more customary plectrum. Saddest note is that the budding sitarist had but three years to live when this pic was taken.

In our picture 18-year-old CARL PALMER hits a selection of Gretsch drums with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown progressive rock group during the awfully progressive summer of 1968. The young drummer, who would go on to fame as the original P of ELP, had already passed through several beat combos at this early stage in his career; least notably the King Bees and Locomotive; most notably Chris Farlowe's Thunderbirds. With the mental Arthur Brown, however, Carl's favourite bit of the show was the eight-minute instrumental section when the players were allowed to 'stretch out' while Arthur was hosed down backstage. Palmer's set-up of Gretsch, Zildjian and Paiste had advanced in leaps and bounds since his original Eric Delaney snare drum and cymbal which he'd started with when only 12. His favourite drummers in '68 were Ginger Baker, Aynsley Dunbar, Buddy Rich and Mitch Mitchell. Wonder how his hearing fared with those great big speaker cabinets so close behind?