As Marvin tells the story in a coffee shop near his inner-city apartment in Perth, he admits the introduction was a strange one. ''A young bloke stopped me when he saw that I was carrying a guitar”, he explains. ''He asked me if he could see the guitar so I took it out of the case and handed it to him. He played this wonderful piece of fingering up and down the fret board and I asked him what it was”. Marvin finishes the story by lapsing into broad Geordie, an accent he has lost and replaced with a very educated English accent over the years. “That's Django Reinhardt'', replied the stranger. Marvin had never heard of the Belgian-born gypsy guitarist but decided to seek out his recordings, "I must admit I wasn't all that impressed by the quality of the recordings at the time, although the tunes he played were wonderful”, says Marvin. At that stage of his fledgling career, the teenage Marvin was more intent on becoming a rock and roll guitarist. His illustrious career with Cliff Richard and the Shadows still lay in the future, so gypsy jazz was something that moved to the back of his consciousness. A lifetime later, however, Django Reinhardt's style of playing has re-emerged, with Marvin forming a quartet with local musicians for the occasional gig around Perth. His quartet played gypsy jazz at a Sunday concert for Jazz Fremantle recently and will perform at the Bunbury International Jazz Festival next weekend. ''It's something I enjoy playing because it's so much fun, more of a hobby than a late career move”, says Marvin. Nevertheless, Marvin and his colleagues Gary Taylor on rhythm guitar, plane accordionist Nunzo Mondia and bassist Ray Martinez practice on a regular basis, and have already built up a repertoire of Django Reinhardt tunes, complete with their own arrangements.

And Marvin does not rule out the possibility of at some stage recording his Relnhardt repertoire and offering it to a record company for release.  “I originally started messing around as a gypsy guitar duo with Gary Taylor, who I Introduced to Django'' says Marvin. ''It just grew from there and we've done a few surprise gigs at places like the Jazz Cellar In Mt Hawthorn”.

Django Reinhardt was the Belgian gypsy who joined with French violinist Stephane Grappelli to pioneer this form of swing jazz in the 1930s. Under the name Le Quintette du Hot Club de France, Reinhardt and Grappelli became famous for their swinging style with fast-paced and inventive improvisations on guitar and violin.

Reinhardt's brilliant guitar work was even more stunning because he was able to make light of a serious injury to his hand that limited his ability to run up and down the freeboard to only two fingers. The other two fingers on his left hand had been left partially paralyzed after he was badly burnt in a house fire at the age of 18. Marvin admits that “What I like about it is the acoustic quality of the music and the sense of joie de vivre that comes from the playing”. Marvin admits that even guitarists with the use of all their fingers must practice hard to emulate his style. “I think that probably after the demands of gypsy jazz, I'm a better guitarist, at least technically, than I ever was'', he says.

Fans of Marvin’s playing days with The Shadows will disagree, of course.  In a career that began in the late 50s, the man with the fiesta red Fender Stratocaster guitar is regarded as one of the most Influential guitarists In the world. His clean, crisp style of playing on a string of hit records with and without Cliff Richard has inspired young guitarists all over the world. He's been credited with influencing Pete Townsend, Mark Knopfler Brian May and even Frank Zappa.

Marvin accepts the compliment graciously in conversation, and admits that he still gets people who come up to him and say how much his music meant to them. ''Even heavy metal rock stars will come up to me at airports or somewhere and say that my music was the reason they became professional musicianship”, he says. Musical legends don't set out to become that way, of course, and the 16 year-old Brian Robson Rankin never envisioned what lay before him when he set out from Newcastle with his friend and fellow guitarist Bruce Welch in 1957 to join London's music scene.  “London was the centre of the musical universe and We wanted to be part of it,'' he says. “For the first six months we were a spectacular failure and even struggled to find how we were going to buy our next meal”. Gradually, though, Marvin and Welch found themselves working in a London coffee bar called The Two I's, a hangout where musicians such as Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, Wee Willie Harris and Terry Dene (who had a big hit with A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation) were discovered.  At one stage of their development Marvin and Welch teamed up with a drummer named Pete Chester (son of British comedian Charlie Chester) to form a group called The Chesternuts. ''We recorded one song and appeared on television, but were probably, looking back, pretty terrible,'' says Marvin, laughing at the memory.

The big break came when Cliff Richard's manager came to the Two I's Club looking for a replacement lead guitarist. Someone pointed to Marvin and said “He's the one you want”. Marvin agreed to join Cliff Richard and the Drifters, as the band were then called, so long as his friend Bruce Welch could come along as rhythm guitarist. A deal was struck for a two-week tour and the new band began practicing in the lounge room of Richard's parents' home in Cheshunt. The rest, of course, is history, with the band changing their name to Cliff Richard and the Shadows (to avoid the clash with the well-known American vocal group The Drifters). At this stage Brian Robson legally changed his name, adopting the surname from American singer Marvin Rainwater. Originally he called himself Hank B. Marvin, the kind of oddball name that sounds vaguely rock'n'rollish.

After years of touring, however, Hank Marvin decided he had had enough of living in England, and looked to Australia for a new home. ''I'd played many times in Australia, and it was always Perth that seemed the most attractive city for me. My wife and l had looked to moving to somewhere like Spain, but in the end I loved Perth with its cleanliness and open spaces”. He moved to Perth in 1986, where his family lived in the semi-rural area of Brigadoon. It was far enough away from the city not to be bothered by Shadows fans, although the occasional German tourist would arrive on his doorstep to photograph the house.  Even now he avoids too much publicity about his whereabouts, and asks for his inner-city apartment, which he has lived in for about six years, not to be too easily identified. A certain cautiousness about the invasion of privacy is warranted In this age of celebrity worship, but Marvin’s modest demeanor and politeness mean he can move about without being bothered by fans, even if a branch of the Shadows' fan club exists In Perth.

At 66, his playing days with The Shadows appear to be behind him, even after his Farewell Tour of England in 2004 proved so successful that it was extended to a tour of Europe in 2005. The band had originally broken up in 1990 with a certain degree of acrimony, with his longtime colleague Bruce Welch blaming him for the break-up.  Marvin says the farewell tour was a chance to patch up differences, and to say a final thank-you to fans who had been with the band over a lifetime of concerts and recordings.    But you can't really write off a good guitarist whose creativity seems undiminished by age. Last year he completed yet another album, Guitar Man, his interpretations of contemporary songs and classics including George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps, recorded in his Perth studio. One of the original songs was written in collaboration with his son Ben Marvin.

Marvin has also recorded a couple of gypsy jazz songs for a compilation album for a London music club, which may be the beginning of a Perth- produced album in the future.  And don't write off the recording career of Hank Marvin and the Shadows. He admits that If conditions were right, there just might be something else from this universally loved British rock-pop band with the clean licks of its lead guitarist He won't however, be taking part In Cliff Richard's 50th anniversary tour of Britain this year.

In the meantime, Marvin is getting into the spirit of gypsy Jazz, learning more about the music from real gypsy musicians such as Lollo Meir, whom he met at a festival In Samois in France that specialized in the kind of jazz popularized by Reinhardt. While Reinhardt died at the age of 43, his violinist companion Grappelli continued to give concerts until the age of 89, which Perth fans can verify from his many appearances here. t's not too much of a stretch to imagine the still youthful-looking Marvin playing his hot guitar at a similar age - making good for another 20 years or so.