Things became worse when we got our first electric guitars. This time I was ahead buying a second hand 62' Framus from a chap at my school, a nice piece, worn but working.It was a stratocaster type solid-body with an ivory finish, three pick-ups and a tremolo.
Instead of the standard ¼ inch plugs the coiled cable had a German 3 pin DIN plug. The sound was changed by a 4-position tone switch. Soon after I bought the guitar I changed the colour by painting the whole body in cherry red with car colour spray.
The strings we used in the beginning were flatwounds, I don't remember why but probably because they were on the guitar when I bought it. They were quite thick, difficult to bend down and they didn't brake but wore off after a time. Anyway we loved them and some of the guitar sounds on our first recordings were dominated very much by these strings. One of the few manufacturers of these strings was Krone/Regina.
Soon afterwards another electric guitar was in the house (although I don't remember how Chris got it) and now we were rocking and playing as often and as loud as we could.
We started abusing an old Philips stereo tape-recorder amplifier. It had about 4 watts of output "power" and we played through loudspeakers from an old radio that we had mounted into a bedside table.
The guitar played through the microphone-jack (or maybe even the phono input) sounded quite noisy and the sound quality at that time was surely not the main problem of our performance.
From the first day we were using plectrums to play and there was a music store in our neighbourhood supplying us with those and the other things we needed that could not be bought second hand. The variety of instruments in this shop was quite poor, mainly keyboards and organs, and some cheep guitars which were of no real use for us. But we kept purchasing strings or other small items here and we always got "special prices" from the shop-owner.