First of all, tell us about the monkey sticker. Does it have a particular significance?
“Well, I had this jacket that I bought from Take 6 in London. I just barely afforded it and I wore it all the time. I wanted to make it a bit different for on stage, so I started putting metal stars and things on it. Then I found these monkeys and I thought, ‘I’ll put a couple of them on, and I’ll put one on the guitar as well.’ So I put one on the guitar and it became known as the ‘Monkey’ guitar.”
And how did the idea come about to recreate the Monkey SG with Gibson?
“It’s been talked about for quite a while. When the new owners came in they said, ‘Let’s do it’ – because that is my original guitar that was on all the early albums. I had a right-handed SG, upside-down, which I strung left-handed. But I heard of this guy who’d got a left-handed SG; he was righthanded and he played his upside-down. I didn’t know him from Adam, but we arranged to meet in a carpark. It looked a bit dodgy, but I finally got a left-handed SG.
“I had a Strat, which I played mainly, and I wanted another guitar as a spare. But when we came to record the first album [Black Sabbath], I played the very first song, Wicked World, with the Strat, and the pickup went, which is weird. In those days you couldn’t just go to the shop and get a pickup, and we only had two days in the studio. So I thought, ‘I’ve got to use this SG,’ and I ended up playing several albums on it.
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