The Sharks and Bryan Ferry guitarist reflects on the quest for good coffee and life as a Womble…
What was your first ever gig?
“That would probably be with my school group. I had a group called The Vulcans and I think it went surprisingly well. I must have been about 14 years old and I had a Höfner guitar and we played a lot of Shadows and Ventures stuff – instrumentals. We had a couple of singers, one who specialised in Cliff Richard style and the other guy sounded a bit like Eddie Cochran. The significance of The Vulcans in Sheffield was that it was a steel town and Vulcan was the god of fire. There was a statue of him on top of the town hall.”
Describe your current stage rig…
“It depends on what I’m doing. If I’m doing a rock ’n’ roll gig with a regular rock band, I’ll use a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, no pedals, although I might put a Boss tuner in. I turn the amp up to 10 and work off the volume control on the guitar. If I want it quiet and relatively clean I’ll turn it down to three or four and when I want to play a solo I just whack the guitar up to 10. For other gigs, like backing up Bryan Ferry, he tends to want more variety in the guitar sounds and so it gets a bit more complicated. So I use a Kemper and we use in-ear monitors, so there’s no noise coming off the stage. It’s not plugged into an amp or a speaker, it goes directly to the front of house or to the monitor guy at the side of the stage and he feeds my sounds back to me.
This story is from the Summer 2018 edition of Guitarist.
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This story is from the Summer 2018 edition of Guitarist.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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