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Lot Essay
JEFF BECK’S VINTAGE TELECASTER – “IT’S JUST A GREAT WORKHORSE”
Although not the earliest acquisition in the collection, having arrived only forty years ago, Jeff’s 1950s Telecaster is perhaps notable as his longest-serving guitar in continuous use, never falling out of favour as his reliable rhythm guitar, as the other stars of the show waxed and waned. When questioned by Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht as to which, of all his instruments, he played the most, Jeff didn’t hesitate: ‘An old battered '53 Tele that I've got at home. I bought that off Seymour Duncan after the ARMS tour. As a matter of fact, my road manager bought it for a friend of his, and I told him there's no way he's having it. I said, "Tell your friend you couldn't find one. I'm having this.”’ Both Seymour and Al Dutton, the road manager in question, report that the Telecaster had been put together for Al himself, before Jeff nabbed it. ‘Six hundred dollars I slapped on the table and bought it, ‘cause it played great,’ remembered Jeff in 2011. ‘I mean, I’ve been playing Telecaster since, god knows, ’59? When I picked this up, it was like an old friend coming back. You can do almost anything on this, it’s just a simple thing, there’s no kind of trick bridges or anything, it’s just a great workhorse and it’s got the old James Burton sort of sound… it’s got a spanky kind of sound to it, which not many other guitars have… it’s got a nice tone to it.’ It's useful to note that although Jeff variously referred to the Telecaster as ’53 and ’54, he only had one vintage Telecaster, and its body is dated ’57.
‘I put together the Telecaster Jeff used,’ Seymour told Obrecht. ‘It has a [‘57] Fender body made of real light ash, and a newer, fairly chunky Fender neck. It has a 5-way switch and two Alnico II pickups – the bridge pickup is tapped. When the lever switch is all the way back in the bridge position, you get the full output from the bridge pickup. In the 2 position (going forward), you get the full output from both pickups. In the center position, you get the rhythm pickup by itself. The 4 position gets the rhythm pickup and the tap of the bridge pickup, so you get the lower output, and it's a little bit brighter. The 5 position gets the tapped, brighter sound of the bridge pickup by itself. I used two 50k pots, which allow him to roll the volume. It has a brass bridge, which fattens up the sound a little bit. He wanted it set up not too low, so that when he hits a note softly, he gets a real clean sound. Then, when he hits it a little bit harder, he can get that attack he's famous for.’
The Telecaster appears to pass into Beck’s ownership by the second ARMS Benefit Concert at the Forum, Inglewood, CA, on 6 December 1983, where it makes an appearance on stage that night. During the final ARMS Benefit Concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 8 and 9 December, Jeff’s old bandmate Ronnie Wood (who joined only for the New York shows) is first seen using the Telecaster to back Eric Clapton on rhythm guitar for his set, before passing the guitar back to Beck to play on an instrumental ‘Stairway to Heaven’ with his old friend Jimmy Page. Jeff then plays the Tele for the all-star numbers – ‘Layla’ and ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’, before switching back to his Strat or Soloist for the finale, while Ronnie once again takes up the Tele for Lead Belly’s ‘Goodnight, Irene’. The ARMS concerts, in support of ex-Faces bassist Ronnie Lane and his appeal for Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis, were notable for bringing together all three former Yardbirds guitarists - Clapton, Beck and Page – for the first time on stage. ‘The whole thing was so un-starlike,’ Jeff told Gene Santoro for Guitar World in 1985, ‘nobody played the big star, and we just loved being on the road because A) it was a good cause and B) it was a short tour, a one-time special thing, so we just got in and enjoyed the hell out of it… Because it was Jimmy, Eric and myself for Ronnie Lane, the whole thing seemed to really mean something. It was an amazing experience all over.’
Although not generally precious about his guitars, the Telecaster quickly became one of Jeff’s favourites, as he told Douglas Noble in 1993: ‘I've got a few vintage instruments but nothing like Dave Gilmour's collection. I've got one prize Fender… (lot 13) [and] I've also got a '54 Tele which I love to death and never breaks strings - it sounds beautiful!' The Fender Telecaster had been in his sights from age 12, when he saw Little Richard strumming on ‘a really nice battered-looking Tele’ in the 1956 musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It. Later it was a search for the James Burton sound that led the young Jeff to lust after his bandmate John Owen’s Telecaster in early band The Deltones before even acquiring his first Strat. ‘I would ogle this thing,’ Jeff told guitar historian Tony Bacon in 2005. ‘I spent more time playing it than he did! He put everything in motion to try and get me to get the Strat so I wouldn't keep nicking his guitar all the time… it was a perfect rhythm guitar.’ One the Strat was in the picture, Jeff lost interest in the Fender Telecaster for years, until this ’57 Tele tempted him back. ‘You go back and find the tone, the qualities, and everything about it being totally different from the Strat,’ he told Bacon. ‘It's not for kids. No whammy bar or anything like that on it. It's a real workhorse guitar, you know? It reveals all your failings and all your plus points. It's a great thing to keep you on your toes… It's a lot creamier… A magical, ethereal, creamy sound that the Strat doesn't have.’ The Telecaster would become his preferred guitar for daily practice. ‘I usually have a Tele down at my feet when I'm watching TV,’ he told Obrecht in 1985. ‘I try not to practice on one with a whammy bar, so that, later, when I'm noodling with my stage guitar, I have an extra toy to play with. I use that as a leverage for inspiration, too.’
When not actively working on his own material, Jeff kept his hand in as a prolific and in demand session guitarist, contributing to releases by the likes of Tina Turner, Roger Waters, Buddy Guy, and Jon Bon Jovi. As Jeff’s reliable rhythm guitar, the Tele would no doubt have been brought along to a great number of these session gigs over the years. Certainly, the guitar was taken to Nassau when Jeff spent three weeks recording with Mick Jagger at Compass Point Studios in 1984 for the latter’s debut solo album She’s The Boss. ‘We built the whole lot,’ Jeff told Obrecht the following year. ‘There was nothing done beforehand. He had like 16 different versions – all demos of the same tunes with different pickup bands that he'd use. I remember using… the pink guitar (lot 32) – as well as an old Tele. We had a drummer and a bass player, and we just played like a live band.’ Jeff confirmed that he used the Telecaster ‘with a bottleneck and volume swells’ on the track ‘Running out of Luck’, and for the riff throughout ‘Lucky at Love’: ‘Yeah. Tele. It was just a little line that kept refraining in my mind, so I kept it in the song.’ The Telecaster was also used during recording sessions for Jagger’s second solo album Primitive Cool at Wisseloord Studio's in the Netherlands and Right Track Recording in New York from late 1986 to early 1987. Photographs by Michael Putland show Beck playing the Telecaster during UK album rehearsals with Jagger in 1987. Putland would also shoot Jeff with the ’57 Telecaster at his East Sussex home in 1989.
Naturally, Jeff would always have a Telecaster to hand when working on his own studio albums. Before Nassau sessions for She’s The Boss, Jeff had begun working on his fifth studio album Flash, and afterwards resumed the sessions with producer Nile Rodgers at the Power Station in New York in late 1984. Although Jeff primarily used his pink Jackson Soloist on Flash, the 1950s Telecaster can be heard on the track ‘Get Workin’’. When asked by Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht about the ‘low-register chicken picking’ on the track, Jeff explained: ‘That's just slap. You block off all the strings with the palm of your hand, find the one you want, and use the first finger and thumb of the right hand to pull it. Then you bend with the left fingers, as well. That was done with the bridge pickup on a '53 Tele, with the treble rolled off.’ The Tele was seen on stage for performances of ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’ during a short Japanese tour in June 1986, which kicked off with the Sound Market Festival with Santana and Steve Lukather at the Prince Hotel in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, on 1 June 1986. Known as the Nagano Session, the open-air concert was filmed for broadcast on TBS Television, Japan. Back in the studio, Jeff again employed just two guitars on his 1989 studio album Guitar Shop – a 1960s blonde Strat put together by Seymour Duncan (lot 36) and the treasured vintage Telecaster. Speaking to Musician magazine’s Scott Isler about the album in 1989, Jeff recalled his acquisition of the instrument: ‘Seven hundred bucks – I couldn't care less. I picked it up and it felt like I got my old friend back again.’
Along with a couple of Strats, Jeff enlisted the Telecaster when he guested as guitarist on Jon Bon Jovi’s debut solo album Blaze of Glory, which doubled as a soundtrack to the 1990 Western film Young Guns II. Jeff is seen clutching the Tele alongside Bon Jovi in publicity photos shot by Marty Temme during the recording sessions at Los Angeles’ A&M Studios in late spring 1990. The Telecaster would see further soundtrack use when Jeff collaborated with Jed Leiber on their BAFTA award-winning instrumental soundtrack for the 1992 British-Australian TV miniseries Frankie’s House. ‘I used a Telecaster for “High Healed Sneakers”’, Jeff told Douglas Noble in 1993. ‘I had a great time playing slide on that, just in standard tuning with slightly raised action.’ Jeff’s then guitar tech Andy Roberts elaborated for Noble: 'The Telecaster he used on “Frankie's House” is a dirty white colour from around 1960 - again, it's got a different neck on it! He acquired that from Seymour Duncan and he's using it now when he gigs with the Big Town Playboys for [Freddie King's instrumental] “The Stumble”. Sometimes we'll set it up for slide, other times we'll have it set for regular playing - it depends what Jeff feels like on the day.’ Photographer Paul Rider shot Jeff strumming the Tele at the mixing desk for Frankie’s House at Comforts Place Studios in 1992. It’s likely that the guitar was signed by former Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps rhythm guitarist Paul Peek during Jeff’s 1995 US tour with Carlos Santana, when he invited Peek and Blue Caps backing vocalist Tommy Facenda along to the Atlanta show. Speaking to Vintage Guitar magazine in 2012, Jeff’s then guitar tech Steve Prior noted that the Tele thereafter became known among Jeff and his crew as ‘the Blue Caps guitar, because Jeff got some of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps to sign the back of it.’
Interviewed by Paul Guy for Fuzz following the release of his 2001 album You Had It Coming, Jeff spoke generally about the Fender Telecaster, noting that it was the only instrument other than his favourite white Strat that he would regularly play: ‘The only other one, to deviate a bit, would be a Telecaster, because that’s got a distinctly different sound, and a totally different feel to play it. As different as, say, a Gretsch, or something like that. It’s got the same neck feel, but everything else is different - the way it plays, it just makes you play different.’ By this time, Jeff had also acquired a ’51 Reissue Nocaster, so it’s difficult to discern which ‘Telecaster’ was used on the album track ‘Rosebud’. Filmed in March 2002, Jeff is seen accompanying Van Morrison on the vintage Telecaster for an incredible live jam of ‘Rambler’s Blues’ and Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long Blues’ at Abbey Road Studios for the 2003 PBS documentary feature Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Red, White & Blues, the sixth of seven feature-length films executive produced by Scorsese exploring how the blues deeply influenced music around the world. Evidently still in everyday use, the guitar can also be spotted leaning against the sofa in Jeff’s home studio in the 2009 documentary Rock Prophecies about rock photographer Robert M. Knight. The following year, Rolling Stone photographed Jeff relaxing at his East Sussex home with old friend Eric Clapton ahead of their historic co-headlining tour in February 2010, the well-loved Tele apparently just laid down within arm’s reach on the coffee table. Noting that it was Clapton who noodled on the Tele that wintry morning, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke recalled the scene: ‘The guitarists warm themselves with hot tea and toasted cheese sandwiches as they talk and fire licks at each other on instruments from Beck’s collection. Beck plays some T-Bone Walker and a piece of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” on a white Stratocaster; Clapton jumps in with stinging runs on a gorgeously weathered 1954 Telecaster.’
Speaking to Tony Bacon in 2005 for his book Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster, Jeff reflected on what made the instrument special: ‘It's such a simple guitar, the Tele, but it still sounds different whoever plays it… I remember some classical guitarist saying on TV, publicly saying, "Oh, this guitar, this Telecaster, means nothing—you could have any old shape bit of wood and pickup, they all sound the same." Complete bollocks. Complete and utter rubbish. To him it may sound the same, but we know differently.’
Although not the earliest acquisition in the collection, having arrived only forty years ago, Jeff’s 1950s Telecaster is perhaps notable as his longest-serving guitar in continuous use, never falling out of favour as his reliable rhythm guitar, as the other stars of the show waxed and waned. When questioned by Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht as to which, of all his instruments, he played the most, Jeff didn’t hesitate: ‘An old battered '53 Tele that I've got at home. I bought that off Seymour Duncan after the ARMS tour. As a matter of fact, my road manager bought it for a friend of his, and I told him there's no way he's having it. I said, "Tell your friend you couldn't find one. I'm having this.”’ Both Seymour and Al Dutton, the road manager in question, report that the Telecaster had been put together for Al himself, before Jeff nabbed it. ‘Six hundred dollars I slapped on the table and bought it, ‘cause it played great,’ remembered Jeff in 2011. ‘I mean, I’ve been playing Telecaster since, god knows, ’59? When I picked this up, it was like an old friend coming back. You can do almost anything on this, it’s just a simple thing, there’s no kind of trick bridges or anything, it’s just a great workhorse and it’s got the old James Burton sort of sound… it’s got a spanky kind of sound to it, which not many other guitars have… it’s got a nice tone to it.’ It's useful to note that although Jeff variously referred to the Telecaster as ’53 and ’54, he only had one vintage Telecaster, and its body is dated ’57.
‘I put together the Telecaster Jeff used,’ Seymour told Obrecht. ‘It has a [‘57] Fender body made of real light ash, and a newer, fairly chunky Fender neck. It has a 5-way switch and two Alnico II pickups – the bridge pickup is tapped. When the lever switch is all the way back in the bridge position, you get the full output from the bridge pickup. In the 2 position (going forward), you get the full output from both pickups. In the center position, you get the rhythm pickup by itself. The 4 position gets the rhythm pickup and the tap of the bridge pickup, so you get the lower output, and it's a little bit brighter. The 5 position gets the tapped, brighter sound of the bridge pickup by itself. I used two 50k pots, which allow him to roll the volume. It has a brass bridge, which fattens up the sound a little bit. He wanted it set up not too low, so that when he hits a note softly, he gets a real clean sound. Then, when he hits it a little bit harder, he can get that attack he's famous for.’
The Telecaster appears to pass into Beck’s ownership by the second ARMS Benefit Concert at the Forum, Inglewood, CA, on 6 December 1983, where it makes an appearance on stage that night. During the final ARMS Benefit Concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 8 and 9 December, Jeff’s old bandmate Ronnie Wood (who joined only for the New York shows) is first seen using the Telecaster to back Eric Clapton on rhythm guitar for his set, before passing the guitar back to Beck to play on an instrumental ‘Stairway to Heaven’ with his old friend Jimmy Page. Jeff then plays the Tele for the all-star numbers – ‘Layla’ and ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’, before switching back to his Strat or Soloist for the finale, while Ronnie once again takes up the Tele for Lead Belly’s ‘Goodnight, Irene’. The ARMS concerts, in support of ex-Faces bassist Ronnie Lane and his appeal for Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis, were notable for bringing together all three former Yardbirds guitarists - Clapton, Beck and Page – for the first time on stage. ‘The whole thing was so un-starlike,’ Jeff told Gene Santoro for Guitar World in 1985, ‘nobody played the big star, and we just loved being on the road because A) it was a good cause and B) it was a short tour, a one-time special thing, so we just got in and enjoyed the hell out of it… Because it was Jimmy, Eric and myself for Ronnie Lane, the whole thing seemed to really mean something. It was an amazing experience all over.’
Although not generally precious about his guitars, the Telecaster quickly became one of Jeff’s favourites, as he told Douglas Noble in 1993: ‘I've got a few vintage instruments but nothing like Dave Gilmour's collection. I've got one prize Fender… (lot 13) [and] I've also got a '54 Tele which I love to death and never breaks strings - it sounds beautiful!' The Fender Telecaster had been in his sights from age 12, when he saw Little Richard strumming on ‘a really nice battered-looking Tele’ in the 1956 musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It. Later it was a search for the James Burton sound that led the young Jeff to lust after his bandmate John Owen’s Telecaster in early band The Deltones before even acquiring his first Strat. ‘I would ogle this thing,’ Jeff told guitar historian Tony Bacon in 2005. ‘I spent more time playing it than he did! He put everything in motion to try and get me to get the Strat so I wouldn't keep nicking his guitar all the time… it was a perfect rhythm guitar.’ One the Strat was in the picture, Jeff lost interest in the Fender Telecaster for years, until this ’57 Tele tempted him back. ‘You go back and find the tone, the qualities, and everything about it being totally different from the Strat,’ he told Bacon. ‘It's not for kids. No whammy bar or anything like that on it. It's a real workhorse guitar, you know? It reveals all your failings and all your plus points. It's a great thing to keep you on your toes… It's a lot creamier… A magical, ethereal, creamy sound that the Strat doesn't have.’ The Telecaster would become his preferred guitar for daily practice. ‘I usually have a Tele down at my feet when I'm watching TV,’ he told Obrecht in 1985. ‘I try not to practice on one with a whammy bar, so that, later, when I'm noodling with my stage guitar, I have an extra toy to play with. I use that as a leverage for inspiration, too.’
When not actively working on his own material, Jeff kept his hand in as a prolific and in demand session guitarist, contributing to releases by the likes of Tina Turner, Roger Waters, Buddy Guy, and Jon Bon Jovi. As Jeff’s reliable rhythm guitar, the Tele would no doubt have been brought along to a great number of these session gigs over the years. Certainly, the guitar was taken to Nassau when Jeff spent three weeks recording with Mick Jagger at Compass Point Studios in 1984 for the latter’s debut solo album She’s The Boss. ‘We built the whole lot,’ Jeff told Obrecht the following year. ‘There was nothing done beforehand. He had like 16 different versions – all demos of the same tunes with different pickup bands that he'd use. I remember using… the pink guitar (lot 32) – as well as an old Tele. We had a drummer and a bass player, and we just played like a live band.’ Jeff confirmed that he used the Telecaster ‘with a bottleneck and volume swells’ on the track ‘Running out of Luck’, and for the riff throughout ‘Lucky at Love’: ‘Yeah. Tele. It was just a little line that kept refraining in my mind, so I kept it in the song.’ The Telecaster was also used during recording sessions for Jagger’s second solo album Primitive Cool at Wisseloord Studio's in the Netherlands and Right Track Recording in New York from late 1986 to early 1987. Photographs by Michael Putland show Beck playing the Telecaster during UK album rehearsals with Jagger in 1987. Putland would also shoot Jeff with the ’57 Telecaster at his East Sussex home in 1989.
Naturally, Jeff would always have a Telecaster to hand when working on his own studio albums. Before Nassau sessions for She’s The Boss, Jeff had begun working on his fifth studio album Flash, and afterwards resumed the sessions with producer Nile Rodgers at the Power Station in New York in late 1984. Although Jeff primarily used his pink Jackson Soloist on Flash, the 1950s Telecaster can be heard on the track ‘Get Workin’’. When asked by Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht about the ‘low-register chicken picking’ on the track, Jeff explained: ‘That's just slap. You block off all the strings with the palm of your hand, find the one you want, and use the first finger and thumb of the right hand to pull it. Then you bend with the left fingers, as well. That was done with the bridge pickup on a '53 Tele, with the treble rolled off.’ The Tele was seen on stage for performances of ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’ during a short Japanese tour in June 1986, which kicked off with the Sound Market Festival with Santana and Steve Lukather at the Prince Hotel in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, on 1 June 1986. Known as the Nagano Session, the open-air concert was filmed for broadcast on TBS Television, Japan. Back in the studio, Jeff again employed just two guitars on his 1989 studio album Guitar Shop – a 1960s blonde Strat put together by Seymour Duncan (lot 36) and the treasured vintage Telecaster. Speaking to Musician magazine’s Scott Isler about the album in 1989, Jeff recalled his acquisition of the instrument: ‘Seven hundred bucks – I couldn't care less. I picked it up and it felt like I got my old friend back again.’
Along with a couple of Strats, Jeff enlisted the Telecaster when he guested as guitarist on Jon Bon Jovi’s debut solo album Blaze of Glory, which doubled as a soundtrack to the 1990 Western film Young Guns II. Jeff is seen clutching the Tele alongside Bon Jovi in publicity photos shot by Marty Temme during the recording sessions at Los Angeles’ A&M Studios in late spring 1990. The Telecaster would see further soundtrack use when Jeff collaborated with Jed Leiber on their BAFTA award-winning instrumental soundtrack for the 1992 British-Australian TV miniseries Frankie’s House. ‘I used a Telecaster for “High Healed Sneakers”’, Jeff told Douglas Noble in 1993. ‘I had a great time playing slide on that, just in standard tuning with slightly raised action.’ Jeff’s then guitar tech Andy Roberts elaborated for Noble: 'The Telecaster he used on “Frankie's House” is a dirty white colour from around 1960 - again, it's got a different neck on it! He acquired that from Seymour Duncan and he's using it now when he gigs with the Big Town Playboys for [Freddie King's instrumental] “The Stumble”. Sometimes we'll set it up for slide, other times we'll have it set for regular playing - it depends what Jeff feels like on the day.’ Photographer Paul Rider shot Jeff strumming the Tele at the mixing desk for Frankie’s House at Comforts Place Studios in 1992. It’s likely that the guitar was signed by former Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps rhythm guitarist Paul Peek during Jeff’s 1995 US tour with Carlos Santana, when he invited Peek and Blue Caps backing vocalist Tommy Facenda along to the Atlanta show. Speaking to Vintage Guitar magazine in 2012, Jeff’s then guitar tech Steve Prior noted that the Tele thereafter became known among Jeff and his crew as ‘the Blue Caps guitar, because Jeff got some of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps to sign the back of it.’
Interviewed by Paul Guy for Fuzz following the release of his 2001 album You Had It Coming, Jeff spoke generally about the Fender Telecaster, noting that it was the only instrument other than his favourite white Strat that he would regularly play: ‘The only other one, to deviate a bit, would be a Telecaster, because that’s got a distinctly different sound, and a totally different feel to play it. As different as, say, a Gretsch, or something like that. It’s got the same neck feel, but everything else is different - the way it plays, it just makes you play different.’ By this time, Jeff had also acquired a ’51 Reissue Nocaster, so it’s difficult to discern which ‘Telecaster’ was used on the album track ‘Rosebud’. Filmed in March 2002, Jeff is seen accompanying Van Morrison on the vintage Telecaster for an incredible live jam of ‘Rambler’s Blues’ and Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long Blues’ at Abbey Road Studios for the 2003 PBS documentary feature Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Red, White & Blues, the sixth of seven feature-length films executive produced by Scorsese exploring how the blues deeply influenced music around the world. Evidently still in everyday use, the guitar can also be spotted leaning against the sofa in Jeff’s home studio in the 2009 documentary Rock Prophecies about rock photographer Robert M. Knight. The following year, Rolling Stone photographed Jeff relaxing at his East Sussex home with old friend Eric Clapton ahead of their historic co-headlining tour in February 2010, the well-loved Tele apparently just laid down within arm’s reach on the coffee table. Noting that it was Clapton who noodled on the Tele that wintry morning, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke recalled the scene: ‘The guitarists warm themselves with hot tea and toasted cheese sandwiches as they talk and fire licks at each other on instruments from Beck’s collection. Beck plays some T-Bone Walker and a piece of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” on a white Stratocaster; Clapton jumps in with stinging runs on a gorgeously weathered 1954 Telecaster.’
Speaking to Tony Bacon in 2005 for his book Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster, Jeff reflected on what made the instrument special: ‘It's such a simple guitar, the Tele, but it still sounds different whoever plays it… I remember some classical guitarist saying on TV, publicly saying, "Oh, this guitar, this Telecaster, means nothing—you could have any old shape bit of wood and pickup, they all sound the same." Complete bollocks. Complete and utter rubbish. To him it may sound the same, but we know differently.’