.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This is the guitar I got when I took a trip to a guitar shop in Doncaster with Noel Gallagher, shortly after we first met in 1992. It has nine pickups and eighteen switches and is a guitar tech’s nightmare. I have no idea who built it… a madman. When I saw it in the shop, I thought: “If Kraftwerk played guitars... they would be playing this”. It finally came into its own on ‘Spirit Power And Soul’ from the album Fever Dreams Pts 1–4 and is seen in the ‘Spirit Power And Soul’ video.
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
In a 2023 interview for Gibson TV’s Icons series, Noel Gallagher hilariously recounts the May 1993 trip to Doncaster’s Music Ground that led to Johnny Marr discovering this nine pickup Stratocaster, mere days after Marr first called him out of the blue when he was handed an early Oasis demo tape: We ended up going for a drink in this pub down by the canal with Johnny Marr from The Smiths, and in he walks, Johnny Marr, and I'm just a fucking lad right… We were talking about guitars… and he's like “Where d’you get ‘em from?” I was like “Oh… there's this place in Doncaster called Music Ground,” and he’d never heard of it… He said, “Could you take us there?” And I was like “Yeah, what are you doing tomorrow?” …So we go to Doncaster, we go to Music Ground and Johnny’s like a kid in a… this one in Doncaster was a mad vintage guitar shop, they're not the same anymore, it was like an Aladdin's cave. So we go in the front door and Johnny says “Right, okay, I need to go and eat first before I shop,” so we go to a sandwich shop and he says to me, “A bit of advice… before you go guitar shopping, don't do it on an empty stomach,” and I was like [whispers] “okay,” and we went and had a sandwich and a cup of tea in a café, and then he went and bought a Stratocaster with fucking nine pickups in it, right? But I’ve still only known this guy two days, right, he's like a poster from my bedroom wall that’s come to life, and he's got this black Strat with nine pickups and he's saying “Do you think it's a bit mad?”, and I'm like “Yeah, it's mad as fuck, yeah”.
Explaining the mechanics of the guitar’s nine pickups and eighteen toggle switches, Marr told us: It sounds amazing, this guitar. Obviously, you can switch each pickup on or off, but just to add absolute torture to your guitar tech you can also switch each pickup either in or out of phase. I need a calculator to work out the permutations. Marr first put the unique instrument to use on Electronic’s second studio album Raise The Pressure, which he and Bernard Sumner co-wrote with Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos and recorded at Marr’s home studio in Manchester over a couple of years from 1994-1996. I used it on the rhythm outro of Electronic's ‘Out Of My League’, Marr told The Guitar Magazine in 1997. I figured it would give some really strange harmonics.
Marr remembered the guitar some 25 years later when messing around in the studio, pulled it out, and found that it inspired him to write electro banger ‘Spirit Power And Soul’, which became the opening track and lead single on his 2022 album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. Marr told us: I wanted to write an electro-pop song for my next album, and it turned out to be the first song I wrote for Fever Dreams. That’s why it’s track one. [Longtime collaborator] James Doviak had a sequencer groove going, and I got him to put it out through the PA. I just stood in front of these speakers and just kept moving all the switches with a tremolo on my amp, until I got this tone that I liked. And then I ended up playing this pattern that we copied for the sequencer, which, because it was so harmonic, started sounding not quite like a synthesizer, but more like a Moog than a guitar. Once I had that rhythm, I then flipped a few more switches and I came up with the riff on top, which is a bit like an epic standing-on-a-mountain riff. It’s like something from The Avengers. Marr turned a few heads when he also appeared with the wacky nine pickup Strat in the official music video for the song, which became one of the best-selling vinyl singles of 2021.
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
In a 2023 interview for Gibson TV’s Icons series, Noel Gallagher hilariously recounts the May 1993 trip to Doncaster’s Music Ground that led to Johnny Marr discovering this nine pickup Stratocaster, mere days after Marr first called him out of the blue when he was handed an early Oasis demo tape: We ended up going for a drink in this pub down by the canal with Johnny Marr from The Smiths, and in he walks, Johnny Marr, and I'm just a fucking lad right… We were talking about guitars… and he's like “Where d’you get ‘em from?” I was like “Oh… there's this place in Doncaster called Music Ground,” and he’d never heard of it… He said, “Could you take us there?” And I was like “Yeah, what are you doing tomorrow?” …So we go to Doncaster, we go to Music Ground and Johnny’s like a kid in a… this one in Doncaster was a mad vintage guitar shop, they're not the same anymore, it was like an Aladdin's cave. So we go in the front door and Johnny says “Right, okay, I need to go and eat first before I shop,” so we go to a sandwich shop and he says to me, “A bit of advice… before you go guitar shopping, don't do it on an empty stomach,” and I was like [whispers] “okay,” and we went and had a sandwich and a cup of tea in a café, and then he went and bought a Stratocaster with fucking nine pickups in it, right? But I’ve still only known this guy two days, right, he's like a poster from my bedroom wall that’s come to life, and he's got this black Strat with nine pickups and he's saying “Do you think it's a bit mad?”, and I'm like “Yeah, it's mad as fuck, yeah”.
Explaining the mechanics of the guitar’s nine pickups and eighteen toggle switches, Marr told us: It sounds amazing, this guitar. Obviously, you can switch each pickup on or off, but just to add absolute torture to your guitar tech you can also switch each pickup either in or out of phase. I need a calculator to work out the permutations. Marr first put the unique instrument to use on Electronic’s second studio album Raise The Pressure, which he and Bernard Sumner co-wrote with Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos and recorded at Marr’s home studio in Manchester over a couple of years from 1994-1996. I used it on the rhythm outro of Electronic's ‘Out Of My League’, Marr told The Guitar Magazine in 1997. I figured it would give some really strange harmonics.
Marr remembered the guitar some 25 years later when messing around in the studio, pulled it out, and found that it inspired him to write electro banger ‘Spirit Power And Soul’, which became the opening track and lead single on his 2022 album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. Marr told us: I wanted to write an electro-pop song for my next album, and it turned out to be the first song I wrote for Fever Dreams. That’s why it’s track one. [Longtime collaborator] James Doviak had a sequencer groove going, and I got him to put it out through the PA. I just stood in front of these speakers and just kept moving all the switches with a tremolo on my amp, until I got this tone that I liked. And then I ended up playing this pattern that we copied for the sequencer, which, because it was so harmonic, started sounding not quite like a synthesizer, but more like a Moog than a guitar. Once I had that rhythm, I then flipped a few more switches and I came up with the riff on top, which is a bit like an epic standing-on-a-mountain riff. It’s like something from The Avengers. Marr turned a few heads when he also appeared with the wacky nine pickup Strat in the official music video for the song, which became one of the best-selling vinyl singles of 2021.