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Lot Essay
This is the first pro guitar that I owned. I always wanted a Les Paul since I was a kid, because Marc Bolan played one and he was my first hero. I loved the look of the black one and I took the pick guard off it. I bought the Les Paul from A1 Repairs, which was the guitar shop that everyone knew in Manchester. I made the money to pay for it from buying clothes on the Kings Road in London and selling them to my mates in Manchester. At this point, I was in a band called Freak Party. The amazing thing about this guitar is that a year after this photograph was taken, in 1982, I traded it in for a different one, and I'd not set eyes on it for over forty years when a guitar tech friend of mine found it in a shop in Southport. He suspected it was mine, identified it and I bought it back.
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
In conversation with author Martin Kelly for Marr’s Guitars, Marr laid out why his first serious guitar simply had to be a Les Paul: I loved all guitars but started getting together my own taste, my own individuality, aged around fourteen or fifteen, and that coincided with punk. I always wanted a Les Paul, which went back to liking Marc Bolan. He really put it into my mind that the Les Paul was the most desirable guitar. But then a lot of the punk guitar players that I started to see were also playing Les Pauls… Eventually, I got together enough money to buy a sunburst Satellite Les Paul copy. That did me for a couple of years, and I started to get good on that. [It] was as close as I could get to James Williamson's 1973 Les Paul Custom. After hearing Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, and with my love of Marc Bolan, no other guitar was going to compete with a Les Paul.
Marr went on to chronicle his history with this guitar: The first guitar in [Marr’s Guitars] is my black Les Paul Standard and I got it when I was seventeen. I was with my girlfriend Angie, who's now my wife, and we'd got into the habit of going down to the King's Road in London and buying clothes wholesale, then bringing them back to Manchester and selling them to our mates. Eventually, the two of us saved enough money to buy a second-hand Les Paul Standard and a Fender Twin Reverb amp (lot 6). That was the first guitar I ever bought from A1 Repairs in Manchester. I would end up buying quite a few important ones from that shop over the years. My best pal for a long time was Andy Rourke, who later became the bass player in The Smiths, and me and Andy would jam for hours. Me getting the black Les Paul coincided with Andy switching to bass, and I was coming up with a lot of ideas for songs and riffs… I formed my own band, with Andy on bass, and we were doing a lot of power pop stuff… That was my apprenticeship as a writer and a guitar player, playing other people's songs. It was a good learning experience.
I think I did have a feeling that I was onto something, Marr continued. I remember having that feeling because I told all my mates, “I'm disappearing for a bit”. And I had a year zero, where I completely isolated myself. There was just me and Angie and the black Les Paul, and I went back to my parents' house and back to the drawing board. I treated my bedroom, my record player and my Fender Twin Reverb like a laboratory. I used a TEAC tape machine, which you could overdub on by just plugging into the front of it. I took all these concepts that I had and just did it all on the guitar, with no drum machine or effects. If I wanted to put a beat down, I would do it by scratching rhythm on the strings. That would give me my drum sound… I started experimenting, trying to find what I was feeling like, and those experiments turned into the early Smiths songs.
Marr would eventually trade his 1980 Les Paul Standard for a Gretsch Super Axe (see next lot) when he formed The Smiths in 1982. Some forty years later, guitar technician Richard Henry discovered an identical 1980 Les Paul Standard in a Southport record shop less than fifty miles outside Manchester that appeared to match photographs he had seen of Marr’s first Les Paul. Marr positively identified the guitar as the same much-loved Les Paul he had owned while honing his craft in the early 1980s and bought it back for its sentimental value.
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
In conversation with author Martin Kelly for Marr’s Guitars, Marr laid out why his first serious guitar simply had to be a Les Paul: I loved all guitars but started getting together my own taste, my own individuality, aged around fourteen or fifteen, and that coincided with punk. I always wanted a Les Paul, which went back to liking Marc Bolan. He really put it into my mind that the Les Paul was the most desirable guitar. But then a lot of the punk guitar players that I started to see were also playing Les Pauls… Eventually, I got together enough money to buy a sunburst Satellite Les Paul copy. That did me for a couple of years, and I started to get good on that. [It] was as close as I could get to James Williamson's 1973 Les Paul Custom. After hearing Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, and with my love of Marc Bolan, no other guitar was going to compete with a Les Paul.
Marr went on to chronicle his history with this guitar: The first guitar in [Marr’s Guitars] is my black Les Paul Standard and I got it when I was seventeen. I was with my girlfriend Angie, who's now my wife, and we'd got into the habit of going down to the King's Road in London and buying clothes wholesale, then bringing them back to Manchester and selling them to our mates. Eventually, the two of us saved enough money to buy a second-hand Les Paul Standard and a Fender Twin Reverb amp (lot 6). That was the first guitar I ever bought from A1 Repairs in Manchester. I would end up buying quite a few important ones from that shop over the years. My best pal for a long time was Andy Rourke, who later became the bass player in The Smiths, and me and Andy would jam for hours. Me getting the black Les Paul coincided with Andy switching to bass, and I was coming up with a lot of ideas for songs and riffs… I formed my own band, with Andy on bass, and we were doing a lot of power pop stuff… That was my apprenticeship as a writer and a guitar player, playing other people's songs. It was a good learning experience.
I think I did have a feeling that I was onto something, Marr continued. I remember having that feeling because I told all my mates, “I'm disappearing for a bit”. And I had a year zero, where I completely isolated myself. There was just me and Angie and the black Les Paul, and I went back to my parents' house and back to the drawing board. I treated my bedroom, my record player and my Fender Twin Reverb like a laboratory. I used a TEAC tape machine, which you could overdub on by just plugging into the front of it. I took all these concepts that I had and just did it all on the guitar, with no drum machine or effects. If I wanted to put a beat down, I would do it by scratching rhythm on the strings. That would give me my drum sound… I started experimenting, trying to find what I was feeling like, and those experiments turned into the early Smiths songs.
Marr would eventually trade his 1980 Les Paul Standard for a Gretsch Super Axe (see next lot) when he formed The Smiths in 1982. Some forty years later, guitar technician Richard Henry discovered an identical 1980 Les Paul Standard in a Southport record shop less than fifty miles outside Manchester that appeared to match photographs he had seen of Marr’s first Les Paul. Marr positively identified the guitar as the same much-loved Les Paul he had owned while honing his craft in the early 1980s and bought it back for its sentimental value.