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Lot Essay
Johnny Marr received this Vintage Blonde ‘63 Telecaster Relic from Fender in 2005, after initially spotting the guitar in a Fender magazine advert and asking them to track one down. Marr told us: I really wanted one of these ’63 reissues, and the only one still available at Fender was the one that had been in the advert, so they gave me that one! I then had Tim [Mills] at Bare Knuckle change the pickups - a Bare Knuckle Country Boy at the bridge and a Yardbird at the neck – and then I put the black guard on. I wanted it to be like a punky kind of a guitar. Bare Knuckle's Tim Mills recalls that the decision was made to go with a Country Boy bridge as it's powered by Alnico 3 magnets which deliver a very pure, clean tone - something that's very much a hallmark of Johnny's sound. The combination of the Country Boy bridge with an Alnico 4 powered Yardbird neck produces a unique tone in the middle position.
Marr continued: That was the start of the sound that I was looking for… the start of the sound that I heard in my head that eventually ended up being part of the Signature Jaguar sound. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I came to make the [Johnny Marr Signature] Jaguar and I was trying to explain to Tim what I wanted from the pickups, he said “Well, what about the Yardbird pickup that you’ve got in the neck of your Telecaster, why don’t we do something that sounds like that?” So, one of the reasons why my [Signature] Jag sounds the way it does is the sort of lineage coming from this Telecaster. I wanted it to sound like a cross between PJ Harvey and the Clash.
Speaking to Jonathan Horsley for Music Radar in 2022, Marr elaborated on the punky sound that he was searching for with this Telecaster and, ultimately, with his Signature Jaguar: Obviously, there are a lot of things you can say about Telecasters, about their functionality, about the simplicity of them, the fact that like a lot of great things they got the design right straight out of the gate. The lack of unnecessary switches, options, means that they are very practical. Fewer things can go wrong on the road or onstage. They do the job very well. All of those things are part of the Telecaster’s story. But for me, if you are talking about tonality, what I was looking for from my Jag – which I wanted to bring from my Telecaster world – was from Joe Strummer, and I think that he had something going on in the Clash records which wasn’t about rockabilly or that classic kind of piercing, very present, clean, focused sound; it was that clang. That was what I wanted from the Yardbird pickup that Tim was doing at Bare Knuckle that went into my early 2000s custom ‘60s reissue… That was really important for me, that punky sound. I wanted that from a Tele. I had that association with Teles that I knew was not necessarily the thing that is usually talked about. There are a few good examples of punky Telecasters. I guess there is a no nonsense, stripped-down, to-the-point functionality about them which suits that attitude.
Notably, Marr played this ’63 Telecaster when he reunited on stage with his old friend and ex-Smiths’ bandmate Andy Rourke to play the Smiths’ classic ‘How Soon Is Now?’ together at the Manchester vs. Cancer benefit concert at Manchester's MEN Arena on 28 January 2006. Writing in his 2016 autobiography, Marr recalled: [Andy] was putting a big concert together to raise money for the Christie cancer treatment hospital in Manchester, and he invited me to join the bill… New Order were also playing, and I agreed to appear and asked Andy to come onstage to do a song with me. I put a version of The Healers together… and we did a set of some new solo songs I’d written and also a couple of Smiths songs. When it came to ‘How Soon Is Now?’, I introduced Andy onstage. It was the first time we’d played together since the final Smiths show in Brixton, and everybody in the place went wild. I was playing with my friend who I’d been in bands with since we were schoolboys… It was a good moment for us and a good moment for Smiths fans, and it put things behind us in the best way we knew how. A shot of Marr with the Blonde Tele, captured by famed music photographer Mick Rock, would later be used for a 2006 promotional campaign to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Fender.
While the Telecaster was largely laid aside for a time when Marr joined the American indie rock band Modest Mouse (he found it necessary to switch almost exclusively to the Fender Jaguar when he realised his Telecaster wasn’t going to cut it against Brock’s staggeringly loud Fender Super Six Reverb amplifiers), the guitar became a studio staple when Marr stepped into his solo era in the 2010s. The ’63 Tele can be heard on ‘Easy Money’, the lead single from Marr’s second studio album Playland (2014), the tracks ‘Rise’ and ‘Bug’ on third studio album Call The Comet (2018), and the songs ‘God’s Gift’ and ‘Hideaway Girl’ on fourth studio album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 (2022).
Marr continued: That was the start of the sound that I was looking for… the start of the sound that I heard in my head that eventually ended up being part of the Signature Jaguar sound. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I came to make the [Johnny Marr Signature] Jaguar and I was trying to explain to Tim what I wanted from the pickups, he said “Well, what about the Yardbird pickup that you’ve got in the neck of your Telecaster, why don’t we do something that sounds like that?” So, one of the reasons why my [Signature] Jag sounds the way it does is the sort of lineage coming from this Telecaster. I wanted it to sound like a cross between PJ Harvey and the Clash.
Speaking to Jonathan Horsley for Music Radar in 2022, Marr elaborated on the punky sound that he was searching for with this Telecaster and, ultimately, with his Signature Jaguar: Obviously, there are a lot of things you can say about Telecasters, about their functionality, about the simplicity of them, the fact that like a lot of great things they got the design right straight out of the gate. The lack of unnecessary switches, options, means that they are very practical. Fewer things can go wrong on the road or onstage. They do the job very well. All of those things are part of the Telecaster’s story. But for me, if you are talking about tonality, what I was looking for from my Jag – which I wanted to bring from my Telecaster world – was from Joe Strummer, and I think that he had something going on in the Clash records which wasn’t about rockabilly or that classic kind of piercing, very present, clean, focused sound; it was that clang. That was what I wanted from the Yardbird pickup that Tim was doing at Bare Knuckle that went into my early 2000s custom ‘60s reissue… That was really important for me, that punky sound. I wanted that from a Tele. I had that association with Teles that I knew was not necessarily the thing that is usually talked about. There are a few good examples of punky Telecasters. I guess there is a no nonsense, stripped-down, to-the-point functionality about them which suits that attitude.
Notably, Marr played this ’63 Telecaster when he reunited on stage with his old friend and ex-Smiths’ bandmate Andy Rourke to play the Smiths’ classic ‘How Soon Is Now?’ together at the Manchester vs. Cancer benefit concert at Manchester's MEN Arena on 28 January 2006. Writing in his 2016 autobiography, Marr recalled: [Andy] was putting a big concert together to raise money for the Christie cancer treatment hospital in Manchester, and he invited me to join the bill… New Order were also playing, and I agreed to appear and asked Andy to come onstage to do a song with me. I put a version of The Healers together… and we did a set of some new solo songs I’d written and also a couple of Smiths songs. When it came to ‘How Soon Is Now?’, I introduced Andy onstage. It was the first time we’d played together since the final Smiths show in Brixton, and everybody in the place went wild. I was playing with my friend who I’d been in bands with since we were schoolboys… It was a good moment for us and a good moment for Smiths fans, and it put things behind us in the best way we knew how. A shot of Marr with the Blonde Tele, captured by famed music photographer Mick Rock, would later be used for a 2006 promotional campaign to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Fender.
While the Telecaster was largely laid aside for a time when Marr joined the American indie rock band Modest Mouse (he found it necessary to switch almost exclusively to the Fender Jaguar when he realised his Telecaster wasn’t going to cut it against Brock’s staggeringly loud Fender Super Six Reverb amplifiers), the guitar became a studio staple when Marr stepped into his solo era in the 2010s. The ’63 Tele can be heard on ‘Easy Money’, the lead single from Marr’s second studio album Playland (2014), the tracks ‘Rise’ and ‘Bug’ on third studio album Call The Comet (2018), and the songs ‘God’s Gift’ and ‘Hideaway Girl’ on fourth studio album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 (2022).