1992. What a year. I bought my first guitar that year. It was a red electric guitar. The reason I bought that red electric guitar was because I was in a band and I wanted to get an electric guitar instead of having to borrow one off my colleagues or sneaking the one that my dad had.
At any rate, two of my favourite guitarists used red electric guitars.
One of them is Hank B Marvin. Hank was the lead guitarist of the band, The Shadows. He has been credited with starting the Stratocaster craze in England (indeed, he was one of the first British musicians – if not the first – to own a Strat). He was also known for using an echo unit, which when combined with tugging at the tremelo bar, gave depth to the twang of the guitar. This technique can be heard on songs such as Apache, Wonderful Land, F.B.I., Man Of Mystery, Peace Pipe, and many others. I might be wrong, but I think the redness of the guitar had a lot to do with achieving that sound too.
The other guitarist is Mark Knopfler, who famously said at the Wembley Arena residency during the Brothers In Arms tour in 1985 that the only reason he bought a red electric guitar was because Hank B Marvin used a red electric guitar. Mark used the red guitar (without echo or tremelo arm) on songs like Sultans Of Swing, Les Boys, Setting Me Up, Once Upon A Time In The West, So Far Away and many other songs that he recorded with his band, Dire Straits.
So that was reason enough for me to make up my mind that my first guitar would be a red electric guitar like the ones they had. I spent almost a year saving up enough money, and then trooped over to the guitar store, asked the man selling guitars if they had any red guitars on sale that I could buy. He said, we have this one, it’s made in America, better than the made-in-Mexico one, but a bit more expensive, but this is a second model, so you can get a discount.
I had no idea what a “second model” meant. (Actually, I still don’t, but the neck of my guitar has a “2″ stamped on it.) At any rate, the price quoted was cheaper than what I thought it would cost and, with the money I’d saved, it meant that I could also afford to buy a multi-effects unit, so I could make those echoey and twangy sounds like what Mark and Hank did. So I bought both of them. And I used the red guitar at many gigs playing many songs with the band, AWOL. And years on after that too.
Incidentally, 1992 was also the year that a young singer was born. When she was a teen, she sang at various different gigs, charity shows, events, what have you. And she even appeared on TV in a series where three teen girls solved mysteries, initially called We Are R.E.M. and later truncated to R.E.M. (no, it’s not about the band from Athens, Georgia).
Last year, she got her IB diploma (that’s International Baccalaureate, not International Bachelorette), and then decided that she wanted have a bash at making music. She’s got her debut album Who Knows done, and, well, you know, the world awaits. Which was why she was in our studios this afternoon getting some snaps done.
By the way, her name’s Ming Bridges, and even though she’s pictured with a Gibby on the album liner book, we think she looks better with red. Drop us a note and tell what you think!
(And yes, that is the same guitar from 1992. We thought it would be fitting.)
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