So are you still favouring Kinman pickups on the Stratocasters that you use today? Once you were all playing, it wasn’t really that noticeable, but back then, people’s sound quality expectations weren’t what they are now.”
“It depended on the venue, particularly when they used the dimmers on the lights, as that seemed to affect the noise tremendously – it was really ‘frying tonight’. How much of a problem was noise in the early days? Whether Fender had stopped making them at that point I’ve really no idea, but that’s the story we were told and accepted.”
“Well, I asked, and they said they couldn’t get the maple necks. Our pick of the best Fender Stratocasters (opens in new tab)Īs you preferred the feel, why didn’t you go back to an all-maple neck? We did get newer guitars as ours got a bit bashed or whatever, and they’d take those back and do whatever they do with them, probably renovated and sold them, I guess.” "There were at least two, maybe three sets going through from then until 1963. We just thought a Strat’s a Strat, and if there was a problem they would obviously fix it – you know, rough frets or anything like that – but we didn’t get to choose them ourselves they picked out two guitars and a bass for us. And I just preferred the feel of that original guitar, which was a particularly nice instrument with a nice fingerboard.”ĭid you get a choice of the guitars that Jennings supplied? When I got the rosewood ’board, it just sounded a bit different to me. “I preferred the maple neck it was a better guitar, I thought, with a particularly good sound. So which did you prefer at the time, the maple-neck Strat or the rosewood ’board? I preferred the maple neck it was a better guitar It could have been two weeks later, or a track could have been sitting around for months.”
HANK MARVIN STRATOCASTER TV
“The first session? Good question, but I can’t remember! When we did the Crackerjack TV show playing The Frightened City and FBI we had those guitars, but we didn’t necessarily record and release things immediately. What were the first recordings the rosewood Strat was on? Cliff liked the look of them, so he said: ‘I’ll get this one sprayed white, so when we’re working together and I use it, it’ll look really cool’.” We didn’t have the red ones as well, so I think they took them back and sprayed them for us. "I know we had white Burns guitars, but before that, we had white Fenders during the time that Licorice was playing bass. That would have been 1961, and I think we had them sprayed white for a while. They gave me one as well with a rosewood fingerboard, so the original went back to Cliff. Then they said we could have red Strats and a bass, and we thought great, that would be a good look. Initially, I still had that first guitar, so Bruce and Jet got the Jazzmaster and Precision Bass. “Yeah, well, when Jennings became the importers of Fender equipment once the trade embargo was lifted, they wanted us to use Fenders. That particular guitar went back to Cliff, and he had it sprayed white for a while? I found it difficult to adjust to the effort.” Unfortunately, the strings were really heavy I was told back in the '70s that they were sent out then with 0.013 to 0.056 gauge or something like that, with a 0.026 wound third, so they were much heavier than I was used to. "We just looked at it for a while, then took it out of the case, tuned it up and played it. The three pickups, the white scratchplate, the red guitar, the beautiful birdseye maple neck and all the gold plating, it just looked sensational. It was like something from space, really, it was so futuristic in its design. “Very! It came in a tweed Fender case with the red plush lining and this magnificent-looking thing was just lying inside. But apparently they never had any such colour it was Fiesta Red – anyway, we ordered that in what was pretty much the top-of- the-range specification.” For some reason, we always thought it was called Flamingo Pink. We could see that Buddy’s guitar was the Stratocaster and as that was their top-of-the-range model, we assumed that James Burton would also have one. "It was great looking, and we liked the sound of it, and we’d heard that James Burton used a Fender, so we got a catalogue from the States. We decided that the Fender was the way to go, because we’d seen Buddy Holly with one on the Crickets album cover, and it was pretty cool. My Antoria had a horribly bent neck, so Cliff wanted to buy me a good guitar. “That first Strat made an appearance in 1959.
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