Rob Luft
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Rob Luft is a rising star of the European jazz guitar scene whose intricate and lyrical playing melds textures from around the world into a striking musical voice. Rob is an extraordinarily creative person and a bit of a chameleon, home with everything from soulful standards and improvised fusion madness to Balkan time signatures and the joyful lines of Congolese soukous. He has even composed and performed pieces for electric guitar with a full orchestra, which is very cool and unusual, to borrow a phrase from Martin Simpson. We talk about Rob’s formative years - growing up in the rich...
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Claire Tole-Moir: Superstar Guitar Auctioneer
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Claire Tole-Moir is Head of Popular Culture at Bonhams, the world-famous auction house in London. On a daily basis, she is in direct contact with some of the most iconic and culturally impactful works of modern art, sculpture, photography, film and artist memorabilia of the last century. So if you fancy a Man Ray photograph; a golden ticket from the original Charlie and The Chocolate Factory film; if you’ve got your eye on John Lennon’s mosaic swimming pool; or maybe Roger Moore’s silver Dupont cigar lighter, Claire and her team can make that happen for you. All you have to do is...
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Scott Gorham (Thin Lizzy)
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Lord of the Les Paul and Mariscal of the Marshall Stack, Scott Gorham shot to worldwide prominence with the legendary rock band Thin Lizzy. He created what would become known subsequently as “The Twin Guitar Attack” - a harmonised lead guitar style developed alongside players such as Brian Robertson and Gary Moore, driving home the larger-than-life persona of frontman and bass player Phil Lynott. At the height of their powers, Thin Lizzy were a world-straddling colossus of a band - hard rocking for sure but real songwriters, too. And just incredible live! I caught up with Scott at what...
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Derek Gripper
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Derek Gripper plays Malian Kora music on a vintage Hermann Hauser classical guitar...and if that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will! John Williams himself describes feeling that this was, and, I quote, "absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it." So that’s pretty cool. We talk about his work translating the music of this beautiful African harp to the nylon string guitar, and the extraordinary instruments he has used in his quest to make the music in his head come to life including 8-string guitars, fanned frets and interchangeable magnetic fretboards. Yes,...
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Jocelyn Gould
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Canadian-born Jocelyn Gould is a JUNO award-winning guitarist, vocalist, composer and professor of jazz studies who performs at the highest international levels. Jocelyn is one of those musicians that I could listen to for hours. She is a force of nature, too. She tours constantly. I was delighted to fly back from Norway in time to catch up with her in the days around her debut at one of London’s top jazz venues in Soho. Like many people, I first encountered her work online and was impressed with her lyrical phrasing and beautiful touch. However, it was at the Rocky Mountain Archtop...
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Adrian Utley (Portishead)
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Adrian Utley is one of the most versatile and creative musicians the UK has produced. His work with artists such as Jeff Beck, Patti Smith and Glenn Branca is testament to this. Shooting to prominence in the mid 1990s with Portishead, Adrian’s beautifully judged, nuanced playing - with its unique jazz and soul sensibilities - set the band apart from their contemporaries in what would become known as the trip-hop scene. Dummy, Portishead’s debut album, would go multi-platinum. The band continues to have a lasting influence in terms of production values, musicianship and sheer...
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Little Barrie Cadogan
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Barrie Cadogan (also known as "Little Barrie") is one of the world's first call electric guitarists when it comes to classic soul, rock, punk, and rhythm & blues. He has worked with some of the biggest indie artists performing today including Morrissey, Paul Weller, Edwyn Collins, Liam Gallagher, and Primal Scream. That’s a hell of a CV by anyone’s standards, but Barrie is perhaps best known for the theme music from the Netflix show 'Better Call Saul.' That glorious guitar intro? That was him! Quite simply, he is very cool. He inhabits a world of pristine big E vintage Levis, Cuban...
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Wizz Jones
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Bruce Springsteen and Thurston Moore adore his work and rightly so...Wizz Jones is a lynchpin of the UK folk blues guitar scene and has been since the early 1960s. When London was an epicenter for artists from the USA such as Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jackson C. Frank, and Bob Dylan - Wizz was right there. Wizz was also there to hear some of the first notes Davey Graham played in DADGAD tuning, to witness the impact of a young Bert Jansch on the UK guitar scene, and to run sessions at the legendary Les Cousins club in Soho’s Greek Street....
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Emma Tricca
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Emma Tricca is a massively talented singer-songwriter, a poet, and beautiful fingerstyle guitarist. Italian by birth, Emma works between Rome, London and New York making gorgeous psychedelic folk rock records - her latest is called 'Aspirin Sun' it is out now and it’s rather wonderful. You may have seen Emma on tour with such luminaries as Robyn Hitchcock, Dinosaur Jr. or Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets - that wonderful band put together to play early Pink Floyd songs. If not, then I hope this interview may serve as an introduction to some very beautiful music. What I...
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Will Ackerman
Life on the Fretboard with Michael Watts
Will Ackerman is a visionary composer, fingerstyle guitarist and producer. As the founder of Windham Hill Records, he achieved international success with his own music and that of artists such as Michael Hedges, George Winston, Alex De Grassi and others. Windham Hill’s sumptuous, detailed sound is widely acknowledged to be a milestone in the evolution of the acoustic guitar. Let’s face it: When the first D-28 rolled off the Martin Guitar Company production line, they were hardly expecting Michael Hedges! In fact, no one was...least of all Will Ackerman. In this conversation, he...
info_outlineLord of the Les Paul and Mariscal of the Marshall Stack, Scott Gorham shot to worldwide prominence with the legendary rock band Thin Lizzy. He created what would become known subsequently as “The Twin Guitar Attack” - a harmonised lead guitar style developed alongside players such as Brian Robertson and Gary Moore, driving home the larger-than-life persona of frontman and bass player Phil Lynott.
At the height of their powers, Thin Lizzy were a world-straddling colossus of a band - hard rocking for sure but real songwriters, too. And just incredible live!
I caught up with Scott at what used to be Olympic Recording Studios in Barnes (Led Zeppelin, Queen, Lizzy ... they all made records there). It’s now a cinema complex and restaurant with a private members club hidden away for those in the know.
We talk about Scott’s early exposure to the guitar and live music, his relocation from California to London, and an audition for Thin Lizzy which I suspect would have broken most of us.
We discuss the iconography of Gibson’s Les Paul model. In particular, the heavily supervised shopping trip for the mini-humbucker Deluxe model with which Scott has become synonymous. We go deep on the semantics of scratch plates, amplifiers the size of a family SUV, and what happens when your guitar gets famous without you.
But it wasn’t all gold tops, champagne and caviar, life in Thin Lizzy could be tempestuous and Scott is candid about the darker times including how golf helped with the pain of recovery from addiction. Hey, if it works… right?
We talk in depth about Scott’s secret double life as a visual artist, discuss two of the rarest materials in the universe and share a fond hope that benevolent extraterrestrial life might just have our backs after all.
Now, what no-one knew - because he had kept it a secret from the world - is that Scott Gorham is an extremely skilled artist and some of his extraordinarily detailed pencil drawings from the Thin Lizzy period have been rediscovered and are now available as fine art prints. He’s had his first gallery showing and it’s all going rather well.
You can see more here: https://scottgorhamworld.
Be advised - the language gets a little fruity as we progress. It doesn’t get too awful, but listeners with delicate sensibilities or the under-fives should proceed with caution.
This episode was brought to you by the kind sponsorship of Guitar Tech Courses. Founded by British luthier James Collins (himself a graduate of the prestigious Galloup School of Guitar Making in Michigan) and an accredited repair technician for Gibson guitars for several years now, Guitar Tech Academy offers an online archive of instructional videos covering the maintenance and set-up of just about every modern guitar design from the wrap-around bridge of a '54 Goldtop to Bigsbys, Strat and Tele bridges, acoustics and archtops, too. It’s all there.
James will guide you through the theory and practice of setting up your guitar for your playing - follow this link https://www.
Join me next time for a chat with Superstar auctioneer Claire Tole-Moir of Bonhams London, who has been responsible for the sale of iconic instruments used by Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Slash, Ian Curtis and many more!
A Fretboard Journal Podcast.
https://www.fretboardjournal.com