That One Guitar

Scott's first real guitar was a Fender Stratocaster, which seems so wrong in his particular case. Only he had to sell it in order to cover living expenses in London. It left Scott with a Japanese Les Paul copy (black, unbranded) with which to pitch up to the audition for Thin Lizzy. The scratch plate fell off and after flailing around looking for screws on the floor, he played on, to this day preferring to play without the plate. But there and then, the iconic Lizzy twin Les Paul look & sound was created - a combination of serendipity and very savvy decision making - Phil Lynott, Brian Robertson and Brian Downey picked Scott out from the pack.  You might say the rest is history, except, as with so many legacy bands today, the Thin Lizzy bandwagon is very much rolling. Indeed, Scott gave up his other music projects a few years ago to focus fully on keeping the Lizzy legacy alive. He is waiting patiently for the stars to line up - literally - in order to get Thin Lizzy back on tour.  In the late 70s he got his hands on a vintage Les Paul for $2,300 ($10,000 today). A dealer presented him with six and his eye was immediately drawn to the sunburst model he subsequently made famous - and vice versa.  It was sold to him as a ’59 - the truly iconic year for Les Pauls, as played by Jimmy Page and later, Joe Bonamassa. As it turned out, the guitar was two years older - a ‘57, but he wouldn’t change it for anything. 

My guest for this pilot episode is Gale Paridjanian of (the magnificent) Turin Brakes. If you listen to the song Underdog (Save me) by Turin Brakes, it will tell you a lot about how Gale plays and what he brings to a song with his guitar playing. Gale is an underrated and understated guitar god - as all Turin Brakes fans know. Olly Knights, singer in Turin Brakes describes Gales playing as “the real deal since the very beginning", and also “band cheat code” which Gale & I explore further in this conversation. Gale's choice of guitar is a Charvel electric-acoustic model from his days working in the acoustic department of one of the music shops in London’s famous Denmark Street, for which he paid something like £469 (roughly £1,200 in today’s money). “It’s got my sound in it. If you plug it in it just sounds like The Optimist and that’s our sound. It’s a battle to play but there’s something about how it sounds when it’s recorded. It sounds like me”. https://www.songsommelier.com/

With his band Mogwai, Stuart Braithwaite has been making music since 1995, with 11 studio albums that have gained increasing popularity over time. In fact, their last L.P. ‘As The Love Continues’ reached the lofty milestone of #1 (in the UK album chart). The band has announced a new album, ‘The Bad Fire’, coming January 2025. Stuart plays us a riff to the new song “Lion Rumpus”, in which he plays out of his comfort zone i.e. fast!  Stuart’s guitar playing style in Mogwai is characterised by a blend of minimalism, emotion, and powerful quiet-loud dynamics. Mogwai eschew traditional structures (as well as virtuosity), instead opting for texture - building from slow-burn delicate passages to massive, wall-of-sound crescendos. Stuart’s tricks of the trade are use of open strings, multiple effects and deploying that trance-inducing trademark of post-rock: the drone. In Stuart’s words: “I’m quite minimal. I see the guitar as a way of expressing emotions. I’m never impressed by how hard something is to play. I like to play with patterns where the instruments will meet at certain times. “It’s a cacophonous thing where we’ll all play almost the same thing, but not quite, so it will be a bit wonky”.