Teardrop and the Bunnymen

Watching Top of the Pops in the 1980s could be an expensive business. An edition in January of 1984 ended up costing me £449 – money well spent, as it turns out. One of my main reasons for watching the show in that era was looking out for guitars. During the 70s, there hadn’t been much to see beyond the usual suspects... Les Pauls, SGs, Strats and Teles. Great though these models are, it seemed that, during the heavy rock era, guitarists had been lacking in imagination when it came to their choice of weapons.

By the early 80s, the mainstream charts were dominated by commercial pop acts, most of them reliant on synths and increasingly computerised production techniques. None of that appealed to me. Out on the fringes, however, the ‘indie’ scene was emerging from the smoking ruins of post-punk and new wave; and one of the ways in which these bands established their alternative, left field credentials was in their use of instruments. Unfashionable brands like Gretsch and Rickenbacker began to emerge from under beds where they’d been in hiding since the mid-60s; all it took was a single TOTP appearance to bump up the value of something like an old Gretsch Chet Atkins, whose prices had been languishing in the low hundreds for over a decade.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’d begun to take an interest in electric 12-string guitars at this time, and anyone I saw or heard using them was instantly worthy of closer inspection. Echo and the Bunnymen had been around for a few years without my taking much notice of their activities, but on January 26^th, 1984, the band appeared on Top of the Pops to promote their new single, The Killing Moon. I saw at once that lead guitarist Will Sargent was using a 12-string, but what on earth was it? The teardrop shape suggested Vox, and I was intrigued by the tremolo arm, which struck me as a relatively way-out accessory to have on a guitar with tuning as unstable as a 12-string. By the time the clip was over, I knew I needed one of these. Never mind that I’d only recently acquired an electric 12-string guitar; the Vox’s cranky aesthetics had won me over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTGWU7X7JIA

Of course, I didn’t rush out and buy one: it was impossible. The Vox ‘Mk XII Acoustic’ model as sported by Sargent on TOTP had been built in the mid-60s and was no longer obtainable. The instrument had been built in Italy at the Crucianelli/ Eko factory to which the British Vox brand had been outsourcing production of its electric and acoustic guitars since early 1966. As is so often the case in guitar collecting, there’s a degree of snobbery attached to the Vox brand which insists that the British era models were in some way better than the ones produced in Italy. This smacks of covert racism, and is in any event palpable tosh. British Vox guitars were quite crude in construction, starting out as a range of literal planks (with co-axial outputs) made at a furniture factory in Deal. Even the famous Phantoms and Teardrops were relatively rough pieces of work, and much derided by guitarists at the time who pronounced them mostly unfit for purpose. The only high-profile Vox user in the mid-60s was Tony Hicks of the Hollies, who used his pentagonal-bodied Phantom 12-string on singles including Look Through Any Window and I’m Alive.

The Italian era of production saw the introduction of a semi-acoustic version of the ‘Mk’ series (better known by their unofficial designation ‘teardrop’), while others such as the Phantom, Tempest and Lynx continued in production, often augmented by wacky electronic effects originally developed for use in amps and pedals. With their bolt-on necks, these models were far from being high end instruments, but the standards of finish and playability were a distinct improvement on the British models.

During 1984, the Bunnymen were interviewed for International Musician magazine, and specific reference was made to the 12-string teardrop that had caught my eye. It was, they attested, part of a cache of ‘new old stock’ instruments that had been unearthed at the Eko factory in Italy. A small number of teardrop and phantom 12-strings had been left stranded and unsold when the tide of fashion turned against the electric 12, and these now found their way back to the UK courtesy of guitar-builder and entrepreneur Roberto Brandoni. The new old stock items found their way into London dealers and thence into the hands of mostly high-profile owners (including Will Sargent of the Bunnymen, Lloyd Cole, and the Damned’s Captain Sensible), while Brandoni subsequently began to assemble new instruments from the hundreds of unassembled bodies, necks and items of hardware that had been part of the Eko salvage operation. These instruments continue to be sold to this day.

The likelihood of one of these coveted instruments coming into my hands seemed slim indeed, but towards the end of 1984 my attention was drawn to a page advertisment in Guitarist magazine. The advertiser was an Essex-based shop called Machinehead Music, and they were advertising a Vox ‘Peardrop’ in ‘deep cherry red’. A call to the shop on Saturday 15^th December confirmed that this was the last remaining example from the Eko haul, and came complete with its original case, Vox plastic bag, and case candy. It even had the original hang-tag dangling from the headstock. It’s still there. I placed a deposit of £49 on the guitar, with the balance to be paid in cash on collection. There only remained the small problem of how to get to the shop. It took almost a month to sort this out, and I finally made the pilgrimage on Thursday 10^th January, 1985.

A closer look at some of the 'case candy' still with the guitar from when it was packed at the factory in 1967

 

Machinehead Music was located in Harlow, Essex. Its location was somewhat unusual for an instrument retailer, whose stores have always gravitated towards the bohemian, out-of-town ends of most cities. Machinehead was slap in the middle of a 1960s shopping precinct, surrounded by newsagents and hairdressers. I got there courtesy of a carload of salesmen who had some connection with my dad’s line of business and were travelling up there for some purpose. My memory of this trip is sketchy to say the least, but my diary states that I went via London, so quite where the salesmen came in, I have no idea. Either way, I found the shop without difficulty, and the deal was done. The trip also provided me with my first ever real-life glimpse of a Gretsch Country Gentleman, which was hanging horizontally on the wall. I had to enquire as to the model and was surprised when the guy told me. The colour was a kind of medium cinnamon-brown, where I’d been expecting the ‘so brown it’s black’ appearance of George Harrison’s famous example. An almost identical Gent would end up in my collection years later, and given the extent to which coincidence has formed a part of my guitar-buying activities, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the exact same one I’d seen all those years ago.

Now I had the Vox Teardrop, was it actually any good? It certainly sounded different from the Rickenbacker: the plinky-dink sound you can hear on The Killing Moon was, I believe, a blend of its amplified and acoustic tone, and suggests something more exotic like perhaps a Bouzouki. This is indeed the sound of the semi-acoustic Vox; and when the Bunnymen’s accompanying album Ocean Rain hit the shops, I already knew enough to tell on which tracks Sargent had used the Vox and which were his Rickenbacker 12-string (Seven Seas for the latter, while The Killing Moon and Silver employed the Vox).

The hang-tag: still attached after 53 years on the guitar

Where Will Sargent and others used their Teardrops in anger, mine remained a ‘case queen’, to be taken out on rare occasions but otherwise preserved in its time-capsule condition. The guitar was 17 years old when it came into my hands, and another 36 years have flown by since then. Aside from some slight yellowing of the binding through reaction with the varnish, it looked brand new – as indeed it was – and has not aged at all in the decades since then. A packing slip in the case includes the legend ‘Model 2 / 267’ which I take to refer to the month and year of its production. The same slip reads ‘color cherry’, the Americanised spelling indicating that the guitar was most likely intended for the US market.

To date, the Teardrop is the only vintage guitar I’ve ever acquired that has all this ‘case candy’ intact, and its presence adds over £500 to the instrument’s value today. The £449 I paid in 1984 equates to £1455 in today’s money, although a mint, uncirculated example like this would command something in the order of £3000 from a dealer.

The arrival of the Vox probably confirmed something I’d begun to suspect: I wasn’t just buying these guitars to play them: I was buying them because of what they were and how they looked. I’d become a collector.