Vox (Un)pop

 

The Vox Marauder: an axe for a Goody

There are a great many candidates for worst guitar of all time, and I’m afraid to say I own a few of them. Judged in purely aesthetic terms, it’s hard to think of an uglier axe than Russsia's Tonika, a product of the accordion factories of Rostov-on-Don after they switched, belatedly, to producing guitars sometime in the late 1960s. It’s also virtually unplayable, with ‘washing-line’ action (so high you could hang the clothes out), a horrible neck and some unremarkable electrics. But the Tonika, despite figuring in my personal collection, is not the subject of this post.

During the 1980s, I made occasional trips to London on business, and would always contrive to find time for a trawl through the guitar shops of Soho, clustered around the Charing Cross Road and, principally, London’s one time tin pan alley, Denmark Street. Around 1988, I looked into Macari’s (still trading to this day) and there set eyes on a genuine oddity – odd, angular, decorated with ‘veg-o-matic’ push button controls (a term I’d learned from reading the ‘Teisco Del Rey’ column in Guitar magazine), it looked as if some amateur luthier had attempted to construct a guitar body using only straight lines. My first thought was of a Telecaster gone wrong. Vox toyed with a Tele-style guitar during the mid-60s but the model appears not to have advanced beyond the prototype stage, perhaps in fear of legal action from Fender. 

The thing in Macari’s was black, and bore the name ‘Marauder’ in Hard Day’s Night style lettering on the peghead. The maker’s name was stamped into the ash-tray pickup cover, which concealed a three-saddle bridge, two design features that strongly hinted at the model’s Telecaster origins. I didn’t take it down, but I later made a quick (and somewhat inaccurate) sketch of the guitar from memory. It would be a long time before I came across another. 

The Marauder was the last gasp of the original Vox company, who had shifted production from Dartford, Kent to the Italian Eko factory during 1966. Collectors have always favoured Vox guitars from the British era of production, despite their often questionable quality, and the Italian models were all of a much higher standard.

By 1967 worldwide demand for electric guitars was beginning to tail off from its peak in ‘64/’65, and several manufacturers were feeling the pinch, Vox amongst them. Given the circumstances, it’s hard to imagine how they managed to come up with a model as rabidly uncommercial as the Marauder: maybe it was a cheap, last-ditch attempt to use up surplus parts: some of the models employed the ‘special 6’ circuitry that had previously appeared on the Phantom and ‘Mk’ (teardrop) models. The ‘bog standard’ model (which appears to be slightly rarer) was a simplistic 2-pickup job, identical to its ‘superior’ sibling in all respects save the bank of push-button controls and tone-modification circuit that made up the ‘special’ stage of the electrics on the latter.

Like the Model T Ford, the Marauder came in a choice of colours: black or black. With a black plastic pickguard, this made for a relatively austere look. Other colours occasionally come up for sale, but these are all, without exception, refinished examples.

I’ve heard it claimed that the unusual body shape refers to the model’s name and was intended to be suggestive of an axe, and, it must have been around the same time that guitarists began referring to their instruments as ‘axes’. Whatever it was meant to look like, the Marauder was a far cry from the angular cool of Vox’s five-sided Phantom or the lute-like elegance of the so-called ‘Teardrop’ models. It doesn’t appear to have been made in great quantities, and nobody of consequence has ever been seen with one, aside from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who weilded a Marauder in the video for the single ‘Something Changed’. The band must have liked the mis-shapen instrument, because it even got a name check on the credits for the ‘Different Class’ album. But nobody else seemed to care. The only other notable user I’ve ever come across is, believe it or not, one of the Goodies – specifically, Graeme Garden, who can be seen miming with one in a short sequence where the trio appear as Beatle knock-offs ‘The Bootles’ in the comedy special ‘Goodies Rule UK’ (pictured at the top of this blog). The Garden example appears to have a chrome pickguard, so it could easily have been a prototype, as most production examples have the standard black plastic guard (like the Phantom pickguards, it’s prone to warp and split).

Vox made the Marauder for a mere eighteen months between April 1967 and September 1968 when the company filed for bankruptcy. The model was designed by Bob Pearson, who would later collaborate with British legend Jim Burns on an equally short-lived range of Hayman-branded instruments. A bass version appears to have been produced, but I’ve seen only one such example online, and all other sightings have been of the 6-string model in its aforementioned variants: basic and ‘special’. Bodies, necks and scratchplates were manufactured in Italy, but the models were assembled at the Vox factory in Dartford, where one presumes the ‘advanced’ circuitry was added, making use of components and effects found on Vox amps and pedals of the era.  

 

A closer look at the Marauder's control layout

To guitarists of the mid-60s, the option of built-in fuzz (alongside tone-boosting circuitry) must have been something of an attraction, and the fuzz unit in the Marauder ‘special’ models sounds pretty much like any typical mid-60s germanium pedal. The other push-button controls offer top boost, mid boost, ‘treble’ and ‘bass’ settings, while a separate knob (missing on my own example) dials in various mid-range boost options. The tone is boxy, and on the treble boost settings, quite alarmingly shrill. But by far the most insane option on offer is the ‘repeat’ control: this is, essentially, tremelo in extremis (with a square waveform), and the control causes the guitar’s output to ‘stutter’ in a rhythmic fashion, the rate adjustable via a rotary control. There’s no conventional way in which the effect can reasonably be employed, but one has to bear in mind that this was a guitar of 1967: conventions in pop music were being challenged on all fronts, so why shouldn’t a guitar stutter? All this gubbins necessitated a 9V battery in the back of the guitar, so the circuitry can be considered as an early form of pre-amp.

I came across not one but two of these beasts around twenty years ago when I used to scour listings magazines online for anyone selling interesting guitar junk. Ebay had barely got started, and my go-to website was the online edition of London ad magazine ‘Loot’. And it was to London that I travelled in pursuit of these items of questionable merit. The same seller owned two examples, one in stripped-down condition, but with a fully equipped control panel, which I later sold on. The other was in more or less original condition and, barring a few crackles, is stillworking two decades later. From the same source, a year or so later, I acquired another oddity next to which the Marauder seemed almost sane – but I’ll return to that in a future post.

The Vox Marauder is an oddity: unloved, mis-shapen, launched at the wrong time, currently languishing in near total obscurity, with few fans aside from the odd dedicated Vox-nut prepared to cut his favourite manufacturer some slack. They rarely come up for sale: I’ve seen maybe two or three on ebay in more than ten years, but a handful of examples have come and gone in recent times on the dedicated gear sales website Reverb. In America, they’re exceedingly rare, and one sold over there for around £2,500. At time of writing, a Vox specialist in Denmark is offering a clean original example for around £4,000, a price that suggests that he’d rather like to hang onto it. Here in Britain, Gardiner-Houlgate sold one in December 2020 which realised a respectable £1250 (on top of which the buyer would have paid an additional £250 premium, so that’s really £1500).

I’ve still got mine: it lived in the garage for about six months but was swiftly brought indoors when I found mould growing on it. If ever a guitar was meant to go mouldy in its old age, it’s the Vox Marauder. It’s certainly a candidate for one of the worst-looking guitars of all time, but in its push-button, fuzz-equipped incarnation it manages to cling onto some vestiges of old school cool, and while it’s pretty universally despised, those who like them seem to like them a lot. I’m not sure I’d include myself amongst their ranks, mind.