 history |
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| When I bought the guitar I
was quite excited to see it had been built in 1968 for Ralph Denyer, as he'd
written The Guitar Handbook a couple of years before and I had a
copy. Ralph moved to London from Newport, Monmouth that very year with his band Blonde on Blonde, and
John Bailey has told me he'd also made doublenecks for the other guitarist,
Gareth Johnson, and the bass player Richard Hopkins, in the hope they'd
appear on Top of the Pops and make him rich! Unfortunately they
split up before it happened.
You can just see Hopkins' bass in the photo (from a record sleeve), including the Baldwin pickups on the guitar neck. |
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| Denyer formed a new band,
Aquila, for one album, and the sleeve not only shows him with the
Bailey doubleneck, but includes a cryptic poem on the back which, once one
knows about the guitar, becomes a lot less cryptic:
Maybe it was because the band split that Ralph sold the guitar. It was advertised in Melody Maker, and Gordon Giltrap went round to his flat and bought it, uncased. |
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Gordon's ownership of the Bailey doubleneck is pretty well documented on his own site. He played it on several albums during his most commercially successful period, and it even appeared again on the sleeve of a (probably now rare) 1980 compilation on K-Tel, Performance. But the vagaries of life and professional music necessitated its sale (together, I believe, with his original Bailey acoustic - arguably an even greater loss. If you know where it is let me know!). I'm only glad I was able to be its custodian for nine years, and to be able return it to the person who is, perhaps, its rightful owner. If you don't count Ralph Denyer. And if Gordon doesn't decide he'd rather I took care of it... |
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