I don’t play the guitar. I do however find myself (an ex-carpenter who misses his tools and shop space) strongly drawn to the vast ‘creator’-content genre of guitar making and repair. For eight or so years now, my weekend includes without fail Hamilton Ontario luthier Ted Woodford’s Sunday release, and usually one by New Haven-area’s Tim Sway, at least (though I have cut back). I’ve learned a lot this way.
Writer on comics Zach Rabiroff is in Flaming Hydra last week with a fun interview with Billy Bragg, in youth a fan of comic books American and Brit. The image of Bragg the piece uses (hard to say why) is this two-decade-old photo from Wikimedia:
Though I’ve wound up later in life the kind of person whose political-things ideas you’d associate with Bragg’s, I have no history of listening to him. (For my youthful music-consumption-as-identity, a long time ago — I’m a dozen-plus years Bragg’s junior — there was instead a pretty different working-middleclass-audiences guy with guitar and a two-plus-one-syllable name, born, as it happens, the same year as Bragg.)
Anyway, Rabiroff mentions Bragg’s playing a Tele. The guitar in the pic is Tele-like, of course, but plainly something else. If I knew Bragg, I might have recognized that this is the same guitar he’s always on stage with now. But I don’t. Curiosity led me to dig a little bit. Turns out that this is a guitar by Australian Jim Dyson, a relative rarity. (People who get into this sort of thing may appreciate a short conversation with Dyson recorded about the time he was giving up the business.)
The short item I really mean to advert to (below) in present post is one Bragg participated in the making of last year — one not about him but about a guitar build. Chances are that this is a build video (a Duck Duck Go search return for me on ‘Billy Bragg guitar’) I’d have never stumbled across apart from getting curious about that old photo of him, above, with main live-date axe. The production on this thing is first-rate, but view numbers, for whatever reason, are quite low — a want my posting it here will do little to help, sadly.
What’s lovely about this is the people and place you get a glimpse of, an evidently well-loved, busy community space in small-city UK, in Gloucestershire a little way from Bristol. How fortunate to be part of that scene, to share in the experience of such a group.