Scratches, stickers and actual bloodstains: meet James Bay’s battleworn guitars
“These brown spots between the pickups I can guarantee you were blood,” reveals James Bay, as he sits down with Guitar.com at Dawsons on Denmark Street to take us through the highlights of his guitar collection.
The multi-award-winning, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter is the second guest of the new season of My Guitars & Me, a Guitar.com Originals series which sees guitarists dive deep into the stories behind their most prized instruments.
READ MORE: How Jake Bugg ended up buying the “rarest guitar” he’d ever seen while drunk in Tokyo
And James Bay is quick to highlight his Gibson ES-335 Luther Dickinson signature model, which with both cartoon stickers and actual bloodstains, might be, at the same time, the cutest and gnarliest guitar we’ve ever seen.
A P-90-, Bigsby-equipped semi-hollow model which features on the cover of his new album Changes All The Time, the pickguard of Bay’s guitar is adorned with stickers placed at the request of his daughter.
“I’ve not recorded it too much,” he says, “but it now features on the cover of my new album, because I like the look of the guitar, but really because my daughter decorated it with some really great bus and dinosaur stickers.”
But between the pickups, Bay explains, are some brown spots that he “guarantees” are blood.
“The adrenaline was absolutely raging when I was first getting up in front of thousands of people that actually wanted to see me,” he continues. “I felt unbelievable but terrified, and I had to put all of that energy somewhere. So yeah, there’s blood on here, too.
“I’m not interested in cleaning it. I try not to be too careful with guitars. They’re very precious, yes; they’re very expensive. They’re beautiful pieces of art, but I live with them, I fight with them, I get emotional with them, and all that stuff that you do if you write on an instrument. I’m quite happy for it to get bashed up if that’s how it goes on.”
Elsewhere Bay shows us his National Reso-Phonic Style O resonator guitar – a guitar he admits he bought on a “whim”, and his Gibson SJ-200 acoustic, the guitar he admits he’s become “renowned” for.
Watch the full episode of My Guitars & Me with James Bay above.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
