killerwatts
QUEEN’S LEGENDARY GUITARIST ON WHY HE USES NINE AC30S IN HIS LIVE RIG…
What was your first Vox amp? “I bought two from a shop in Wardour Street in about 1969. It was the end of a quest to find the sound that was already in my head. I had tried various amps but I had come to the conclusion that the sound of Mullard valves being overdriven could not be reproduced using transistors, no matter how clever the circuits. I had also had a chat with the wonderful Rory Gallagher, a great hero of mine, at the Marquee Club. He was typically gracious and patient, and I asked him what was the secret of his fabulous sound. He told me the key to powerful but clear chords and sweetly sustaining single notes was a Vox AC30 driven hard on the input, using a treble booster.
“My dad was an electronics genius so he was able to explain to me that the AC30 was unusual in that its power output stage used the valves in the Class A configuration and without the negative feedback that was used to make hi-fi amplifiers of the day reproduce signals accurately.
“The result was a smooth ‘characteristic curve’ (the graph of output volume versus signal input). For small input signals – with the volume control set low on the guitar – the curve is a nice straight line without any of the kinks inherent in a push-pull configuration. But, as the signal increases, the output begins to reach a limit, a plateau. So as you go on turning up the volume on the input, the output saturates. This is what sounds like distortion, but while in normal push-pull amps this saturation comes about suddenly, in the case of the Class A Vox, it happens very smoothly and gradually. So instead of a harsh, fuzzy overload you get a very smooth saturation which sounds more like a human voice than a fuzz-tone. That ‘voice’ was the voice I wanted, and once I found it, it became part of me. It was all thanks to Rory. And Vox!”
Why the multiple AC30 set-up? “I wanted to achieve clarity and breadth when using effects – most of the time I use chorus and delays. In both cases, the pedal or processing device gives you a nice clean companion signal which wants to be heard alongside your original signal. But if you mix it back into the same amp that the original goes through, it doesn’t work very well. The stereo opportunities are lost, and worse, at high volumes the two signals intermodulate and make an ugly distorted sound. The beauty and clarity of the single note saturation is lost.
“So my solution was to feed the processed signals into entirely separate amps, hence my three amps at ground level, the centre one handling the ‘straight through’ signal unmodified, and the outer two transmitting the two different delays in use, or the stereo chorus signals, slightly altered in pitch. No matter how far up I turn the guitar, those amps are still handling one note each, and it sounds clear and warm.
“In the early days it was often a struggle to hear the guitar, so I took to having another set of three on top of the first ones. The second three also serve as spares and the same applies to the top row. For that feeling of comfort I still like to see the whole array of nine AC30s behind me, I can’t remember the last time I needed to have them all turned up.”
What mods are done to your amps? “These days we have them all rewired without printed circuits, to make them rugged enough to survive long tours. We also take out all the elements that I don’t use – the tremolo and ‘bright’ channels. This optimises the power to process my signal with minimum losses. We also use one traditional ‘Blue’ speaker in each cabinet and one Celestion G12H vintage reissue.”
Which era AC30 is your favourite? “My absolute favourites are the old cream ones. They sound damn good. Like guitars, even if they are all identical in design, every amp has its own character, born of slight variations in materials and, apparently, what day of the week they were made.”
What would you say are a Vox AC30’s distinctive characteristics? “The great quality – pretty much inimitable – is that unique ability to put you halfway between chordal clarity and full-blown sustaining single notes. It’s a big part of my style. And the delicate spot where the notes are just beginning to break into saturation but are still sharp and warm is pure magic.”
Why have you remained faithful to Vox over the years? “There is no substitute!”
Whatever the kids had been into up to that point was finished, British rock was in the post and, what’s more, there was an embargo on American goods. Tom Jennings and Dick Denney’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The engineer set about refining his prototype.
Originally designated the AC-1, the amp that would become better known as the AC15 was unveiled in 1958. Denney nailed the classic Vox formula with the AC15. For a start he plumped for EL-84 output valves, which, when pushed hard, distort due to their low headroom. In the 1950s, distortion was still considered a fault and an engineer like Denney would reduce unwanted fuzz using a ‘negative feedback’ circuit, a device that sends some of the amp’s signal back into the power amp.
The eureka moment came when Denney decided he didn’t like the effect these problem-solving gubbins had on the sound of the amplifier. Drop kicking convention to the wind he engineered his new Class A combo without the circuitry. The AC15 would now produce overdrive when pushed hard.
As John Oram reveals, Dick Denney always had the last say on a new amp’s ‘voice’ despite having one key disadvantage.
“Dick was always hard of hearing,” Oram says.” You’d speak to him at a normal level and he wouldn’t know you were talking. You’d have to yell at him. I’ve always said that when Dick Denney voiced the sound on an amplifier he probably wasn’t hearing what we were hearing at all. He was hearing a more mellow sound perhaps. He had to tweak it so it was crisp for him. That created the Vox sound.”
Dick Denney wasn’t the only one that heard something special in the AC15. Artist endorsement was in its infancy in the late 1950s but JMI trumped the competition when it supplied three of its new amplifiers to The Shadows to replace their existing Selmer backline.
“Charlie Cobbett used to be the artist liaison manager for Vox,” says John Oram. “He was the one who used to go out and find the bands that Vox could give their gear to. That’s why they became so popular. They used to run adverts that said ‘95 per cent of bands played Vox’ but the top bands were given the gear for free. In exchange, whenever they went for a photo shoot, or if there was any TV show or whatever, there had to be Vox amplifiers on stage, even if they weren’t being used.
“When The Shadows and Cliff Richard did Sunday Night At The London Palladium, in those days they had a rotating stage. And when it came round, the Vox amps would be there, all clean and tidy, glistening. And in use, of course. At that juncture, it was all live. But when they went to the Ed Sullivan Show in America, they didn’t play in the first show. They were just interviewed but they had to have those Vox amps in the background behind them. That was the rule of the game.”
Vox became the go-to brand for, of course, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and just about every provincial beat group
“When Dick Denney voiced the sound on an amplifier he probably wasn’t hearing what we were hearing.…”
with a recording contract. Most used their free Vox gear with gratitude and without incident. That is, until a bunch of louts from Shepherds Bush rolled up.
“The most unsuccessful band for Vox were The Who,” sighs Oram. “Charlie Cobbett nobbled them and got them signed up. They came, took the gear away for a gig on a Saturday night. On the Monday, the driver was back. There’s the gear, all smashed up. I think Tom put up with it for three sets of kit and then, in his own terms, said ‘You guys can fuck off!’”
Legend has it that when Who guitarist Pete Townshend visited the Rickenbacker factory back in the day, he was shunned by the workforce due to his habit of gleefully destroying the fruits of their labours for the amusement of pilled-up mods.
“It was just so disrespectful what The Who did,” agrees Oram. “Bloody idiots!”
The Shadows never trashed their gear, of course. Even if they were hankering for more power from their AC15s. By mid-1960 The Shads took delivery of a new beast, the four input, 30-watt, 2 x 12” AC30/4. Denney had increased the power output from 15 to 30 watts with a second pair of EL84 valves. The most important British guitar combo of all time was now a reality, and it would be relentlessly tweaked over the following few years.
The first generation AC30/4 amps supplied to Hank and the boys were in a throwback ‘TV front’ layout but production models featured the now iconic split panel format. There were four inputs of course, two for the ‘Vibrato’ channel, the remaining pair for the ‘Normal’ channel. The speakers were Celestion G12 Alnico ‘Blue’ items although a small number of early examples had tan coloured versions of the ‘Blue’.
By 1961, the AC30/6 was unveiled as a replacement for its four input predecessor. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for band members to share an amp, and so Vox had it covered.
In 1964, the same year he sold JMI to Royston Industries and moved to Erith, Kent, Tom Jennings secured JMI the European distributorship for Fender guitars and amplifiers. By that point, JMI had been selling its own range of guitars. The first was a Vox-branded, Guyatonebuilt version of the Antoria LG-50 that a pre-Fiesta Red Strat Hank Marvin played in The Shadows.
1962 found JMI selling rudimentary plywood student guitars built in the UK by Stuart Darkins & Company, a furniture builder based in Shoeburyness in Essex. The following year production shifted to G-Plan, a well-known manufacturer of sofas based in Hemel Hempstead.
The truth is Vox nailed their best guitars when they got weird. The iconic white two-pickup Mark VI model managed to make Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones look even cooler than he already was. The Mark VI’s ‘teardrop’ body and the twisted coffin vibe of the Phantom model were the result of JMI’s desire to build guitars that
“The Who came and took the gear for a gig on a Saturday night. On the Monday, the gear was back, all smashed up...”
looked nothing like their competitors. Job done. Yet, it was a brave manifesto given the collective shrug that had greeted the Gibson Flying V and Explorer just a few years before.
Vox guitars caught the attention of teenage US Anglophiles who traded the reverb-drenched sound of the surf music of Dick Dale for the repackaged electric blues of The Stones, The Yardbirds and The Animals. The garage rock uniform of Chelsea boots, polo necks and Brian Jones haircuts was sonically backed up with the angry-sounding swarm of fuzz guitar. When Keef played that riff on (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction every kid within earshot felt a psychotic reaction. The Human Riff used a Gibson Maestro stompbox on Satisfaction, a unit that had been languishing on shelves and in stock rooms since 1962. That changed thanks to Keef.
Tom Jennings would always say to Dick Denney “we need new noises”, hence the creation of treble boosters and wah pedals. One of their smartest moves was to source Sola Sound fuzz boxes [built by engineer Gary Hurst] from Music Exchange in London’s Charing Road, which were then rebadged as the Vox Tone Bender. So, Vox became legendary for the sound of fuzz tone thanks to a pedal it didn’t design or build. The Maestro faded into obscurity.
Given the cultural impact of its amps and guitars, not to mention the ‘new noises’ emanating from its stompboxes, Vox appeared unstoppable. Yet trouble was brewing. 1967 may have played host to The Summer Of Love but there was little love lost between Tom Jennings and the board at Royston Industries that year.
“The situation was that Vox was making more money than the rest of the group,” explains John Oram. “Obviously, it’s annoying when you’re pulling all this money in and it’s all going into this bottomless pit that’s paying all these people and propping up weaker companies. Tom liked to think he was in control of his own
domain, and when you’re in a corporate structure, with a board of directors, you cannot do just what you want to do. That’s a fact of business life.”
Jennings had established the Thomas Organ Company in the US in 1965, and seen Vox-branded products manufactured in Italy. The brilliant but bonkers Phantom XII Stereo 12-string was built by EKO there.
Jennings was an entrepreneur par excellence but the bottom line is, JMI was not his company anymore and he was about to clash with the Royston board head on.
“Tom used to treat himself, fairly regularly, to a new Jaguar car,” says Oram. “He’d gone through the range. He’d had the Mark II. He had the Mark X. Then he decided that he wanted a silver E-Type. He was at a board meeting and happened to let it slip that he’d ordered one. The board went crazy. ‘You don’t need a new car!’ they said.
“Now, when Tom was with ENSA [Entertainments National Service Association] during the war he had worked very closely with a chap called Sidney Ives. Sidney had become the in-house company accountant. Tom sent him down to the bank to withdraw some cash, walked round the corner to Beadles, the main Jag dealers, and he got his E-Type.”
“They sacked him,” reveals Oram. “He came over to the research department over the road, where myself, Dick Denney and a few others were. He had tears running down his face and said, in words to the effect of, ‘those bastards have kicked me out of my own company.’
“He said, ‘I’m going to start again. Dick will you come with me?’ Dick said, ‘Yes, guv.’ He said, ‘John will you come with me?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes.’ ‘You can become my chief engineer,’ he said.”
“’Where are we going Tom?’ we asked.” He replied, ‘We’re going back to the chip shop in Dartford Road.’”
If Tom Jennings harboured any lingering anger for Royston Industries, he didn’t have to wait long for karma to oblige. By 1969, his one-time parent company was bankrupt. So began a gradual decline in the fortunes of the Vox brand, albeit with occasional blips of hope, like when it was purchased by onetime Gibson and longtime Rickenbacker distributor Rose Morris in the 80s. Since the early 90s, Vox has been owned by Japanese company Korg, the brand’s safest pair of hands since it was driven by Tom Jennings. Today you can buy highly-regarded UK and Chinese-made Vox gear.
Even through the darkest periods for Vox – the stack-obsessed 70s, the rack-mounted geekdom of the 80s – the AC30 secured its place in the backline of the likes of Brian May of Queen, Irish blues icon Rory Gallagher, U2’s The Edge, and Paul Weller during his tenure with The Jam.
The AC30 encapsulates everything that’s electrifying and timeless about ‘The Vox Sound’. Sixty years after the birth of JMI it’s the ultimate tribute to that decade when an accordion teacher and a half-deaf engineer did their bit to change the world.
“‘Where are we going Tom?’ we asked. He replied,‘We’re going back to the chip shop in Dartford Road’...”