Me & My Guitar: Barrie Cadogan

Little Barrie’s mainman has covered a lot of ground with his beloved 1963 ES-345 – including a TV show soundtrack

1

“It was the first electric guitar type I wanted after seeing Chuck Berry on TV with a red guitar that was pretty similar. And my first guitar was a cheap bolt-on copy of one of these. They look cool and they do work for me. I’ve got used to them and even though I’m a little guy I find them really easy to play.”

2

“I first saw this guitar around Christmas time 2004 in Chandlers in Kew, which is a shop that’s now sadly gone. I was out going around guitar shops with one of my best friends and we were talking about guitars, maybe talking about trying to downscale the amount of guitars I had and not buying any more. Then I saw this and I just fell in love with it, because I love black guitars anyway and black Gibsons were pretty hard to find. This one has been repainted, it was originally sunburst so it means it wouldn’t be as expensive as a super-rare factory one.”

3

“A friend of mine, Al, who worked in Chandlers, saved it for me over Christmas so I could raise the dough and get hold of it. And at the time it was a pretty reasonable price. It needed a bit of work, the frets were a bit shot and it had some pretty crappy tuners on it so I swapped those out and got it refretted by Knight Guitars. Then it was good to go and I started using it through 2005 with my band Little Barrie. Then a year later I started playing it with Primal Scream and it was my main guitar with them for a long time, I used it on a lot of their gigs and some recordings. I’ve used it with Matt Johnson in The The. I used it on the last three Little Barrie albums and the

Bettercallsaul theme was done with this guitar.”

4

“I’ve used it a lot for sessions because you can get loads of sounds out of these guitars and it was easy to take just one. I got more into using the Bigsby and it used to have one originally so I put a Bigsby back on. I bought one down on Denmark Street in Regent Sounds. I got into the Bigsby thing because of Neil Young and I liked what Bernard Butler did with it. I guess maybe seeing Bryan Setzer with it as well… Stephen Stills too. It’s quite a romantic sound, you can almost get it like a steel guitar in a way if you play the right chords.”

5

“It has its original pickups and they’re both PAFS. The original gold covers are pretty worn out now. They sound really sweet – they’ve got a clear, bell-like ring to them in a way. But when you crank them up they’re fat and chunky.”

6

“Sadly, the Varitone gave up earlier this year so I had to take that out, but to be honest since it’s been taken out, because it has that big choke thing in the middle, it’s a lot lighter. So it’s easier to throw around. It plays nicer but I miss the sound a bit.”

7

“My friend from Japan had an original ‘Custom Made’ plate in his shop and he sold me that when I was on tour in Tokyo, so I could put the guitar kind of back to how it was.”