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Billie Joe's leopard skin-lined case has as much wow factor as his new guitar

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So far, so 1950s. It's not until you check out the Junior's solitary pickup in the bridge position that you're dragged kicking and screaming into the noughties. It might look exactly like the 'dog-ear' P-90s that featured on the first Junior guitars, but the spec sheet reveals this is actually Gibson's stacked double-coil H-90, designed to iron out all the interference that was the achilles heel of the original model. "It's kinda based on the P-90," confirms Armstrong, "but it's hum-cancelling, so you can play it onstage and crank it with lots of distortion. You just get to hear what the guitar sounds like."

As anyone from The Clash's Mick Jones to Dirty Pretty Things' Carl Bârat will tell you, Les Paul Juniors aren't meant to look pristine. This guitar is a staple of punk-rock and should be played in sweaty basements and carried home in a binliner. The good news is that whether you choose to chip a bit of paint off the Billie Joe Junior for authenticity or stick with its immaculate US finish, we don't see any structural problems in the pipeline.

For one thing, the neck is set too deep into the body (it hits at the 16th fret) to warp or snap under normal playing conditions. And for another, the bridge configuration is too simplistic to go wrong. The only potential deathtrap we can envisage is the combination of the angled headstock and the tiny strap nubbins (we were using a fairly standard strap and the guitar fell off a couple of times during our review). So avoid tears by investing in a couple of strap locks.

That said, at least the Junior is one of the lighter members of the Gibson family, especially when compared to its Les Paul sibling. We played it for two hours without taking a break and you should be able to make it through a proper gig without buggering up your spinal column. Besides which, the Billie Joe Junior is comfortable where it counts - up and down the length of its neck and fingerboard.

The slim-taper '60s profile neck combines superbly with a narrower than standard nut profile (1.687") and a gorgeous fretboard to make fast runs really easy. Thanks to a standard Gibson 24" scale length, bending, squeezing and adding vibrato to the Junior's strings also feels natural and allows for more than Armstrong's trademark powerchords. OK, so the Les Paul Junior has never been a shred machine, but it plays fast enough to be used by the likes of Billy Corgan and Gary Moore, so you shouldn't have any problems.

Sounds
When it comes to tone, the Gibson Les Paul Junior has always enjoyed a reputation as an uncomplicated rock 'n' roll workhorse, best played through a high-gain valve amp. In our experience these guitars sound crunchy, brittle and rasping; the kind of tone that Libertines fans would kill for and Eric Clapton would run a mile from. Armstrong has his own description: "The sound I go for is that real punchy mid-range kinda sound," he explains. "The first time I picked up a Junior, which was the guitar I now call Floyd, I plugged it in and it was the sound I'd heard in my head for so many years. They just have a real rock 'n' roll sound. You can really hear the sound of the wood."