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Fender - a classic brand

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Away from the megastar hoopla of the televised 2009 Grammy awards, a few other gongs were handed out last weekend. And one was a posthumous award for Clarence 'Leo' Fender.

Before the main Grammy show of 8 February, Leo Fender was posthumously honoured with the Academy's Technical Award during a lower-key ceremony on 7 February. Leo Fender died in 1991.

Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, The Edge and Eric Clapton have all paid tribute to the man whose company invented the Stratocaster, Telecaster, numerous classic amps and also set a benchmark for mass-scale guitar building.

Leo Fender's achievements in the guitar industry are too many to summarise here, so we'll let some stars have their say and roll some classic footage…

Writing for the LA Times, these tributes were paid:

Eric Clapton

"The first time I saw one was in Jerry Lee Lewis' band in some footage from [the 1958 film] High School Confidential. His bass player was playing a Fender Jazz Bass. I'd never seen anything like that solidbody guitar before. That was it for me. It was the perfect design. It looked like a spaceship.

"That guitar is perfect" Eric Clapton on the Stratocaster

"I loved that it was new and exciting and like science fiction… He had a very small budget to make those early guitars, so every decision he made about design was about function… That's why that guitar is perfect. He didn't care what it looked like; it was about function. That's the cornerstone of why the Strat and the Tele are what they are, and why they cannot be improved on."

Watch Eric Clapton covering Robert Johnson's Crossroads, with Doyle Bramhall and Derek Trucks

"The Strat is like the '57 Chevy of guitars" The Edge

The Edge

"When we got our record deal, the first thing I did was go out and buy another Strat. It's the black one, that's the one I recorded a lot of our big, important songs with, Pride (In The Name Of Love), Where The Streets Have No Name, major U2 songs . . . There is something completely unique about the Strat. What's really special is that something so simple and so mass-produced should end up with such a kind of subtle and unique and amazing sound quality. All of the guitars that had gone before - the great Gretsches, the big Gibson archtop guitars - were all complex designs that were much more like cellos or violins, construction-wise. But with the Strat, you get this plank of wood with a neck stuck into it. Yet it just sings. It's an incredibly inspiring instrument. . . . It's like the '57 Chevy of guitars. It's the pinnacle of something that was very special about that time in history."

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