82 famous players on their first guitars

What was your first guitar and when did you get it?

Featuring a stellar cast, including the likes of Slash, Joe Bonamassa, Mark Tremonti, Joe Satriani, John Petrucci and a host of other axe heroes, our compendium runs down the instruments that first set these legends' fledgling fingers alight.

Every guitar has a story – from the humblest of pawn-shop electrics to barely playable acoustics, we all had to start somewhere. Read on to discover thefirst guitars of some of the biggest names in the business…

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1. Slash

“It was a one-string Spanish-style acoustic and I got it right before my 15th birthday. My grandmother gave it to me. My uncle, my mom’s brother, had a couple of guitars and one of them was this beat-up old hollowbody electric with a fake Bigsby, and it just never appealed to me, but the acoustic with the one string… for some reason, it was like, ‘That’s what I need.’”

2. Joe Satriani

"A Hagstrom III. I came home one afternoon after finding out that Hendrix had died. I had quit the football team, and I announced to my family that I was gonna be a guitarist. And my older sister, who had just started teaching at a local high school, stood up and said, 'I'll give him my first pay cheque.'

"There was this white Hagstrom in the local music shop, that for some reason, to me, looked like what Hendrix played. I was so naïve then, I didn't know what a Fender Stratocaster was. It was $124 – that price sticks in my mind."

3. Zakk Wylde

“I started off with a cheap Les Paul copy. Before that, it had to be an acoustic guitar, originally. I don’t even know the name or the brand.

"My actual first real good guitar I saved up for was a Gibson SG. It was a big deal, because it said ‘Gibson’ on the headstock and, ‘Oh my Lord!’ You’ve got an actual, real guitar, man.”

4. Joe Bonamassa

“It was called a Chiquita. It was my first electric guitar – like a short-scale, little electric guitar that was easy for a four-year-old to play. And then I got a Gibson SG at six.”

5. Carlos Santana

“I got it in 1960 in Tijuana, and my father bought it for me. It was a big, hollow Gibson, kind of like Wes Montgomery’s. I liked that it had six strings and I could bend them and learn how to play chords and connect with BB King.

"I was a violin player before that. The first thing I noticed with the guitar was that you couldn’t make long notes like you could by going up and down with the bow. But later on, I discovered you could do that with feedback instead…”

6. Joe Perry

“The first time I heard a guitar was when my uncle played. He had a home-made instrument. It was shaped like a ukulele but sounded like a guitar. I remember he used to pull it out around the holidays and play Portuguese folk songs on it.

"That was my first exposure to that type of instrument. He let me play it, and it just felt good. It felt comfortable. Then I got a Silvertone. The action was unbelievable. It had to be half an inch across the neck. If there was ever a guitar designed to turn you off from playing guitar, it was that one. It hurt so much to play, to have to press down those heavy strings.

"But at that point, when you have that calling, you do the best with what you’ve got. So that was when I first fell in love with the guitar.”

7. Orianthi

“I was six. It was an acoustic that belonged to my dad. It was actually lefthanded, so we re-strung it right-handed. I started with classical, then moved onto electric when I was 11. The other guitar I was strumming on was his Gibson ES-125. I was just playing chords – Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley songs – but it was amazing.”

8. Gus G

“My dad got me a cheap classical when I was 10 years old and I still have it. I didn’t get an electric until I was 14, and I still have that too. It was a Fender Strat Classic Floyd Rose Series. It’s a kinda like the Richie Sambora model and is a really great guitar.”

9. Matt Pike

“My very first guitar was just some weird acoustic thing from [US department store] Sears – I was eight years old and it was small enough for my hands. My uncle and grandfather used to play guitar to me all the time, so I’d try to play along with them. I picked up the chords because I’d been watching them since I was a baby. I was a natural at just jumping into it.”

10. Mike Campbell

"My very first guitar was pretty much unplayable. I was 14 or something. My mom went to a pawn shop and got me a Harmony acoustic. I didn't know any better! It was one with an f-hole, and it wasn't a good one. They do make some good ones, but this was not a good one. I thought that it was just the way that guitars were. I could hardly push the strings down, and I figured 'man, these guys must be strong!'

Then I went to my friend's house and he had an SG. He handed it to me and I pressed the strings down and was like, 'my god, you don't have to bleed!' I used to bleed over that thing.

"The next guitar I got, my dad sent me a Goya electric six-string. He was on tour in Okinawa and he mailed me this $60 guitar. It was playable. I actually auditioned for Tom on that thing. They laughed at me when I walked in and played it, but once I played Johnny B Goode, they quit laughing."

11. Duane Eddy

“I was about nine and my aunt sent me a little lap steel with an amp – I guess it appealed to her. So I learned to play it, then my folks gave me an old Kay they found somewhere – I had that until I was 14 or 15. Then I bought a Les Paul Goldtop in 1954.”

12. Mark Morton

“It was a nylon-string acoustic – a very cheap version of a classical guitar. I bought that guitar from an ad in a local paper called Trading Post for $15, and I was 12 years old.”

13. Richie Sambora

“It was a Teisco. My father bought it for me and it cost 10 bucks. It was a return to a department store that he was working at. It never stayed in tune, but it sounded awesome!

"I’ve been using Teisco guitars in the studio every once in a while. They sound like crap, but it’s cool crap!”

14. Todd Rundgren

“It was something made in Japan or Korea – a steel-string acoustic. I was only seven or eight at the time, and it was something that you got if you signed up for three months’ worth of lessons at the local music store.”

15. Kris Coombs-Roberts

“A Hohner Rockwood, I think I was 12 years old. I nagged my father for a guitar and initially he thought my interest would be a flash in the pan – something I’d only be in to for a couple of months. But that guitar was horrible – it had a black painted fretboard and the frets were so high that it had a sitar-like effect of bending the note out of tune.

"To be honest, I don’t know how I stuck with it, because everything I played on it sounded absolutely horrific!”

16. Max Cavalera

“My first acoustic was my dad’s. He used to play guitar and sing Italian songs. He worked for the Italian embassy in Brazil, but in his spare time he’d grab a guitar and sing. He passed away when I was nine, in 1979.

"When I was 11, I found his guitar, and I was really into KISS at the time. I remember Paul Stanley had a guitar that was all mirrors, so I decided to do the same with my dad’s guitar. I broke a mirror and glued it on – it was not well done at all!”

17. Nile Rodgers

“My first guitar was a Fender Mustang. Later on, Hendrix made me want to get a Strat, but the first people that I wanted to imitate were jazz guitar players.So I went from a Fender Mustang to a Gibson Barney Kessel within a matter of months. My first guitar, the Fender Mustang, cost $79 and my next guitar, the Gibson, cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars!

“Remember, guitars were traditionally considered very cheap compared to other instruments. I used to play symphonic music. A student flute cost more than a Strat; my childhood flute cost more than Eric Clapton’s guitar. Classical instruments were held in a much higher regard, so if you got a top of the line flute or trumpet, these things were 30 times more expensive than a Fender guitar. Years later, I ended up trading that Gibson guitar in at a shop on Miami Beach for my white Strat.”

18. John Petrucci

“My first guitar was an acoustic, kind of plastic, nylon-string thing that eventually ended up breaking. I’m not sure where my parents got it, but it wasn’t very good – it wasn’t very nice to play [laughs].”

19. Brian Setzer

“My very first guitar was a Harmony Rocket. My dad was a labourer and he didn’t have any money, so that was a big deal.

"The defining moment for me to play the guitar was seeing a picture of The Beatles in a record shop. George – just being a wise-guy – had the neck of his Gretsch across the necks of the other Beatles. I’d already heard The Beatles on a jukebox when I was about seven, and I loved it, but my parents weren’t musical and I didn’t know what made that sound. So that’s when I thought, ‘That’s the thing that makes the sound I love.’”

20. Johnny Marr

"My first guitar was a little wooden toy thing, bought in a haberdashery shop in Manchester in 1967, when I was four years old. Humble beginnings, as they say..."

21. Tim Farriss

“My father bought me my first guitar when I was eight and I still own it – I just had it fully reconditioned. It’s a Suzuki classical guitar and its serial number is something like 402. I learnt to play Spanish and classical guitar on it.”

22. Mike Mushok

“I guess my first guitar was a Yamaha acoustic – I was probably about seven or eight and I got it for Christmas from my parents. They actually played a very mean joke on me – it was Christmas and they brought down a guitar case, but they had taken the guitar out and just gave me the empty case which, at seven, made me cry [laughs].

"Then they brought down the guitar and that night I proceeded to pretend I was Elvis and found out what a belt-buckle can do to a guitar – it gouged the whole guitar up and I cried again…”

23. Bill Kelliher

“My very first guitar was called a Starforce. It was actually a pretty decent guitar for what it was. It was a cheap copy of an Eddie Van Halen guitar – red with the white stripes and the black tape or whatever he had on his guitar. It had a whammy bar and all that stuff.

"I took all of the paint off of it – I went through my punk-rock stage – and had it spray-painted neon green and put a bunch of Sex Pistols stickers on it. There weren’t stickers back then, so I just had to cut out pieces of paper and make my own.”

24. Rick Parfitt

“My first guitar was a Framus sunburst and I shall never forget the smell of the varnish when I opened that case. I got it in 1958, for Christmas. I was so thrilled, because I’d seen Cliff Richard and The Shadows with Hank [Marvin] and I was mad to have a guitar. It had a cord with sort of a pom-pom hanging down from the machine heads…”

25. Matt Schofield

“It was a 3/4-sized classical, and I was about eight. When I realised I wanted to play electric guitar, I cut a cheese wedge shape out of the lower bout so I could get up higher! Completely ruined it with a hacksaw.”

26. Scott Gorham

“I was nine and my father bought it for me. It was about as cheap as you could get – a nylon-string Silvertone from the department store Sears. It was the shittiest thing you could imagine.”

27. J Mascis

“My first guitar was a Jazzmaster. I guess I was 17. I wanted a Strat, but I couldn’t afford it. I went to the store, and in the paper they’d said it was $400, but then you get to the store and they wanted $450.

"It was like ‘Slimy Bob’s Guitar Rip-off’ – the guy was pretty sleazy. I could have bought a Jaguar for $200 or bought a Jazzmaster for $300. I had $400, so I bought the Jazzmaster and this cheap cabinet.”

28. James Dean Bradfield

“It was a black Gibson-copy Kay-40, £25, paper-round money. I bought it off Matthew Horton, a schoolfriend, when I was 15.

"Late starter? Yeah, but I certainly wasn’t getting any girls, so I needed something. I wanted to start a band, so I had to learn to play something.”

29. Stevie Salas

“It was an electric my brother-in-law built. He used to make all my surfboards and he used to make my fishing poles, and then one day he decided to build this Strat copy. That was when I was about 15.”

30. Tommy Shannon

“I was about 15 years old and I remember washing dishes all summer so I could buy my first Fender guitar. It was a beautiful white Jaguar and I loved it. I played guitar first then one night a bass player didn’t show up so I played the bass and I liked it so much I stayed with it.”

31. Paul Gilbert

“I had a Stella acoustic guitar that I played for two years. I recently found one just like it on eBay. I realised it was actually a small-scale neck, so it was really great for my little nine-year-old hands.”

32. Björn Gelotte

“My very first was a Spanish guitar. At the time I wanted to sound like Vivian Campbell from Dio and of course the nylon-strung guitar was nothing like that! I was using coins as picks and I was about 11 or 12.

"At that time there was so much good music to learn and I discovered why I couldn’t sound like Dio – so I learned a lot.”

33. Dan Hawkins

“It was a bass because I played that before guitar – but I did use my dad’s acoustic from the age of eight. It was based on a Gibson Hummingbird but it should have been called Mingingbird – I used to spend hours just trying to get the thing in tune!

"My first electric was a budget white Strat that I named Mumm-Ra – my guitars always have names.”

34. Myles Kennedy

“An Ibanez X Series DT250. I wish I still had it but it was stolen from my high school.”

35. Greg Howe

“It was given to me by my sister’s boyfriend when I was 10. It was called a Guya and it looked like one of those models The Ventures used to play. It had four pickups and it was pretty ugly. I don’t have it any more, but I really wish I did.”

36. Mikael Åkerfeldt

"My first guitar was an acoustic, a classical by Levin, that I got from my grandmother. At the time, I was into metal music so I wasn't really happy with an acoustic guitar. But she gave me some chord books, things like House Of The Rising Sun and some Beatles songs, I remember.

"My first electric was a Les Paul... Well, it looked like a Black Beauty. I bought it for £40, so it obviously wasn't the real deal!"

37. Mark Tremonti

“A Tara, which was an imitation Les Paul that I got when I was 11 years old. I remember it cost 10 bucks.”

38. Joe Brown

"I bought it for a pound off some bloke in a pub. I was about 11. I grew up in my mum’s pub, y’see, and this bloke would come in on Saturdays with this guitar. I don’t remember the model, but it had a lot of knobs on it.

"In those days, you couldn’t get your hands on Gibsons and Fenders, so you either had to have a Höfner – which were beautifully made but sounded bloody awful for rock ’n’ roll – or one of these hand-made jobs. I dunno what happened to it. It probably disintegrated.”

39. Sammy Hagar

“To start, I had a makeshift guitar. It was an SG body but it had Guild pickups and bridge. Someone stole a Guild guitar and sold it to me; I still owe him the money for it, actually.

"I wanted an SG because I’d seen Clapton with an SG, and a friend of mine had an SG with a broken neck. It was in a pawn shop, just the body, and I got it for $25 – I sold my shoes or something to get it! I took all the pickups from my Guild and put them on it. It wouldn’t tune for crap but it looked cool.”

40. Vic Flick

“My first guitar was a small-bodied Gibson Kalamazoo bought for $10 in 1949. It was good to play, and with a Tank Commander’s throat microphone clamped to the machine head and played through a radio it nearly sounded like a guitar! All through my life I have regretted trading it in for a really crappy banjo.”

41. Mike Stern

“I was about 12 years old. It was a nylon-string and cost about $30. I don’t even think that it had a make – I think somebody found it on the street or something – it was really funky.

Then I got some kind of Fender, maybe it was a Strat.”

42. Martin Harley

“My mum had a 3/4-sized Portuguese classical guitar, she pulled it out of a flood. I think she was living in Wales at the time and it went floating past a second-floor window and she pulled it out of the water.

I started playing when I was about 16 or 17 – I’d never really shown much interest until then as I don’t come from a very musical family.”

43. J D Cronise

“An Ibanez RG550 in bright orange when I was 13 or 14. I originally wanted a Les Paul – I started playing guitar because of Jimmy Page – but I had these friends at school who said Les Pauls were stupid and I needed to get an Ibanez. It was cool, a total shredder guitar, though.”

44. Chris Robertson

“It was an acoustic guitar that my grandfather made by hand. He gave it to me for Christmas when I was 12 years old.”

45. Charlie Burchill

“My earliest one was an Embassy coupon guitar – you got them from a catalogue when you saved up enough coupons from cigarette packets. My mum got me that guitar by smoking her life away! As you can imagine, it was more like a cheese-cutter than a guitar.

"My first ‘proper’ guitar was a Gibson Flying V.”

46. Joel O'Keeffe

“It was a Gibson SG. I got it when my Dad agreed to buy it if I spent the summer coating the house in wood preserve when I was 12. I got covered in it, but I got an SG!”

47. Alex Westaway

“A £20 Spanish guitar I got when I was eight and starting guitar lessons. When I got into it more it was an Ibanez RX, which was a good low-end guitar. I’d play my Nirvana covers on that.”

48. Peter Frampton

“My first guitar was a nasty, old and cheap – I think they call it a plectrum guitar [a four-string tenor-style guitar]. It was steel-string and cost about four pounds 10 shillings. It didn’t have a name on it – they were too embarrassed to put it on I think!”

49. Warren Haynes

“My first guitar was a Norma, with a Norma amp. One was $49 and the other was $59. They lasted about a year and after that I got a Lyle copy of a Gibson SG.”

50. Dallas Green

"The first guitar that I ever had was one my dad bought me. It was from a music shop in St Catherine’s, which is the place where I grew up. The shop had a Midnight Madness sale on and I got an old Harmony guitar and a Tiger amp combination – it was my first foray into the electric.”

51. Phil Collen

"It was my 16th birthday and I'd pestered my parents for a guitar since I saw Deep Purple when I was 14. There was an entry-level Gibson SG in Exchange And Mart for £200, which was completely out of their range, but I'd hassled them for so long.

"I've still got it and it's a beautiful guitar. It still sounds really cool. It was like porn: 'Oh my God! I can touch a Gibson! Wow!'"

52. Tim Sult

“I was 14 and I believe it came from Sears or JC Penney. I think I ordered it straight out of the catalogue, it was a little Strat-style guitar that came with a two-watt practice amp.”

53. Keith Nelson

“My first guitar was a beat-up Fender acoustic that I got when I traded my drum kit in. I started playing the drums as soon as I could bang things together and I switched to guitar when I was 17.”

54. Herman Li

“Like a lot of people starting the guitar it was just the cheapest Squier – I was 16. After that I got into Satriani and Vai and started doing all the whammy bar stuff and tapping, so after a year I traded it in for an Ibanez and since then I’ve pretty much played Ibanez.”

55. Satchel

“I was eight years old and it was an acoustic guitar made by a company called Global. I wanted an electric guitar, but when I asked for a guitar they bought me an acoustic for my birthday and I was really, really pissed off about it too.

"You know what – I’ve still got the guitar.”

56. Mark Hosking

“My family were very musical and I started on drums, then piano before moving onto guitar when I was about 12. But the first guitar I ever played was my dad’s Maton Wildcat, they only made about 4000 of them. It was a killer guitar, but I broke something on it and my dad wouldn’t let me play it any more!

"So then I had to get one of my own and the first one I ever had was a Fender Squier – I modded the pickups and electronics on it. From then it was a Fender Strat and then a PRS Custom 24, which I still play now, nine or 10 years later.”

57. Dweezil Zappa

“A Fender Music Master, which was kind of like the Fender Duo Sonic. I got it when I was about six, but I didn’t really know what to do with it. It wasn’t until I was 12 that I picked it up seriously.”

58. Steven Wilson

“When I was about six years old my parents decided I was going to learn to play guitar and they bought me a nylon-string classical, I don’t even remember the make, but I hated it. I hated guitar lessons and after about six weeks I gave up and it went in the attic for about four years.

"Then, finally, I rediscovered it when I discovered my passion for music.”

59. Josh Rand

“I was a late bloomer because I started out on bass. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 17 – it was an Ibanez RG550, all black.”

60. Philip Sayce

“My brother and I played piano as kids – we took piano lessons and my mum and dad saved up in order to buy a piano for us. So I always felt guilty asking for a guitar, but I wanted one, so they got me an acoustic guitar from Sears.

"I used to carry it around in a garbage bag. The action was like that [indicates a high action] and it was almost impossible to play...”

61. Pepper Keenan

“My friend Pat The Rat got decapitated on a motorcycle trying to outrun the police and died… obviously. Me and my friend snuck into his house and I took his guitar, because it wasn’t going to get used.

"So I started learning at 13. It was a junk Sears Les Paul copy and I sprayed it black.”

62. Steve Rothery

“It was a Strat copy that I got when I was 15, so 1974.”

63. Ginger

“The first guitar I took onstage was a little red Westone that I loved. I swapped it for a blonde Strat, but the Strat was so crap I swapped it back for the Westone!”

64. John Norum

“I was 12 years old and my mom gave it to me. It was actually her guitar. I can’t remember the name of it, it was an acoustic. I didn’t have a plectrum, so I took a bottle opener and used that as a pick. I ripped that thing apart – all the finish was gone.

"I was quite aggressive… I was playing hard, even back then.”

65. Mick Box

“I was 14 years old, so it was quite a while ago. I went with my mum to buy it from a pawnbroker and it was £12.10 in old money. It was called either a Telstun or a Telstan, I think. It was a hollow body cutaway, with the one DeArmond pickup; the action was like a bow and arrow. Bleeding fingers but it never put me off.”

66. John Scofield

"When I was 11, I had an acoustic that my parents rented from a music store. Then, in 1964, I got my first electric, which was a Hagstrom that looked sort of like a Strat.

"It was a strange sky blue Swedish guitar, and it had a kind of plastic top, but it was cheap and looked like a Fender. I don't have it now. All through the 60s, into the 70s, I'd trade one guitar in for the next, like a car."

67. Nils Lofgren

"My first real official guitar was a Fender Telecaster, probably in '64 or '65. Before that, I had some $15 guitar that my parents got me from Sears and Roebuck, but it almost couldn't be called an instrument.

"For me, it was either get a Tele, because Jeff Beck played one, or get a Strat, because Hendrix did. I went with the Tele, and eventually moved over to the Strat."

68. Nergal

“My father must have gone to a party, found an acoustic guitar and brought it home for me.

"I have no idea about the brand and it was really poor quality, but I immediately fell in love with it. It blew me away. I was seven or eight and would spend all day trying to play it even thoughI didn’t know any chords.

"My parents decided I showed a lot of will to play this instrument, so they sent me to a guitar school.”

69. Chris Stein

“I was probably 11 or 12, and I was wandering around in Brooklyn in about 1961 and I heard electric guitar notes coming out of a gas station. I still remember the moment. It was very haunting – it sort of struck me, you know?

After that, I got my first guitar – a Harmony single-pickup, double-cutaway kind of thing that my parents bought for me.”

70. Doug Aldrich

“My very first guitar was a department-store copy of a Les Paul. It was a department store called the Sears, Roebuck chain. It had a bolt-on neck, body made of plywood, and the frets were definitely cut off with wire cutters on the side, cutting your hand when you played it.

"That was my first electric guitar, but my very first guitar was a classical guitar I pinched from my younger sister, and along with it a book of chords. I had heard some records that my older sister had, one being Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow, and I loved it, man. I loved the sound of the guitar.

"So I started on a classical, but when I got my electric guitar and a little amp – that was when it was on!”

71. Reb Beach

“An Aria Strat: it was a light-coloured wood. It had two pickups and I wanted it to have three, so I bought a mailbox sticker that kind of looked like a pickup. It was a letter ‘I’ and I stuck it right in the middle so it looked like another pickup. But it was really a good guitar, actually.”

72. Robert Cray

“It was a Harmony Sovereign acoustic. I had it for about six months or so [in 1965]. I really wanted an electric guitar, but my mum got me an acoustic just to see how it was gonna go. And to stop me making a racket? Yeah. I traded that guitar in for the Harmony electric I got next.”

73. Leslie West

“Jesus. My first guitar was a Martin ukulele – does that count? My aunt got it for me. Her daughter was going to Juilliard’s music school in New York and I went over to her house and she had a guitar that was too big for me, so all of a sudden I got a ukulele in the mail, started foolin’ around with it. That was what I thought was my first guitar.”

74. Larry Carlton

"The first guitar that I played belonged to my mother when she was a teenager, because she played guitar in south-eastern Oklahoma when she was growing up. She played rhythm guitar, and her father played the fiddle – and they would play at some of the local dances and at church. That guitar had no name on it – it was an acoustic."

75. Rich Robinson

“I was 15. I used to mess around with my dad’s guitars but he didn’t like it because he had a 1953 Martin D-28. He didn’t like us messing with it. They bought me this Strat copy and that was our first guitar. By then I was into punk rock, so it made sense.”

76. Huey Morgan

“My first guitar was an acoustic that my mother got at a pawn shop. It had an action that was like two-and-a-half inches high. I don’t know how I managed to play chords.

"When I went to the marines, the drill instructors were like, ‘Were you milking cows, boy?’ because I had these big muscles on my hands.”

77. Juha Raivio

“It was a guitar by a brand called Rocky – a really crap Fender Stratocaster copy. I must have been 11 or 12.”

78. John Oates

“My first guitar was an acoustic – handmade by my best friend’s father when I was six years old. It had hand-painted playing card hearts and spades for fret markers – and the action was so high, I almost gave up trying to learn!

"So I purchased a simple acoustic from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, sanded down the finish, then hand-lacquered the top. I put it out in the garden to dry, then my neighbour decided it was a good time to mow his lawn… so it dried with little bits of grass and dust settled into the finish! I still have it – and it plays okay!”

79. Dave Kushner

“I was 16 and it was a Strat copy. But I don’t even remember who made it!”

80. Adrian Belew

“My first guitar was a Gibson Firebird. I’m going to say I got that guitar in 1968, and I bought it for $10 a week. For 17 weeks I coughed up the money, and then it was mine.

"I kept wanting it to be a Stratocaster, so that’s why I switched to a Stratocaster.”

81. Wilko Johnson

“I don’t know what make it was. I was about 14, and it was left-handed. I’m left-handed. I struggled away for some time, then realised everybody at school was better than me!

"Then I chanced upon a right-handed Watkins Rapier that was a better guitar. I changed over to playing right-handed. It was counterintuitive at first, but now I can’t play left-handed at all!”

82. Phil Campbell

“I borrowed a Hofner Futurama Duo off my cousin, which he’d sprayed all psychedelic. Then I bought a £12 guitar from Woolworths: I can’t remember the name – it might have been Zenith.

"I thought it was great, and the first song I remember playing properly was Streets Of London by Ralph McTell. We had a music teacher at school and she taught me some chords, and that was the first song I could play from start to finish.”