b'of the top session guys. Before long, we began toequipment. I had been designing tape recorders suspect we were being followed around the studios,just a few years before, so to see an audio recorder because each time we delivered a new Fylde, thethat could automatically return to a marked place Ovation rep would visit that artist shortly after.Ion the tape time and time again was a revelation. have some great quotes from the New York SessionTechnology was starting to move very fast.players, and I know that some of them still useFor quite a while I had been so busy getting the those old guitars, even though so many aspects ofinstruments made that I didnt have much need of guitar making have moved on in the last 35 years. new names. We were making nearly 20 guitars a When my wife Anne and I visited NY we stayed inweek and I was mostly overseeing staff rather than a flat not far from where John Lennon was killeddoing much making myself, so my mind began to shortly afterwards, and one of my customers wasstray, and the devil makes work for idle hands - David Spinozza who was dating Yoko Ono whileElectric Guitars!! John was on walkabout. If I try really hard, I canI met Terry Pack, and Barry Barlow from Jethro conjure up a scenario where if my movementsTull, both originally based in Blackpool. Together and guitars had been just a little different, andwe cooked up an idea for an English made, top level things had unfolded in just a slightly different way,Electric guitar, the Pack Leader, taking Terrys perhaps John would have been somewhere else onname and the concept of Leader of the Pack. that day. Who knows? It could be a film, The manClever eh?? Nothing Shakespearean at all, I really who could have saved John Lennon with Georgedidnt think William would have approved, and Clooney playing me. I kept my book of possible names firmly closed. Maybe I should point out that I was once describedMaybe Sycorax would have been OK.as a cross between George Clooney and SeanTerry specified the basic shape and supplied sales Connery. George Clooneys eyes and Sean Connerysand marketing, Barry supplied the finance and hair.useful contacts, and I did the detail design, making I spent some time in the CBS studios with Alsure the guitar was ridiculously high spec and Di Meola and was fascinated by the recordingalmost impossible to make.That was silly, as it Hobson and LeesJohn Hobson and Howard Lees -. John and Howard were, and still are, high-level professionals in engineering and computing. Music was their hobby and safety valve; its a good way to do it. Archie Fisher once said to me that if you have two things that you are good at, choose the one you enjoy most as a hobby and the other as a career, thats the way to have both success and happiness.We all spent a lot of time with them and they were good times. They once took me to a guitar festival in France, where some of the audience thought I was famous and asked for my autograph, I didnt know how to say no, Im not one of the artists in French, so I just signed. J and H went off to a fancy restaurant together and left me in the hotel. To bethe world to work in detail, which is one fair, that was my choice; by the time wereason why the thumb is a separate got home I was desperate for egg andpiece, attached to the neck with bluetac.chips.John and Howards one and only album was called HAND MADE. The record cover is a hand that I carved from ash especially for the photograph, I cant remember if the title came first or the hand.Ash is not the easiest wood in 56'