However, when I saw that a very reasonably priced Chinese-made copy of my dream guitar existed I had to have it. I remember deliberating for a few months, but my desire for this object wouldn't get out of my head. As I recall I ordered it from a shop in Scotland which seemed to be the only place in the UK this model was available. I think it was around £200.
Tokai is a Japanese company renowned for making copies of guitars by the big American brands Gibson and Fender. This was quite controversial at one point, I think in the 1970s. Lawsuits were threatened, or maybe they happened.
The Tokai instruments made in Japan have a reputation for being really very good, but my Tokai Firebird I is not very good, or at least it wasn't when I first took it out of its box. It looks very cool though. It is the best guitar I have for standing in front of the mirror with.
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| Very cool |
What appealed to me at the time was the simplicity of the guitar. One pickup, a simple bridge, and two controls for volume and tone. That was what I was into in 2010, keeping it simple. The problem was that the pickup sounded really weak and the bridge was so basic that the guitar wouldn't intonate properly. This wasn't the machine for laying sonic waste to cities without mercy that I'd thought it would be. The guitar was really badly balanced too, so that the neck drops down all the time when you are playing standing up. There's a great German word for that - "Kopflastigkeit".
So I had a shitty guitar that looked great. I'd kind of expected this. I decided to make some improvements, so I bought a replacement pickup and bridge and took it to a shop to have it improved. The pickup in particular is rather special, and I would hope so given that it cost half of what I'd paid for the guitar. Graham at the shop did a brilliant job, including changing where the strap joined the body, which made it balance perfectly.
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| Special pickup |
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| Special balance job |
I had the wiring changed too, meaning that I could change the sound of the pickup by lifting the tone control knob which now featured a concealed switch like in a Bond film.
Having this guitar improved was a great experience all round, because I ended up with an instrument that was really good, I was given advice and suggestions, and there wasn't any prejudice about it being cheap. I have a justified fear about snobbery in guitar shops, so this was refreshing.
Then I played my Firebird I a fair bit. It's a strange guitar, because the shape is really rather odd when you're playing it (rather than just looking at it). The guitar is enormous, with loads of wood after the neck joins the body. It's like playing a boat. I had to buy a special case to carry it around, and deal with the fact that you can't lean this guitar up against anything without risking it falling over. Still, thanks to the improvements it was really fun to play and I wrote quite a bit of material on it. At the time I was channeling 'classic rock', probably aided by the guitar itself in a weird kind of nominative determinism.
My main memories associated with this guitar are the tour I did with my band in the autumn of 2010. I say tour, but really it was 4 shows in a week, with 3 of them being outside of London. A mini-tour. Still, for us it was really significant. At the show in Bath nobody came to see us, but thankfully there we had a ready-made audience: We went 'on the road' with two bands who were good friend of ours. One band was such good friends that we shared 2 members and the singer used to be in a different band with us.
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| Throwing shapes on mini-tour |
I was two months away from becoming a parent for the first time. The mini-tour is a strange memory, because it was so close to a fundamental change in my life. It was a culmination of a decade playing music with this group of people. It wasn't a "last hurrah" though - that would be crass. And besides, we're still at it.
