My friend John Bohlinger from Premier Guitar just shot a Rig Rundown video with one of my utmost guitar heroes, Andy Gill.
I’ve rhapsodized about Gill’s guitar voice more times than I can count. But the aspect of his playing that I love the most is the way he created such a definitive voice with zero reference to prior rock and blues. If I’d ever worked at Art Forum like my wife did, I could probably draw comparisons to Luigi Russolo’s futurism and Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, but really, I just dig Gill’s blunt, brutal badass-ness.
The big surprise for me in this interview: These days Gill plays through a laptop running Logic, and he’s using some of the stuff that I helped make while sound-designing guitar components for Apple. This news makes my year (though given the year we’ve all been through, walking to the corner store without breaking my ankle would probably also make my year).
Nice work, JB! And thanks, Andy, for the endless inspiration since 1979’s Entertainment!
One of my favorite guitarists. So glad to see he’s not caught up in all the tone mojo nonsense. Though the fact he’s just running mainstage and plugins is still pretty surprising. I saw him a few years ago, and it sounded amazing.
He has been a big fave and a bit of influence to me since the first lp (import) hit my old Phillips 212. They were one of the loudest shows I have ever been to. They played Mabels a small second story club in Champaign, IL. The PA was big enough to do a medium theater and they had a deaf British sound man. The sound was unitelliglble untill I put my ear plugs in, then the PA was beautifully mixed and you could hear every note it was just too damn loud. I felt like I had fallen down a set of stairs after the show as Sarah Lee’s bass and the drummer were so loud my body felt physically worked over by the PA bass bins. Andy Gill was great playing thru a silverface U-L Fender Twin that was cranked. Couldn’t get down front to see what pedals he was using but it sounded relatively clean.