I hung on to it for years but decided in 2019 I’d earned an upgrade to a Gibson model. In 1997, while still at school, I did a few weeks’ work for my dad during the summer holidays and used the money earned to buy an Epiphone SG. My other main electric is my most recent purchase. That same Strat, stripped bare and refinished by Andy Gibson. To aid tuning stability (which I have to say is rock solid), the tremolo is blocked off. It’s put in a lot of hard yards for me, but still looks, sounds and plays great. Mine began life a cool translucent blue, but about four years ago I followed my heart and asked the great Andy Gibson (guitar tech based in Denmark Street) to remove the paint, so I’d have the natural-finish Strat I’d hankered after for years. Live with Carterhaugh at the Camden Eye, 2008. They had thin nitrocellulose finishes, supposedly designed to scuff up and look played-in quickly, but again, that was probably at least partly a cost-reduction thing.

Highway Ones were conceived as workhorse “player’s” guitars – officially American made, but with at least some of the manufacturing process taking place in Fender’s Mexican factory, and hence sold at a lower price than American Standard and Professional models (or whatever they were called at that point). Because it was an older model, it had been discounted, bringing it down to a price where I could, at a stretch, afford it. I bought it new in 2007, but I think it had been kicking around in the shop for a year or two as it has a 1960s-style small headstock, and at some point around 2006 the Highway One range was revamped, with the Strats getting bigger, ’70s-style headstocks (and hotter pickups). My longest-serving electric is a Fender Highway One Stratocaster.

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