JAKKO JAKSZYK

What was the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money?

“I don’t know whether it’s a guitar… I bought a copy of a 345 from Macari’s in Charing Cross Road and I think the brand name was [El] Degas, and although it sounds Spanish I think they were Japanese. I scrubbed off the original name and made a little stencil from a Gibson advert and I put ‘Gibson’ on the top. That was my first kind of proper guitar that I bought with my own money. I was an enormous fan of Robert Fripp and I remember reading that he said he had two main guitars. One was the famous black Les Paul, but the. Oh, and Fred Frith had one. I was a big Henry Cow fan, so that’s why I was particularly enamoured of that.”