Chris Spedding

The Sharks and Bryan Ferry guitarist reflects on the quest for good coffee and life as a Womble…

- David Mead

What was your first ever gig?

“That would probably be with my school group. I had a group called The Vulcans and I think it went surprisingly well. I must have been about 14 years old and I had a Höfner guitar and we played a lot of Shadows and Ventures stuff – instrumentals. We had a couple of singers, one who specialised in Cliff Richard style and the other guy sounded a bit like Eddie Cochran. The significance of The Vulcans in Sheffield was that it was a steel town and Vulcan was the god of fire. There was a statue of him on top of the town hall.”

Describe your current stage rig…

“It depends on what I’m doing. If I’m doing a rock ’n’ roll gig with a regular rock band, I’ll use a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, no pedals, although I might put a Boss tuner in. I turn the amp up to 10 and work off the volume control on the guitar. If I want it quiet and relatively clean I’ll turn it down to three or four and when I want to play a solo I just whack the guitar up to 10. For other gigs, like backing up Bryan Ferry, he tends to want more variety in the guitar sounds and so it gets a bit more complicated. So I use a Kemper and we use in-ear monitors, so there’s no noise coming off the stage. It’s not plugged into an amp or a speaker, it goes directly to the front of house or to the monitor guy at the side of the stage and he feeds my sounds back to me.