Scott Holiday

Rival sons’ guitar man on the perils of touring Europe in a van nicknamed ‘Castle Grayskull’

- David Mead

What was your very first gig and how did it go?

“I think one of my first proper gigs was at my high school. Junior year, junior sophomore year, maybe? I was in a band and all the other guys were out of school, except for the other guitar player, so all these guys were college guys, which amazed everybody I went to school with. It went down really, really well. We were playing my high school at lunch and that was probably my first real gig.”

Describe your current stage rig…

“‘Amazing’, is how I’d describe it! I’m using Orange amps, predominantly. I have three racked up, but I use two – one is very heavy and the other is a little bit lighter for clean stuff.They both go into a Radial Tonebone box called the Headbone that allows me to switch both heads into one 4x12 cabinet. We’re playing with Black Sabbath quite often and our stages are quite big, so instead of showing one cabinet, I have something like eight cabinets on deck and most of them are loaded, but I’m really only using one. If I plugged into all of them it would just ruin our front of house’s job, because there’d be too much guitar coming from the deck. I have my pedalboards that I built with my buddies over at Salvage Audio. I have three ’boards – six albums’worth of pedals and whatnot, and I think I’m taking about nine guitars out. There are my custom Kauers, a really beautiful guitar made by Meloduende from France, then there’s the blue Gibson ’99 Custom Historic [Firebird VII] and a ’65 Non-Reverse Firebird and a ’62 Fender Jazzmaster.”