HÖFNER S7L

How a little known and short-lived guitar from Höfner found its way into the hands of The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell around the time of the band’s hit Golden Brown 

- David Mead

If you happened to be watching The Stranglers performing Golden Brown on BBC’s Top Of The Pops in the early 1980s, you may have found yourself wondering about the strange looking guitar that singer Hugh Cornwell was holding. None more black in colour, of course, but with a strange blade-like body shape with a Fender-ish headstock, it wasn’t immediately unidentifiable from any sources we have to hand. But when we ran into Hugh last year, we were able to ascertain that the guitar was a Höfner and so we contacted Steve Russell, a Höfner historian, who identified the guitar as an S7L, a highly unusual model that was only available between 1978 and 1984. It was known as the ‘Razorwood’ because of its body shape and featured an interesting set of parts, along with a fascinating backstory – and Hugh’s tale of how one of his pair of S7Ls went missing and was subsequently recovered is a bit of a page-turner, too.

“The Höfner company was initially an orchestral instrument maker – violins, cellos, and so on – from the 19th century onwards, based in a place called Schönbach in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic,” Steve Russell begins. “In the late 1920s and 30s they diversified into acoustic guitar making, first flat-top guitars and then archtops with a Gibson influence. After World War II, the Höfner family and their workforce, being of German origin, were expelled by the Czechs and had to reestablish themselves in Bavaria, Germany. So from 1948 onwards, they got back into producing orchestral instruments and acoustic guitars. The guitars soon started appearing in the UK, distributed from 1952/’53 by the famous Selmer London company.