Chris Buck

When a player of the calibre of Guns N’ Roses’ resident mad-hatter Slash says of someone, “This guy’s a f**king awesome guitar player…” and that same someone goes on to win Best New Guitarist in our sister magazine Total Guitar’s online poll, it’s time to sit up and take notice…

- Olly Curtis

The above was the case with Chris Buck, whose soulful bluesy Strat tones ripple tonefully throughout his band Buck & Evans’ debut album, Write A Better Day. The album is causing a stir, with singles receiving A-list play on radio and live dates creating a buzz at venues across Europe. He’s even got his own set of signature Strat pups from Radioshop Pickups and we hear that they’re the company’s top-seller. He’s still in his 20s, and Chris’s reason for starting to play guitar is laced with juvenile cunning.

“I guess I’d have been about 12 or 13 when I started and, hand on heart, it was an excuse to get out of maths lessons in school, because I realised the guitar slots coincided with my maths lessons,” he tells us. “A mate of mine started playing and, suddenly, come 2pm on a Thursday afternoon, he was buggering off for guitar lessons, so I thought, ‘I’ll have a bit of that action.’”

And thus, a career in music had, albeit unwittingly, begun. Retrospectively, his choice to pursue guitar was a natural progression, as Chris remembers.

“I’d always been surrounded by guitar music I guess, looking back, whether it was The Beatles or Stones or Dylan…”

After the maths-dodging guitar lessons had begun to bite, a few guitarists first captured Chris’s imagination.