Cooper’s Column

The first I ever encountered was, I think, being driven by Albert Lee when he was toting a Tele with Chris Farlowe’s band, but I’d read about them in the MI mag of the day, Beat Instrumental. Asking around, I was told they were “the session man’s amp” and, indeed, that proved to be the case, I later found out.

Anyway, there I was, face to face with a Henry Blofeld lookalike who was babbling through a cheap dynamic mic plugged into the back of this fabulously vintage valve guitar combo, somewhere in the English countryside. I peered at it, took a couple of pictures (by now, Blofeld was eyeing me warily, no doubt suspecting I was a would-be terrorist from a rival village) and withdrew to consider my options. Now, as it happens, I knew that, wonderful creations though they were, Wallace amps aren’t exactly up there today with tweed Fenders and plexiglass Marshalls. I also knew that there was every chance Blofeld wouldn’t want to sell me his amplifier and, anyway, I wasn’t sure I really wanted it. But it did prove a point. You just never know where you are going to stumble over a piece of vintage gear. Quite how this ancient British valve guitar amp had wound up in the middle of a Sussex village being used as a PA system by a man with an old Etonian accent and a Panama hat, I can’t even begin to imagine. But there you are — it could have been a juicy Selmer Zodiac, a lovely old Watkins Dominator or even a Bird (anyone remember those?), but it wasn’t. And I wasn’t sufficiently beguiled to get into a bargaining session for it.

But there are two morals that come out of this tale. The first (as any Girl Guide will tell you) is always expect the unexpected. The second (and it’s the more important) is that the experience echoed the words of an amp-guru I was talking with a few weeks back. He told me that what he hates most landing on his workbench are old solid-state amps. Far too often, once broken, they are just about unfixable, because the components are simply no longer available. But a Mullard- or RCA-circuit-based valve amp (which is most of them) of almost any vintage? No problem at all.

I might wander back next year and see if Blofeld is still using his Wallace line array. And, who knows, the next fête I go to, I might find that red plexiglass 200-Watter being used to announce the results of the Donkey Derby. Either way, if it’s a valve amp, I’ll be able to keep it alive to enjoy an altogether darker and louder old age.  0