Lee Kiernan is a real nice guy, but you should think twice before lending him your electric guitar. Chaos is a guiding principle when he’s on stage with IDLES. Plus, he admits he’s occasionally dabbled in misadventures with a soldering iron.
It’s amaing his pink Mustang is still standing.“I broke it, fixed it, broke it, fixed it so many times; changed things so many times,” he says. “I created my own weird wiring inside and it broke again.
I took it to our tech Gavin Maxwell and he had to reinstall wires I’d put in for no reason to make it work again – we still don’t know why!”Despite that, Fender did lend Kiernan a guitar when they enlisted him and bandmate Mark Bowen to test the Player II Modified series. It’s a range of classic Fender instruments, pre-modded in the factory. Kiernan put the new Floyd-equipped HSS Strat through its paces.
“It’s really solid,” he reports. “It feels good to play. It feels like a Fender but with more – and isn’t that the point with modding a Fender? You feel Fender, but you can do more.
”An HSS Strat with a Floyd turned him onto Jackson guitars, which is why he packs a Soloist in his arsenal. We didn’t have him down as a typical Superstrat player; but this unorthodoxy, he explains, is part of a sensibility that shapes IDLES’ sound in radical ways.Certain instruments can be more important in stimulating an idea that can be executed elsewhere.
Is that what happened with your Soloist?“It works both ways – .
