“He said, ‘Put it away and get a proper guitar!’ So it went by the wayside”: Andy Fairweather Low had a guitar specially bought for him in America, then brought back across the Atlantic – but Eric Clapton wouldn't let him use it onstage

If the name Andy Fairweather Low doesn't sound super familiar, here are some of the folks the well-respected guitarist has backed up...

Roger Waters (who he had never heard of until Waters explained that he was one of the principal members of Pink Floyd), George Harrison (who insisted that Fairweather Low play his slide parts onstage, despite the fact that the latter had never played slide before), Joe Satriani, David Gilmour, and Eric Clapton.

It's a fascinating mix of players that speaks to the guitarist's versatility, a versatility that, we might add, also extends to his taste in guitars.

As he recounts in a new interview with Guitarist, Fairweather Low was bewitched by the Teisco Spectrum V electric guitar after seeing slide master Ry Cooder use one onstage.

“[I was] drawn to it immediately,” he says. “It's got colors and knobs and bits of Lego.”

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Fairweather Low was friends with Pete Townshend’s guitar tech, Alan Rogan, and heard that he was about to leave for America for a Who tour.

“I said [to Rogan], ‘When you're over there, if there's any chance you see [a] Teisco Spectrum, [can you] get it for me? And he did.”

All too excited about the oddball addition to his collection once it was set up, Fairweather Low took to using it onstage with Eric Clapton... “briefly.”

“I used it on a couple of gigs, and then one night after the [Royal] Albert Hall he said, ‘Put it away and get a proper guitar!’” Fairweather Low recounts. “So it went by the wayside.”

“It's stereo,” Fairweather Low goes on to explain. “Teisco’s idea of stereo is that these three pickups go through one amp and these three go through another, and you’ve got a double lead that goes in there.

“I never did that but I loved the look of it, and because I loved the look of it I loved playing it, too.”

To read Guitar World's recent full interview with Andy Fairweather Low – in which the guitarist discusses why he probably won’t write any more songs, the ignored art of rhythm guitar, why he always thinks, ‘Why me?’ – and trying to persuade an amp expert to build a deliberately inefficient model – step right this way...