Bond - Electraglide- 198x - [finish uncertain]

An Strat Dubh

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Bond - Electraglide- 198x - [finish uncertain]

Album: The Joshua Tree

Song(s): One Tree Hill, Exit, Mothers Of The Disappeared

Tour: N/A

Details: This is the guitar that The Edge used for the solo on "One Tree Hill" and for Exit, and Mothers of the Disappeared as per Joseph Bosso's 1987 Guitar World interview with The Edge.

[from Guitar World. July 1987]

"I am interested in abusing technology," he chuckles. "There's a revolutionary new guitar called the Bond Electric Light, which is a very finely-crafted guirar without propeer frets. Instead it has little serrations. I tried to incorporate it into my playing armory and found that ist was not working, until I discovered the things that you can do if you really osrt of abused it! I got fantastic results. Liek the sort of heavy fuzze guitar at the end of "One Tree Hill", and the last three tracks on the middle of side two - that sound is from the Bond.

"It's and English guitar. I dont' know if they're still made [Editor's note: They're not], but I got it three or for years ago. Naturally, with us, we try to approach anything without preconceptions, we just control the room withour the windows. Now, this Bond guitar, wasn't meant to do what I do to it. It's neck is some kind of plastic, so it's more flexible than most wooden necks. I discovered that I can bend the neck so that the strings started to vibrate on the fretboard as I played, and - the guitar having no frets - it created a different type of effect. It was an attempt to sound obnoxious. You know, you can wind up a Marshall, and it starts to sound better the higher you go. Well, this was a transistor amp and the sound was compressed to the hilt. I had it very loud and it just kind of had that edge of a sound that you don't normally get. People complained bitterly about it!"

More info on the Bond Electraglide:

Built by luthier Andrew Bond in the remote Scottish village of Muir of Ord. This guitar boast a unique 'shark's tooth' or 'stair-step' fretboard, that rise and peak where a fret would traditionaly be employed. High tech, molded carbon fiber solidbody. Modular construction neck with stepped fingerboard, dot inlays with 3 at the 12th fret. LED pickup monitor with digital controls. 3 single coils with multiple pickup & patch combinations. Stop tailpiece, roller bridge, Schaller gears. 5 buttons on the instruments bottom serve as pickup selectors and 3 rocker switches serve as volume controls. This highly evolved scheme requires more power than any traditional battery can provide; hence the guitar comes with and external power source the size of a wah pedal. Only 300 to 1000 units made.

Other BOND users besides The Edge? Echo and the Bunnymen's Will Sergeant and post-Clash guitarist Mick Jones used one in B.A.D. (Big Audio Dynamite).