John at the bench in the shed, from the side
Blind John · Hopton, Suffolk

Blues heritage, punk history.
I like rat rods. I like busted-down homemade choppers. I’m almost turned off by the new and shiny.

Music has always been my constant. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I need it — whether I'm listening or creating. It doesn't matter which.

Becoming a guitar maker was never part of the plan when I left school 40 years ago. Funny how life works like that. It throws you down a path you never saw coming, only for you to realise it's the one you were meant to be on all along. As the Buddhist saying goes, everything that has happened had to happen for you to be here now. It's true — and I wouldn't change a thing.

Somewhere along the line, I developed a fascination with the old, the battered, and the discarded. Things with stories to tell. There's a certain je ne sais quoi to them, as the French would say — and for me it's relics: beaten-up, well-used, slightly shoddy objects that look like they've been to hell and back. You can imagine the lives they've lived.

John and his workshop buddy.

I can't stand the look and feel of modern "new." It feels soulless to me. No judgement — if that's your thing, that's your thing. It's just not mine. I like weathered. I like beat up. I like used. I love old Levi's on the brink of falling apart, rat-rod motorcycles, sleeper custom cars in a vintage style, and sheer originality. New dressed as old. All of it feeds directly into what I do.

That influence shows up everywhere — from four-string resonators built from suitcases and reclaimed oak, to custom Telecasters that look like they've been played by the Devil himself… and survived. Not that every guitar I make has to be that extreme. Most of us live somewhere in the middle ground, and that's really the crux of it.

A hand on the Runaway’s neck.

If the music's playing (and it always is) and I'm working timber, then all is right with the world.

When you buy a Blind John's guitar, you're getting a one-off — something that genuinely looks like it's already 60 years old, feels properly played-in, and is built to last another 60. A guitar that will continue to age, with you. A guitar with stories to tell…

I love what I do — passionately. It's one of the few times my mind quietens, when I can focus and let everything else bleed away. I can, and do, get lost in it — sometimes to an almost pathological degree. If the music's playing (and it always is) and I'm working timber, then all is right with the world.

I'm not cut out for the rat race — the absolute shitshow that it is — and that's another reason I do what I do. So, if you're looking for a unique custom guitar made by a slightly weird, grumpy, stiff, late-fifties skateboarder who's been around the block far too many times — the living embodiment of Generation X — then you're in the right place.

Fitting the pickups to a custom on the bench.

I've built guitars for clients all over the world: from York to New York, Manchester to Maine, Lisbon to Lima, Perth to Paris, and Birmingham, Alabama back to Birmingham, West Midlands. Instruments for people to tell stories, because stories matter… and music matters.

I guess, for me, the first album that made me realise music wasn't just sound — that it mattered — was in '79, when the Clash released London Calling. I was ten. We'd just moved from York to South East London. Didn't like school; school didn't like me. A kid with a North Yorks accent in a South East London school: never gonna go well. But I heard London Calling and something snapped in my brain, and I've been a Clash fan since. I don't remember understanding why it was an important album. Something in me knew it was. From there I absorbed music like a sponge, going from punk to blues and back via everything in-between. And London Calling is still on rotation… over 40 years later.

The 107’s number, under the tuners.

Look… some folks think punk is just a phase teenagers outgrow, like skateboarding, but to me, again, like skateboarding, it's a lifelong philosophy. It's that same raw, independent spirit you find in the best blues music — a refusal to let the big corporate machine tell you how to live, how to think, or what to create. Now that I'm in my late fifties, being a punk doesn't mean causing chaos, or wearing bondage trousers and Vivienne Westwood tartan… it means keeping my freedom, trusting my own hands, and doing things my own way. That's exactly why I do what I do today, building and sharing authentic, high-quality guitars for people who still value the real deal.

SoundingsWho plays them
Where we stand

Seven things from where we stand.

The wear goes where you'd wear it.
Whenever anybody comes to us for a custom guitar we want to see them sit with the guitar, or stand, and we'll pay attention to how they're playing — how it sits on their lap. That dictates where the wear would be. If they play with their arm here, the wear's here, not there. So it becomes their wear.
“That guitar hasn’t earned that.”
The guitars that have earned it, you will never be able to afford. In 25 years, when you possibly could, you won't, because the prices have gone up and there's less of them. Every guitar has a story. Every guitar. If we're building you a guitar, you're going to fill it with your stories. We don't know what they are, and quite frankly we don't care. They're yours.
Rolled edges and a bare neck, on every one.
We wouldn't let a guitar leave the workshop without rolled edges on the fretboard. Technically that's relicing, because it only happens with time and playing. It feels nicer. If it feels nicer it plays nicer, and if it plays nicer you play more. Simple as that. And we have a pet hate for glossy necks — if you get slightly sticky hands, they stick. Ours are bare wood on the back, waxed, buffed, knocked back so it's matte. You're not filling the pores with sweat.
Do you paint behind your radiators?
Under the pickguard it still relics, just less. Take it off and there's a tide mark in the shape of the guard. A strap button wears a ring into the paint, so we've an old strap button with sandpaper glued to the bottom and we spend ten minutes turning it. Customers say it's pointless, no one sees it. Do you paint behind your radiators? Nine times out of ten: well, yeah, of course. Why? No one sees it. We know it's there. There's your answer. It's not a real old guitar. But it needs to be convincing. Nothing winds us up more than a badly done relic.
The first test is the volume control.
If you can get a nice, crunchy tone with it on ten, and roll it back and it cleans up — that's how it should be. Our fuzz pedal is almost always on, because at six it cleans up like you wouldn't know it's there. You have all that nuance in between. People forget that.
A hand-wound pickup isn't neat. That's the point.
Back then nobody was counting the winds. You can see where the wire is. It's lumpy. It's not nice and neat, and that's not what you want — that lack of neatness is what you hear once you pluck a string across it. A machine-made pickup is identical every time. Hand winding costs more. The sound is that much better.
What we don't do.
Fan frets, seven- and eight-strings, Floyds, acoustics, and fakes. And the same guitar twice. It's physically impossible, unless you want showroom-new. And that's not how we strum.
The shed

Ten by twenty, split down the middle. One side clean, one side not.

The bench, and John over it.
The clean side, where the spanners live.
Play one

Come and play one.

Nobody has yet come down and left without saying yes to a guitar. Bring your own if you want to hear the difference in the same room.

Where8 Nethergate Street, Hopton, Diss, Suffolk IP22 2QZ
BetweenBury St Edmunds, Thetford and Diss, the middle of the triangle
WhenTuesday to Saturday, by appointment
HowEmail or ring 07494 633179, and we'll find a day
Repairs
Whatever’s on the bench that day, you can play.
The films

Three conversations in a Hackney studio. Start there.

All the films