Hondo II Strat copy (circa 1980)

My parents bought me this guitar when I was at Rosny College, and had been playing in my first band ‘Unit Rock’ for a while. It’s main selling point was that it has DiMarzio pickups, which sounded like a good thing to me at the time even though I didn’t have a clue what that meant.

It came with an awful bridge with a cover over the top which made it impossible to dampen the strings with the right hand. I eventually replaced that with the strat style string-through body bridge that’s on it now. It also has a velcro strip below the pickups which I used to attach the remote controller for my Zoom 9002 multieffects unit that fitted on the guitar strap.

I converted it to left-handed for a while for my nephew to play, but now it’s come back to me and is right-handed once more. These days it’s occasionally played by some of my students.