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was a copy of a Fender Precision bass guitar that I bought in 1981 for £79.50. With that I learned to plonk along with the tablature in, and the flexi-disc that came with, a book called How to Play Blues Bass. It got me going, at least enough to play in a somewhat naïve and idiosyncratic way with my first band, a three-piece we called The Playground.

We rehearsed, or rather made a glorious racket, in the Labour Hall once or twice a week. But we came to a bit of a halt when, in a fit of teenage frustration, I slammed the bass, still plugged into my Vox Escort bass combo, to the floor and cracked its neck. That produced a deafening hum from the Vox, and open-mouthed silence and hard stares from my bandmates, Les (drums) and Ringo (guitar). Not very clever.

Within a week or two of that tantrum, in February 1982, I went to Biggles, a music shop in Plymouth, where I had previously spotted a relatively small and somewhat odd looking bass called a Burns Artist. It was still there, so I pulled £150 from my wallet and swaggered out with it. I loved it, and still do: the short-scale neck was fast, allowing me to bounce around the fretboard and find my own way of playing.

I soon got hold of Paul Day’s The Burns Book, published in 1979. Paul’s book told me that my Burns Artist was made in 1960, i.e. older than me. The Burns Book was, and remains, a veritable mine of information, and is the foundation from which all subsequent Burns’ books derive. I quickly struck up a correspondence with Paul, who patiently replied to my flow of inquisitive and pedantic letters. I became hooked on Burns guitars and basses, and went on to amass a small herd of them, as you’ll see!

Burns was always a bit of an outlier on a guitar market saturated by Fender and Gibson, and their cookie-cutter copies and Far Eastern knock-offs. Back then I was adamant that I would never own a Fender or Gibson, and as my guitar obsession developed I sought guitars far from the mainstream. And that, in a nutshell, is how I ended up with