A SOLID-BODY ELECTRIC JAZZ GUITAR, SPLIT SOUND

Mark Knopfler purchased this guitar in May 2004 and kept it for occasional home and studio use. Knopfler’s guitar tech Glenn Saggers told us that, on first arrival, every guitar would spend time in Mark’s hands so he could get an idea of the sound and where a particular guitar might fit in a particular song. This guitar was tried during the recording process but, ultimately, did not fit the song. The blue Split Sound was, however, featured in the promotional shoot for Knopfler’s 2007 solo studio album Kill To Get Crimson, seen in the background to the left of the abacus. Photographed by Fabio Lovino, the resultant publicity shots were used for the album’s liner notes, as well as the 2008 Kill To Get Crimson Tour programme. The shoot was also captured in Tom Bird’s short documentary film that accompanied the CD/DVD album set.

Knopfler told us: 'The love affair with guitars was always there, and it has never gone away. And it also applies to the cheap guitars. It’s not just about the Gibsons and Fenders. But you get this whole thing about Burns guitars, about Eko guitars. These are magic words to me. It’s like a Lord’s Prayer. These are some of the finest words in the English language: Ormston Burns.'

ORMSTON BURNS
If "necessity is the mother of invention" then the story of James Ormston Burns and the electric guitars he conceived and built are encapsulated in that proverb. As a young RAF ground crew fitter stationed in North Africa during the Second World War, Jim realised he did not have a guitar to play. He managed to cobble together some wood and strings to make one. It is said that for amplification he used a magnet and wire from a scrapped aircraft, which he wrapped around a toilet paper roll to produce a crude but workable single-coil pickup. The two other guitarists in the squadron band were awestruck enough to ask Burns to make guitars for them as well.

Burns would return home in 1946 and ply his trade as a joiner while playing Hawaiian-style slide guitar in a local band. By 1952 he was making guitars and some amplifiers part-time and grew his business until 1958, when he made the shift to be a full-time guitar-maker under the Supersound name. A year later he partnered with Henry Weill, manufacturing guitars under the name Burns-Weill. The reputation of his work grew, as did orders from British musicians, and in 1960 the first factory-workshop, located in a basement in Buckhurst Hill, was in full production building electric guitars under the firm's name Ormston Burns Limited. It can be said that the Burns guitars were the first high quality electric guitars being mass produced in the UK and fulfilled a considerable need for British guitarists. The instruments would be quickly embraced by British guitarists for their exceptional tonal quality, playability, craftsmanship and, most of all, striking visuals in body design - Hank Marvin and The Shadows, John Mayall, and Brian May, are but a few of the British guitar gods that strapped on a Burns guitar and made history. Burns guitars were not restricted to just the UK market. In the mid-1960s, the American amplifier company Ampeg contracted with Burns to produce guitars under their name. The sale by Jim Burns of Ormston Burns Limited to the Baldwin Company of Cincinnati in 1965 gave Burns Guitars a brief exposure to the US market, before Baldwin all but exited the market in 1970.