This is an extract from a larger piece called 'Back To The Batcave' exploring the history of Goth guitar playing. Dave Sharp is interviewed along with Wayne Hussey (The Mission), Nick Marsh (Flesh For Lulu), Rowland Howard (The Birthday Party) and John Ashton (Psychedelic Furs).
The article appeared in the December 2005 issue of Guitar & Bass magazine. See contact page of www.guitarmagazine.co.uk for ordering back issues.

---

Another band pioneering acoustics were The Alarm. Guitarist Dave Sharp was heavily into Woodstock folk and British rock music, but it was his combination of electric and acoustic guitars that gave The Alarm their organic, yet anthemic sound. Sharp ripped the components out of a Les Paul and installed them into his Epiphone acoustic for a gnarlier sound, and souped up frontman Mike Peters' instrument in a similar way.

Live, they'd use a hot-rodded Marshall, getting inside the chassis and messing with the components. 'In the early stages we used a lot of outboard equalisers, but eventually I found that really getting inside the chassis was the way to go,' he says. 'I was working with a great amp doctor called Peter Hartley, who'd been modifying amps since the early days of
Marshall. More or less all through The Alarm I was using master-volume Marshalls converted back to the same specs of the model 1959 amp. It exploited the rhythmic style I played with, and gave me a measure of fluidity when moving over to playing lead guitar.'

Over the years, Sharp also used a Tele, a Strat and a Zemaitis. 'and I had a flutter with an E-Bow on Howling Wind, just as a textural thing.'

Despite legions of loyal fans and faultless production on all their albums, The Alarm were winning no fans at the music inkies during the '80s. The Cult's Billy Duffy once admitted at a time of critical unacclaim that if it wasn't for The Alarm. he would have committed suicide.

It's not at all surprising that he was relieved - you can distinctly hear shades of Cult's classic She Sell's Sanctuary in The Alarm's earlier track, The Stand.

'I wasn't too aware of them,' says Sharp, 'but we were rehearsing at a studio at one point and I happened to hear a sound coming from next door. I popped my head around to have a look and there's Uncle Billy. It was interesting because he was doing things that I'd just begun to do, like running multiple amps within the same rig.

'The majority of people seemed to be listening carefully to each other at that time. I'd heard what The Edge was doing, and after that began to understand how to use the delay in a dynamic sense, to create different depths of perspective. A lot of bands started to use that heavily chorus sound as well, but I was thinking back to Hank Marvin and Pete Townshend, and the purity of their tone.'

Click here to download a PDF of the whole article (1.2MB)