Fresh off the release of his fourth album, Idols, “punk's next guitar hero”, a.k.a. Yungblud, shows no sign of slowing down. For his latest album, he took one of rock's most recognizable hollow-body guitars and made it his own – thanks to a background story that, shall we say, is slightly out of this world.
“We were using Epiphone Casino for a lot of the rhythm stuff,” Yungblud tells the Gibson Gazette.
“Adam [Warrington, the guitarist and musical collaborator Yungblud previously described as ‘the Sid Vicious to my Johnny Rotten’] was playing a Les Paul through an Orange Tiny Terror into a Marshall cab, which was sick.”
As for Yungblud himself, “I had my black 1964 ES-330. It’s fucking epic, man, I call it ‘Ghost.’ It’s rare from that time. Back then, black guitars were seen as the devil’s instruments. A guy painted the scratchplate with a ghost, and apparently, he died two weeks afterwards, so it’s full of voodoo!”
Yungblud states that he prefers the 330 because it gives him “the cleanliness with a little bit of bite.”
“It gives it that Oasis, Richard Ashcroft, Verve, kind of Radiohead element to the rhythm playing,” he extrapolates. “So there’s a lot of Casinos and hollowbodies for the rhythm section, and then the big, beefy bits were Les Pauls.”
And while he's already dipped his toes into the signature model world with his Epiphone Yungblud SG Junior, he's fully ready for his next one.
“My vibe is that I would love to make Ghost. I would love to make an Epiphone Ghost. A black 330 with the matching scratchplate to mine would be just a dream," he fantasizes.
“Put this in the article, put some feelers out, see if the kids would be into it! Again with that guitar, no one’s got it, it feels really iconic. With the scratchplate, it’s so fucking sick.”
Last year, Yungblud laid his hands on one of punk's most iconic guitars – Steve Jones’ Sex Pistols Les Paul – and played it at one of his shows.
