As Billy Idol spent the ‘80s cementing his reputation as a platinum blond, spiky-haired rock star, guitar foil Steve Stevens was strutting his stuff on his signature Hamer SS1. And it turns out that a Kiss legend hooked him up the the instruments.
After five years in Generation X — which became one of the first punk bands to perform on Britain's Top of the Pops — Idol moved to New York City. There enlisted Stevens and his glam-rock stylings to launch a solo career that transcended both genres.
As it would happen, Stevens wasn't blessed with an extensive guitar collection. He said Idol was keen to fix that as they went into record his self-titled 1982 debut.
“The first Billy Idol record was recorded with a Les Paul,” Stevens tells Guitar World. “When I met Billy, I didn’t really have an amazing guitar. He said, ‘Oh, you gotta have a Les Paul, mate.’
“We went down to 48th Street and Billy got me a ’53 Les Paul that would have had the trapeze tailpiece on it but had been retrofitted for a Tune-o-matic. And it had P90s on it, but originally, it had the PAF pickups. It wasn’t a collectible; it was a workman and great-sounding.”
As the duo set out to make Rebel Yell one year later, Stevens expanded his collection with a Kramer Pacer, "which I spent $650 on at Sam Ash” he says. It was this guitar he used for that album's title cut, on which he used a toy ray gun to create the solo's wild effects.
“I remember saying to Billy and Keith [Forsey, producer] that it can’t just be notes. I was adamant about that. It’s gotta explode," he told Guitar Player last year.
“I eventually stumbled upon the idea of using toy ray guns and putting them up to the pickups of my guitar and manipulating it with a Lexicon delay. So conceptually, it was this space-age gunfighter solo.”
As the decade progressed, Stevens forged an association with Hamer that culminated in the brand creating signature two models with him: the SS1 and SS2.
But as he explain, his relationship with the brand actually predates his time with Idol.
“Paul Stanley actually got me my Hamer endorsement,” he reveals. “I still own the very first Hamer guitar I got as an endorsement that was given to me before Billy Idol. I still have that guitar, and I have the prototype, which was the guitar Andy Summers played.”
As for what he found appealing about Hamers, he says they combined old-school vintage build with the kind of hot-rodded modern features and styling required in the 1980s.
“Roughly, they were similar to Les Paul Juniors or Les Paul Specials,” he says. “They were all mahogany and definitely in the Gibson school. They were the first kind of hot-rodded guitars out of the box.
“They came with DiMarzio pickups and had great parts and paint jobs. It seemed like my heroes, like Rick Nielsen, were playing them. I was like any other kid; I was looking in the pages of magazines, seeing the ads, and I thought, ‘Oh, man, one day, I want to have one.’ It was a dream of mine to have a guitar endorsement and — eventually — my own model.”
His dreams came true, with a little help from Stanley. His signature Hamer, which he posed with for a Guitar World cover feature, included a button that produced the ray gun sound on command.
Asked if any of his Hamers appeared on any notable recordings, he says only, "Probably not." While the guitars appeared often in his photoshoots, studio work called for him to use other axes.
Stevens would go on to win a Grammy for his work on the Top Gun soundtrack, but even though he wields his SS2 signature model for the "Top Gun Anthem" video, he recorded the track with a Charvel San Dimas Glow through a '69 Marshall "Plexi" Superlead, with a Boss Compressor in front of it.
