Paul McCartney Shows His Very First Guitar Amp
The Beatles man continued to use the formative combo for decades afterwards.
In the newly released Super Deluxe edition of Paul McCartney's 1997 album Flaming Pie, we're treated to an hour-long tour of the Beatles man's home studio, in which he shows us some of his most important gear.
Among swathes of guitars sits his very first guitar amp, an Elpico A55.
“This is my very first amp I ever had when I was 14, it was called an Elpico,” he says at the 19:31 mark in the video below. “As you can see it is very ’50s - the design looks like a piece of ’50s furniture.
“Instead of putting guitars into it, it says Mic1, Mic2, Gramophone - anything but guitars, really.”
The Elpico A55 is actually the same combo used by Dave Davies on The Kinks' hit single, You Really Got Me. You can hear the amp's fuzzy sound on the track, though Davies supposedly cut his amp's speaker with a razor blade for extra drive.
We're also treated to a display of Macca soloing on his custom Ernie Ball Music Man Silhouette models, which were fitted with custom pickups and specially produced for McCartney and fellow guitarist Robbie McIntosh.
The Super Deluxe edition of Paul McCartney's Flaming Pie is out now.
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Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.