“This pic by Tony Motram appeared in Metal Forces magazine in 1991 and features the Gibson Les Paul that I recorded the “Electric” album with and purchased at the end of the session with Rick Rubin in New York.
If you look closely on the guitar neck you can see a mechanism at the nut and it's part of a system called a Floyd Rose Tremolo which a lot of guitars in the 80s were having which allowed you to do those quite hysterical dive bombs and quite extreme noises.. while the guitar stayed in tune.
You can hear it on the solo at the end of “Electric Ocean” and some of the background guitars at the intro to “Sun King” off “Sonic Temple”… and possibly even the intro to the track “Ceremony”… so quite a CV for this beauty!!!
It was very unusual to see it fitted to a Les Paul cause it's quite an invasive surgery, but it was a very useful tool at the time.
For the gear heads out there here’s how it works… basically the strings are locked down at the nut which is what you can see in the photo which makes them almost impossible to go out of tune.
When you actually restrung the guitar or needed to tune it you just loosened off the locking mechanism at the nut, tune the guitar as normal and then locked it down again ready for "dive bombs".
Also, near the bridge tremolo area it had the ability to micro tune using tiny little adjusters there as there as well.
This Guitar was originally wine red, so I had it sprayed Black but unfortunately that wasn't a very good job so finally got it sprayed cream by Gibson in America.
It finally went to guitar heaven when it was dropped on stage at a gig somewhere on the “Ceremony” tour. The neck broke at the nut... so whilst it did great work as mentioned the downside of adding this system was it weakened the guitar at the nut 😉
After I had it fixed and sold it to Hard Rock Vegas where it lived above the door of the joint for years... after it was eventually taken down I actually got it out of Hard Rocks storage and used it to jam with Matt Sorum at another Hard Rock club years later... AND it was still in tune!!!... but all the knobs had been stolen while it was on the wall hahaha"
Billy – March 2026