Manson Delorean

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Manson Delorean
Article on the Delorean in Total Guitar's July 2015 issue
Delorean
Manufacturer Manson Guitars
Used 2001-02-122005-05-07
Body type Solid
Neck joint Bolt-on
Body covering 1.70mm Aluminium (back and front) 1mm sides
Wood Body: Poplar
Neck: Birds-eye Maple
Fingerboard: Rosewood (with white inlay dots)
Bridge Fixed (Schaller bridge)
Electronics One volume, one tone, 3-way toggle pickup selector
Pickup(s)
  • Neck: Seymour Duncan Hot P90
  • Bridge: Kent Armstrong Motherbucker
  • Roland GK-2a MIDI pickup
Special circuits

Background

Although officially called "Manson Delorean", the guitar is known to fans as the "Silver Manson" and "Industrial Disease".

This was the first custom built guitar Matt got from Hugh Manson. In an interview with Australian Guitar Magazine, Matt talked a bit about how this guitar came to be:

  • Matt wanted a guitar that sounded like a P-90 Gibson guitar but looked like a Telecaster. In his sketches, he essentially drew a Telecaster with a hook on it, similar to an SG.
  • As he was spending lots of money, Matt really wanted to make this unique. Instead of going for a wooden guitar, he was inspired by the DMC Delorean in Back to the Future, and thought it would be great to have a guitar with a rough metal finish.
  • A Bass Guitar string was fitted on the sixth string of this guitar whilst recording Citizen Erased.
  • In an interview in 2006 Bellamy answered the question "If you had to give up all your possessions but you could only keep three, which 3 would you keep?" By saying he'd keep this guitar saying that it "means alot [sic] to him".

Hugh Manson on the Delorean

"Matt came to the shop and asked me to make a guitar for him. He had a definite idea of what he wanted it to sound like. We reached the body design through a combination of me drawing and him pointing and we got there pretty quickly, I think there was just a slight alteration on the top horn. In terms of the aluminium finish, that was an interesting one. I plated the whole thing and thought, 'My God, I'm gonna have to polish this and that's gonna be a nightmare.' It was all covered in really rough file marks and looked industrially atrocious. I was summoning up the energy to take it home and spend a week flattening it down and polishing it, but before that I took it down to the shop to show the lads how it was going. By fluke Matt turned up at the shop that day and I said, Why don't you have a look at the work in progress? He looks at it and goes, 'Oh wow, I love the finish!' I thought, That's brilliant, exactly what I want to hear."

Additional Information

Touring

The Delorean made it's first live appearance in February 2001 and was used until the end of the Absolution touring cycle in May 2005. It was used for many different songs in both standard and drop-D tuning.

Songs used for

Delorean Gallery

Signature Model

Links


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