First bass No.5 - Off with his head!!

So, here we are with yet another bass guitar in my fickle fingers…

This is an 80’s classic - the Westone Superheadless. Its name , as you can see by the pics, is self-evident.  It had a Steinberger inspired tuning section below the bridge, but its weak point was the string clamp that held the strings at the blunt end of the neck.  It featured one bar that clamped across all four strings at the same time, so in a gig situation, a solitary string break meant that you had to slacken off ALL the strings at the same time! Nightmare! I had mine modified to take a more user-friendly 4 -point system that allowed clamping and release of individual strings. This model seemed quite rare to me. I never saw another one quite like it, it had see-through pillar-box red paint, with a beautiful birds-eye maple visible underneath, and all-black fittings, whereas most others I saw were an unappealing dirty-brown colour. This one saw off my Aria pro ll and became my favourite for a few years in the 80’s.

You won’t be surprised to know that it went the way of the others eventually…for a short while I had a Status headless - supposedly a wonderful instrument, and considerably more pricey than this Westone, but I hated it with a passion, it played like a cricket bat, and probably sounded like one. Small wonder I have no pictures of it!

These shots were taken at a charity show in South Yorkshire. I remember very little about it - except that we were on with a band called Slug the Nightwatchman!

Kev Moore