My Swannell IA:A Guitar Named After a Woman Who Floated Across the Irish Sea on a Leaf
A chat with a friend this morning prompted this post. He was talking about a beautiful Martin OM-28V he'd recently pulled out of storage and fallen in love with all over again. It got me thinking about guitars that get hidden away. We don't mean to forget about them, but life happens, and they stay in the shadows until their moment comes round again. I always feel a bit guilty about that – they deserve to be played and celebrated all the time, but I've only got two hands and 10 fingers.
I first saw this gorgeous guitar on Instagram, being played by dear old Michael Watts. I had a massive urge to play it myself, so before the end of that week I'd driven from Hampshire to Ely to give it a go. I was determined I wasn't going to buy it. I wanted to prove to myself I had the self-restraint not to. That didn't go very well.
It's a Swannell IA, handmade by Jamie Swannell in Cambridge – built acoustic-style but light: hand-bent cherry or walnut sides, low-output pickups, the whole thing barely over 2kg. The name comes from St Ia, who's said to have floated across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Cornwall on a leaf and gave her name to St Ives, where Jamie grew up. I bought it just before setting off on tour with the Needless Alley band, and it became the sound of that tour almost by accident. I hadn't planned it that way. I just kept reaching for it.
I love this guitar to bits. It's one of the loveliest things I own. Since the tour ended, though, it has mostly sat on its stand. Not neglected exactly, but not played the way it deserves either.
Every guitar seems to suit a different mood, and this one's given me a few tunes I wouldn't have found on anything else. I found this video from a morning when the sun fell through the music room window and settled on the IA while I was noodling, and out came this little tune. It's rough, unfinished, and I think it might end up woven into the Strange Heavens project – the Stanley Spencer record I'm writing with Richard Lines.
Jamie makes lovely things, slowly and carefully, with a lot of love in them. At FolkEast last month I spent a very happy hour at his stall, twiddling around on his MD – a Modified Dreadnought – which had more bass and warmth to it than seems fair. I've definitely got the bug for hanging around luthiers, and that's the fault of Michael Watts and Martin Simpson, mainly, who, as loveable as they are, are the guitarist equivalent of drug pushers. It's a lovely thing to do, though. I just wish I had the bottomless pockets to go with it.
Have a look at Jamie Swannell's wares on this page here: https://www.swannellguitars.co.uk/
