He didn’t understand where I was coming from because there was nobody else there who knew anything either, so I was the only one saying what needed to be done.” Joe Bonamassa playing through a Silver Jubilee. How did Steve find Jim to work with? He pauses, then says: “Interesting. For that he relied on engineers, originally Dudley Craven and Ken Bran, with Steve Grindrod the man behind much of what the company produced during its later successes in the 1970s and 80s. ![]() In fact, he knew relatively little about them, or how they worked. Jim Marshall is remembered as the ‘father of loud’ and a guitar-amplification pioneer, but whatever his skills as a businessman and a leader who could spot an opportunity, he was not – and never pretended to be – an amp designer. If that sounds a little bitter, it’s not entirely undeserved. “I was hidden – out of the way, so that people didn’t find out that nobody else there knew what they were doing,” he says with a wry laugh. Steve’s evident ability saw him promoted quickly to R&D duties, but he reflects that it was possibly the ultimate backroom job at Marshall. Primarily, I was test engineer when I started with Marshall – a product-testing guitar player trying to make things work, mostly repairing a lot of blowing-up solid-state amps.” ![]() How much of that is wishful thinking 40 years later, I can’t say. I’d built a modified version of one for a guitarist friend of mine and it sounded okay. “EMI had wanted to move Simms-Watts more towards transistor amplifiers and actually they had one that wasn’t too bad. Faced with the task of trying to make Marshall’s early transistorised amplifiers work reliably (like most early solid-state amps, they had a miserable reliability record) Steve found himself on familiar ground, as he explains: It wasn’t long before Marshall’s new test engineer had begun to make his mark. It was to prove a turning point, not just for him but for Marshall, too. Finding himself with no job and a young family to keep, Steve applied for the post of test engineer at the nearby Marshall factory in Milton Keynes. Unfortunately, Simms-Watts fell victim to both the curse of EMI’s corporate inertia and a recession. Though well regarded for its guitar and bass amps (Mick Ronson and John Entwistle were among the users) Simms-Watts was particularly noted for its PA equipment and it was on the PA side (though mostly for installation use in conference centres and the like) that Steve was hired as a designer. ![]() Originally a challenger to Jim Marshall’s fledgling amplifier brand, they were made by rival Ealing music-shop owner, Dave Simms and his designer, Richard Watts. The latter resulted in a job with giant electronics and record company EMI.ĭuring the 1960s, and for reasons that have never been quite clear, EMI had bought the small British amplifier maker, Simms-Watts. The two disciplines, technology and music, were fostered by playing keyboards and guitar in a succession of bands during the 1970s, while simultaneously studying technology and earning a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. Not only had Steve started to play electric guitar but he had begun trying to build amplifiers, too. After applying extended pressure to his father, he was eventually able to pair his Vox with a Watkins Westminster amplifier, but not before he had tried to build his own, using parts cannibalised from his father’s radio. The infection having taken hold, the young Grindrod hot-footed it to the Bexleyheath Vox store, where he purchased his first electric guitar – a Vox, naturally – which cost him a princely nine guineas (nine pounds and nine shillings, which would roughly equate to just under £200 in today’s money). Having become an accomplished childhood pianist, he caught the rock ’n’ roll bug, as many of his generation did, through listening to Radio Luxembourg, the one station in the UK during the 1950s where you stood a chance of hearing contemporary music. How Steve Grindrod got into the business of designing amps is very much a story of his time.
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