“When we were finished gouging it with screwdrivers, spraying blops of paint on it, dragging it around the yard, and banging it on the driveway, we hung it up in a tree”: Adrian Belew on how he and Seymour Duncan made one of the first relic’d guitars

Adrian Belew with the Fender Stratocaster that he and Seymour Duncan relic'd in the back garden.

Long before the Fender Custom Shop had turned the relic’d electric guitar into an art form, way before Tom Murphy had cracked the formula for his aged nitro finishes from the Gibson Custom Shop, there was electric guitar pickup specialist Seymour Duncan, prog trailblazer Adrian Belew, and one Stratocaster that was about to become a piece of history.

This CBS-era Strat was to customised in the most barbaric form possible, and Belew has just shared some as yet unseen pictures to his Instagram of that fateful day, when he and Duncan turned a box-fresh instrument into one of the most notorious instruments in prog.