Cue guitars

In spite of an acute allergy to certain types of wood, Roger Bucknall has managed to sustain a successful career in the music business. John Prosser reports

Since Roger started his small business 30 years ago in the basement of a gent's outfitter, Mick's been a customer, so have Keith, Pete, Gordon, Steve and Ian. It could be a description of any number of small local businesses in a community where perhaps the customers gather of an evening after a hard day's work to share a drink, moan about the Government and worry about the future. But it's not. Mick is Jagger, Keith is Richards, Pete is Townshend, and, as for Gordon, you can choose between two - Giltrap or Sumner; the latter perhaps better known as Sting.

Roger Bucknall's customer base over the last 30 years reads like a list of rock and folk royalty and his business, Fylde Guitars, has a brand image for which most businesses would cut off their right arms. Of course it helps if you offer a lifetime guarantee on your product, happen to be in the right place at the right time, have natural talent, and can turn your hand to manufacturing 10,000 snooker cues a year when occasion demands.

I meet Bucknall at Penrith railway station in the UK's Lake District on a bright October day. He picks me up in his Audi Quattro and jokingly assures me that he doesn't usually pick up strangers in railway stations. In return, I do my best to reassure him that there's nothing strange about me.

Back at his purpose-built offices with its temperature-controlled workshop, he offers me tea, puts his feet up ('well it's my office'), and tells me how it all began. He has been making guitars since he was about nine. 'I had always liked making things, models, in my father's workshop, but I got fed up with making gliders so I made a guitar.'

The young Bucknall's first prototype, designed for a boy scouts' show, was a construction of hardboard, plywood, assorted domestic debris and fishing line. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unplayable. Undeterred, he continued his interest in acoustic music and technology, gradually learning to play and build guitars with a greater degree of functionality and style. After a technical school secondary education, during which he spent much time in the woodwork room and workshops, he graduated in mechanical engineering at the UK's Nottingham University, before taking work in the early 1970s as a technical writer and designer with an industrial tape recorder manufacturer. In his spare time he continued to build guitars, study musical acoustics at university, and play in local clubs.

By now, Bucknall's guitars looked elegant and were eminently playable. He explains: 'I was making and playing guitars; people saw them, liked them and bought them.' Then a chance meeting with guitarist, Gordon Giltrap, resulted in a commission and Giltrap has remained a customer ever since. (Bucknall now makes a Giltrap signature model.) 'I was making the guitars in my spare time, often working until four in the morning. I found I couldn't get up for work the following day,' he admits. Something had to give. For Bucknall it was the day job. With finance from a colleague in sales, who was based in Lancashire, he moved north, set up a workshop on Lancashire's Fylde coast, and Fylde Instruments Ltd was born. But initially the volume of instruments Bucknall could produce and, more importantly, sell could not sustain a maker as well as a salesman and Bucknall found himself alone again.

But the orders kept coming. The 1970s were a boom time for music in the UK and the guitar was king. Acoustic folk music in the UK was a burgeoning cottage industry with strong links to the mainstream world of rock and pop. The USA, traditionally dominant in electric guitar production, with Gibson and Fender, was not exporting acoustic guitars to the UK in large numbers and the market had largely fallen to the Japanese in the shape of Yamaha, whose guitars, Bucknall concedes, 'were quite good'. But circumstances in the UK were ideal for the emergence of a home grown product for players who wanted to move on to a handmade guitar. Bucknall's reputation was growing, both by word of mouth and the increasing number of influential musicians who could be seen in clubs choosing Fylde guitars for their more ambitious finger style playing. 'I had met a lot of musicians and, in those days, you could go backstage and meet everyone. You can't do it now, you can't get near them,' he adds ruefully. 'I had a salesman who had a contact with some of the bigger names and we took a guitar to London where it fell into the hands of [The Who's] Pete Townshend. He gave us all sorts of contacts in the States.'

And the financial side? 'In this sort of business you meet a lot of people who want to help you,' he says. 'They were interested in music and, also, there was a lot of bartering. People would say, 'you do this for me and I'll do that for you'. Also I was very lucky because one of my neighbours was chief accountant for the Co-op Bank. He became a very good friend and helped me with the books'' Bucknall concedes that getting professional financial administration is 'the key to success'.

But around the end of the 1970s, in Bucknall's words, it went 'horribly wrong'.

He had grown the business organically to a point at which he had 15 employees and a respected brand, producing 1,000 guitars annually. By this time he had established a thriving market in England and Scotland with healthy exports to New York music industry customers. The acclaimed Scottish folk artist, Archie Fisher, had become a customer and he spread the word about Bucknall's guitars in Scotland, an important market. Fylde guitars had become the instrument of choice for many of the leading lights in the UK's booming acoustic scene. But all this had meant borrowing to expand the business. He was 29-years-old, running the business alone and juggling with an overdraft, training, production, finance, sales, marketing and management.

The tragic death of his young daughter triggered a personal and business crisis, the ultimate result of which was the corporate insolvency and closure of Fylde Instruments Ltd. 'The technology was changing, Margaret Thatcher was in power, a lot of industries were struggling... the pound was very, very strong and it was difficult to export to the States. I lost the lot,' he says.

Things were not looking good. The synthesiser was taking over the world and guitars were distinctly less cool. His company had collapsed but, by making a deal with the bank, he managed to retain his home and some personally owned equipment. But what next?

Bucknall turned to snooker. He had already undertaken some training videos for the aluminium industry and this, coupled with a more than passing interest in snooker, led him initially to designing and producing aluminium snooker cue cases. Their success with leading players of the day, and his expertise with wood, resulted in a number of lucrative patents, the full-scale production of snooker cues and a new business for the 1980s, Barracuda Sports which, in Bucknall's words, 'did exceptionally well. I was part of the snooker boom.'

Barracuda Sports grew to a point at which Bucknall was making 10,000 snooker cues annually. But he had developed a severe allergy to certain kinds of wood. He became seriously ill. Again something had to go. At the height of its profitability Bucknall sold Barracuda Sports. Suddenly, he was cash rich.

In spite of his allergy to wood, and a professed desire to leave guitars behind, he had never abandoned guitar production. (He had started again the day after losing his company.) 'A lot of people think we stopped making guitars, but that is not so,' says Bucknall. 'In fact, we continued to supply guitars to some big name musicians - Andy Summers and Sting, for example, during this period. At the lowest point we still made at least 100 guitars a year.'

From a financial point-of-view, however, it was the snooker cue business that generated the main income, and Bucknall sold this side of the business in 1992 to reinvest in guitar manufacture. His fondness for the Lake District, coupled with the discovery there of an 'unbelievably beautiful house' led him in 1996 to move to Penrith and, because rents in Penrith were so high, build the workshop which currently houses Fylde Guitars - 'the best thing I've ever done,' he says.

Since 1996, Fylde Guitars has operated from the Penrith workshop, making around 300 guitars each year. Bucknall also produces a range of mandolins, mandolas, bouzoukis and citterns. He concedes that producing fewer instruments, with three staff, puts pressure on margins, but counters that his experience and investment in skilled staff has enabled him continuously to improve techniques and quality and that, because of the calibre of every instrument, he can price appropriately. His customers seem to agree with him. In spite of the UK's outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, which devastated businesses locally, Fylde's order book remained healthy. With a current annual turnover approaching £200,000, business is again thriving and Bucknall has designed a special 30th anniversary model guitar, of which he will produce six. Four are already spoken for and Bucknall is confident the other two will be snapped up quickly. He could be right. One of Bucknall's guitars was recently described as 'the perfect guitar for recording' by session musician, Fridrik Karlsson, who has played guitar on eight UK number 1 hits in the last couple of years. For Fylde Guitars, life's good at 30.

For more information on Fylde Guitars please see the website at www.fyldeguitars.com.