Manson Delorean

Manson Delorean

Article on the Delorean in Total Guitar's July 2015 issue

Delorean
Manufacturer	Manson Guitars
Used	2001-02-12 — 2005-05-07
Body type	Solid
Neck joint	Bolt-on
Body covering	1.70mm Aluminium (back and front) 1mm sides
Wood	Body: Poplar Neck: Birds-eye Maple Fingerboard: Rosewood (with white inlay dots)
Bridge	Fixed (Schaller bridge)
Electronics	One volume
Pickup(s)	Neck: Seymour Duncan Hot P90 Bridge: Kent Armstrong Motherbucker Roland GK-2a MIDI pickup
Special circuits	Z.Vex Fuzz Factory MXR Phase 90 Graphtech Ghost acoustic saddles via preamp built by Ron Joyce Three-way toggle killswitch

Background

Although officially called "Manson Delorean", the guitar is known to fans as the "Silver Manson" and "Industrial Disease".

This was the first custom built guitar Matt got from Hugh Manson. In an interview with Australian Guitar Magazine, Matt talked a bit about how this guitar came to be:

• Matt wanted a guitar that sounded like a P-90 Gibson guitar but looked like a Telecaster. In his sketches, he essentially drew a Telecaster with a hook on it, similar to an SG.
• As he was spending lots of money, Matt really wanted to make this unique. Instead of going for a wooden guitar, he was inspired by the DMC Delorean in Back to the Future, and thought it would be great to have a guitar with a rough metal finish.
• A Bass Guitar string was fitted on the sixth string of this guitar whilst recording Citizen Erased.
• In an interview in 2006 Bellamy answered the question "If you had to give up all your possessions but you could only keep three, which 3 would you keep?" By saying he'd keep this guitar saying that it "means alot [sic] to him".

Hugh Manson on the Delorean

"Matt came to the shop and asked me to make a guitar for him. He had a definite idea of what he wanted it to sound like. We reached the body design through a combination of me drawing and him pointing and we got there pretty quickly, I think there was just a slight alteration on the top horn. In terms of the aluminium finish, that was an interesting one. I plated the whole thing and thought, 'My God, I'm gonna have to polish this and that's gonna be a nightmare.' It was all covered in really rough file marks and looked industrially atrocious. I was summoning up the energy to take it home and spend a week flattening it down and polishing it, but before that I took it down to the shop to show the lads how it was going. By fluke Matt turned up at the shop that day and I said, Why don't you have a look at the work in progress? He looks at it and goes, 'Oh wow, I love the finish!' I thought, That's brilliant, exactly what I want to hear."

Additional Information

• This guitar is featured in the "Hyper Music" music video, the "Butterflies & Hurricanes" music video, the "Dead Star" music video and the "Stockholm Syndrome" music video (the U.S version).
• Matt let me have a go on it during the Hyper Music video shoot, until some arsehole took it away from me :( --crazybobbles 01:04, 21 April 2008 (BST)

Touring

This guitar has been retired from live use since the start of the Black Holes and Revelations tour.

Songs used for (pre-Black Holes and Revelations tour)

• Blackout
• Bliss
• Butterflies & Hurricanes
• Can't Take My Eyes Off You
• Cave
• Citizen Erased (used during recording)
• Darkshines
• Dead Star
• Fillip
• Fury
• Hyper Music
• In Your World
• Micro Cuts
• Muscle Museum
• New Born
• Plug In Baby
• Screenager
• Showbiz
• Stockholm Syndrome
• Sunburn
• The Groove
• The Small Print
• Time Is Running Out
• Uno

Delorean Gallery

• 

  Manson Delorean

• 

  Internal circuitry of the Delorean

• 

  Matt with the Delorean during the making of Origin of Symmetry

• 

  Manson Delorean

• 

  Manson Delorean

• 

  Manson Delorean

Signature Model

• Manson DL-1 Matthew Bellamy Signature Guitar

Links

• Pictures of the Manson Delorean on the Manson Guitars website

Go back to Manson Guitars