"Guitar Solos is the debut solo album of British guitarist, composer, and improviser Fred Frith. It was recorded while Frith was still a member of the English experimental rock group Henry Cow and was released originally in October 1974. Voted one of the best albums of 1974 by NME critics it also attracted the attention of Brian Eno, resulting in Frith playing guitar on two of Eno's albums.

Frith's never tiring spirit in creating and performing music has made him one of the most notable and creative guitar players and musicians in the scene of improvised and composed music. For the anniversary of this release, Week-End Records have encouraged Frith to arrange a set up similar to what he used 50 years ago to record an album of new compositions which will accompany the original record."-Week-End Records

"There was a record called Guitar Solos, which I made in 1974. At that point, Henry Cow had recently signed to Virgin Records, and as is typical of a major record company, they had decided that they wanted to have the guitarist make a solo record. They thought that rock guitar players should make solo records, because it's "cool." But they had no idea what they were getting into in my case. I gave this to myself as a kind of challenge. I gave myself two weeks in which I would try to completely redefine for myself what I thought a guitar could do, and then I would go into a studio and record it.

One of the things that came out of that period is that I started to experiment with laying guitars on the floor. What I started to discover, when I no longer had the guitar in the "playing" position, is that there were things you could do which no longer were concerned with gesture. Gesture, to me, seemed to be very important. Your playing gesture, the way in which you produce sound is tied to a whole bunch of assumptions about technique, and once you lose those assumptions, interesting things start to happen.

One of the things I did for that record, was I laid two guitars flat on the ground, with their necks coming from opposite directions. So I had these two necks, which were basically like keyboards, and I started preparing them. I'd seen David Toop, who opened for Henry Cow at a concert in 1971, using alligator clips on his guitar. That led me into a whole thing about, if the alligator clip could produce a sound out of an electric guitar which sounds like a gong, then there must be all kinds of things you can do to a guitar, which are going to do comparably interesting things. So I started to try out everything. I used sticks, bits of glass, metal, springs, chains, and all the things which have become a part of my vocabulary ever since. Dropping things on the guitars came later.

I don't think anymore, when I'm playing a guitar with a paintbrush, or pouring rice on it, that there's anything unusual about it. It's just like using a pick for me. For somebody who's not used to this, seeing someone play a guitar with a paintbrush is kind of funny. And I have no desire for them not to find it funny. I mean, I don't want to impose any restrictions on how people react to what they perceive. But something I observed when I started performing solo concerts is the palpable relief that people feel when they understand that this is not going to be difficult. That they don't have to be genius to understand it.

Because there is a lot of preconception about "new music" being cerebral, but once you come into a room and find that it's ok to laugh, that can be a very big relief, and I like that. The only problem is that once people start laughing, it's very difficult to get them to stop. You have to learn to project a certain kind of intensity, which creates a tension between the thing which they are finding funny, and make it also perhaps feel a little bit dangerous."-from Interview Freedom In Fragments: Steve Elkins Interviews Fred Oakland, California December 2004