"Restoring a Piece of My Childhood: The Stranglers' Vintage Keyboard and My Hero, Dave"] - Guitar | Technique

A vintage keyboard belonging to the Stranglers has been restored to something approaching its former glory by the BBC show The Repair Shop.

If you check out yesterday’s edition on iplayer, you can see the story of the instrument, a rare 1950s Hohner Cembalet. It originally belonged to Dave Greenfield of the band but had passed through a number of hands and was going to be thrown on to a skip when its owner saw the words ‘The Stranglers’ stencilled on its side and decided to gift it to Greenfield’s replacement, current keyboard player, Toby Housham.

“It was in a very bad state of repair,” said Housham in an interview with BBC Radio Surrey. “The wood was all rotten, the keys didn’t work, the mechanics were all broken so I couldn’t play it! It didn’t actually make a sound.”

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“It had had hundreds of gigs, it had been thrown about in the back of an ice cream van which is what they used to go to gigs in (in the band’s early days). Lots of stains and burns. It didn’t play a note.”

It’s now been renovated by the BBC show in their workshop at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which Hounsham says has kept the character of the instrument “brilliantly”.

“They actually did it really quickly,” he says. “I did the drop off and then about two three weeks later we filmed the reveal. I really didn’t know how I was going to feel but I was genuinely pretty emotional.”

Housham had been a long-time Stranglers fan. “They were my favourite band growing up. Dave (Greenfield) was my hero, and this was his keyboard, his original keyboard that inspired me to play the keys. And then many years later being in the band, I’m playing his keyboard.”

“They did a beautiful job,” he insists. “One of the things I wanted to keep is all those cigarette burns and dents – they all tell a story. I wanted them to try and keep that character and they did a fantastic job. It looks lovely. It’s got that lovely warm electric piano sound, which is really unique.”