VOX at 60 celebrating six decades of tone
IN 1957 , TWO MAVERICKS FORMED AN AMP COMPANY THAT WOULD DEFINE THE SOUND OF BRITISH ROCK. WE LOOK BACK ON 60 YEARS OF VOX
Earlier this year, a commemorative blue plaque was unveiled at the site of the first Vox factory in Dartford, Kent. It reads: “From these premises, music entrepreneur Tom Jennings and sound engineer Dick Denney produced the first Vox amplifier, changing the sound of popular music forever.” Actually, one of the first Vox products was a poorly-selling 3.5-watt practice amp with a 6.5” speaker. The only thing it changed was Dick Denney’s mind when he chose to upscale the speaker chassis to an eight-inch version. Even then, it was poorly equipped to take on existing combos like the WEM Clubman…
the real breakthrough, the amplifier that would establish what we now celebrate as ‘The Vox Sound’ was the AC15. The momentum created by this landmark 15-watt combo led to Rolling Stone Brian Jones’ MKVI ‘Teardrop’ guitar, the Vox wah, the Tone Bender fuzz, and the greatest British backline treasure of them all, the iconic AC30.
It was in 1956 that Dick Denney first showed Tom Jennings his homebuilt 15-watt amplifier. A little over a year later, the entrepreneur and the engineer pooled their experience in a new venture called Jennings Musical Industries aka ‘JMI’. It was a landmark moment but it’s not the beginning of the Jennings story.
As former Vox employee, celebrated electronics genius and ‘Father of British EQ’, John Oram explains, the origins of JMI can actually be traced back to the end of World War II and an outfit called Jennings Organ Company.
“A lot of people who know Vox for the guitar side don’t realise the company was running years before the amplifier thing, just on Tom Jennings selling accordions... and teaching accordion. That was down at Dartford, next to a fish and chip shop.”
Oram began an apprenticeship at the JMI parent company Royston Industries in 1964. Just about the last man standing from the original lineup at JMI in the 60s, he worked on the Vox wah, the AC50 and early solidstate gear like the Super Beatle stack. He’s an invaluable source of anecdotes, not to mention an excellent tour guide into a very different world.
“I first saw Tom when I was about five or six years old,” says Oram. “He used to wait for kids to come out of school, and he would follow them home, with an accordion on his back, riding a bicycle. He would wait ‘til you’d gone in, usually with your mum, cos at that age you were escorted home. You’d get in and there would be a knock on the door and – this actually happened to me, so I’m speaking from experience – mum would answer the door and Tom would be there with his accordion, playing it. With a big smile on his face!
“He’d say, ‘Madam, I see you’ve got a very nice little boy there. How would you like him to be able to play accordion like this?’”
Sadly for Jennings, by the mid-50s, few kids wanted to be seen dead with an accordion. The skiffle craze, led by Chas McDevitt and Lonnie Donegan, had British ‘yoof’ pestering their parents for acoustic guitars, or raiding garden sheds or the local dump for tea chests and washboards.
In 1956, Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel effectively signed skiffle’s death warrant, although it took another year or so for rigour mortis to set in good and proper. When Paul McCartney first encountered John Lennon at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool in 1957, his future Beatle bandmate was still playing skiffle with The Quarrymen. It wouldn’t be long before kids like John and Paul were turned on by the sound of amplified guitar courtesy of Elvis sideman Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry and a Lubbock, Texas kid called Buddy Holly.
Holly electrified the imagination of a generation of kids when he appeared on the cover of his album The “Chirping” Crickets cradling a sunburst Fender Stratocaster.