Guitar Solos - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

Guitar Solos was voted one of the best albums of 1974 by NME critics. Sean Westergaard of AllMusic called Guitar Solos a landmark album because of its innovative and experimental approach to guitar playing. Radio journalist Chris Comer said it was a "ground breaking guitar improvisation record." In the January 1983 edition of Down Beat magazine, Bill Milkowski wrote that on Guitar Solos "Frith unveiled a haunting collection of improvised music on prepared guitar which must have stunned listeners of the day. Even today that album stands up as uniquely innovative and undeniably daring." The album also attracted the attention of Brian Eno who was "excited by the timbral possibilities that been discovering." Eno asked Frith to record with him, and this resulted in Frith playing guitar on two of Eno's albums, Before and After Science (1977) and Music for Films (1978).

The table-top guitar setup Frith used on this album became a standard for many of his subsequent live solo performances, including those recorded on his 1982 live double album Live in Japan. He later extended his technique to include "found objects", which he used on his guitars to extract new sounds.

The success of Guitar Solos spawned two follow-up albums, Guitar Solos 2 (1976) and Guitar Solos 3 (1979), which featured Frith and other improvising guitarists, including Derek Bailey and Hans Reichel. Frith coordinated and produced these albums, and employed many of the same "unorthodox techniques" he had used on Guitar Solos. When a remastered edition of the original Guitar Solos was released 28 years later on Frith's own Fred Records label, it attracted further praise from critics. Westergaard wrote that "Guitar Solos' lasting legacy is that it radically redefined the way some people think about the guitar."