Hammer Guitars

It was in 1984 when he started to mainly use a custom made Hamer Phantom, plus his own distinctive designed GT. This guitar is featured on the Hammer Guitar page. 

Even though the numerous amount of guitars he used through the years and the size of his gear, Glenn doesn’t consider himself a guitar collector. In an interview with Pete Wadeson he said that guitars are for him tools that do a job but also significant and valuable items. The wide number of instruments among his equipment shows a wide palette of sounds to choose but also a collection of interesting and important memories:

“(…) if there’s one guitar among this lot that makes me sentimental and misty-eyed, it’s my cream-coloured faded 1961 Fender Stratocaster. When I was in the Flying Hat Band before joining Priest, my only guitar was an early Salmon pink strat. Sadly, it got nicked after a gig in Newcastle. It was the only point in my musical career where I seriously thought of giving up… I had no money to buy another, but luckily I was offered this Stratocaster for thirty pounds (even though cheap at the time it was still a lot of money going back but I managed to raise the cash somehow). A lot of parts of early Priest songs were written and some recorded on that guitar. It’s beautiful – and completely original. It’s still one of my favourites.”

Now, what Glenn calls ‘Working guitars’ are the Hamer Phantom and the Hamer GT. The second one is his own design, cream with black edging on the body. Built by Jol Dantzig, the model was upgraded several times to get all the subtle features perfectly set up. When you are on the road you often have guitars go down or they get broken, so you need to have reliable, identical backup guitars. So the Hamers design is very simple and straightforward in this matter: a slim SG-style neck, twin humbuckers, a locking trem, no tone controls what makes the electronic simpler -This may sound strange for many players but Glenn’s style implies to getting what he wants tone-wise with pickups and graphics in his rack-. The extended lower body is a unique feature to fit inside Glenn’s right thigh, what benefits the manic running through the stage. “It’s immediately in the right angle and position for lead solos especially any stretch playing like the solo in Painkiller.”
The mirror-plated Hamer Phantoms are Glenn’s favourite. They’re fantastic guitars, easy to play. Many solos were recorded with them like “Baptizm of fire”, “friendly Fire” and several JP songs as well. “the narrower neck, just the volume control, a toggle switch and the EMGs – that’s all I need”.