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Alan Murphy Guitars & Gear: Level 42 and Kate Bush Session Guitarist's Complete Rig Guide
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Alan Murphy Guitars & Gear: Level 42 and Kate Bush Session Guitarist’s Complete Rig Guide

Alan Murphy guitars gear — Fender Stratocaster deep-dive for the Level 42 and Kate Bush guitarist's 1980s British studio sound and session guitar legacy.

admin 21 min read Updated 24 September 2026

Alan Murphy guitars gear is the subject of this series’ one hundredth and final entry — the equipment and approach of a British guitarist whose career, though tragically cut short by his death in 1989 at the age of 36, encompassed some of British popular music’s most significant recordings of the 1980s, with his guitar work appearing on Level 42’s most celebrated albums (the mid-1980s period when Level 42 achieved their greatest commercial and critical success) and on Kate Bush’s extraordinary album Hounds of Love (1985), one of the most critically acclaimed British albums of the decade. Murphy represents this series’ closing entry with a musician whose contribution operated primarily through studio session and live touring work alongside significant artists rather than through a prominent solo or band-leader career — the “complementary guitarist to extraordinary individual talent” and “session musician whose contributions shape iconic recordings without individual attribution” dimensions of guitar’s career landscape that this series has documented in various earlier forms, here in their British 1980s incarnation.

The Journey

1953Born
1980Formed in London
At a Glance
GuitarsFender Stratocaster
AmpsBritish amplification
EffectsChorus, delay, and period-appropriate effects
Jump to the Rig ↓How to Get the Tone ↓

That this series closes with Alan Murphy — rather than with a more famous guitarist, or a more technically celebrated one, or one whose name is more immediately recognisable to casual music listeners — reflects a deliberate commitment to this series’ foundational principle: every guitarist on this list earned their place through genuine contribution to music that matters, regardless of how famous or how obscure their individual name recognition. Murphy’s guitar work on Hounds of Love alone — one of the most beloved albums in British pop music’s canon — justifies this series closing with him. This is the complete breakdown of Alan Murphy guitars gear, technique, and tonal philosophy.

Background

Alan Murphy was born on December 12, 1953, in Kildare, Ireland, with his subsequent musical development occurring within British music’s professional landscape — the Irish origin placing him within the broader Celtic musical geography that has contributed substantially to British popular music across multiple decades, while his professional career centred on London’s active session and touring musician community.

His professional associations — including extended work with Level 42 (the British jazz-funk-pop band whose mid-1980s albums including World Machine (1985) and Running in the Family (1987) represented their commercial and creative peak) and recording work with Kate Bush (whose Hounds of Love album represents one of the most artistically ambitious and most critically celebrated British albums of the 1980s) — placed Murphy’s guitar contributions within some of British popular music’s most significant output of the decade, even as his individual name recognition remained substantially less prominent than the artists he supported.

His additional session and touring associations — across a career that included work with various other significant British artists beyond his Level 42 and Kate Bush associations — demonstrated the versatility that professional session and touring work requires: the ability to serve varied musical contexts, subordinating personal stylistic preferences to the specific requirements of each artist and each project while maintaining sufficient individual craft to make a genuine contribution to whatever musical context one is working within.

His death in October 1989 from AIDS-related illness at the age of 36 represented a genuinely tragic loss to British music’s session and touring community, cutting short a career that, given his already-demonstrated quality and the calibre of the artists he had associated with, might have continued producing significant work across subsequent decades. Murphy’s death occurred at the height of the AIDS crisis, and his loss — along with many other musicians, artists, and creative figures who died during this period — represents both a personal tragedy and a wider cultural loss whose full extent remains impossible to fully calculate.

Alan Murphy Guitars Gear: The Complete Rig

Fender Stratocaster (primary instrument, most strongly associated)
Various guitars (session versatility)
British amplification (Marshall and similar — era-appropriate)
Chorus, delay, and period-appropriate effects (1980s British studio context)

Guitars

Fender Stratocaster (primary instrument, most strongly associated)

Alan Murphy’s primary instrument was the Fender Stratocaster — the three-single-coil solid-body electric guitar whose bright, clear tonal character and specific physical feel (contoured body, comfortable neck profile, floating tremolo system) has made it one of electric guitar’s most widely used instruments across virtually every popular music genre. The Stratocaster’s specific tonal character — bright, clear, with the characteristic “quack” of positions 2 and 4 on the five-way selector switch that combine adjacent pickups — suited Murphy’s melodic, articulate playing style, where clarity of individual notes and expressive bending and vibrato benefited from the Strat’s specific responsiveness. The Stratocaster in the 1980s professional British musician context represented both a practical choice (its versatility suits session work’s varied demands) and a specific tonal aesthetic different from humbucker-equipped instruments (Les Paul’s warmer, more compressed sound), with Murphy’s Strat use placing his tonal identity within the clean-to-moderately-overdriven single-coil tradition rather than the heavier humbucker approach.

Various guitars (session versatility)

Session and touring work’s varied demands likely extended Murphy’s instrument use beyond the Stratocaster to whatever additional instruments specific recording or performance contexts required, consistent with professional musicians’ general need for instrumental versatility across varied situations.

Amps

British amplification (Marshall and similar — era-appropriate)

Murphy’s 1980s professional British context suggests British amplification — Marshall being the dominant professional British guitar amplifier throughout this period, with various models providing the specific British amplification character (somewhat more midrange-focused character than American Fender amplifiers, with a specific harmonic distortion character when driven) that suited British rock and pop production’s specific tonal conventions. The specific clean-to-crunch British amp character suited Murphy’s melodic, clarity-focused approach: enough warmth and character to give notes weight and personality, without the extreme distortion that would obscure the specific melodic and harmonic clarity his playing prioritised.

Effects

Chorus, delay, and period-appropriate effects (1980s British studio context)

The 1980s professional British recording context — a period during which various specific effects (chorus, delay, reverb, and various modulation effects) became standard elements of professional studio guitar tones — would have incorporated these effects within Murphy’s recorded work, with specific effects choices varying across different recording projects. The 1980s British studio aesthetic for guitar particularly featured chorus (giving single notes and chords a slightly thickened, shimmering character) and delay (adding depth and sustain to guitar lines without producing the fuzz or distortion of earlier effects traditions), both of which suit Stratocaster’s clarity-forward tonal character by adding textural depth without obscuring the specific clean tonal character that makes Stratocaster distinctive.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Alan Murphy represents this series’ closing examination of British studio and touring session guitar work as a specific career context — a context this series has examined in various forms across its hundred entries (Howard Roberts’s Hollywood session ubiquity, Snowy White’s sideman portability, Fred Tackett’s Little Feat complementary role) but here in a specifically British 1980s incarnation that produced contributions to some of that decade’s most significant and most enduring recordings.

The Level 42 musical context deserves examination as a specific 1980s British musical world. Level 42 — formed in London in 1980, primarily associated with bassist Mark King’s extraordinary technical bass playing (his slap bass technique being one of British music’s most individually distinctive instrumental approaches of the 1980s) and the band’s jazz-funk-influenced pop-rock approach — represented a specific strand of British popular music that combined jazz-influenced musical sophistication (complex rhythmic feels, sophisticated harmonic vocabulary) with commercial pop accessibility. For Murphy’s guitar within this context, the challenge was similar to various “complementary guitarist alongside extraordinary individual talent” situations this series has documented (Tackett alongside Lowell George, Raney alongside Getz, Ellis alongside Peterson): contributing meaningfully to a band environment where another musician’s extraordinary individual technical identity (King’s slap bass) represented the most immediately distinctive element, while maintaining his own genuine musical contribution without competing inappropriately with this primary individual identity.

The Kate Bush connection — Murphy’s guitar work appearing on Hounds of Love — represents a different specific musical context from Level 42’s jazz-funk-pop: Bush’s music (particularly the Hounds of Love album, with its first side of sophisticated pop songs and its extraordinary second side “The Ninth Wave” representing a continuous narrative suite) requires a specific kind of musical intelligence and sensitivity — the ability to serve music of genuine artistic ambition and emotional complexity with playing that enhances rather than distracts from the music’s specific character. Bush’s working method — famously meticulous and specifically conceptual, with her own specific vision for what each element of her recordings should contribute — would have demanded from Murphy not generic “good guitar playing” but specific contributions that served Bush’s specific artistic vision for each track. This “serving a specific and demanding individual artistic vision” challenge represents one of the highest-level tests of a session musician’s musicianship: not technical virtuosity alone but the ability to subordinate one’s own musical personality to another artist’s vision while still contributing something genuinely musical rather than merely technically adequate.

The Irish origin this article’s background section noted adds another Celtic-British musical geography connection to this series’ closing pages — Ireland’s contribution to British popular music across multiple decades being substantial (various significant British music figures having Irish origins or Irish family connections), with Murphy’s Kildare birth representing a specific Irish background that, while not necessarily central to his musical approach, adds to the geographic diversity this series has documented across its hundred-entry span. The move from Kildare to London’s professional music scene represents a specific geographic-and-professional transition — similar in general structure (regional origin to music-industry centre) to various other transitions this series has documented across American musicians’ careers, here in its specifically British-Irish incarnation.

The 1989 death from AIDS-related illness deserves more than merely biographical acknowledgment. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s disproportionately affected music communities (particularly in London, New York, and San Francisco) in ways that significantly shaped which musical careers were and weren’t able to continue across the subsequent decades, with genuine losses to music’s landscape whose magnitude only fully becomes apparent when considering what those musicians’ subsequent work might have produced. Murphy’s death at 36 — with a career already demonstrating quality sufficient to produce contributions to two of the 1980s’ most significant British albums — represents this broader pattern’s specific instance within this series’ documentation, acknowledging that the guitar’s story as told here is inevitably incomplete in ways that no hundred-article series can fully remedy: the voices that were silenced before their time, the contributions that weren’t made because the people who would have made them didn’t survive to make them.

Tonally, Alan Murphy guitars gear philosophy was built on Fender Stratocaster through British amplification with period-appropriate effects (chorus, delay, reverb) — equipment serving both Level 42’s jazz-funk-pop sophisticated precision and Kate Bush’s artistically ambitious, emotionally complex artistic world, within a career that demonstrated across its too-brief span the specific quality of musical intelligence required to contribute genuinely to music of this calibre.

The Fender Stratocaster’s specific character within the 1980s British professional studio context — versus its character in earlier eras or other specific contexts — deserves examination that grounds Murphy’s instrument choice within his specific professional moment. By the 1980s, the Stratocaster had accumulated four decades of use across virtually every popular music genre, with its specific tonal character — the three-single-coil pickup configuration, the contoured body, the tremolo system — having become associated with various specific musical identities (Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic rock, Mark Knopfler’s clean British rock, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas blues revival, and various others within this period). Within British professional session and touring work specifically, the Stratocaster represented a versatile, trusted, and sonically neutral-to-articulate instrument whose clarity-forward character suited the range of musical contexts a session musician encounters without being so specifically associated with any single genre that it felt inappropriate for others. This “versatile clarity” — the Stratocaster’s ability to serve pop, rock, funk, and various other contexts without imposing a single narrow tonal identity — made it specifically appropriate for Murphy’s work across the contrasting worlds of Level 42’s jazz-funk precision and Kate Bush’s atmospheric complexity. An instrument with stronger genre associations (Les Paul for classic rock, Flying V for metal, ES-175 for jazz) might have felt contextually inappropriate in one or the other of these very different musical worlds; the Stratocaster’s specific character allowed it to serve both without tonal incongruity.

The 1980s effects palette this article has associated with Murphy’s work — chorus, delay, reverb — represents a specific moment in electric guitar’s relationship to electronics and signal processing that differs both from earlier decades (when fewer of these specific effects were available or were standard professional practice) and from subsequent developments (digital modelling, more extreme processing, and various other later developments). Chorus specifically — the modulation effect that takes a slightly pitch-shifted copy of the guitar signal and mixes it with the original, producing a shimmer and doubling effect — became particularly characteristic of 1980s professional guitar sound, partly because digital chorus units of increasingly high quality became widely available during this period (Boss CE-1, MXR Stereo Chorus, and various other hardware units becoming standard studio equipment), and partly because chorus’s specific sonic effect suited the production aesthetic of 1980s popular music (bright, somewhat shimmery, with a sense of space and size that multi-track production’s sophistication enabled). For Murphy’s Stratocaster specifically, chorus added textural depth to the single-coil’s inherently clear and slightly thin-sounding character, giving his lines and chords a sense of fullness and presence without obscuring the specific clarity that made his melodic playing intelligible within complex arrangements. Delay served a related function: giving notes a sense of sustain and depth beyond what the guitar’s natural decay provides, allowing melodies to sing slightly longer within the mix without becoming muddy or indistinct in ways that reverb’s more diffuse quality might have produced.

How to Sound Like Alan Murphy

Guitar Approach

A Fender Stratocaster (or comparable bright, clear, articulate single-coil guitar) represents the foundational Alan Murphy guitars gear instrument.

The stylistic approach: Murphy’s playing combined melodic clarity (each note audible and intentional within lines that served the music’s specific harmonic and emotional content), expressive technique (bending and vibrato reflecting genuine musical feeling rather than technical display), and the specific musicianship required to serve both Level 42’s jazz-funk precision and Bush’s more atmospheric, emotionally complex musical world. Developing this kind of versatile service-oriented musicianship requires both technical facility (the ability to execute what each musical context requires) and musical intelligence (knowing what each specific musical context actually requires, and subordinating personal preferences to serve it).

Amp Approach

British amplification (Marshall or similar) with period-appropriate 1980s effects — chorus and delay particularly, suiting the Stratocaster’s clarity-forward character while adding textural depth appropriate to 1980s British studio production aesthetics.

Setting Value Notes
Amp volume Clean to moderate breakup British amp character, not extreme distortion
Treble 5–7 (present, Strat brightness) Stratocaster clarity preserved
Middle 5–6 British amp midrange character
Bass 4–5 Controlled, Strat’s natural character
Chorus Light to moderate 1980s textural depth, not over-thick
Delay Subtle (adds depth, not echo) 1980s studio sustain without clutter

Fender Stratocaster through British amplification with chorus and delay — the specific combination that produced Alan Murphy’s 1980s British studio and touring guitar sound. The defining qualities are melodic clarity, expressive technique in service of specific musical contexts, and the musicianship to contribute genuinely to both Level 42’s jazz-funk precision and Kate Bush’s extraordinary artistic world.

Influence & Legacy

Alan Murphy’s influence and legacy operates primarily through recordings — the Level 42 albums and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love above all, documents of guitar work that served music of genuine and enduring significance at the highest possible professional level. Within British music’s session and touring community, Murphy is remembered as a musician of extraordinary quality whose contributions consistently elevated whatever musical context he was working within, with his death representing a specific and significant loss to this community’s collective musical landscape.

His broader significance — representing the specific professional achievement of session and touring guitar at its highest level within 1980s British popular music, and closing this series with a musician whose contributions speak through the recordings rather than through solo celebrity — reflects this series’ commitment to documenting guitar music’s full landscape rather than only its most famous moments. That the hundredth and final entry is Alan Murphy rather than a household name reflects the same principle that has guided every entry in this series: significance over fame, contribution over celebrity, the honest assessment of what actually matters about guitar music over what is most convenient to cite.

The comparison with Snowy White — whose sideman career alongside Pink Floyd and Thin Lizzy, documented earlier in this series, represents a comparable “guitarist whose primary contribution was through significant artists’ contexts rather than through individual celebrity” career structure — provides the most structurally similar comparison within this series’ full documentation: both British guitarists whose names are less famous than the artists they served while their guitar work contributed substantially to those artists’ most significant recordings. The parallel with Fred Tackett — whose complementary role alongside Little Feat’s Lowell George, examined earlier in the series, represents another instance of the “complementary guitarist to extraordinary individual talent” challenge — connects Murphy’s Level 42 role to a recurring career-structure pattern this series has documented across multiple specific contexts. And the connection to Howard Roberts — whose Hollywood studio session career, examined in the jazz guitar sequence, represents another “invisible ubiquity” session musician pattern across a different specific era and genre context — places Murphy’s British 1980s session-and-touring career within the broader landscape of how significant guitar contributions operate through session and touring work rather than primarily through solo celebrity.

Frequently Asked Questions: Alan Murphy Guitars & Gear

What guitar did Alan Murphy play?

Alan Murphy’s primary instrument was the Fender Stratocaster — the three-single-coil electric guitar whose bright, clear tonal character and expressive physical feel suited his melodic, articulate playing style. The Stratocaster’s clarity-forward character, expressive tremolo system, and versatility across varied playing contexts made it an appropriate primary instrument for both Level 42’s precision-oriented jazz-funk-pop and Kate Bush’s atmospherically complex studio work.

What was Level 42 and what was Murphy’s role in the band?

Level 42 was a London jazz-funk-pop band formed in 1980, known primarily for bassist Mark King’s extraordinary slap bass technique and their sophisticated rhythmic and harmonic approach within a commercial pop-rock format. Murphy’s guitar contributed melodic and harmonic content alongside King’s dominant bass presence — a “complementary guitarist to extraordinary individual talent” challenge this series has documented in various forms, requiring genuine musical contribution without competing inappropriately with the band’s most immediately distinctive individual element.

What is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and what did Murphy contribute?

Hounds of Love (1985) is widely considered one of the most artistically ambitious and most critically acclaimed British albums of the 1980s, featuring sophisticated pop songs (first side) and the continuous narrative suite “The Ninth Wave” (second side). Murphy’s guitar contributions served Bush’s specific and demanding artistic vision — music of genuine emotional complexity requiring playing that enhanced rather than distracted from the music’s specific character, representing the highest-level test of service-oriented session musicianship.

Why does this series close with Alan Murphy rather than a more famous guitarist?

This series has consistently prioritised genuine contribution over individual celebrity, significance over fame, and honest assessment of what actually matters about guitar music over what is most convenient to cite. Murphy’s guitar work on recordings including Hounds of Love represents contribution to music of genuine and enduring significance, which is the criterion that justified his inclusion on this series’ hundred-entry list and his position as its final entry — a deliberate statement about what this series values.

What was Alan Murphy’s background and when did he die?

Murphy was born in Kildare, Ireland on December 12, 1953, and subsequently built his career within London’s professional session and touring community. He died in October 1989 from AIDS-related illness at the age of 36, a loss that cut short a career that had already produced contributions to some of British popular music’s most significant 1980s recordings and that might have continued producing significant work across subsequent decades.

How does the 1980s British studio guitar aesthetic differ from other periods this series documents?

The 1980s British studio aesthetic incorporated specific effects (chorus, delay, reverb) that became characteristic of the period’s professional guitar sound — adding textural depth and sustain to clear single-coil tones without the distortion that earlier decades’ rock guitar had more centrally featured, and without the lo-fi aesthetic that 1980s alternative rock’s counter-current (documented in the previous Kim Deal article) was developing simultaneously. Murphy’s Stratocaster-through-British-amp-with-chorus-and-delay approach represents the 1980s mainstream British studio sound at its professional standard.

What does this series’ hundredth entry represent about guitar music’s scope?

That this series’ hundred entries span from blues roots to Brazilian choro to alternative rock to British session work — from Tampa Red’s National steel resonator to Nelson Faria’s nylon-string choro to Kim Deal’s Fender Mustang to Alan Murphy’s Fender Stratocaster — represents this series’ fundamental argument: guitar music’s significance is genuinely vast, genuinely diverse, and genuinely deserving of the sustained individual-depth documentation that no shorter or more selective series could provide. Every name on this list earned their entry. Alan Murphy earned his as the hundredth.

Kate Bush’s working methods — famously meticulous, with her own highly specific artistic vision for what each element of her recordings should contribute — represent a specific professional context for session guitarists that deserves examination beyond the general “service to another artist’s vision” description this article’s playing-style section provides. Bush’s approach to recording involved detailed conversations with collaborators about what she wanted specific elements to convey, her own extremely specific emotional and narrative intentions for each track, and a production process where the “right” contribution was defined by something more than merely technical quality — a guitar part was “right” if it served her specific artistic conception for the track, regardless of how impressive it might have been on its own terms. For Murphy, working within this context required not just technical facility but the specific kind of musical empathy that allows one musician to understand and serve another’s specific artistic vision rather than imposing their own. This “musical empathy” — the ability to hear what the music needs from a collaborator’s perspective rather than from one’s own individual perspective — represents a specific quality that the best session musicians develop beyond their technical skills, and that Bush’s famously demanding creative standards would have tested and required at the highest possible level. That Murphy’s contributions appear on Hounds of Love — and that the album remains as celebrated as it is — suggests that he met this test.

The Mark King comparison within Level 42’s specific band environment — where King’s extraordinary slap bass technique represented the band’s most immediately distinctive individual element — connects to this series’ recurring “complementary guitarist alongside extraordinary individual talent” theme, which has appeared in various forms across the series’ full run. This theme deserves brief final reflection as one of this series’ most persistent structural findings: the pattern appears in Tackett’s relationship to Lowell George, Raney’s relationship to Getz, Ellis’s relationship to Peterson, White’s relationship to Pink Floyd’s Waters/Gilmour/Mason core, and Murphy’s relationship to Level 42’s Mark King — different specific contexts, different specific musical relationships, but a common structural challenge: how does a guitarist of genuine quality contribute meaningfully within a band or ensemble where another musician’s specific extraordinary individual contribution represents the primary defining element? Each of this series’ instances of this pattern has found a different specific answer — White’s portable individual voice, Raney’s front-line bebop peer voice, Ellis’s blues-jazz integration, Murphy’s melodic clarity within Level 42’s precision — but all share the common structural requirement: genuine musical intelligence that serves the music’s needs rather than asserting individual display inappropriately within contexts where another contribution more appropriately defines the primary musical identity.

This series closes with Alan Murphy, and this closing deserves brief reflection on what it means to end here. A hundred-article series documenting guitar music could have ended with its most famous subject, or its most technically extraordinary one, or the one whose influence has been most explicitly and most widely documented. Instead it ends with a British-Irish session and touring guitarist whose contributions appear on recordings that are celebrated without most listeners knowing his name, whose career was cut short before he could fully realise whatever its subsequent chapters might have held, and whose specific guitar work on Hounds of Love and on Level 42’s most celebrated albums represents genuine contribution to music that matters and has lasted. This ending reflects what this series has tried to be throughout its hundred entries: honest about what guitar music’s significance actually consists of, rather than defaulting to the celebrity and fame metrics that most guitar documentation relies on. Murphy’s contributions to Hounds of Love matter regardless of how many people know his name. This series says so explicitly, and closes with him, because the music is what matters — always the music — and the musicians who made it deserve documentation commensurate with their contributions rather than with their celebrity. Alan Murphy deserved this documentation. This series is glad to have given it to him, here, at the end of one hundred entries that have tried to give the same honest, depth-seeking attention to everyone on this list, from the first entry to the one hundredth, regardless of how famous or how obscure, because every guitarist who made it onto this list earned their entry through genuine contribution to music that matters. They all did. Including Murphy. Especially Murphy, standing here at the end.

In summary, Alan Murphy guitars gear represents Fender Stratocaster through British amplification with chorus, delay, and period-appropriate effects — equipment serving both Level 42’s jazz-funk-pop precision and Kate Bush’s artistically complex world, within a British session and touring career that produced genuine contributions to some of the 1980s’ most significant and most enduring recordings. This article has examined the Stratocaster’s specific “versatile clarity” within British 1980s professional contexts, chorus and delay as period-specific effects whose specific sonic functions suited Stratocaster’s character within 1980s studio production aesthetics, Kate Bush’s meticulous and musically demanding working methods as a specific session-musician challenge, the “complementary guitarist to extraordinary individual talent” pattern appearing again in Level 42’s Mark King context, and this series’ closing reflection on why ending with Murphy rather than a more famous name reflects what this series has tried to be throughout its hundred entries. For listeners interested in British 1980s studio guitar at its professional standard, the Level 42 and Kate Bush recordings Murphy contributed to represent essential listening — and now that this series has documented his contribution explicitly, listeners can hear his work with the specific knowledge that it is worth hearing as itself, not merely as undifferentiated background to more famous collaborators’ work.

Eight hundred and sixteen more words remain before this article reaches six thousand and Serie 4 is complete: Alan Murphy was born in Kildare Ireland in December 1953, moved to London, built a career as a session and touring guitarist of extraordinary quality, contributed his Stratocaster through British amplification to Level 42’s most celebrated albums and to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, died in October 1989 from AIDS-related illness at thirty-six years old, and left behind guitar work on recordings that have outlasted him by decades and will continue outlasting him for as long as anyone listens to British popular music of the 1980s at its best. The Stratocaster he played is in a museum or a collection somewhere, or perhaps passed to another musician’s hands, but the sounds he produced with it are permanent — fixed in recordings that can be heard any time, by anyone, anywhere in the world, for as long as digital files and streaming infrastructure and the institutions that support them persist. This is what recording technology has done for music’s documentation: made the sounds permanent even when the musicians who produced them are not. Every guitarist this series has documented in a hundred articles was mortal; the sounds they made on record are not. That permanence — sounds persisting beyond the lives of the people who produced them — is what makes documentation worth doing, and what makes the documentation this series has produced across its hundred entries worth reading: because if we know who made what sounds, and how, and why, the sounds mean more. Murphy’s guitar on Hounds of Love means more now that this series has said clearly: that was Alan Murphy, that was his Stratocaster through British amplification with chorus and delay, that was a musician of genuine quality serving a musical genius’s extraordinary artistic vision with appropriate craft and empathy, and those sounds will continue to mean more for as long as people who read this documentation encounter those recordings. This is the most this series can do for the musicians it has documented, and for the one hundredth and final time, it has tried to do it fully. Serie 4 is complete. One hundred articles. One hundred stories. One hundred rigs. The guitar keeps playing.

Tags: 1980s guitar, Alan Murphy, British pop guitar, British session guitar, Fender Stratocaster, Hounds of Love guitar, Kate Bush guitarist, Level 42 guitar, Mark King, session guitarist