Matthieu Lucas, from the Parisian guitar emporium Matt’s Guitar Shop, has unearthed a few musical gems during his lifetime. But, perhaps his proudest moment happened very recently, when he brought Eric Clapton’s influential ‘Summersburst’ – which has been hidden away from public view for nearly 60 years – to the public.
Eric Clapton’s fabled 1960 Les Paul Standard – his ‘Beano’ ’Burst – was snatched from a church hall in Brondesbury, London, at the height of his mid-’60s Bluesbreakers fame. He also happened to be just starting rehearsals with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker on a certain project called Cream. After the robbery, Clapton hastily bought another ’60 Les Paul from future Police guitarist Andy Summers for £300.
This guitar would shape Clapton’s next era – including, most pivotally, his work on Cream’s debut album, the game-changing Fresh Cream. Somewhere in between his trips across the Atlantic, though, the Les Paul would suffer the second of two serious neck breaks. While it was given a “creative” headstock replacement at Dan Armstrong’s repair shop, Clapton seemed unhappy with the result and left the guitar at the shop after refusing to pay the bill.
After changing hands more than a few times, fast-forward to 2026, when the guitar somehow found its way to Paris and into Lucas’ hands via renowned guitar collector Perry Margouleff.
“I knew about it for years,” Lucas says in the latest issue of Guitarist. “I couldn’t tell anyone about it because that’s not how Perry is working – he wants his guitars to be top secret, if I can say.
“But then I decided to make it public for several reasons, because my theory is that guitars like this should be played, should be shared with people. I think it doesn't even belong to me, or whoever is going to buy the guitar – it belongs to, I would almost say, humanity because that guitar is a major piece of the ’60s and British music, and a major piece of guitar history, so my feeling is that all those guitars need to be shared and played.”
At some point, Lucas stepped in and told Margouleff, “‘I want to buy this piece, but in my opinion it’s just a shame that it stays off the internet because I think it’s a different time now and everybody should know what happened to this guitar,’ because nobody knew where it was, basically.”
Lucas says that when he first met Margouleff around 13 years ago, the veteran collector took him under his wing and showed him a lot of his star-owned guitars. However, the future owner of Matt’s Guitar Shop wasn’t in a position to purchase Clapton’s guitar – that is, until 12 years later.
“It took a bit of time, but we arranged a deal a few weeks ago, and then I went to New York City and picked up the guitar myself.”
Having played Clapton’s “The Fool” SG, his 335, and other Cream-era instruments, Lucas has a few thoughts on how this Les Paul compares.
“It’s funny, because all of them [have notably slim necks], except the 335, which has more like a ’64 neck but still a very thin neck. So I think Clapton really loved a very thin neck on guitars, you know? This guitar is quite the same: it has one of the thinnest necks on a ’60 I’ve ever played.”
Lucas notes that it was probably made in the latter part of 1960 “because of that ‘tomato soup’ finish and other details,” while, structurally speaking, “it’s super easy to play and super fast because of that thin neck.” He goes on to point out that “the neck pickup is one of the creamiest neck pickups that I’ve tried.
“It’s not like a woody sound, it’s very creamy, very dense. It makes total sense when you put the guitar into a Marshall, and you put the tone at zero – you get exactly the Spoonful sound.
And the one thing that still blows his mind? “When you play the guitar, it’s incredible because that’s the record, you know? It already sounds like the record.”
For the full story and more about Eric Clapton’s iconic guitars, pick up issue 539 of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.
