TAKING TIME off from their rehearsals at Norms in London's Olympia, we find former trendsetters Souxsie & The Banshees hitching their star to the cowpunk bandwagon. Moseying up to F-Hole (it's a Denmark St. shop) with spurs a-jingle, they handed over the silver dollars for a pedal steel guitar. Will the followup to 'Hyena' be called 'Coyote', perhaps?

Anyone see Elvis Costello lending his Rickenbacker 12-string to the Long Ryders at Dingwalls recently? Very trusting of him, considering they'd managed to break theirs...

Mind you, Elvis has got lots of guitars; after all, he's just paid almost a four figure sum for one of those big fat Gibson semis, the ES295...

Which is the same guitar that Geordie from Killing Joke uses. Did you know that he and bassist Raven change their strings before every gig? Could it be something to do with the acidic nature of their sweat? At £20 per set for Raven's Status bass, that adds up to a lot of moolah on a 30-date tour...

Five members of Madness now own Yamaha RX11 drum machines to go with their JX3P synths. Try turning the drums into a sequencer, using the MIDI send — it can sound really nutty...

And while we're on the subject of sequencing, Mr Stewart from the Eurythmics has just bought his second DX7, and a QX7 to drive them both. This presumably leaves his hands free to play more guitar, such as we heard on their last single...

The London Rock Shop have just had their first ever offer of a DX7 in part exchange: but before Yamaha start panicking, he was trading it for two TX7s, the DX-In-A-Box expander module. And he's still got another DX7 at home — 'he' being songwriter/producer Paul Bliss.

Paul Young has been out shopping recently, shelling out for a cheapo acoustic guitar, some plugs and batteries, and a black Porsche with red trim. The batteries were either for that, or Chubby Cheeks has invented the first active acoustic...

Go West (remember them?) are writing a song for Chaka Khan; we say she should be told...

Velvet Underground fans should note that wayward Welsh genius John Cale has once again produced Nico. They worked on an album in the Strongroom (a City studio).

If Bronski Beat have split up, could explain why Jimi and Steve both went out at different times and bought the same piece of gear (a Portastudio 244).

Well-known sexists Girlschool were recently seen in Andy's Guitar repair Shop in Denmark Street eyeing up new 'old' guitars: one particular favourite was an inappropriately named Rich Bitch...

Finally, Frederick Mercury, popular Queen-about-town has dedicated his solo LP 'Mr Bad Guy' to 'Jerry'; this is the name of his late cat, contrary to what you might have thought...

Remember waiting for that fretless wonder, the Bond guitar? All those production difficulties and delays, and then a price tag roughly £200 higher than promised? Is this why they are not selling? Could it have anything to do with a faulty first batch of guitars, many of which had crackly jack sockets, and frequent power failures — which it has been rumoured, is the reason why the first batch were only dispatched to dealers in the UK because they might easily be recalled should the worst happen? Which it did... Tales of Dave "Stiff" Robinson's deafness are widely known throughout the music business — the massiveness of his Island office hi-fi, the numerous graphic EQs built into his car, the shattering volumes he works at. But it should also be borne in mind that the man has a sense of humour... when Jakko, nascent Stiff Records pop star and One Two contributor, broke his arm in a car crash in Los Angeles, most people simply marvelled at the coincidence of his having run into somebody from his own record company, MCA. Not so Mr Robinson, who is Jakko's label boss in Britain: he immediately penned a letter to MCA (USA) along the lines of "not only do you rip off my artists with bad deals, but you send your employees out to try and kill him...".