SUPRO 1261AW OZARK, 1296 SILVERWOOD & 1275JB TRI TONE £1,099 EACH
Relaunching a heritage brand is never easy. Should the new instruments be exact clones of yesteryear or should they be brought up to date? That was the dilemma faced by Absara Audio, the ‘custodians’ of Supro – and rather like the company did with its contemporary amps, it chose to effectively embrace both scenarios with a 10-strong Americana range of guitars based on Supro’s fabled but short-lived Res-O-Glas models, and a trimmer three-strong range of updated models, the Island series. Further additions followed in the form of the Westbury and Hampton baritones, as well as the Huntington basses, and while the latter have been retained, both the Americana and Island series are gone, now called ‘Legacy models’ by Absara.
Supro’s offerings for 2019, then, are based on specific historic models. We’ve already seen the Bigsby-equipped David Bowie Limited Edition Dual Tone and the first batch of the current hardtail 400-only David Bowie 1961 Dual Tone models was unleashed on 8 January this year, Bowie’s birthday. Then we have the 2019 ‘Reissue Collection’ we’re looking at here: a trio of original models that have been ‘modernised’ from the 50s and 60s originals: the Ozark, Tri Tone and Silverwood.
It’s impossible to generalise the Supro sound, but if there is a unity, it might well be ‘hot single
