MODERN MASTER NOVO GUITARS

I first encountered Dennis Fano’s work in these pages some 20 years ago. My former colleague Rick Batey had interviewed XTC’s Andy Partridge, who’d raved about a guitar that was custom-made for him by a little-known builder in New York. That builder, Dennis Fano, was then little-known only because it was the first custom guitar he’d ever made.

“I had put together some kit guitars, bought some bodies and necks from Warmoth and made some for friends and so forth,” says Fano. “But that was a big leap – and I kind of skipped over some steps getting there!”

JERSEY BOY

At the time he created the guitar for Partridge, Fano was working as a repairman at Matt Umanov Guitars, the legendary shop on Bleecker Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The venture was typical of the way the young guitar tech had leapfrogged into enviable positions in the world of luthiery, including securing his own workbench at one of the country’s best-respected guitar havens in the first place. But Fano seemed destined to cut a distinctive profile in the industry right from the start and, if the Partridge creation took him almost prematurely from repairing to building, there are thousands of Fano and Novo players today who are certainly glad he got there sooner rather than later.

Fano was born in New Jersey in 1970 and moved with his family to Florida and then North Carolina before settling back in Bloomfield, about 20 minutes south of New York City, in his early teens. Sport had been the big draw of his youth. Fano played American football, baseball and – as the Yanks call it – soccer, before that 1980s music-video sensation hit the airwaves and lured him over to the dark side.

“Then MTV came out,” he says. “I was