Gin and Tonika, anyone?

In the 1960s, Russia banned pop music. Decadent western beat groups with their unruly hair and unfeasible trousers were seen, quite rightly, as a corrupting influence on Soviet youth and an unwelcome distraction from planting potatoes, building tractors and not putting a man on the moon. But the kids weren't going to give in as easily as that. If the state wouldn't let them buy guitars, well, they could just build their own, using bits of old Soyuz spacecraft and nuclear reactor components. Thus a DIY industry was born. Pop groups thrived in an underground enviroment (safest place to be during the cold war) making music on instruments they'd cobbled together themselves.

By the end of the decade, the powers that be finally recognised the demand for electric guitars and persuaded a couple of accordion factories to rejig their production lines. What emerged were the first 'legitimate' Russian electric guitars. Cheap, very, very badly made and almost unplayable, they were probably little better than the home made instruments they were intended to replace, and they were certainly not intended for export outside the Soviet Union. So how this one escaped is a mystery - maybe MI5 exchanged it for Kim Philby or something.

Either way, it (apparently) wound up in a skip in London and from there found its way onto ebay, where the seller guessed it might be related to the curious mis-shaped guitars produced here in England (and, latterly, in Italy) by Vox. He was wrong, of course, and therefore anyone scouring the net for 'Tonika' guitars would have missed the listing.

Tonikas came initially in this, uh, distinctive design, with a choice of red or green pearlescent scratchplates. The tailpiece looks as if it was intended to hold a tremolo arm (the strings are mounted into a metal tube which looks as if it would rotate under pressure), but none of the examples I've ever seen have such an attachment.

The action is so high you could hang the washing out on the strings. The pickups are very trebly with a sort of serrated-edge sound. A clunky selector switch offers a number of combinations, none of them particularly pleasant. Notice also the unique (and utterly pointless) binding within the fingerboard.

The neck is secured with a plate covered in cyrillic text, and the guitar comes in a quaint burberry check soft case, which also bears a cyrillic label with the guitar's name, which anglices to Tonika. There aren't many of these in captivity, and it's not surprising. Even the nastiest European and far-east import guitars play better than these. It's as heavy as plutonium and has a neck like a telegraph pole. It really is as bloody awful as it looks. Which, in essence, is the secret of its appeal. It looks wrong, sounds wrong, and plays all wrong. But sometimes, you know, three wrongs can make a right. Sort of.