16 Jan 2025
Behind a nondescript door along St Albans’ London Road is an Aladdin’s cave for axemen, strummers, pickers and shredders – or guitarists to you and me.
Located in a windowless basement room, The 58 Sound offers vintage and rare pre-owned guitars to those people who know their Les Pauls from their Stratocasters, and everything in between.
But while it’s something of a secret mecca for guitarists far and wide, it’s also perhaps the only independent guitar shop owned and run by the lead guitarist from an acclaimed British pop-punk band.
Ryan Hyslop is part of Trash Boat, formed in St Albans in 2014 and with four albums under their belts since then, together with a host of festival performances and gigs across the world.
He started The 58 Sound during lockdown, after being furloughed from his day job and with the band unable to tour, starting off with just a few guitars, but gradually adding to his offering.
“I bought a three-quarter size guitar that came with a stand because I knew I could use the stand to take some photos of it.
“I then bought another guitar on the way home and set them up, cleaned them and then sold them. I was like, I reckon I can just keep going with this.
“The original plan was just to buy one nice guitar at the end but then I thought well, we’d never had a real cool shop with this much second-hand and vintage options in so I kept going.”
The shop itself is very low-key, primarily because he doesn’t rely on walk-in customers: “I think a lot of people know what they’re coming in for.
“We do get people coming in off the street but they generally want cheaper instruments rather than the high-end vintage stuff we’ve got.
“I think a lot of people don’t like going to guitar shops because stereotypically they’re run by old grumpy men who think they know better than them, so I guess it’s a little bit fresh having the place to yourself and being able to just play what you want.”
Unconventionally, he also operates a booking system, giving customers an hour slot to try out a few different guitars without any public scrutiny, and tends to find he’s booked out back to back until 7pm.
“The amount of people who aren’t working during the week and come in and buy guitars is wild. It’s like, how have you got jobs that are this flexible? People just make any excuse to go and buy a new guitar, everyone’s always chopping and changing.
“I think a lot of people are quite insecure about their guitar playing. We get loads of really cool bedroom guitarists who are probably way better than me but they’ve just never taken it outside their bedroom. I think people like that really appreciate it because it’s just a completely different way than normal shops.”
Ryan says stock comes in from all over the place, and although he no longer needs to hunt down guitars, he still has an eye for specialist items: “I search for cool vintage rare bits and stuff in cool finishes and all the bits that you wouldn’t just be able to walk in places and find, but I get offered massive collections all the time, there’s a constant flow of new items.”
This includes equipment from Beyonce’s sister Solange after her team cleared out her UK lock-up: “She took a really nice vintage Fender back to America, and her tour manager dropped off a load of gear that they were trading in for that.”
As a professional guitarist, isn’t he tempted to just buy everything he likes and keep it for himself?
“My guitar collection’s slim because all of mine are kind of useful if I want to get a song right or just have a jam.
“I don’t need a selection of a million guitars to play at home, I just need the select few that I like the feel of. I’m surprised I haven’t kept more but I guess I just like the ones that I have in my collection because they mean something to me more than just pulling another one off the wall and keeping it.”
His customers include various St Albans-based musicians, including renowned singer-songwriter Seb Wesson: “We sell a lot of guitars to session players because it’s their job, and they want really high-quality instruments that they know are going to work and do what they want.”
There’s also the unique aspect of having a professional guitar player as the face of the shop: “I’ve never met anyone else in a band who owns a guitar shop.
“I guess it’s cool for people who want to buy guitars off someone who actually plays guitar, has played shows and uses the instruments that he’s selling and appreciates them from a player’s perspective rather than to just look at them on the wall.
“I think if you want to buy off a player, I think it’s a cool thing to do because not all shops have people that play guitar in them, bizarrely. You’d think that everyone would be a guitar player, but perhaps not.
“We do get people who like the band as well, and I guess they like coming and talking about that, which is something special.”
Ryan was born and bred in St Albans, and went to school first at Wheatfields and then Sandringham, where he joined a band formed by schoolmates Dann Bostock and Oakley Moffatt which eventually became Trash Boat.
They were joined by James Grayson, who is now his stepbrother, a pupil at Verulam School, and then they found singer Tobi Duncan online.
“We took him from another band where he was singing some pop-punk songs and put him in ours. So the four of us are from St Albans but Tobi now lives in Hemel, although he keeps the Hemel bit quiet and likes to say he lives in St Albans!”
Spending all day in the shop gives Ryan a chance to listen to music on Spotify – “I try and put stuff on that I wouldn’t listen to at home, it’s nice to find something I haven’t heard before” – but he said apart from seeing friends play at The Horn he doesn’t tend to watch a lot of live music.
He puts this down to the amount of time he spent on the road with Trash Boat: “I think I’ve got pretty bad at going to shows because we toured so much. Once I got back from tour, I wasn’t that keen to go to a show because I think I’ve been surrounded by live music so much.
“I’m pretty bad for going and trying to actually discover people. I guess I’m kind of like everyone else and I wait for it to come up on my Spotify playlist or Instagram before I pay any attention, unfortunately.
“It’s also time-consuming going to shows. If you want to go discover some new band, you’ve got to listen to them from 7 till 10, 11 or whatever on a school night, and I don’t really have the time for that.
“I wish I could go to more shows, but we’re lucky to have The Horn as they’ve got a lot of new bands coming through.
“I know they do a lot of fun covers bands and tributes on the weekend, which I think is good, but there are a lot of midweek shows that I think go under the radar that I think more people would appreciate if they paid attention to the show listings.
“Everyone starts somewhere, and I think people forget that all their favourite artists weren’t just immediately famous, they were just regular people.
“St Albans isn’t an A-town tour because it’s so close to London, it’s a B or C-town, so to have that many bands come through a venue of that size is really good, it’s a way better venue than a lot of the places we’ve played.”
Which brings us onto the recent announcement that Trash Boat were cancelling their UK and Europe headline tour, which was due to take place in a few weeks’ time.
A statement from the band said: “We realised we would not be able to deliver a show that meets the standards you deserve and that we hold ourselves to.”
Ryan seems happy to discuss the hiatus: “We’ve just taken a break for a bit, we’ll be a band again but we’re just taking it easy for a bit.
“It’s just been 11 years of hard graft. It’s been a long time and I guess we’ve just got some bits to sort out and things are going to run differently. It’s just, I guess, adapting to some degree.
“We’re just going to switch things up and make it work for us. It’ll probably be different, but we’ll still do it.
“There’s a lot of pressure to just keep on going and going until you lose the point of doing it. You forget why you started doing it.
“I think it’s the wrong idea to start a band to be massive, you know what I mean? It’s not like we’re going away to work out how we can suddenly do five nights at Wembley because that’s just completely unrealistic.
“We always enjoy it, there’s no doubt that it’s fun, but it’s also different touring when you’re 18 and I’m 29 now. It’s a very different vibe to what it was.
“We haven’t got loads of responsibilities, but it was easy to just sit in a van and stay on floors and drink loads, whereas now I can’t do that all the time. It’s not just one big party.”
The 58 Sound is located at 26 London Road. To make an appointment to visit use the contact form at www.the58sound.com/pages/contact-us
