So then. This blog, I like to think, is a series of messages in bottles, out there floating on the oceans, sometimes washing ashore in the most unlikely of places. Some posts I crafted over – oh, days, sometimes – have but a few moments in the sun, and then sink without trace soon after.

Then there are the floaters.

These tend to be about the more obscure things, perhaps unsurprisingly. I mean, if I put up a review of the forthcoming Bob Dylan film featuring Timothee Chalamet, it’s not exactly going to be the only one, is it?(1) On the other hand, if I post a story about long-lost all-female Glasgow band His Latest Flame, I suddenly become one of a few sources of information online. That post is solidly, consistently, one of two top things random people come to my website for. (2)

The other hardy perennial is my post on DeVille guitars. First published on 28th June, 2014, it has attracted more interest than almost any other – despite it being actually pretty uninformative. Sixteen different people have been moved to leave a comment, all, like me, seekers after the truth of who, exactly, made this obscure brand of guitar.

A typical comment on this post and the discussion threads I’ve researched for this piece will be, ‘aw yeah, I had one of these … always wondered … wish I’d never sold it … it was a copy of a [fill in famous guitar name] and I’ve played both and preferred the DeVille…’ (in the interests of balance, I should say there’s a small minority of comments on other threads that say, ‘yeah I had one, it was shit’).

Why does it matter? non guitar players might say. It’s just a guitar, after all. (3) Fair question. I’m not sure I have a great answer.

But … it just does, right? Guitarists – like other musicians, I imagine – can have an intense relationship with their instrument. It can be the source of great frustration when you can’t coax the notes out of it you hear in your head – or on Youtube, if you’re trying to emulate another player. You’d hope more often, though, that it’s your Muse, a wellspring of great pleasure, distraction and comfort, both to yourself and sometimes even others. You play it alone in the house, but also, if you’re lucky, it’s the instrument, quite literally, of some of your greatest moments on stage.

For guitarists, guitars are like lovers, and they will always matter to you. Even when you’ve traded them in for something fancier.

So, like any lover, you’re keen to know where it’s come from. Especially if it’s an obscure make. I mean, if you choose to spill for a Fender, or a Gibson, say, you can totally go on their website and fill your boots with all their guff about the wood being harvested by happily smiling tribesmen in [insert name of non-First World country with sketchy human rights record] and then hand tooled, drilled, and generally smacked upside its head into a guitar shape by aged, gnarly persons who’ve spent their entire lives wedded to the craft of luthiery in the flat lands beyond Nashville, Tennessee.

It’s the same with their better known competitors. Take Ibanez, for example: a long established guitar maker from the Nagoya region of Japan. Their site has similar reams of guff. Even Harley Benton, my budget guitar brand of choice, is very much in existence and answering my emails about how sustainable their woods are (4).

DeVille, on the other hand, is a mystery. Though its Fender Strat copy turns up in most of the online chat about it, they also apparently made copies of Gibsons, Rickenbackers and Danelectros – as well as of Ovations, which my one was (see right). That’s quite the range – and one theory has it that, actually, it was a kind of umbrella brand name that all guitar manufacturers had for surplus product they wanted to shift under another name. I dismissed this in my first piece about these guitars, as it just didn’t seem likely that there was some kind of unspoken agreement of that kind amongst guitar makers. Besides, if there was that sort of thing going on, you could be sure someone would have handed it over to their marketing department to punt the concept as ‘buy this exclusive….!’

So, if it wasn’t that, what was it? Let’s start with the less helpful leads I followed up: guitar-list.com says simply ‘DeVille brand guitars were typically copies of the classic American solid body electric guitar designs as well as acoustics.’ At least it quotes a reputable source – me! Interestingly, it does have a link for buying DeVilles in various countries, if you’re intrigued sufficiently by this story.

Jedistar.com tells us that the logo seems to be from a 1970s headstock of a Japanese made guitar, which is perhaps our first clue to our guitars’ origins. It also links us to a forum, jag-stang.com, where a fellow Scot – and fellow seeker after the truth of DeVilles – starts a discussion which doesn’t lead us any closer to the truth, but also supports the theory that DeVilles were Japanese. Over in Malta a guy posts on guitargods.quora.com to ask for information about his DeVille, which he calls a ‘vintage Japanese guitar.’

All roads seem to point to Japan: and this is borne out by the most helpful discussion, on a Reddit forum, where someone with the handle BeefBlaster says he’s recently acquired a DeVille, which he posts loving photos of. He says they were sold in Germany (incidentally, I picked mine up in the early Nineties in Kirkcaldy, Scotland) and that, ‘according to Frank Meyers, author of The History of Japanese Guitars, DeVille guitars are a true mystery. They were made in the Nagoya area of Japan in “pop up factories” that vanished.’

If you scroll through the pictures of the guitar, you get to an image of an email from Frank Meyers, which says: ‘Hi Brian, it’s sort of funny because another fella sent me a pic of a similar guitar but with one pickup. Your guitar falls into the ‘mystery’ category because the factory couldn’t be identified. I know it came from the Nagoya area of Japan which had like 5 – 10 pop-up factories for a few years and then vanished to time. Wish I could help you more but even the old Japanese guys couldn’t recall all the factories there.’

I contacted Frank, who is indeed the author of what, so far as I know, is the definitive history of Japanese guitars (writers of rival definitive histories – please don’t write in, I’m not that interested). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like he’s anything to add, and I’m sure he’s busy with other stuff.

So what can we learn about the Nagoya area of Japan and its guitar factories? This blog’s Japanese correspondent (5) says: ‘I’ve been to Nagoya a couple of times. It’s a nice medium sized city. If bands do a 3 city tour of Japan it would probably be Tokyo, Osaka, and third would be Nagoya. It’s a decent place to visit. Famous food dishes are spicy chicken wings, and pork cutlets served with a miso sauce.’ Beat that, Wikipedia!

He also comments that he has an Aria Pro II guitar from the 80s, which may have been made at the Matsuoka guitar factory in Nagoya, although it seems more likely to have been the Matsumoku guitar factory in Matsumoto (following me so far?) which is in Nagano, another city in the same region but a different prefecture of the main Japanese island from Nagoya.

Where does all this take us in our quest to find the origins of DeVille guitars, other than down several Japanese rabbit holes at once? Probably nowhere much. To sum up, though, there seems to be a body of opinion that they were Japanese made, and may have originated in pop-up factories in the Nagoya region of Japan, home of spicy chicken wings and pork cutlets with miso sauce. Nagoya certainly had active luthiers during the period (roughly 70s – 90s) when the DeVilles seem to have been made, including Matsuoka, which turned out high end Aria and Ibanez branded guitars.

Ibanez itself came from the Nagoya region, and interestingly, also manufactured Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker copies in the 1960s before lawsuits persuaded it to focus on its own designs. This might actually explain the sudden emergence, from the 1970s onwards, of ‘DeVille’ branded guitars from the same region, produced in so-called ‘pop-up’ factories, if luthiers trained to produce such copies split off from Ibanez and created their own versions, under the radar, so to speak. However, I have absolutely no evidence to back this up.

Perhaps there’s still some aged, gnarly Japanese guy left who knows the real story: maybe on that small island where they eat mostly fish and live to 150. And perhaps he has a granddaughter who, like the woman in the Yellow Pages advert, wants to help the old guy find – not Fly Fishing by JR Hartley, but evidence of his DeVille guitar pop-up factory still making waves all these decades on. And perhaps she’ll stumble on this post, and say, ‘Look, Grandpa! Some Scottish bloke has posted about your guitars…!’

If so, endearingly supportive Granddaughter, please get Grandpa to get in touch. We still love his stringed children.

Even where we have moved onto something fancier.

(1) I might. But if I don’t the world will probably keep spinning at the same speed.

(3) Other guitar players: yeah, I know.

(4) Pretty sustainable, as it turns out.

(5) Well of course this blog has a Japanese correspondent. What did you think, this was some sort of half-arsed one-man operation? Thanks to Moray Crawford for the info.