Yungblud on the genius of his guitarist Adam Warrington – "the Sid Vicious to my Johnny Rotten”

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Look up any footage of Yungblud playing live on YouTube and there’s a strong chance you will see Adam Warrington on stage right.

The Scottish-born 28-year-old guitarist has been on almost every tour with the band, including landmark performances at the Reading and Leeds Festivals, various awards ceremony events and television appearances, including The Graham Norton Show. You’ll also spot his face in a lot of the music videos and see his name credited on a handful of tracks from the last two studio albums.

Back in November 2020, Yungblud decided to introduce Warrington to fans on his BBC Sounds podcast “because of how important he is in my life and in my career,” going on to describe him as a guitar player who always makes people turn their heads wherever he goes. High praise, indeed…

“I met Adam on Phil Taggart’s Slacker night in Old Street in East London,” Yungblud recalled. “I was like, I needed a guitar player. I kind of needed someone who would be the Sid Vicious to my Johnny Rotten, or the Carl Barat to my Pete Doherty or whatever. I remember we were both wearing Harringtons and you came up to me and passed me a beer. It was that doppelg?nger thing and I was like, ‘Ah, hello!’”

Within two weeks of meeting, the pair were living together and playing in the same band. In the same podcast, Yungblud revealed how these early years playing together helped him transition from Dom Harrison Music to the pseudonym he’d go on to take over the world with – the relationship and chemistry fuelled by their shared love for Joy Division, gin and port.

He’s an incredible guitar player... It’s nice to have someone you grew up with going on to do amazing things

The effervescent frontman praised Warrington’s well-roundedness and passion for the guitar but also championed his ability to not overthink it all. “He’s great at scales but he’s not going to be like, ‘Hey man, B minor diminished blah blah blah!’” grinned Yungblud. “He’ll just have a couple of beers and play you something amazing.”

Before working in his current role, Warrington was performing alongside chart-topping Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi, who remains one of his oldest friends and biggest supporters.

“Adam is one of my oldest pals from back home,” Capaldi once revealed. “We started off together playing shows out and about in tiny venues in Scotland. He’s an incredible guitar player and is usually off playing around the world with Yungblud now! It’s nice to have someone you grew up with going on to do amazing things.”

For live shows, Warrington tends to rely on his Gibson guitars – with models like his 2018 SG Standard, 2001 Les Paul Standard and Custom Shop ES-335 covering most of the set.

On the rack, you’re also likely to find a Gretsch G6128T-89VS Vintage Select ’89 Duo Jet with Bigsby and Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster Special, with whichever he picks up running in stereo via a Hiwatt Custom 20 and Marshall 1962 Bluesbreaker reissue.

The latter was demonstrated on Marshall’s YouTube channel as part of its Artist Spotlight series, in which Warrington explained how it was the John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton connection that led him to the amp, citing it as his main workhorse. “It’s called a Bluesbreaker for a reason,” he smiled, highlighting its ability to sing and cut through with a “really amazing middle presence”.

As for pedals, there’s an entire universe of tonal options coming from the high-performance Boss 500 series – namely the RV-500 reverb, the DD-500 delay and MD-500 modulation. For standalone stompboxes, he favours the Ibanez WH10V3 wah, Electro-Harmonix Micro POG, DigiTech Whammy, Z.Vex Super Hard On boost and Dunlop Echoplex delay pedal.

And there’s no shortage of fuzz options coming from a JHS Crayon, which recreates the sound of plugging direct into a preamp; a JHS Muffuletta, which packs five classic Big Muffs into one unit; and a Fulltone ’70 BC-108C – famously reverse-engineered from Eric Johnson’s original blue Fuzz Face, which made history on the Strat virtuoso’s early studio albums.