‘People are desperate for live music’: The CEO of Fender on playing guitar and bagging his dream job

Former heavy metal axeman Andy Mooney made waves at Disney before jumping into the hot seat at Fender. He talks to Andy Martin about learning to play online, Snow White and making room for all his Telecasters

There are real rarities among the 50 guitars Mooney owns (Fender)

Andy Mooney started playing classical guitar when he was 10 or 11. At high school in Scotland his dream was to be a rock star. Now, after fifty years of playing the guitar, he’s the CEO of Fender, who produce the legendary Stratocaster and Telecaster.

He was born in Whitburn, a small town between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and his father was a miner who played the piano. “Being a rebel, I picked up the guitar,” says Mooney. While still at school he started teaching guitar. “I would get teenage girls turning up with a 12-string steel guitar. I couldn’t even tune it let alone play it.” Now he recommends to raw beginners that they should start with the ukelele, progress from there to the six-string acoustic guitar, and only then have a shot at the steel-string electric guitar.

According to a recent survey commissioned by Fender, as many as 90 per cent of novice guitarists give up the instrument in their first year. Which is why Mooney has made it easier – with Fender Play, the online guitar tutorial system, now in its third year, with a base of 930,000 users, about a fifth of them in the UK. I wish I’d had this when I was learning (and failing) many moons ago. “When I was teaching guitar and somebody didn’t turn up,” says Mooney, “I had no idea what had happened to them. Now we have the data.”

When I spoke to Mooney he was staying in East Hampton on Long Island, and has lived in the US for decades, but he retains the Scottish accent. In his twenties Mooney was playing semi-pro for a band. It was the era of the Bay City Rollers (the “tartan teen sensation”) and he and his fellow band members all had to lie about their ages. But he was leading a double life, heavy metal musician by night, garbed in a white boiler suit, and trainee accountant by day. When his band broke up he walked straight into a job with Nike, then as he describes it, “a small company based in Halifax”. That was in 1980. When he left them in 2000 he was chief marketing officer based in Portland, Oregon.

He went to Disney to lead the consumer products division but was shocked to discover that the studio, back in pre-Pixar days, controlled everything they did. “The studio won’t let you!” was the phrase he heard most often. And “They’ll fire you!” The turning point was when he went to see a production of Disney on Ice in Phoenix. He noticed that all the mothers and daughters queueing up to go in were dressed in various Disney princess outfits, all of them handmade. He asked them, “If we were to make these, would you buy them?”

“Of course!” came the answer. The concept of the “Disney Princess” was born.

My wife used to say, ‘Can’t you find somewhere else for all those guitars?’ Now I’ve got them hanging on the wall in my office

Until then no characters from different movies were allowed to be seen together. The studio thought it would devalue the product. Mooney took a dozen classic characters, including Snow White and Belle and Cinderella, and turned them into an all-star team. The new approach contributed to a big rift at the top at Disney (Eisner vs Iger), but also, ultimately, led to the huge success of Frozen. Mooney had arrived at Disney feeling like the tail of the dog. When he left, “franchise management had become part of the culture”.

Mooney had been approached by Fender. But he was based in Los Angeles and Fender had its HQ in Scottsdale, Arizona, even though they manufacture the guitars in California. His daughter had just been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and he didn’t want her to have to change school, so he went to work for Quiksilver instead. Then, in 2015, Fender said they were going to open an office just down the road from where he lived. Would he reconsider?

By this time, Mooney had collected approximately 50 guitars, many of them Fenders. He knew all about the history of the guitar and Leo Fender who had created the first Telecaster in 1952. He owned one of the original Telecasters and a ’55 Stratocaster. He knew that Jimi Hendrix had played a right-handed Stratocaster, but was left-handed so he used to play it upside down. And that Eric Clapton bought him a left-handed Fender but Hendrix was dead before he could give it to him. His whole life Mooney had been playing Fenders and now he could get paid for doing it. He was a Fender fanatic. If ever there was a no-brainer decision, this was it.

Mooney cradles a Stratocaster in his Los Angeles office (Fender)

“My wife used to say, ‘Can’t you find somewhere else for all those guitars?’ Now I’ve got them hanging on the wall in my office.” If you drop by the Fender showroom on Sunset Boulevard, you can play them. Anyone can, they want people to play them.

Mooney says that Leo Fender, the founder, developed amplifiers and then his own brand of electric guitars because back then the bass player in a band couldn’t be heard. “He was always listening to the needs of musicians.” The new Fender Ultra range takes into account the input of some two thousand pro guitarists. “The new Fender is the same as the old one,” says Mooney, “except for how it feels and how it sounds.” It has been re-sculpted so it’s lighter and the top frets are easier to reach.

In the realm of musical performance, all the most recent events have gone virtual. The latest online gig by South Korean boy band BTS pulled in 750,000 fans at $30 a time. In LA, Fender’s neighbours include Live Nation, who put on live shows and festivals around the world. Or used to. But Andy Mooney says that 80 per cent of people have not asked for a refund at Live Nation. “There’s a massive untapped demand. People are desperate for live music. It will come back strong as ever, if not stronger.”