Usually, when someone tells you that they don't like giving interviews because they are too inclined to tell the truth, it's time to put away your notebook, make your excuses and leave. You know you're going to get little more directness from them than you would expect from a perfectly on-message, junior cabinet minister. When Mark Gooday, MD of Ashdown says it to you, on the other hand, you can't help mentally rubbing your hands in anticipation. Because Mr Gooday, as the saying goes, shoots straight and shoots from the hip.

In the past few years, Gooday has turned Ashdown almost completely around from the company it was when Fender courted him with an offer, only to drop it in order to buy American rival SWR, instead. It is no secret that this late-in-the-game switch cost Gooday and Ashdown both face and business advantage. Fender had seen his books and his plans. They now had one of one of his potentially most significant rivals in house. It could have been curtains - but it wasn't. Ashdown went on to walk away with the backline credits at Live 8, it still sells by the shedload and now Gooday is busily engaged launching his new Hayden guitar amp brand and there's more to come. How he did it, and what he has done to regain the commercial advantage he almost had snatched away from him is one of the best business stories to come out of the UK's music industry in the past decade. And Mark Gooday is ready to tell it exactly like it was. Including the bits where he got it wrong.

'The downside of the Fender thing was that they knew nearly everything about us - though luckily I had held one or two products back.' he says. 'So you sort of take a step back, say "oh, shit!" and then start again. What we did was absolutely re-engineer and upgrade every single product. It made us look further afield, too. At that stage we were 95 per cent UK built and, ok, we weren't making great margins but we had a very nice product growing around the world. But at that moment in time it seemed as if that world had fallen about our ear'oles.

'It was like a bloody good kick up the arse, to be honest. I hadn't got complacent, but life was good, we were chugging along, the brand was growing and suddenly I had to re-focus. It was actually brilliant - I have to thank Fender for that.'

Did having Fender circle around, fin twitching in the water, encourage any other would-be predators?

'Yes - we've had three approaches since then, but I'm a lot harder about it now. I say "Guys, you can see what's available to the public. You can chat, but if you want anymore, I want a couple of hundred thousand before I start making any information available.'

Gooday isn't bragging here. He is sharing his experience with any reader who might ever find himself in the same position. He made a mistake, he freely admits, and it's one he'd rather not see anyone else make.

'I must say that Fender were very, very honourable with us, though. They went out of their way to do what they could, including paying for things they weren't liable to pay for. They were brilliant and I have no animosity'.

So what exactly did he do to revitalise Ashdown in the face of what must have looked like an oncoming tsunami of revitalised SWR?

'I'd bought a small industrial estate and geared-up UK production by that point. There were around 30 of us then, but I've now turned that right around. I've rented out the estate, reduced my overheads dramatically and have gone back to what I started as, when we were called Ashdown Design and Marketing Ltd. We've refocused so that we now ship something like 5,000 units a month out of China and we build about 400 a month in England. We've also gone back to using the original cabinet shop we used when I first started the company, so we've had a kind of reversal of the way we had been going - and I have to thank Fender for that. Out-sourcing is the way, because everyone then does what they do best. We do design and marketing best, so that is what we do.'

For those peering even further over the horizon than China, they will find Mark Gooday likely to have beaten them to it. He has just received the initial samples of Brazilian-produced Ashdown - the first fruits of a move designed to tap a gigantic potential market, where tariff barriers have made it prohibitive to sell before.

'The Brazilian products may come back into North America, they may go elsewhere, but only if the quality is good enough. That's the big game now - it's all down to the quality.'

This is potentially uncomfortable ground, as Ashdown has had its critics among retailers during the past couple of years, as production of the more affordable products was migrated to China. Gooday admits that China has taken a lot of work.

'I was in and out of Hong Kong 18 times last year. China's a fantastic place and when it's right, it's absolutely brilliant, but keeping that consistency is hard.'

Which raises the question of those rumours about reliability problems. Once again, he is refreshingly candid.

'We did have some horrible issues in the middle of last year on two products - the Five Fifteen and the Mag 300. One was a fuse - pathetic really, it was just a faulty fuse holder - and that was why I spent so much time in Chin last year. I actually stopped production out there for two months to make absolutely certain everything was fixed.

'Right now, the quality is so good that while last year we had two service engineers, we don't need them any more and we're down to one. That's how much it has improved. In fact I can honestly say they are now making better product than we have ever done here. You can open up an Ashdown made in England and one made in China and you might think the Chinese one is better - they have so much right for electronic manufacturing in China.'

'But what we did when that happened was, I think, the way to handle it. We went to every single dealer in England, took every one of their products apart and changed the fuse holders on-site. That's all you can do if something goes wrong - act quickly and decisively to put it right and make sure your customers are looked after'.

Has the setback harmed Ashdown in the UK?

'Not at all - in fact our UK sales are up 40 per cent this year. We'll do £1.5 million in the UK this year as a bass-specific company, and I know that we are doing really well against certain other brands.'

One of Ashdown's greatest strengths has been its incredible array of endorsements. As mentioned earlier, Live 8, in particular, was astonishing for the quantity of Ashdown gear on stage but, Gooday reveals, that wasn't the result of any special effort.

'You know, we didn't send any extra gear to Live 8 - those were the bands' own products. Live 8 was very, very hard. We managed to get a pass and Dan, my son, was down there merrily taking pictures for our website, but we didn't ship any gear in there. Paul McCartney uses Ashdown, U2 uses Ashdown and Razorlight just happened to be coming along at the time - so it was all very fortunate. But it still goes on. The V festival a few weeks ago was much the same - we had a backstage truck which we shared with MB media with an artists relations centre and it helped us bond with bands, which is what we like to do. But we had 25 bands at the V Festival who are actually using Ashdown and four of them were using the new Hayden guitar brand. At that festival, another four or five signed-up to buy Hayden - and buy is the applicable word, because we're not giving it away. I don't even give U2 gear: they pay for it and they even pay for the photography of them using it!'

'Other manufacturers, a few in particular, try to target our endorsement programme, but you know, it isn't that simple. Ours is built on real relationships and no mater how much product you give away, or even if you give people more than they need to use, just to get that deal, which we know happens, that doesn't make an artist want to play it. Giving product away lacks integrity and we don't give much away. We see artists who have been with us being targeted and we have a momentary panic, knowing they were being offered a lot, but then two or there months later they're back with us, because we're a small company and we offer a really personal service.'

So what is the secret of Ashdown marketing? Gooday has an interesting take on it.

'From a marketing point of view? We have such a strong brand identity with that big Vu meter and our big double wing chrome badge, that no matter what we do to a product, it's still an Ashdown. That has been our winning thing - and we have other products to come that will be featuring that, too.'

Of course it doesn't always go to plan and one area where Gooday admits he didn't get it quite right was with guitar amps. One of the great paradoxes of the amp business is the apartheid that musicians seem to impose on brands. Guitarists use Marshall, but seemingly regardless of how good brand M's bass products are, they have never quite taken hold. Ditto Fender, which, though it invented the bass guitar, and outsells all other instruments by a country mile, hasn't really excited the world's bass players, since the days of the early Bassman. The opposite is true of Ampeg, of course - fine guitar amps, but all anyone seems to want is the SVT.

Ashdown, presumably thinking it could buck the trend, launched its Fallen Angel guitar amps and, with an ironic twist of fate, almost pulled it off, in so doing, creating a minor problem for itself, as it now tries to establish its new guitar amp brand, Hayden. That problem is that the Fallen Angels are still selling.

'Yes, I didn't get the timing quite right,' says Gooday. 'In fact Fallen Angels are still selling well - something like 40 or 50 valve amps in the UK alone each month and on a global basis it's doing well. So one of our questions here is what do we do with it? Do we re-brand it into Hayden? And the answer is, no - the Hayden range has its own unique, hand-wired, point to point image - though there are offshore products coming at the end of the year. But with the endorsements we've now got for Hayden and the adverts that will follow, I think that by mid-next year, even in the difficult UK, Hayden will be in the guitar market proper.'

Anyone else, having to watch fierce competition in the bass market and trying to establish a new valve guitar brand would consider himself already pretty overburdened. Not Mark Gooday. His thrill, he openly admits, is getting new ides off the ground (he cheerfully describes himself as 'a crap manager'), so already he has his next project ready.

'It's true - we've just started the Lodestone Guitar Company and by November there will be a proper NAMM launch for a range of unique basses and guitars.'

The cynic will be thinking "just what the world needs - yet more guitars and basses" but Gooday is sure he has the answer to such world-weariness.

'There will be a really massive marketing effort in 2007, so you'll see a range of guitars and basses that are quite different. There hasn't been a new guitar with any major effort behind it for ages - not since Paul Reed Smith and Warwick. There are new products around, but has anyone really, really put their balls on the line and gone for it? We've got around 60 distributors around the world and many of them are gagging to have a high quality guitar and bass line.'

The range promises to be very comprehensive, with UK-made models at the top end, Czech-made for the mid-market models and mass-market versions from China. Prices will range for around £239 up to around £2,000. Sceptical? This is Ashdown we're talking about and Gooday believes it is very do-able.

So everything is now wonderful in the Ashdown camp? Well, not quite. Gooday ruefully says that the US is still difficult for him - which is curious considering the band's high-profile endorsee programme and its undoubted success elsewhere in the world. Why? He admits he isn't sure - though says he finds the review policies of US magazines hard to grapple with. Products take an age before they get written about - where he can get them written about at all. Anti-British bias? More like a strong pro-US one, he seems to feel. That said, business in the US doubled last year, so things are looking up in that vital market.

'It is disappointing,' he says. 'Our English made products are problematical because of the exchange rate, and the reverse is true of all the Chinese and American products coming into Britain now at a 1.90 exchange rate, and we are being attacked in Europe by American brands too so, yes, it's very tough.'

So why not set-up over there?

'It's certainly crossed my mind, over and over again for a few years and we did that with Trace Elliot, or course - but all we did was piss money away. Partnerships are very complicated, a piece of paper that doesn't mean a lot in the end, so it's hard to know what to do.

'When you're in America you're part of it. You price accordingly, you don't think outside the American market (which American companies don't - a lot of their export prices are 10 per cent off their best trade) because their own market is so massive - and few of us properly comprehend just how big it is. To them, exports are a secondary thing and they can make so much money out of their home market that they can spend and advertise and very rapidly build a brand'.

But if setting up shop in the USA doesn't appeal, don't take that as a sign that Gooday is resting on his laurels. Despite it being 24 years since the Trace Elite days, her remains a restless soul.

'I get bored. Everyone who knows me will tell you that. I want a new product tomorrow and I've still got ideas coming all the time. It's fun. I still enjoy what I do and having reduced our overheads as much as we can now, we have become a customer service company - and that's what we have to be.

'You know, we don't even do much selling? Not as such. We have one person on the road in England and his major job is servicing the dealers to make sure they've got what they want, not taking orders. We just don't do much physical selling - what we do is marketing, and we see his role as going round to make sure everyone is happy, that the displays are right, there are brochures, finding out what's hip and what's not, discussing who's using the gear - all that sort of stuff. We made that decision just two years ago, that our job now is customer service and support and, least of all, to force people to stock product they don't want. That's
the biggest mistake in our industry and when people complain about discounting and retailers blowing things out, that is so often the cause of it'.

One of the advantages of making electronic products, as Gooday reveals, is that the voltage requirements make it harder to grey import gear from the USA - which could, potentially, be cheaper in the UK market because of the low exchange rate of the US dollar. However, all Ash down's Chinese-made amps are either 230 volt or they are 110 volt - and while the Pro products can be switched it has to be done internally.

'I know it's war out there and people are having to fight to stay in business, but the discounting thing baffles me at times. Just today we had someone ring-up, asking about our chorus pedals, which aren't actually arriving for a couple of weeks. Yet a few dealers are already doing deals against each other - and that's for something that isn't even in the market yet! I don't get it - although I realise it has been a bit tough and I suppose people are just doing what they can to make money.'

Altogether the Ashdown model is a very different bast from most in the industry - more like a modern consumer products company, say Dyson, or one of the better computer outfits. Ashdown designs more than it makes. It markets rather than sells. It distributes via third party logistics facilities and it pours its money and creative energies into making new brands, new products and creating enthusiasm for them.

'My job on a global basis is to create demand. If the public wants what I produce, they'll buy it and they'll pay a fair price for it. And I'm really glad we decided to go that route, which we did just before we started to have problems, because we then had two people on the road who could go into dealers, check the products out and replace them. It hurt us, without doubt, but it didn't cost our dealers a penny. And that is another thing - there are no service costs to our dealers. God knows when we last charged for repairs or service - it's not what we do'.

It's a far cry from nailing together bespoke amps in shed, but it is the only way to build global brands - something few European MI companies have been able to achieve and which Mark Gooday has done twice now. With Hayden and Lodestone he is now trying it a third and fourth time. It would be a particularly mean-spirited competitor who didn't wish him well in the attempt.

Ends.