Vincent Berton maker of Vline guitars, France updated 14/8/2009

Information and images (Lyre and Sword) courtesy of Romain Bidaut and Daniel, France (March 2009).

"Vincent Berton was a French Avant Garde luthier in the early 1980s. He made guitars in Chalais, France.

In December 1979, he lived in Othis (north of Paris).  His motorbike a Guzzi 850 Le Mans had a car radio on the fuel tank.

The first guitar Vincent made was the VLINE, ‘ La péniche’ (the sword).  During a TOTO concert he gave that guitar to Steve Lukather. [Source: Daniel]

Eric Lovett reports seeing the Sword in the Lead Guitars store in Paris in the late 1980s and communicated with Vincent in the mid 1990s.  At that time Vincent was working on a flying car.

According to Romain Bidaut of Foxyguitars "He was the protege of James Trussart, who recognized his art was beyond anything that had ever been done. He was completely brilliant, maybe too much for sanity, as he would spend months building one a kind creations and built every single detail by hand.  He would build the knobs, the saddles, the control plates all from solid blocks of brass. He also built his own revolutionary pickups hiding the secret of his custom design by integrating them inside the body, he also built his own cases, but even down to the smallest of details like the hinges and the handle, also built by hand from solid brass. The guitar bodies are made from resin.

Insanity caught up with this genius, and unfortunately Vincent Berton, after he built a reported 2 dozen instruments, all unique, committed suicide in the mid 1990s.?"

Examples of his craft are shown below:  The thumbs will enlarge.

Also see Violent guitars

V Line Lyre

VLine Sword

Evil rouge guitar (not its official title)

Black brother

Vline, Concorde supersonic jet guitar