How It Started

So where did all this begin, and who is Elle?

Elle (Eleanor Ann Holmes) was a talented musician and singer. There wasn’t an instrument she couldn’t get a tune out of and you’d hear her singing long before you saw her come around the corner. To her, music spoke when words failed and her greatest love was her guitar. Like so many teenagers before (and unfortunately since), Elle struggled with demons. Body dysmorphia, depression and low self-esteem created a belief that somehow she was broken and without value.

As a result Elle left the stage in the middle of her song when she was just 15 years, 1 month and 11 days old.

So many girls and young women don’t even get the chances Elle had to experience a stage, to play music, or even hold their truth up to the light, and so her mum and friends wanted to change that for as many as we could in Elle’s name. So we are giving them the means through an Elle’s Guitar to help them bring their unique song into the world.

The guitars we send out are not brand new perfect shop bought copies. Instead they are donated or bought from junk shops, and given a new lease of life. In other words, they were previously identified as being broken, worthless or discarded. Some were just literal bags of bits.

But every Elle’s Guitar has been spotted as having potential, has been rescued by one of our guitar-building partners, and had some intrinsic beauty and value brought out that may have been difficult at first to see. With an added pinch of Elle’s snark and a spoonful of sass, they’re sent out for girls to make the world seem a little brighter and for another generation of musicians to take centre stage, or stage left or right, or at the bottom of their bed, or wherever their musical truth needs to be heard.

Every Elle’s Guitar we send out is rockstar cool – quirky, original, one-of-a-kind and full of character. It’s not good enough to simply be playable, it’s got to have attitude. The hope is that these guitars might play a small part in opening up a new world of creativity and friends to young people who feel they’re struggling to be heard in an increasingly noisy world.

You can hear a little of Elle’s music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3rBzcHbJk

Who We Are Now

We started in 2022 as a charitable initiative by Leigh Holmes-Hill, who is Elle’s mum.

Leigh enlisted the help of her ‘gentle disruptor’ old schoolfriends, Jon Beverley, of Derelict Guitars, our initial guitar-building partner, and James Blundell of Feel Design on our online presence. Jon and James both donate their time as well as considerable materials to Elle’s Guitars, but it could not function without donations from the public too!

We wanted to get a ‘soft launch’ of this site up for Christmas 2023, but keep an eye out for further changes in the new year!