231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 113
“Although regarded now as the most revered recording
facility on the planet, the origins of how a family home
became a second home for everyone from The Beatles
to Lady Gaga is as complex as it is improbable.”
Either the residents of Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood are exceptionally
tolerant of audio disruption to their day, or the sound insulation is
extremely good.
Both neighbourly tolerance and technical wizardry were put to their
ultimate test in the summer of 1964, and it had nothing to do with the
four lads from Liverpool who made the recording studios world famous.
The loudest guitarist in rock and the loudest singer in the known
universe were together on this day to record a John Barry tune.
Four years before forming Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was, at this
point, the most in demand session musician in London. While Shirley
Bassey was at the absolute zenith of her career as a vase-shattering
siren of stridently powerful love songs.
Jimmy Page later recalled the ensuing recording session in Studio One
that evening: “The full orchestra sounded absolutely amazing, but then
Shirley Bassey arrived. When she sang, it took her just one take. And at
the end of the tape, she collapsed on the floor. She just held this one note
and basically ran out of breath and collapsed. I was in the front row of
all the musicians, so I really had a good view of all of this.”
And so ‘Goldfinger’ – perhaps Barry’s most perfect encapsulation of the
bombast, glitz, and elegiac loneliness at the soul of the Bond character –
was born. Though, by this point, the neighbours, living among the
inter-war apartment blocks and wide boulevards of St. John’s Wood,
should have long become used to limousines carrying pop stars and
their entourages revving their engines outside the front doors of the
studios. Although regarded now as the most revered recording facility
on the planet, the origins of how a family home became a second
home for everyone from the Beatles to Lady Gaga is as complex
as it is improbable.
It was back in the last days of the 19th century that a twenty-five-year-old
native of Washington DC, Fred Gaisberg, sailed to London to set up the
very first recording studio Britain had ever seen.
Located inside a long-vanished hotel called the Coburn on Maiden Lane,
just opposite what was then and still is Rules restaurant, the studio was
run by the Gramophone Company, a fledgling operation whose owners
liked Fred’s ability to persuade opera singers that the new technology
wasn’t something to be afraid of.
Owned by Emil Berliner, the American who invented the gramophone
itself, consigning Edison’s ‘cylinder’ method to history, Fred’s days at
the Gramophone Company studio involved him putting stars from the
Victorian music hall tradition as well as hifalutin sopranos, all of whom
were required to sing and play into microphones that weren’t any more
sophisticated than a landline telephone receiver.
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