London and Mastering
I met yesterday with EMI’s catalog manager Tim Chacksfield (pictured below at Abbey Rd) to go over the cover art for the re-releases of my first two albums, plus a planned ‘singles’ album which they will release first. The re-releases will essentially look like deluxe versions of the originals, with bonus tracks and additional sleeve notes. The singles album is more up in the air as there’s no existing precedent for the artwork. The closest was ‘Retrospectacle’ which was a kind of best-of LP including key tracks from all the albums. This one is less editorial, it’s just a collection of the 7″ versions of all songs I’ve ever released as singles. So I had to go through EMI’s photo archives to pick out a selection that might be used to make up a good sleeve.
Needless to say, EMI is not all a-buzz the way it was when I first walked in there around 1980. The atmosphere was quite mellow, to say the least. Still, it was an interesting sensation, being back in the offices of a major label, staring at tiny transparencies on a light box through a loom. Outtakes from old photo sessions where the picture commonly used was the only one I remembered; and entire sessions I’d forgotten about completely. And there were some nice surprises too: rolls of stills taken during video shoots. Paparrazzi snaps of me palling around with my then label-mates Queen, Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet. One aspect of getting older is, while I’m still picky about the way I look from different angles and with different expressions… the old shots all look pretty damn good! Which means there is a wider range of shots that I find acceptable, unlike the old days when I would veto lots of shots for um, ‘personal’ reasons, much to vexation of the photographers, no doubt. And the names of the photographers are impressive: Jill Furmonowski, Anton Corbijn, Peter Ashworth.
But it was Andrew Douglas who really encapsulated my visuals. A brilliant artist with a huge mental database of oblique visuals and strange cultural artefacts, he and I would spend hours together flipping through dusty volumes of vintage black and white photographs, attending screenings at small art cinemas, wandering around obscure London medical institutions and architectural landmarks, or examining the hyraulic workings of the flood gate doors at the Rotherhithe Tunnel. He was half mad of course, and often sported a black eye where his fiery girlfriend/assistant Carol had hurled an alarm clock or something at him. He and I dreamed up the original front cover of ‘The Golden Age Of Wireless’, which featured a kind comic book rendition of one of his shots, framed and mounted on the wall of a gallery. If you look very closely you can see a reflection of me, now an octagenarian, regarding the exhibit while being pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse, the same Carol: she was also the ‘lips’ and the bandaged statue in the ‘Europa’ video. One morning we were visiting the South Bank theatre complex next to the Thames, and stumbled upon the set of a play called Gallileo, which had a gorgeous stage set made up of astrolabes, maps and telescopes. We snuck in completely without authorisation, and Andrew reeled off several rolls on his Hasselblad before we got thrown out by a couple of stage hands. That shot became the cover of the US version of GAOW.
So now I’ll have to choose between those two covers! What a tough choice. They’re both classics of the era, and have so many good memories for me. And I’m not even mentioning Andrew’s infamous ‘running away from the Machine in his wellies‘ shot, which bewilderingly ended up as a third GAOW cover in some overseas territories.
Fortunately ‘The Flat Earth‘ only really appeared in one format. However there were some great pics that never got used from the session we shot in Snowdonia with a pair of lamas. (Oh! BTW, Snowdonia features in one of the new songs I’m recording. More on that later!)
From EMI’s offices I went on to Abbey Road to master the singles CD with Peter Mew. When a producer attends a mastering session, the engineer has often pre-prepared EQ and volume levels on the songs, cut the gaps to length etc. Hopefully there’s not a lot of tweaking to do. Yet this was quite a tricky one, because of the enormous difference in sonic style between ‘Urges’ circa 1980 and ‘I Love You Goodbye’ a dozen or so years later, and all the singles in between. There were necessary compromises made when we originally cut the vinyl versions, because vinyl is sensitive to some artefacts (eg sibillance on vocals) and if there’s too much bass, the grooves gut cut too deep for safe manufacturing. Yet I’ve become accustomed to those modified sonics over the years, so it’s a bit of a shock to hear the songs back to the way they were when they first came out of the studio. It took us a good few hours to level everything up, but I think the end result is very good; and there’s a logical progression to it, given that the songs are all chronological.
It was satisfying for me to flash through over a decade’s worth of work in a single evening. Abbey Rd was all quiet and the night watchman was pouring tea from his Thermos as we left. Yet I was all too aware that within feet of me, a certain other four-piece once nonchalently churned out hit after hit, seven days a week. if you read George Martin’s account of his time working there in the Sixties, it reads something like this (I’m being quite liberal with my recollection!): “Mon April 4th, lead vocals and final mix on ‘I Am The Walrus’, after lunch John overdubbed a mellotron on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Tues April 5th, planned to record alternative bass and drum tracks for ‘Hello Goodbye’ and ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Couldn’t find Ringo, turned out he’d gone for a drive round Hampstead Heath in his Bentley with Twiggy and Cassius Clay. So had Paul double-track the choruses on ‘Penny Lane.’ “
Oh wow… Thomas! Thanks a million for the insight. I love these stories…
Cheers,
Darren.
Working at Abbey Road… what a thrill! Just soaking in that atmosphere must get the blood pumping…
Snowdonia?!? I always assumed those Flat Earth shots were done in the Andes or somewhere equally remote and exotic. Didn’t dream it was essentially in your backyard!
Beech
Incredible and fantastic story telling, Thomas.
You transported me around London, with your tales.
Thanks
Lindon
One vote here for the wheelchair/framed magazine cover shot. It tells a story.
Hi Thomas,
Might I suggest printing one cover on the front of the booklet and the other on the back? That way, us picky long-time fans can choose just by flipping the booklet over in the tray. In any case, really looking forward to these remasters!
Jim
I’m curious. How does EMI feel about your blogging the details? Do they look at it as marketing, or give it no thought at all? I wonder how it would have been back in the 1980′s, if you’d had the Internet during the recording of the early set.
Blogging at its very best! Bravo.
All these years and I never noticed you in the wheelchair. Excellent!
It would be great for us fans, if you did a multi panel fold out of all the covers. Your favorite or most recognizable could go on the front (for the marketing folks).
It would be a nice gift. I can’t wait to hear the new mixes!
Or find a way to include high resolution scans of the artwork in digital format (goes off on high-cost fantasy of embedded USB memory chips in CD case…). Will there be a website associated with the re-release, or can you put up materials on thomasdolby.com? There used to be some fab gear on the old Flat Earth Society site, but if it’s still out there I canna find it, Captain.
(I particularly liked the back-of-the-fag-packet calcuation for the GAOW budget….)
As ‘duckorange’ pointed out, I never noticed the wheelchair either! Allllllll those years…… never seen it. Blimey.
Great stories BTW. More for that book your gonna write one day!? I hope.
Blogtastic!!
“Running away from the Machine in his wellies”, hee hee…I’d
always mentally captioned that photo with, “Oh my gawd, I think
it’s gonna EXPLODE!!!
Hmmm, so it almost seems as though dynamic limiting of audio
isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, because the music had to be
modified for it to be recordable on vinyl! Funny how I used to
think that music on vinyl sounded ‘richer’…music on CD does
unmistakeably sound different from the same music on vinyl,
and now we know why! I lovvvvve this techinical stuff, and I’m
glad you’ve been having such fun deciding on cover art!
Fascinating reading, Thomas! Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
And oh, the tales you tell! Methinks Patrick O’Brian has been an
influence on you…I’m just getting into his books now. His prose
flowed like water. I’ve just finished “The Unknown Shore”. Some
day, the elegance of his writing may influence me, too.
Hello, and welcome to the Blog Book Review!
I’ll shut up now.
Peace and a Thermos of hot tea,
Kara
‘techinical’, tee hee…well, my hands are cold!
And chalk me up as another one that’s had and listened to the album for decades without noticing the wheelchair – and I used to be a designer, so I have NO excuse.
And, yes, great read.
In years of comically excessive record-shop bin-diving I don’t think I’ve ever once seen the “Galileo”-sleeved US GAoW LP.
If it were used for the reissue, a lot of folks probably wouldn’t realize what album it was!
Hi Thomas,
I heard you were at EMI where my friend Richard works ( in the photo dept), he said you autographed a photo for me, so thankyou ever so much!
All the best,
Matt.
Well, I have to say, I purchased GAOW in the US in the spring of 1983 and the cover is the ‘original front cover’ from the link above. I still have it though no longer have a turntable so I’ve been listening to the CD version for the last almost 20 years. Great, but I really miss the guitar version of Radio Silence. Hope it makes the new collection.
I haven’t seen the other cover though they’re both pretty cool & very retro.
Oh I’ll second most of the above, Tom – it’s always fascinating to hear the process of puting together such an ‘archive’ release. And the singles CD is long overdue too, especially after numerous half-hearted efforts from EMI Gold and others in the years after Retrospectacle first appeared.
I like the idea of the reversable booklet to include the first two GAOW covers (had no idea the Windpower shot had later been pressed into service too in the States, and had only become aware very recently that the Europa single cover initally took over album cover duties in the States later on).
Good stuff – much to look forward too.
Rob
Thanks for the fascinating insight into the whole reissue process.
I vote for the original cover of GAOW – it is classic.
I can’t tell you how excited I am about these reissues. Are they going to come out in the US? I hope so…