Building on AIR

IN THE early years of AIR, we had no studios of our own. We had to rent whatever studio was available and suit­able for the particular recording. The more work we got, the more money was being spent on other people's studios. It didn't take a genius to work out that if we had our own studios the trend would be reversed - not only would that money not have to be paid out, but some might even start coming in. In addition, the company was enjoying an ever-increasing income from royalties, which was likely only to be fodder for the taxman. So it made sense for us to keep our belts tightened, not pay ourselves very high salaries, and plough back the money into our own company, quite legitimately, to finance the building of our own studios. Someone who knew a great deal about that side of the business advised me against it. 'You'll burn your fingers. You'll lose your money,' he said. But being pigheaded, we went ahead with the idea.

The most difficult job was to find a suitable site. London is a very expensive place, and none of the major studios was actually in the centre, such facilities as existed being confined to poky little places. It became a straight choice between 'out' and 'in'. If we went to the fringes of London, we could build much more cheaply and have a big car park. I found that the dividing line was a circle whose radius from the centre stretched about as far as Finchley. Beyond that was cheap. Once inside that line, expanding parking restrictions and uniformly high prices meant that there wasn't much to be gained unless we went right to e centre. The choice was greatly affected by the fact that wanted a multi-purpose studio, one that could be used for dubbing films as well as making records. To make that we would have to attract the American trade. I wanted the best American film and record producers to use the studios. That indicated somewhere within easy distance of Claridges and the Connaught. So we started to look for sites right in the centre of London. All suffered from one disadvantage or another.

Finally I heard about the top of the Peter Robinson building at Oxford Circus. You certainly couldn't get more central than that. Peter Robinson is one of the big old London multi-purpose department stores. Like many of them, it had at the top a huge restaurant - a banqueting-hall, in fact - in which the gentry had been wont to take their china tea, cucumber sandwiches and cakes after making their purchases. The gentry having been whittled away, or absorbed into a world of T-shirts and hamburgers, it had fallen into disuse, and for two years the store, which still occupies the building, had been trying to let the floor as offices. Lack of success in this enterprise was hardly surprising, as conversion would have cost a fortune. To walk into that place was to step back half a century into the high Edwardian era. It had a huge vaulted ceiling with neo-classical frescoes, marble columns, and kitchens at each end. It was enormous, and very tall.

'It's certainly got the space,' we said. 'It's certainly got the height. And the rent is very reasonable. So why don't we investigate the difficulties of building a studio in it?' Those difficulties were very real, not least the fact that we were looking directly down on one of the world's busier traffic junctions. In addition, we were in a steel-framed building directly above three Underground railway lines (which today have become four, with the new Victoria Line). There were clearly going to be acoustic problems!

Although we had been in studios all our working lives, building one was quite another matter, and that we had never done. Nor, in fact, had our architects, Bill Rossell Orme and his assistant Jack Parsons, though they had designed a few cinemas. The important thing was that Bill was used to doing big contracts, with county councils and so on. That meant he was accustomed to assembling many different talents for a project, which in the case of a recording studio was clearly going to be necessary. To work with him from our side I recruited Keith Slaughter as studio manager, and later Dave Harries who had worked with Keith at EMI. Their job was to liaise on problems like wiring - something like twenty miles of wire had to be brought into the place - and the ordering and placing of equipment. After all, we didn't want to be obsolete before we started,

As our acoustics expert we employed Kenneth Shearer, a real sound boffin, who can tell you more about acoustics than anyone else in this country. He is the man who designed all those 'flying saucers' in the Albert Hall. The answer to the rumble up through the building from the Underground was drastic, and dramatic. The whole works - studios and control rooms - would be made completely independent of the main building. Essentially, a huge box was to be built inside the banqueting-hall, and mounted on acoustic mounts.

Then there was the problem of air-conditioning; obviously you can't have windows open in a studio! You have to be able to supply air to appropriate parts of it, and not only does that supply have to be at the right temperature and humidity, but it must also be completely silent. In order to keep it fresh, especially with the amount of oxygen consumed by loud-lunged rock groups, a large volume of air has to be exchanged. And a large movement of air through small channels creates a great deal of noise; you only have to listen to the extractor in the kitchen to know that. The system we installed was a large-volume/low-speed air exchange, mounted in sound-proof baffles, so that no sound could enter from outside - nor, equally importantly, could we expel any sound.

That may sound very elementary, but it is surprising how many recording studios do not have proper air-con­ditioning. EMI, for example, for all their sophistication and history of brilliant recordings, had continual problems with sound escaping. At times, this used to drive the studio manager to the brink of despair. We often recorded at ⁿ'ght, especially with the Beatles; the police would come round and we had injunctions flying in all directions. For a _ while the authorities stopped us recording after midnight, and on one occasion threatened to close the studios down unless we complied. The curious side of it was the particular effect of this escaping sound. It would come out of the echo chamber, go straight up in the air and then, by some freak combination of acoustic, weather, and pos­sibly architectural conditions, land again about a mile away in Swiss Cottage.

With these and other problems to contend with, the planning and design of our studios took a year. Finally we got an estimate of £66,000 for the work, and decided to go ahead. Unfortunately, it didn't end there. A few weeks later Bill Orme rang me to say: 'I want you to come to a meeting. I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you.' As I entered, all the experts were sitting round a table - four­teen of them: quantity surveyors, sub-contractors, archi­tects, air-conditioning people and the rest. 'You'd better sit down first,' said Bill, 'because I don't want you to take the shock standing up. As you know, the original estimate was £66,000. The fact is that there now seems no way we can make it less than £110,000.'

Retrieving my limp body from the floor, I expostulated: 'How can you do this to me? I haven't got £110,000!'

'Well, we can always cancel it,' he said, deeply apologetic. 'But things are costing more. For instance, we didn't know, until we got into the building and took that beam out, that it had to be underpinned.'

I felt as if I were on the set of the film Mr Standings Builds His Dream House; we had been trying to build AIR on a shoestring - and it seemed the string had just snapped. The whole business shook me to the core, to the extent that when I held an immediate meeting with my partners I even said: 'All those critics who said we should never do it were probably right. It's costing far more than we ever dreamed. What do you think?'

But it was only a moment of doubt. The fact was that we were already in far too deep to back out, and we simply had to go ahead. Even then costs continued to rise, and in the end we settled for about £136,000. On top of that was a £200,000 bill for equipment. It was an enormous effort; we had to strip our company to the bone, and were in what the jargon calls a 'serious cash-flow situation' for a while. It very nearly bankrupted us, and, if the studio hadn't turned out a success, that would certainly have happened, because at the start money was going out far more quickly than it was coming in. But in the end we managed, and we survived.

We even held a party in true showbiz tradition for the opening in October 1970, to which we invited all our friends and enemies from EMI, people from other record companies, and - with a certain magnanimity, I thought - the architects, with whom we had had a major falling-out over the spiralling costs. The saddest thing was that, soon after the studios were completed, Bill Orme's assist­ant Jack Parsons suffered a paralysing stroke. Since the project began he had done little else than work on the design, and I have always felt that without his devotion we would never have had the fine studios we enjoy today.

The opening party was on 7 October. And on 9 October I made the first recording at AIR Studios; the artist - Cilia Black, godmother to our daughter Lucy.

Not long afterwards, the acoustics of the studio, with its floor 'floating' two feet above the original floor and its walls and ceilings suspended from acoustic mounts, were put to a severe test. We were approached by Argo Records, who specialise in the spoken word. It seems that they had been recording Julius Caesar with • Laurence Olivier at Decca's studios in West Hampstead, and in the middle of a key passage had got the sound of a jet flying overhead. It's well-known and generally found acceptable that there are certain anachronisms in Shakespeare, such as cannon going off when cannons hadn't even been invented; but it was felt that a Boeing 707 was taking things a little too far!

So they wanted to see if they could do better with us. Their chief engineer came to our number one studio and placed a very sensitive microphone in the centre of it. Then they shut all the doors, went into the control room, and turned up the gain to the maximum on all the ampli­fiers, so that if someone had whispered in one corner of the studio it would have sounded like a lion's roar. Then they just listened to the ambient sound, to hear if there was any spillage from the air-conditioning, or any other extraneous noise. They could hear nothing, and it's true to say they were amazed. But they weren't satisfied with that. They next ran a tape off that mike for two hours, at a speed of 7 ¥i inches per second. Then they played it back at 30 inches per second, which would have the effect of quadrupling the frequencies of any rumbles or other noises that might otherwise have remained inaudible. Still they could hear practically nothing.

So they were satisfied, and we gained the first of many customers for recording the spoken word. There was only one embarrassment. Their first session with us was to record a jet-less version of Julius Caesar. Just as Olivier was delivering a speech from the steps of the Roman Forum, he moved, and we discovered to our horror that we had a squeaky floorboard! Stone steps just don't squeak, and we soon got that repaired.

AIR today has many functions. We have our own record label. We have our own artists, whom we record. We record artists for other labels. We hire out our studios to other producers - who may either use our own recording engi­neers, or bring their own as is current practice in America; and we hire out producers and engineers to others. But most often, because we now have a world-wide reputation, people come to us not only for the studios themselves but also to use our staff, knowing they are backed by AIR's training and high standards. That may sound like a sales pitch, but it happens to be true, to the extent that we have a very live agency which actually exports the talents of AIR's creative people - men such as Geoff Emerick, Peter Henderson, Mike Stavrou, Steve Nye, Jon Kelly and myself.

Once AIR Studios in London became a reality and gained its reputation of being the finest recording complex in Europe, my thoughts turned to other ideas.

The concept of a 'total environment' studio had always appealed to me. I had worked at Jimmy Guercio's Caribou studio in the American Rockies about sixty miles from Denver, and I loved the creative freedom it gave. You were there to make an album, and the studio was yours for as long as you wanted it, any time of the day or night. It was very comfortable, with individual homely log cabins and a good studio with a Neve console. The only thing wrong was the time of year that I was there. In February Colorado can be pretty cold, and a macabre sense of humour could easily label it as an expensive labour camp! Our nickname for it was Stalag Luft III. However, it was a great idea that worked well. In England Richard Branson was having some success with his studio The Manor, installed in an old Oxfordshire manor-house. There is certainly a great deal to be said for working in congenial surroundings when the pressure is high.

I had the temerity to think of building a studio on a ship. It could go anywhere - preferably the Mediterranean or the Caribbean - and it would certainly give the groups their get-away-from-it-all feeling. I suppose I spent two years developing the idea and sorting out the problems. Keith Slaughter, who had been running our London stu­dios, was put in charge of the project, and I started boat-hunting. After a great deal of looking, as far afield as Iceland and Yugoslavia, the choice narrowed to two vessels. The smaller (and more expensive) was the SS Albro - a yacht, converted from a Scandinavian freighter, which I found in Malta. It was about 120 feet long, with most of the superstructure at the back, driven by a slow single-shaft engine with feathering prop. It had been beautifully converted, and the living accommodation was spacious and luxurious. But the studio would have had to go in the hold, and that was not quite large enough for my ideal.

The alternative ship I found in Yugoslavia. This one, of about 160 feet overall, had twin engines and seemed to give us all the room we needed. She was a passenger ferry named Osejeuik that plied her trade up and down the Dalmatian coast. With the building of a new coast highway, trade had fallen off, and the Yugoslav government had decided to offer her for sale. Of course, a ship studio presents enormous problems. Running costs would obviously be high, power supplies had to be stable, and the acoustic problems presented by a large steel box made the building of AIR London a picnic by comparison. Still, our experience stood us in good stead, and we believed we had all the answers. It is difficult to believe now, but it should have been possible to have completed the project ^ln 1974 at a cost of around $750,000. Today it would cost at least twice as much. But with great regret the idea was abandoned. The real killer was the economic crisis which hit Britain - the three-day week - and the world oil crisis, all of which made risky ventures downright foolhardy. So it became an unrealised dream, and I turned my thoughts to a land studio.

Of all the places I had been to, I loved the atmosphere of working in Hawaii. But that was much too far away from London, and while we were based in England it did not make a lot of sense to build on American soil. Canada was tempting; Mexico more so. I knew the Caribbean fairly well, but never seriously considered it because of its polit­ical instability. There always seemed to be undercurrents in the Bahamas and Virgin Islands, and beautiful Jamaica is sadly an unhappy place.

Then I discovered Montserrat. It is still a British colony (one of the few left), and I was delighted to find a luscious green tropical island with a population that seemed happy to be living together, black and white. I was struck by the natural friendliness of the place, which I am sure has a lot to do with the lack of progress in 'civilised' developments. I am happy to say Montserrat does not have a casino, high-rise hotels, or concrete sunbathing pads beside huge chlorinated swimming-pools. But it does have a fresh charm of its own. What clinched the whole thing was finding an ideal site for our purpose. In short, we now have a super new studio on a thirty-acre farm overlooking the Caribbean Sea, five hundred feet up. The clients live in villas nearby and it has become my ideal working place. My only complaint is that I cannot get in because of other people wanting to book it!

The studio has both twenty-four- and thirty-two-track machines, but I personally am not over-enthusiastic about thirty-two-track. I can cope quite nicely, thank you, with twenty-four; and, if more are really needed, I prefer to use our locking device to harness two twenty-four-track machines together, giving up to forty-six tracks. Cost is a great factor to be taken into account. Our first console at AIR London, built by Rupert Neve who makes the Rolls-Royce of recording desks, was sixteen-track, and cost $35,000. At the time, we thought that was a lot of money. The Montserrat console, by contrast, cost $210,000. Even though it is hand-made, and designed to our own speci­fications, that is still a lot of money! It has fifty-two inputs and twenty-four or thirty-two outputs, with twenty-four separate monitors. It is about as advanced as any console can be today without changing from what is called the analogue system.

And the chances are that within a couple of years it will have to cope with 'digital recording'. But that is part of things to come----

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 786