It was where Big Star were born, Primal Scream embraced the Blues, and Isaac Hayes made Hot Buttered Soul. Steve Sutherland has the story of Ardent Studios in Memphis
Over there in the corner is a teetering tower of folding chairs. On the chairs are sheets of glass. And around the tower are something like 100 microphones, all set up and ready to capture what comes next. And what comes next is cacophony as the band hurl cinder blocks at the tower in an attempt to simulate the sound of a car crash.
Beginning life in East London, SARM's name is synonymous with artists keen to use the latest tech to push the potential of sound to excite. Steve Sutherland has the story...
The Boy couldn't get out of bed. The phone rang. And rang. And rang again. The boy turned over, tugged the pillow down hard over his head, and fell back asleep. The phone rang. And rang. And rang again. Eventually the ringing roused him. He'd had a heavy night and was feeling rough. He answered the phone. The voice on the other end, Irish, cursed him.
For this fifth long-player, the thrash-metal pioneers transformed into heavy rock titans. Now the LP is out on 180g vinyl, Steve Sutherland relates its rocky birth
Lars Ulrich is not amused. 'Is this the test pressing?' he asks his manager, Peter Mensch. 'No', Mensch answers emphatically. 'That's the jacket, the cover that's going out across the country.'
Buy this reissue for the title track, says Steve Sutherland, but who was John Barleycorn? The unsparing details will be no surprise to all who have seen The Wicker Man…
Police Sergeant Neil Howie steps inside the bakery. He has flown here, to Summerisle, a small, remote Hebridean island, on a one-man seaplane to investigate the whereabouts of Rowan Morrison, a young schoolgirl who's reported missing. He's been to the school, the church, the library, the pub, the graveyard, even to the Laird of the island's manse, but every local he questions is infuriatingly vague, reluctant to divulge any helpful information.
From The Beatles to Kate Bush, Sir Edward Elgar to Kayne West... this year sees the north London studio celebrate 90 years of history and hits. Steve Sutherland on Abbey Road
We could begin at 8.54pm on the 25th of June 1967, when the cameras cut to the studio about 40 seconds earlier than expected to discover producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick scrambling to hide a bottle of Scotch whisky beneath the mixing desk. They'd been taking a tot to calm their nerves before the tricky task of mixing the audio for the live worldwide broadcast of The Beatles' contribution to Our World, the first ever live global television link.
Steve Sutherland tells how the group's name resulted from a chance find in a reference book and highlights hidden subtleties in this 1971 live set, now on 180g vinyl
Ever heard of bibliomancy? No? Read on… Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was this chap. Let's call him Jerome. Jerome is travelling down a country road when he comes upon a crowd of blokes kicking a corpse and creating a hullabaloo. Our hero stops and he's told the deceased had snuffed it without paying a number of debts he owed to some in the assembled crowd, so there's no way they're going to stump up for a grave-digger to bury him.
Built by Jimi Hendrix, this studio is not only steeped in rock history but is still used by the top recording artists of today. Steve Sutherland catches the Greenwich Village vibes
The sum was $1,032,425.26. That's how much, in today's money, that his engineer Eddie Kramer reckons Jimi Hendrix was paying every year renting studio time in the late 1960s. And that's why, when Hendrix and his manager Michael Jeffery told Kramer they'd bought a venue at 52 West 8th Street in New York's Greenwich Village and were planning to turn it into a nightclub, he told them they were crazy.
Founded by two brothers in the 1960s, this German studio was where David Bowie, Depeche Mode and U2 made much of their best music. Steve Sutherland has the story
There were pieces of me laying all over the floor.' That's how David Bowie remembered 1976. Living – though that's hardly the word – on a diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine, every successive alias he ditched – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, The Man Who Fell To Earth – had been like shedding a layer of skin. And now, what's left of him is a skeletal ghost, a fading shadow of his former selves.
Get your Vaccines here on 180g black vinyl (sorry, we couldn't resist), as Steve Sutherland sets out the background story to this UK indie/rock debut album
Remember Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong? Of course you don't. No reason why you should. They didn't amount to a hill of beans. To elucidate: they were one of those thousands of bands heaped on the steaming pile of what was rather cruelly described in the mid-'90s as Landfill Indie.
In 1968 the band's road manager proposed putting a control room in a van, so creating the world's first independent mobile recording studio. Steve Sutherland hitches a ride...
We all came out to Montreux/On the Lake Geneva shoreline/To make records with a mobile/We didn't have much time/ We ended up at the Grand Hotel/It was empty cold and bare/But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside/Making our music there...'
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