Studio
In 1955, several customers asked if Phillips could make demo discs, so he bought a 1/4 inch tape recorder (replaced in 1963 with a Vortexion portable), an MSS (Marguerite Sound Studios - after the owner's wife) disc cutting machine, an amplifier, a 4-track mixer, three microphones (a Reslo, an HMV ribbon microphone, and an AKG), and three pairs of headphones for £400, while on a trip to London to visit his son Frank, who was there for a sound recording course at EMI Electronics.
Phillips set up the equipment behind his shop in the (12 square feet) middle living room, with a piano and an overturned tin bath in the cellar as a reverb chamber, with a speaker and microphone linked to the studio above. The recordings would normally be on tape, and then transferred to disc, although the tape was recorded over again during the next session. Because of trams, trucks, and horses going up and down Kensington, Phillips had to hang heavy blankets over the studio door and a rear window to minimise the noise. Phillips' first recording was of himself singing "Bonnie Marie of Argyle", (unaccompanied) and a few days later he recorded "Unchained Melody", with local dance band singer Betty Roy. The first disc he cut in the studio was on 7 August 1955, with his eight-year-old daughter, Carol, singing, "Mr Sandman". All the discs had "Play with a light-weight pick-up" on the label, as this would increase the life of the disc, which would eventually wear out.
Phillips advertised the studio as Phillips' Sound Recording Services (also advertised as P. F. Phillips' Professional Tape & Disc Recording Service), and his business cards read: "PF Phillips, 38 Kensington, Liverpool, 7. Television and Battery Service. Gramophone Record Dealer. Professional Tape and Disc Recording Studio." He started cutting discs for members of the public, as well as for actors from the Liverpool Playhouse, who often stayed in the first-floor boarding rooms above the studio, who were sometimes asked by Phillips to record monologues and poems. These included the actors John Thaw, Richard Briers, and the ventriloquist Ray Alan.
For the first couple of years, Phillips made music compilation discs for local businesses such as the local ice rink or cinema, men singing songs for loved ones, children playing an instrument, or even a neighbour’s dog howling along to piano accompaniment. As the record shop and studio took over the business, he had a brass plate made which he put on the wall just outside the front door, and had labels made for the discs, but changed the design of the disc label every year. By 1957, Phillips was recording more and more groups of young men with guitars, basses, washboards and drums, who played skiffle.
Ron Wycherly (a.k.a. Billy Fury) recorded several songs onto disc in the studio, including, "I'm Left You're Right She's Gone", "Playin' For Keeps", "Paralyzed" and "Come Go With Me" (all previously released by Elvis Presley) as well as, "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" (Lulu Belle and Scotty) and his own composition, "Yodelling Song". Fury's mother sent the songs to impresario Larry Parnes, which started her son's singing career. The songs were released on DVD/CD in 2008.
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Famous quotes containing the word studio:
“The studio people want me to do “Good-bye Charlie” for the movies, but I’m not going to do it. I don’t like the idea of playing a man in a woman’s body—you know? It just doesn’t seem feminine.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“Again and again, I struggled though the storm. Once I fainted—and it wasn’t in the script. I was hauled to the studio on a sled, thawed out with hot tea, and then brought back to the blizzard, where the others were waiting. We filmed all day and all night, stopping only to eat standing near a bonfire. We never went inside.... The blizzard never slackened.”
—Lillian Gish (1896–1993)
“The studio has become the crucible where human genius at the apogee of its development brings back to question not only that which is, but creates anew a fantastic and conventional nature which our weak minds, impotent to harmonize it with existing things, adopt by preference, because the miserable work is our own.”
—Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)