Sunday 30 January 2011

Basing Treat

Look at these super-cool pictures of studio one at Basing Street, as it was in the mid-70s. This is the studio set up by Chris Blackwell of Island records, and was home to some of the best recordings of the 70s - Led Zep 4 for example. It evolved into Sarm West at some point and 80s music was born. Here we can see the Helios [not neve as I originally thought] wraparound console that epitomized the big huge sound of the seventies, plus it was painted yellow





UPDATE: Using the magic of google image search, I discovered a scan of the original Basing Street studio brochure on this forum here, and now this post is complete






UPDATE TWO: OK so see the comms for something cool...

4 comments:

  1. WOW!.... I was an asst/engineer at Basing Street in the mid-70's... Jo Yu was my boss (head techo) and I worked with Rhett Davies (who did many of Dire Straits albums) and Penny Hansen was the booking chick... I ended up helping build and manage the Island Records Mobile studio - the first 24tk setup in Europe after the Stones mobile (16tk)...

    In fact I was at Island when these Helios desks were installed... :-)... WOW!... what memories... thank you sooo much for these... - I will see if I have any pix - I have my employment letter still - 1GBP/hour!!! .. we wuz rich!!!! :-)

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  2. super cool! send me some more pics - i will put them up here and also on my other blog: http://balanceweblog.blogspot.com/

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  3. Queen recorded there, and in Wessex "News of the Worl". For "We will rock you" NO drums where used !!!!!!!!

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  4. A friend of mine used to own one of those desks, the yellow one. Its so cool to see it where it used to live.

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