Keith Emerson
When on the staff at Livingston Studios, having recently graduated from tape op to engineer, a booking came in. It was around 1989, and it was for Keith Emerson. I was assigned to engineer the sessions. I asked my boss, is it THE Keith Emerson? Of Emerson, Lake and Palmer?!! He didn’t know! Astonishingly, it was! He arrived for a booking of about three days, the purpose of which was to sift through a pile of slightly decayed looking old multitrack tapes (24 track) from miscellaneous ELP recordings. The idea was to find tracks that hadn’t been previously released. My job was to mix them!
Mixing
We beavered away on various mixes, and chatted over dinner in the Livingston Studios restaurant. I’d describe his general demeanour as ‘a bit grumpy’! He was in the process of suing Greg Lake for some reason. Or was Greg Lake suing him? I can’t remember! And there was also some copyright claim going on involving Polar Music. He said, Who the hell are they? Of course I knew they were something to do with Abba! But perhaps not Abaddon. I can’t remember what the other tracks we mixed were, but Abaddon’s Bolero (orchestral version) was definitely one of them. I do remember him being grumpy about the odd artifacts of the A&D F760 compressor which affected the fade on one track, to my embarrassment! I recently found a cassette amongst my many thousands in boxes, simply labelled Abbadon’s Bolero (note misspelling). Not my handwriting. And on a cassette with a price label on it marked Wiseblood’s, possibly an electrical shop that still exists in Heathfield, East Sussex. Did he live near there? Was it his tape? Is this my mix? I think so… He released the track, (an orchestral version of a track previously released by ELP) in 1995 on a solo album, but I think re-mixed by then by someone else. Sadly in those pre-mobile phone days there are no photographic records of our collaboration. But there is the ansafone message (above) and the cassette audio (below)…
P.S. the “lovely ansafone message” he refers to is my greeting tape which was an adaptation of the start of Telephone Line by ELO, with my spoken vocal overdubbed!
Enjoy!
