Tuesday 1 September 2015

Olympic Studios AIR - Day 1

I started my 3 month residency at the Olympic Studios today - one of the first projects is to help the owners collect the 350 plus albums that were fully or partly recorded and or mixed here from its opening in 1966 to 2009, when it closed. We have 160 of the albums already.
Over the 3 months, I will look at and listen to 4 albums a day and document one or two interesting facts and stories about the music.

Playlist for day 1 -
https://open.spotify.com/user/rogermiles/playlist/2saRhySR873S7U9TXRbLEo


Snafu recorded this album in 1973 - the name came from the Captain Beefheart song, "Big Eyed Beans from Venus".
They toured with the Eagles in the US - the Eagles recorded "On the Border in 1974. This is the first album by the Eagles to be released in Quadraphonic surround sound. A hidden message carved into the run out groove of vinyl LPs reads: "He who hesitates is lunch".

The track, "On the Border", was inspired by Watergate and fears of the government overstepping its bounds and infringing on people's privacy. Barely audible at the end of the song, Glenn Frey can be heard whispering "Say Goodnight, Dick,"  Nixon resigned five months after the release of the album.


KLF mixed "Justified and Ancient" in 1991 at the Olympic and adopted the philosophy espoused by the novel series "The Illuminatus! Trilogy", gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. 



Their most notorious performance was a collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the after show party. This performance announced The KLF's departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

With The KLF's profits, Drummond and Cauty established the K Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative art award for the worst artist of the year and burning one million pounds sterling. 

Arcade Fire mixed part of their second album," Neon Bible" here in 2007. The artwork for the album is a photograph of a six-foot neon sign that the band commissioned for use while on tour. This is the band playing in a lift... without the neon ...


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