Simon Henderson

In the year 1989 or 1990, I was working with the legendary Gus Dudgeon at Rockfield Studios in Wales with a band called ‘Lunch with the president’. We had been using a studio 2 miles away for some tracking as our studio at Rockfield had to be made available for Graham Bonnet.

The other studio was called ‘Mono Valley’ and Brian May had just finished his solo album there when we took it over.

We were using two 24 track Otari machines at Rockfield, but at Mono Valley they only had one 24 track, so we had made up some ‘slave’ mixes as guide tracks on one tape for those sessions. We mixed down all the drums to two tracks, had a mix of the keyboards, and another stereo pair of all the guitars. We the used the remaining 15 or so tracks to do the real tracking.

So, we were now back at Rockfield to finish the alum. Gus suggested that we erase the guide tracks from the second reel as they were no longer needed and just confused things while we were trying to mix.

With the track sheet in front of me and a copy in front of Gus, we both called out the tracks to the engineer that he could safely ‘arm’ for recording. It kind of went a bit like this ‘track ten, track ten, ok, check, track ten, track eleven, track eleven, ok, check track eleven’ and so on. After we had checked and double checked that these were the tracks to be erased, we put the machine into record and went for a cup of tea.

We cleaned two reels of 2 inch in the same way, the whole album!

The first proper job of the day was to fly in some vocal samples from the sampler.

So Dave, the engineer, put track 1 into record enable and we started ‘punching in’ these various vocal bits and pieces.

Upon hitting the record button the second machine started to spin out of control. Dave jumped up and stopped it manually. I gazed over to the ‘VU meters’ and saw that track 24 was armed, NOT track 1. When I announced this we all looked at the mixing desk where Dave was arming the machine and saw track 1 flashing, then looked back at the VU meter on the machine and saw it was still flashing on track 24.

Dave enabled track 24 on the mixer but the machine flashed up track 1. We found out that the second machine had returned from maintenance the previous day, and the multi core had been plugged in upside down. One would think that they would design the cable to only plug in one way wouldn’t you? No such luck here.

Track 24 is really track one, track 2 is really track 23 and so on.

So we had been recording on the SMPTE code track which was track 24.

Small holes in the SMPTE code were not a big problem, but the fact that we had erased at least 8 tracks for the whole album that we not guide tracks at all was a NIGHTMARE thing to have done.

We had erased main vocals, Sax solos, guitar solos, backing vocals this was a complete disaster!! Kingsley, the owner, brought the maintenance guy in, bent him over, and told me and Gus to literally ‘kick his ass’, it was just like a scene from ‘Spinal Tap’. He wanted to fire the guy, but settled for a good arse kicking instead. I gave it a little token boot and so did Gus to satisfy Kingsley, not that it helped the situation.

Kingsley said ‘I am lucky you guys are here on a production deal and not here record company money or I’d get sued’ this didn’t make us feel any better. ‘Oh well!’ Gus said ‘Down the pub then’ he continued.