Though less familiar in America, Bill Price is a well-known and widely respected name on the English recording scene; few engineers have amassed a more varied—or more stellar—list of credits. Fast at “getting a sound,” unfailingly polite and a living embodiment of the can-do, nothing-is-too-much-trouble work ethic, Price is the consummate engineer. Producers prize his unruffled efficiency and almost inhuman stamina, while his technical expertise is broad enough that he can finesse almost any equipment malfunction. His own mixes leap out of the speakers, and other engineers who work on Price’s tapes find them faultless. And a highly developed instinct for control room diplomacy has put him in high demand as a producer.

As a staff engineer at Decca’s West Hampstead studios in the mid-’60s, Price recorded a string of worldwide hits for Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, and has been consistently associated with quality recordings and commercial success ever since. Tapped by George Martin and his partners for the position of chief engineer at the new AIR Studios facility in London’s West End, Price went on to revive Wessex Studios in the mid-’70s and recorded several of the most influential records of the decade, including albums by the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Pretenders. In the ’80s, Price worked with Pete Townshend, Elton John, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Big Audio Dynamite, among others, and the ’90s found him producing The Waterboys and mixing for the Stone Roses, The Cult, Robert Plant and Guns N’ Roses.

Despite his extraordinary success, Price has rarely been interviewed. However, a series of e-mails (including a draft of the interview questions—Price is never unprepared) finally resulted in a long phone conversation in late June, soon after Price had returned from attending the Glastonbury Festival near his home in England’s West Country.

Bill Price in Wessex Studio 2, 1988 (click image for larger view)

Let’s start with some questions about The Clash—you recently remastered the entire catalog. Why did the label decide to remaster the whole catalog when these albums are already available on CD?
That’s a question that would be best asked of Sony. I had been working with them on the live album, and the available CDs were a pretty mixed bunch. Some were quite recent, and some had been done very many years ago. I checked out all the available CDs and, if nothing else, there’s a 15dB variation in the peak level between the different albums. Also, there were some songs in The Clash repertoire that had not actually appeared on CD, and there were some confusing overlaps where the English and American vinyl versions and the CDs were different. I think they just decided now was a good time.

Where was the remastering done?
It was all done at Sony’s studio in Whitfield Street with Ray Staff and Bob Whitney, Sony’s in-house engineers. What can I say about it? I was trying to be reasonably quick. In the old days of stuff being cut onto vinyl, sometimes you might say that the finer detail and nuances of the music were lost. But I would suggest that with a band like The Clash, the final result wasn’t the master tape but the actual vinyl, the cut that was pressed and everybody heard locked in their bedrooms. So when I was asked to do it, I was firmly of the opinion that the important thing to do with the CD was to match the vinyl. I decided that what we really needed to do for the sake of old Clash fans that no longer had a record player and wanted to relive the late ’70s/early ’80s, was that they should be able to put on a CD that sounded just like their record did. I agree that sometimes remastering might unearth subtleties that had been lost on vinyl, but I didn’t think that particularly applied to The Clash records. We had quite a hard job matching the vinyl.

Click for larger image

I’ve got an interesting story for your readers. It’s actually quite a cautionary one. We managed to find most of the original masters—every Clash record was recorded on analog, although occasionally the only tape that Sony New York found was a digital safety copy, but we finally got all the tapes together. Of course, being late ’70s/early ’80s tapes, they required baking, which was no problem. Whitfield Street’s equipped with this laboratory oven that you can program how long it’s going to take to heat up and what temperature it’s going to get to and how long it’s going to take to cool. We baked them very successfully, only to find that whenever a song had been leadered, the first second or two of the song had a series of short dropouts in it.

And to cut a long story short, this turned out to be due to what they used to call “timing leader.” It has a little arrow printed on it every half a second so that you could work out how much leader was three seconds’ worth by counting the arrows. Unfortunately, when this was baked, the ink on the leader sort of bonded itself to the oxide of the tape that was on the outside of the leader. When the tape was played through, it pulled the oxide off, which was most unfortunate. So anybody who’s investigating tapes of this vintage that need baking would be very wise to spool the tapes first and check to make sure that there’s nothing printed on the leader. There were also some leaders which had AGFA printed on them throughout their entire length, and they also produced a few dropouts.

Next Page

Reprinted with permission from Magazine, October, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved