The Bill Price Interview

The Bill Price Interview—PART 1
Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

EARLY DAYS AT DECCA
I know you worked for an electronics company before you got into recording. Have you been able to use that background to save or at least streamline a session? Any amusing stories?
I used to work for the Plessey company, working on guided missiles, of all things. I got a bit bored with that. When I’d got my qualification from them, I left and started working at Decca. It was very handy to have some electronics background because, in the ’60s, the ethos of Decca Studios was very much that engineers were expected to be just that—engineers. The maintenance department was always very much of the 9-to-5, bring-it-up-to-the-workshop-if-it’s-not-working variety. It was quite normal for the engineer to be groveling in the back of a valve desk, changing ECC83s, while 25 valve mics were frying gently over a 60-piece orchestra. That’s what people expected. Interestingly enough, when transistor mics were introduced, it took me a few years to appreciate what we were losing by ditching the valve mics, such was the relief that we no longer had to keep hunting for the valve mic with the intermittent crackle.

Which would reoccur on a regular basis?
Particularly if you had 25 of them going at once. You could spend quite a long time figuring out which one it was. If you had a crackling sort of noise going on, you’d be reaching for the panpots, trying to pan it around and find out which mic was doing it, while the string section were shouting at each other and making a lot of noise. It was a great relief when the transistor mics first came in.
But to answer your question, there’s nothing intrinsically amusing about electronic repair, nothing at all. If you know a bit about electronics, it’s not difficult. The hardest part is to carry it out whilst you’re convincing the artist and the client that it’s “just routine. Everything’s going to be okay very soon.” That’s the hardest one.

When you started as a staff engineer at Decca, pop records not made by self-contained groups were often recorded with session orchestras. Is that a style of music and/or recording that you remember with any fondness?
When I started in ’62, blues and soul music were penetrating England, or just about. Those pop records might have had orchestras, but the rhythm section contained people like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, John McLaughlin, Herbie Flowers, Clem Cattini—guys that ignored the charts in front of them and played like they were in a rock band anyway. So it was still like working with a band, even in 1962. The only difference was that everything was done live. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a ’60s desk. I know a few people have got them lying around in Los Angeles, but I don’t know if you’ve noticed that they’re a few inches higher than today’s average SSL. Have you noticed that?

No, I haven’t. Why was that?
Measure a few. You’ll find that they were definitely higher in those days. I think it’s purely that when you’re doing a big session straight onto 4-track, it’s not something you could do sitting down. It wasn’t a leisurely process. You would definitely be on the balls of your feet at all times whilst recording. Not sitting back in a comfy armchair.

INTO THE WILD WEST END
Did you have any hesitation in leaving Decca for AIR?
Wild horses wouldn’t have stopped me going to AIR. A bit of history—AIR Productions, Ltd., was George Martin, Ron Richards, John Burgess and Peter Sullivan as four independent producers. The first three were employed by EMI. Peter Sullivan, the fourth, was employed by Decca, and I was Peter Sullivan’s engineer. They all formed a company and went freelance, but carried on contracts with EMI and Decca respectively for several years in order to get the finances together to build the studio. This was the dream of these four producers, to build a studio, that I had been aware of for many years before it finally came to fruition. When eventually they started building the studio, I gave in my notice at Decca, and I joined the technical team that George had found from EMI, Keith Slaughter and Dave Harries. I was one of the launch team that put together AIR Studios in 1970.

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