The Final Cut

Going from tape to vinyl was a big step. A leap of faith. A serious investment of money. A move in to a much wider world.

Releasing music on tape was pretty straightforward. You could buy blank cassettes at wholesale prices from businesses that advertised in the back of Melody Maker or some such music publication. You designed the tape covers yourself and had them printed at the local printing shop, on to cheap coloured card. You made copies to order via a tape to tape machine in your bedroom. It didn’t matter if you sold one copy, ten copies or two hundred.

Vinyl was different. You couldn’t DIY the process from your bedroom. First your original music had to be mastered on to reel to reel tape – this usually involved going to a professional studio of some sort. Then the master tape needed to be cut to vinyl. This vinyl master (acetate) was used to make copies, a process carried out at a pressing plant. After that came the record sleeve. Here you needed a specialist printer. You couldn’t just get the nearest outlet on your local high street to do the job.

The other leap, the leap of faith, was down to the fact that you had to make a minimum number of copies. The vinyl process wasn’t designed for someone expecting to sell ten copies. It worked on economies of scale. Minimum numbers of pressings were usually no lower than three to five hundred.

To simplify the process, there were companies that handled all the different elements for you. One such company, again discovered via an ad in the back of the music press, was called IPS. Independent Pressing Services. It was a small ad, with a logo that showed a record spinning off into the air as though fired out of a cheeky schoolboy’s catapult. The sales pitch wasn’t much beyond a declaration that they offered the cheapest prices.

More – much more – on IPS another time. What I want to write about today is the process of transferring that master tape on to vinyl. The vinyl cut, as it was known. I’m sure there were various places that provided this service – and I know I used at least one other at some point – but Porkies was for sure the king of them all. Porkies came from the nickname of the convivial George ‘Porky’ Peckham. You’d recognise his work from the run off grooves of a thousand different albums – where his signature ‘A porky prime cut’ would adorn that part of the record between the actual vinyl you played and the label in the middle.

I’d grown up seeing this friendly sign off featuring on huge swathes of my own record collection. His work stretched back to the days of The Beatles. Alongside his own signature message, bands also got to add cryptic messages of their own which George would faithfully etch out for them among the run out grooves. Maybe someday I’ll make a list of some of the most memorable ones. But here are a couple of those more personal to this story.

Remember The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm and their sell out ep with the Heart of Glass cover version? On one side of the record, the run out groove read ‘Give me head…’ and on the other side the completion of the quote was ‘until I’m dead’.

Rock ’n’ roll, right?

On our own, much less successful, shared ep – the one recorded in that sterile studio in Thornton Heath – we’d put ‘Thanks to the Cyclone 4’ in recognition of the four members of the band who all worked as couriers for a company called (I think) Cyclone Rangers.

I don’t remember exactly where in London Porkies was located, but I do know it was situated in a basement somewhere. You went down rickety wooden stairs to get there. The lighting was dim. The studio itself was chaos. There was stuff everywhere. Tapes. Vinyl. Scraps of paper. Bits of equipment. The walls were plastered with posters and bits and pieces of rock memorabilia. The actual business end of the studio was at one end of the room and George would be sat on a raised platform, alongside his equipment, like a king surveying their kingdom. (An eccentric king that had perhaps fallen on hard times…)

My memory of the specifics may be highly inaccurate, but the important part is true – it was, at least on the surface to me, a very chaotic space. It had character. It suited its place within the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll. You could imagine bands in there, hanging out, taking drugs, doing whatever it was bands did while the mad scientist character was busily transferring their music lovingly on to vinyl. The fact that Porky’s signature adorned virtually every record you owned was a testament to his skills and his position within this niche but important part of the music industry.

Fast forward a couple of years. We’re still in the 1980s. The project my brother and I had devoted our attention to after the band fizzled out, was 91 Vibrations. This was the part of the story where we’d spent months chiselling away at what was going to be our debut vinyl album. We’d come up with a couple of really interesting songs. One of them – the title track to the album – still sounded interesting, weird and vaguely disturbing (in part thanks to speeding up my vocal track), even after we’d probably tinkered with it far more than was necessary. The other one had lost pretty much all of its original strangeness and charm. Most of the rest of the tracks hadn’t, in truth, had that much going for them in the first place.

Having turned our back on using a professional studio after our bad experience in south London, we'd ended up doing something similar to ourselves. We’d over engineered all the life out of our music. It didn’t sound like us. And this time there was no one else we could blame it on.

But the full realisation of this didn’t hit until a bit further down the line. Meanwhile there was one final trip to Porkies to be made to get the record cut to vinyl. The thing is, in the meantime, Porkies had moved. While I couldn’t tell you where that old studio had been located, that basement at the bottom of the rickety stairs, this new place was in or close to Leicester Square. The heart of London. Tourist central. Expensive as hell I would imagine. If not then, certainly now. It was state of the art (a vacuous phrase, but appropriate for where we now find ourselves). There was a receptionist who sat at the front desk and checked who you were before ushering you into the main studio. The studio itself was pristine. There was no chaos. No random junk spilling out all over the place. No crude posters tacked to the walls. There was a lot of glass and recessed lighting, and expensive looking (and sounding) speakers.

I cannot possibly convey the difference between these two venues. You’d need a much better writer than me for that task.  It was quite intimidating having to sit and listen to this recording that had previously only ever been heard by me and my brother in the cramped back room of that house in Ponders End, suddenly exposed in hyper clarity in a large climate controlled studio with glass windows and tasteful furniture. The old Porkies had been the kind of place that bread a friendly air of chaos, where random people might walk in and out at any moment. Here was a much bigger and grander space and there was just me and George and somewhere outside, the receptionist carefully screening anyone who might enter the premises.

I don’t remember much about that day. I do recall George (Porky?) - I’m not sure what name to use. I only met him a couple of times, he was friends with the guy who ran IPS. I was just a client. A shy young man who wasn’t good at small talk.

Anyway, I recall at one point he made a positive comment about the quality of the bass on one of the tracks. I don’t for a minute think there was anything exceptional about the bass or the sound we’d created for it, but I guess it made sense to find something complimentary to say about a project you’re being paid to work on. As an artist, what you’d want to hear is something about how catchy a song sounds or how original an arrangement is or … anything, really. The quality of the bass sound is definitely more along the lines of, well I’ve got to try and find something positive to say. But fair play, that record didn’t have any catchy songs. Or exciting arrangements. Or anything much. ‘The bass sounds nice’ is a good pick if you’re reaching for a neutral compliment.

In retrospect, that new studio was a perfect metaphor for our album. It was soulless. Maybe George had only just relocated there. In time I’m sure it must’ve gained some character. I hope so. It needed it. Not nearly as much as our record did, but still.