Every moment in pop’s golden era has its Camelot. Whether that’s LA’s Gold Star studios, where Phil Spector created his epic “Wall Of Sound”, Electric Lady, the former nightclub that lent after-hours insouciance (and later its name) to Jimi Hendrix’s recordings, or Muscle Shoals, the single-storey roadhouse that gave us hits by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Rod Stewart – each once served as a proving ground for acolytes as well as a rallying point for their admirers.

And whether subsequently demolished, redeveloped or simply rendered defunct, these buildings are regularly invoked – just as Camelot is – to remind us that “for one brief shining moment” there was a spot that would go on to define the legacy of an artist who’d recorded there every bit as much as the songs themselves.

In the case of Sound Techniques, however, a small one-room studio carved out of an old dairy in London’s Chelsea, not so much. And yet anyone in search of “ground zero” of the UK’s late 1960s/early 1970s musical search for an “English Arcadia” – best summed up by the era’s penchant for peacockery and patchouli, matched by an increasingly abstract expression of these islands’ folk roots – will be familiar with its output.

Set up in 1964 by a sound engineer and a vision mixer as a hand-crafted redoubt from the “big rooms” ruled over by the major labels and their minions, during its brief, ten-year run, Sound Techniques was where Pink Floyd recorded their first single (thereby introducing the straight world to London’s most out-there ensemble). It’s also where The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, John Martyn, Sandy Denny and Steeleye Span laid down most of their best-known work. And it’s where Nick Drake – surely the most enigmatic and certainly the most impactful proponent of the period’s deep dive into a sort of needle-cord pastoralism – recorded all three of his albums.

Those recordings, along with Drake’s demise at 26, would come to define their times, as the Age Of Aquarius descended into the dour, increasingly drug-addled inertia of the 1970s, a creative flatlining that would only end with the explosion of punk towards the end of the decade. Their atmosphere, however, remains timeless and to some degree is now considered achingly contemporary, due as much to the manner as the circumstances of their recording, a process of patient, delicate soundscaping that’s rarely been matched in the commercial recording world.

Sound Techniques was started by two young sound engineers, Geoff Frost and John Wood, both of whom had worked at music publisher Morris Levy’s recording studio on New Bond Street until it was sold to CBS in 1964. Fearful for their jobs, the pair decided to strike out on their own – a decision cemented by a trip Frost had taken to the States earlier that year.

“I got on a plane to Nashville to look at the American studios to find out why they got so much better sounds than English studios,” he recalled in an interview with Matt Frost for Sound On Sound magazine in 2008. “American stuff was open, it was loud – the stuff from British studios was very sort of twee and dull. The stuff coming out of America, and particularly from Bradley’s, really impressed me personally.”

Named for its founder, Bradley’s, as it was then known, was a former Quonset Hut that would later serve as the Nashville recording studio of CBS Records, meaning it was the wellspring of the 1960s metropolitan “Nashville Sound” (Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” was recorded there) as well as the choice of a host of non-country artists including Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.

The approach Owen Bradley and brother Howard had taken when constructing their room had been in stark contrast to the white-coated “English way” then epitomised by EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Rather than suffocate the natural acoustics of a space in order to suppress echo, they had opted to expose the natural “feel” of their environment, an audio “signature” they were able to capture with the minimum of “outboard” or sound-affecting equipment. As Frost recalled, “Bradley’s was by far the most impressive studio I saw and just the kind of studio that John and I wanted to build.”

Back in London, Frost and Wood found the space required to replicate Bradley’s stripped-down approach in a former dairy, built in 1908, at 46a Old Church Street, an historic part of Old Chelsea that runs south of the King’s Road and meets the Embankment. Set back in its own courtyard (yet easily distinguished by a plasterwork cow’s head protruding from the front of the building) it sat across the road from the Black Lion pub (now the Pig’s Ear) and close to a grocery store (now the site of a Manolo Blahnik shop) that sold fresh-cut sandwiches, both of which would prove invaluable to the various musicians and technicians who worked at Sound Techniques.

For Frost and Wood, however, it was the space itself that proved the selling point. At the time, part of the ground floor served as a pottery (the light industry the area had been known for before the “Chelsea school” of 19th-century British artists moved in) but the pair were able to lease the remainder along with the first floor. By removing the ceiling they created the necessary height they’d been searching for – along with two further zones beneath the control room and workroom/office, both of which were “hung” at opposite ends of the room, accessible via flights of stairs. A shortage of available funds precluded any further adaptation beyond the laying of asphalt beneath the carpet (to deaden reverberation) and the installation of some double-glazing.

If the studio’s construction was largely “artisanal”, so was much of the equipment. Frost and Wood built the original mixing desk from scratch, housed three Ampex recorders in consoles salvaged from the BBC used-equipment department and built four monitor speakers from plans found in the recording industry bible, Audio Encyclopedia. Later, as the studio’s reputation grew, so the pair were able to expand the studio’s repertoire; its calling card, however, would remain the simplicity of the setup.

Still, in the early days, survival was the order of the day. Initially the studio got by recording hundreds of hours of light orchestral music needed to launch a new Muzak-like service destined for restaurants and hotels. (Apparently, London had been chosen thanks to the talent – and reliability – of its musicians, gifting the two technicians ample opportunity to fine-tune their room for acoustic performances as well as access to world-class players.) But it was another, albeit wackier, instrumental gig that sent perhaps its most important customer down to Chelsea, when the then-head of Elektra Records’ London office visited the studio to settle the recording costs of a bizarre-sounding orchestral cycle based on the signs of the zodiac.

Joe Boyd © Michael Putland

Described by Patrick Humphries in his engrossing 1997 biography of Nick Drake as the “Jack Kennedy of the music biz”, if Joe Boyd hadn’t been around in the 1960s it would have been important, for the full narrative strength of the moment to be captured, to have made him up. A Princeton grad with a passion for music, he first became a promoter while still at college, before becoming one of the most charmed showrunners in history, responsible for Muddy Waters’ first UK tour, production managing the Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan “went electric”, as well as producing the first take of Cream’s storming “Crossroads” (for an ill-fated blues supergroup featuring Eric Clapton).

After landing in London ostensibly to run Elektra’s US interests in the UK (a job that was swiftly retooled into an A&R role for the young entrepreneur blessed with a natural convening power as well as incredibly astute instincts) Boyd helped launch the epicentre of London’s underground – the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road (where he met Pink Floyd). His presence at the pivotal moments of that decade’s hippest moments goes some way beyond mere prescience to appear almost shamanic.

Dismayed after his boss at Elektra, Jac Holzman, passed on both Cream and the Floyd, Boyd decided to strike out on his own, forming Witchseason Productions, to act as a management, production and booking service supported by a label deal with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. At a time when most groups were encouraged to sign deals that ensured studio and production remained in house, it was to be an innovative approach that today would be referred to as a 360.

It was in this guise that Boyd approached UFO regulars Pink Floyd with the idea of recording and shopping an album to one of the two major labels at the time. In the event, Floyd were steered elsewhere, losing Boyd a valuable leg up in the emerging rock business – but not before he’d taken the band into Sound Techniques to record their debut single, Syd Barrett’s paean to a Cambridge cross-dresser, “Arnold Layne”.

For all their subsequent stadium-filling success, Pink Floyd’s time at Sound Techniques reflects only a fraction of the studio’s enduring legacy: for the rest, you have to look to Boyd’s stable of Witchseason acts, starting with the Incredible String Band and growing to encompass John and Beverley Martyn and the most long-standing folk-rock entity of them all, Fairport Convention.

Fairport Convention © Michael Ochs Archives

It was after a Fairport gig at the Roundhouse in November 1967, that Nick Drake, a 19-year-old Cambridge undergraduate from Tanworth-in-Arden, was first spotted by the group’s bass player, Ashley Hutchings. Numbers were exchanged, Boyd got in touch and on the strength of a home demo, he was booked into Sound Techniques to start work on his debut album, Five Leaves Left.

Often cited as the epitome of the introverted English singer-songwriter and, according to most contemporary accounts, something of a cipher himself, Drake would have been no stranger to Chelsea. His sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, lived in a flat just over the bridge in Battersea, where he would often stay. This in turn brought him into a demimonde that included a titled set of hard drug users, leading him to develop a habit of his own. This was the start of a physical and mental decline that continues to feed the mythos surrounding his recorded work: three albums in as many years that would seal his place – along with his fate – in the pantheon of 1970s music’s “lost generation”.

Nick Drake © Keith Morris/PR

Extending over a year, the sessions for Five Leaves Left were slotted in around the recording of the Fairports’ third album, Unhalfbricking, and, besides their guitarist Richard Thompson, featured Pentangle’s amiable yet extraordinary bass player, Danny Thompson, as well as stellar string accompaniments by his Cambridge friend Robert Kirby and the veteran arranger Harry Robinson.

“My productions had until then been mostly with working groups, which meant simply recording what was already there,” recalls Boyd in his 2005 memoir White Bicycles. “But Nick’s compositions cried out for arrangements, an ideal setting for each song. One source of inspiration was John Simon’s production of the first Leonard Cohen album. Simon had adorned the tracks with choruses, strings and other additions that set off Cohen’s voice without overwhelming it or sounding cheesy.”

The result is generally credited with forging the gentle, soft-focus setting that accompanies Drake’s essentially unassuming yet ultimately unsettling voice, but probably undermined the attention given to the artist’s own spare songs. Certainly on its release in September 1969, Five Leaves Left was marketed on the strength of its contributors, the feeling being that the likes of Danny Thompson, who’d recently toured the UK with Tim Buckley, might be a better lure for prospective buyers than an unknown singer-songwriter from Cambridge.

It might also be why his second LP, Bryter Layter – released the following year – is more of a collegiate affair, once again featuring the playing of Richard Thompson, now joined by fellow Fairports Dave Mattacks and Ashley Hutchings’ replacement on bass, Dave Pegg. Kirby once again supplied arrangements, as did former Velvet Underground member John Cale, who arranged and played on perhaps Drake’s most famous tune, “Northern Sky”. However, in common with its predecessor, there was to be no single release or sustained touring, ensuring it a muted reception.

John Cale © Mick Gold

In contrast to – and in all likelihood a reaction against – his first two long-players, Drake chose to record what turned out to be his final album, Pink Moon, alone at the microphone in Sound Techniques over two nights in October 1971.

Many have shied from embracing its stark, haunted to sound, but to those listening for the beauty in its hollowed-out depths, it stands alongside those other great swansong albums, Big Star’s Sister Lovers and Neil Young’s paean to lost confreres, Tonight’s The Night. It was released without fanfare and received none.

By which time Boyd had sold Witchseason to Island Records (with the stipulation that Drake’s records never be deleted from its catalogue) and returned to the States, where he took up a job at Warner Brothers in its film soundtracks department.

Drake made one last trip to Chelsea in 1974, where he recorded five tracks destined for a posthumous album. Instead, following a breakdown later that year, he died of an overdose of antidepressants on 25 November. He was 26.

Sound Techniques closed down the same year, after failing to raise the sum required to purchase the now-expired lease from the landlord. Olympic Studios – itself a talismanic name in rock history (you can see it in all its Stones-filled glory during the sessions for “Symphony For The Devil” featured in Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One) – bought the freehold and operated there until the early 1980s, at which point the building was redeveloped as flats.

For those looking for a physical imprint of of Sound Techniques today, there’s precious little evidence. Wrapped up in a scene from Peter Whitehead’s 1968 documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London – a suitably psychedelic commentary on the capital’s musical explosion – is a snippet of the Floyd performing their magnum opus “Interstellar Overdrive” at Sound Techniques. But it’s a glimpse, nothing more. Of Drake’s time in the studio, there is nothing at all. Having missed the chance to audition for a slot on the BBC’s flagship rock show, The Old Grey Whistle Test, no known footage exists at all. (He does, however, enjoy his own “Zapruder reel”: 13 seconds of fuzzy film shot at an unspecified 1970s rock festival that shows a man of similar height and demeanour walking away from the camera; his identity has yet to be established.)

The true legacy of Sound Techniques’ “breathy, beige sound”, as the late critic Ian MacDonald once described Drake’s voice, survives elsewhere: notably at Livingston Studios in north London, where studio alumnus Jerry Boys recorded numerous groups that mustered there during the mid- to late 1980s, eager to pick up the baton (although as Woods once mordantly said: “Records get the sound they deserve”). Its technology would travel farther, as the mixing consoles that Frost and Wood designed eventually became highly sought after by “back-to-analogue” recording studios, LA’s Sunset Sound among them.

But for the true expression of what Sound Techniques achieved over its short life you have to travel farther still, to the initially unpromising surroundings of Havana’s huge and imposing Egrem Studios.

Inspired by music collected by Joe Boyd and Boys in Cuba in the mid-1990s, Boys was hired to return to the island to record Ry Cooder’s collaboration with its leading players. From this distance, Buena Vista Social Club, the album that resulted – an international dance-jazz classic and perennial performer on any dinner party playlist – might be remembered solely as a litmus test for fin de siècle cool. But as well as shining a light on the island’s musicians, Boyd believes it achieves another goal: the ability to create actual, physical “space” in a recording.

“I’ve seen people enter pubs and bars where the Buena Vista Social Club CD is playing and look around for the source of the music; they seem startled to be entering a three-dimensional acoustic space… [The record’s] success is usually ascribed to Cooder, the film or the brilliant marketing, all of which were certainly relevant. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important.”

That sound wasn’t exported to Havana; it grew up in the creative compact of those musicians, playing in the way they played on those days and captured by the producers and engineers charged with doing so. But it travelled there in an approach to artistry that found its form at Sound Techniques, perhaps best expressed in the music Nick Drake made there.

John Wood, Brian Eno and John Cale at the desk at Sound Techniques, 1974 © Mick Gold

Due for release in 2021, The Parts You Don't Hear is a feature documentary by Neil Innes & Nick Turner charting the rise of Sound Techniques, from its DIY beginnings as a jobbing studio in a converted dairy, to becoming the epicentre of English folk-rock within its Chelsea studio, their legendary consoles conquering the music world recording everything from The Beatles to Bowie, The Doors to Elton John, Paul Simon to Fleetwood Mac. soundtechniquesmovie.com

Further reading:

Nick Drake: The Biography, Patrick Humphreys (Bloomsbury, 1997)

Darker Than The Deepest Sea, Trevor Dann (Portrait, 2006)

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