Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [VINYL]

Product Information

We arrived and took our seats, the aisles crowded with expatriates. The first film was “Marooned,” about astronauts stranded in space. The special effects were state of the art, with our friends the Russians saving the day at the end. But then the second feature started to roll - the movie was “Yellow Submarine.” BW: So moving on to the Audio-5 Sgt. Pepper, what was that day like – when you first received the tapes? The standard line about the album is that, at its centre, it’s a work of tremendous warmth and inclusion, that attempts, as Ed Vulliamy writes in the accompanying book, to “embrace everybody – ‘the man from the motor trade’, ‘the girl with kaleidoscope eyes’”. There are moments where it sounds like a high-water mark of hippy-era optimism before disillusion set in. Their fans are lovely and the band want to take them home, life is getting better and a splendid time is guaranteed for all – including traffic wardens, worried parents of errant teens and cosy sexagenarian couples.

DB – After a couple of years on the job at EMI, management called me into a meeting. They presented me with these tapes. They said they were special tapes from Abbey Road, and they wanted to produce an audiophile version of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. I was amazed, and said to myself, “This is me? I’m going to work on this album?” It was like a dream coming true. Fewer than 500 copies of the Audio-5 album were made. This is fewer than the Nimbus Supercut production run, making it one of the rarest Sgt. Pepper’s… factory pressings in existence. It was never available at retail outlets and was sold only for “cash in hand” at the hi-fi show. And its audiophile provenance makes it all the more desirable.

Log In

So eventually I got a job at the Australian Record Company. I told my parents about my new position, and they said “Oh no! A government job is very secure!” As well, my school careers adviser had suggested being a train driver, or bus driver instead (laughs).

DB – When I started mastering in 1971, I was told to leave the recordings alone – no EQ or other changes allowed! The priority was to transfer the audio on to the vinyl without distortion. And if you have a good clean vinyl of a traditionally cut record, you’ve got a bit of gold there, because they don’t age. Vinyl is a very accurate physical representation of the audio modulations etched into it. And so, it also began for Don Bartley. One of the top sound engineers in Australia, Don first heard Sgt. Pepper’s…. upon its release in 1967, and decided then and there to enter the music business. As a result,, he eventually came to master what many consider the “holy grail” of audiophile Beatles records: the “Audio-5 Sgt. Pepper’s”.

never miss a release.

I basically said “Wow!” and chatted with Richard for a few hours, and he eventually said, “I think we can do something.” So I put my name and number on a piece of paper, and didn’t think anything else of it. He called a week later and said: “When can you start?” My family was cautious about it at the time – “when you get a job with the government, it doesn’t get any better.” But that’s how I started at the Australian Record Company. One rare version has been out of reach: the Nimbus Supercut pressing, said to be one of the best. But in the course my research, I came across a lesser-known Australian audiophile release from 1983, the EMI Audio-5. I have come to realize that, from a sound quality perspective, this may be the most valuable and best sounding of them all. Those tapes were one generation from the absolute original, and they sounded so good - clean, quiet - just superb, really. They were very nice to work with. For the half speed, I was able to run the 30ips original at 15ips, so the system worked very well to accommodate the dynamic range and frequency response on the tape. DB – It’s more artistically correct, and quite a nice atmospheric effect. Whereas with the early Rubber Soul it’s an extreme technical pan, and it just sits in place.

I also take issue with some of Martin’s stereophonic choices. Why, for example, should the first three notes of the harpsichord theme that introduces “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” be placed in the left channel, while the fourth (and others) find themselves in the right? The effect not only comes across as arbitrary, it distracts from the musical line. DB - In the end, RCA decided to close the factory and I was sent to EMI, as I was told they might have a position for me. I now had quite a bit of experience. When I arrived, EMI said they’d heard about my reputation, and were offering me a job. And I said, “Um, what have you heard?” My father was an American advertising executive assigned to Japan Air Lines, and had been transferred to Yokohama. And my mother was a bit of a bohemian - born in Paris during the 1920’s, her parents were members of the Lost Generation. She was happy to be in Japan, but realized we still needed a connection to home. So one hot summer day, we rode a crowded train to a Tokyo theater specializing in American movies. DB - I really enjoyed working with clients, because I learned a lot from them - just listening to them talk about how they went about making the record, and what they wanted to hear as the end result. Some clients were very technical and specific and others were musicians, and spoke more on a musical, emotional level. I just learned so much from all of them. I never took a course. Apart from Richard Harvey at CBS, who taught me the ground rules - and did a good job of it - I never actually had a formal education in mastering, as there were no courses in those days. I’m not self-taught, but learned from a lot of people around me, and the ones who came before me.Apple, the Beatles’ label, has attempted to set things right a couple of times, first in 1982 with a remastered Beatles in Mono CD box set; and later, in 2014, with a 180-gram mono vinyl box set taken from the original analog tapes. Still, although these releases did allow us to hear the album as the Beatles had intended, they were still in mono and thus missing the spatial benefits of stereo.

In steps Giles Martin, son of the Beatles’ indispensable producer George Martin and a proven producer himself. Martin thought it would be nice if we Sgt. Pepper fans could experience the album in a stereo version that more closely hewed to the Beatles’ musical vision. The result of his efforts, which purportedly involved months of research, is this Anniversary Edition. I worked for the Sydney Water Board in their electronic section as a cadet design engineer, looking after two-way radios and telemetry systems. It was quite interesting, actually. It was quite advanced for the 1960s. One day, a component salesman I knew stopped by and said “I was talking to a guy who is looking for someone to help in the mastering department of their record plant – would you find that interesting?” So I went and met Richard Harvey. It was a position in the mastering rooms for international releases from Columbia, Polydor and Warners, as well as some local product. At the time, they had Ampex tape machines, Neumann lathes and Westrex cutters – one was a valve room, and the other was a transistor room. This will be the very first time Apple have authorised a super deluxe edition box set of a Beatles studio long-player. DB – They were quarter inch 30 IPS tapes. I was amazed at how it corresponded with that first record I had been listening to. I thought it would be more open and detailed, but there was very little difference in terms of those early vinyl recordings, which is a testament to how good they were. That’s the thing about this album – how well it was recorded and produced. And how the tape sounded like the original vinyl issue – there was so little difference. The tape was nearly identical. And when I worked at EMI in Australia, there was an engineer there who had worked at Abbey Road at that time, named Richard Lush – I think he was the original assistant engineer on Sgt. Pepper’s…. He said everything for the original was done in mono, and fully designed around a mono release. They had spent two to three weeks mixing it for mono, and just as they were sending it off, someone came running down from the office and said ‘by the way, we need a stereo mix.’If the new mix and stereophonics were equally laudatory, this album would be a watershed event. Sadly, this is where the younger Martin fails us. He boosted all of the vocals—as well as certain instruments—to the point where they’re right in your face. And there’s no letup. So rather than the Beatles’ carefully-plotted journey through emotional highs and lows, Martin gives us an album that’s unremittingly aggressive. Rather than inviting you into a fascinating world, as even the lousiest-sounding predecessors did, the new edition pushes you away. Finally, the bonus album contains a version of “A Day in the Life” with the originally-conceived ending: a large group humming an E natural. The band concluded that, after the song’s monumental orchestral crescendo, ending with a hum was anti-climactic. After listening to this ending, you’ll no doubt agree. The group decided instead to deploy an array of keyboards (mostly pianos) hammering a single E major chord in unison. The rest, as we know, is history.