In 1960, Britain boasted few recording studios worthy of the name. Such as there were were almost exclusively record company owned and dedicated more or less entirely to classical music recording. Even there, however, the predominant fashion was to seek out sympathetic “real” recording environments in the form of churches, halls etc. Thus many famous recordings came to be made in such venues as London’s Kingsway Hall or, more prosaically, in the town halls of Watford, Walthamstow and similar locations. (At one point a standing joke existed that good acoustics would only be found in venues whose location began with the letter “W”!)

The relatively small number of purpose-built studios included EMIs Abbey Road and Decca’s Kingsway facilities. These were typified by a rigidly structured working environment quite unlike the contemporary equivalent. At Abbey Road, for example, engineers clad in ties and white coats enacted carefully defined recording practices which encompassed not only the fairly obvious ones of tape types or operating levels but also the choice of microphones and the types of equalisation or dynamics processing that were permitted. As such, the studio environment was decidedly user-hostile with artistes discouraged if not actually formally banned from entering control rooms and sessions carefully timed to remain within a 9-5 working day. The epitome of this rigidity can be found in a switch on an EMI - built console which selected either “pop” or “classical” equalisation.

Such constraints notwithstanding, the upside of a rigid approach proved (in the case of Abbey Road at least) to be superbly high technical standards. That is not to say that their studios necessarily boasted the latest or the best equipment but that such as there was was superbly maintained and often modified in - house to improve performance beyond the original specifications. Not only this but the workshops of EMI produced a constant stream of custom - built consoles, tape machines and other more exotic devices such as the “fridge”, an audio oscillator coupled with massive power amplifiers that delivered sufficient wattage to operate tape machine capstan motors which could then be varied in speed by varying the oscillator frequency, a facility that was not incorporated as standard by many manufacturers until the mid 1970s.

Nonetheless, the British studio of the early 1960s was a primitive and poorly equipped shadow of its American counterpart. The British music industry remained small and the recording industry a yet smaller adjunct to it. In an era when sheet music sales were generally regarded as more important than those of records, there was little impetus to invest in improvements and, worse, there was little native manufacturing industry capable of meeting the technical needs. Inevitably, therefore, such developments as did take place tended to demand foreign (and hence expensive) equipment. The EMI response was therefore a logical one and, apart from allowing them to create consoles that were not only cost - effective but also built to specification, established a small but significant tape recorder manufacturing industry that endures to this day. For many years the classic EMI BTR/2 (it stands for British Tape Recorder) was the mainstay of studios unable to afford the luxury of Studer, Ampex or other overseas makes.

Meanwhile the American recording industry was expanding and evolving by leaps and bounds. Largely as a result of decentralisation of broadcasting, most towns had their own radio stations, all of which had studios of a sort and many of which had well equipped music recording facilities that were, in themselves considerably superior to the average English independent studio. In general, the American electronics industry had fared considerably better both during and since the War than had its British counterpart. The considerably greater reliance placed by the American military on electronic systems, particularly as a means of communication had flooded the postwar market with huge amounts of war - surplus equipment: microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, transmitters and so forth. The radio industry infrastructure was such that it could benefit from such materials quickly and, furthermore, the substantial number of recently demobilised servicemen who had trained in radio and electronics in the military meant that a skilled workforce was readily available both in manufacturing and in production itself.

As the size of the military ramped slowly down following the end of the Korean War, interest in recorded music, always greater in America than England due to the huge jukebox market and now further fuelled by the advent of rock ‘n’ roll leaped upward. The result was a huge number of small, low cost studios built at the back of music shops, in garages and the like. Based on war - surplus equipment and operated (in the main) by engineers trained by the military, these studios were notable for their ability to improvise solutions from minimal resources and yet achieve remarkable quality of product. For example, many modern engineers attribute the classic pulsing interaction of drums and (acoustic) bass to the lack of microphones in such studios. One solution to this was to place a figure-8 microphone between the two players with each being picked up by the opposite lobe of the microphone’s response. In so doing, a mechanical interaction was presumed to occur with the result that when playing suitable parts, the sound of both instruments was enhanced in a way still not fully explained but one which made a significant contribution to the unique sound of American rock ‘n’ roll.

Furthermore, local radio stations meant disk jockeys keen to promote and exploit local talent (not always from the most  altruistic of motives, however) and that demand, in turn, brought increased business to local studios. Thus it was that many classics of the genre came to be recorded in tiny home - built studios by engineers who, being completely unversed in the “correct” approaches espoused by the likes of Abbey Road, invented techniques and misused equipment shamefully. as they did so, creating practices that remain to this day: compression to tighten up drum sounds, tape echo to thicken vocals or lend interest to solos, reverberation to enhance overall atmosphere etc etc.

Such innovations remained largely unacceptable to British studios and thus, British popular music remained heavily overshadowed by American imports. This is not to suggest, however, that serious developments and/or work of quality was not done in Britain at that time, merely that it was restricted to the classical genre. Provided with a sound theoretical basis by Alan Blumlein and others, British engineers worked quietly but to great effect in improving and developing microphone techniques and many aspects of record manufacture and reproduction. One of the best known of these developments was the “Decca Tree”, a carefully arranged array of microphones designed to provide optimum pickup and balance to a full orchestra, an approach that has rarely been bettered to this day.

Behind-the-scenes work continued, especially in the development of specialist audio electronics. Designed initially for the steadily growing high - fidelity domestic market, many of these innovations crossed over into professional audio and formed the basis for the dominant position still occupied by British console designers and builders. However, the creativity encouraged in electronics engineers remained profoundly discouraged, even forbidden to the end - user in the studio. So stultifying did some engineers and producers find this that they broke away to become independents. Even those as successful as Joe Meek found to their cost that the major labels still maintained a stranglehold on product distribution and that they were often independent in name only.

Practical independence, then, hardly existed in Britain until the mid/late 1960s when the boom in “underground” music led to the establishment of numerous small record labels. In general, however, these were the not always well disguised attempts by the major labels to cash in on a new genre by creating their own “psychedelic” label. Thus EMI created Harvest, Decca created Immediate and so on.

Notwithstanding the inevitable problems that these connections raised, the 1960s and 70s saw a huge outpouring of creativity and innovation from British studios which more than matched the earlier developments in the USA. Where the Beatles had trod, others were bound to follow and, although the pioneers had quietly swum away from innovation and experimentation back into the mainstream, there was no shortage of would-be researchers. Particularly prominent amongst these was the English band Pink Floyd who developed an extended instrumental style which relied heavily upon the use of sound treatment, multichannel PA technology and pre-recorded tapes.