THE FIRST RECORDING STUDIO IN THE WORLD:

Budgie was the youngest of three brothers who lived at
the garage in the valley below our house. It was the last garage
out of town on the road that carried steel trucks across the boarder
into North Wales. The old wooden workshops had been cleared to build
an modern brick box with huge wooden doors that could accommodate
everything from motorcycles to Lorries.The two brothers were chief
mechanics, they drove me to school in draughty LandRovers & huge
American station wagons whose footwells were strewn with car batteries
& old receipts. Budgie was two years above me in school & my best mate
during the intermediate years.
We watched silent films on an 8mm projector in his attic –
Tugboat Willie, the Keystone Cops, Laurel & Hardy, doing our own
voice-overs, always hoping that the next time we ran them the
characters would speak. We played with his racing car track, flogged
apples off his dad’s trees to passing motorists & every thursday
plotted up in front of the Tele with a bag of Iced-Gems for the weekly
ritual of ‘The Monkeys Show’.
Budgie had a 7 inch of ‘The Last Train To Clarksville’
(or maybe it was his brothers?),It opened with a great hook, the
melody was catchy with an infectious vocal style but I preferred the
other side because it ran backwards – the drums sucked instead of
pounded. We rode our bikes, messed around in the workshop addicted to
the sweet aroma of oil & rubber & annoyed his brothers, but best of
all, Budgie had ‘a reel-to-reel tape recorder’, a fabulous treasure,
dropped into our world from another dimension. Every week we would lock
ourselves in his room & record plays, comedy sketches, anything to make
us laugh & we roared until it hurt or his Mom banged the door for us to
shut up. We filled reels with the stuff, no ‘music’ that I can recall,
but hours of improvised dialogue & noises. I especially remember one of
those ‘life changers’ when we discovered it could run at different
speeds, opening up a jungle of wonders as we experimented with the
sounds everything in his Mom’s kitchen could make. We played these
noises back slowed right down to reveal concealed reverb worlds,
animal voices, creature howls & grunts, all made out of the most
mundane objects.
That little fat grey box with the Phillips logo, an object way beyond
my family’s pocket, looked at me & winked.

(K)