An extraordinary archive of recordings, a treasure trove of aged world music, has been unearthed at EMI's warehouses, Alexis Petridisreports
THE TOWN OF Hayes in Middlesex, England, doesn't offer much to the sightseer, but the town itself may well be the world's biggest metaphor for the decline of the music industry. EMI started building factories here in 1906, when it was still called The Gramophone and Typewriter Company. In the 1960s, its factories covered 150 acres and it employed 14,000 people. Today, however, the factories and recording studios are gone or in the process of being demolished. EMI's Hayes workforce is in single figures, all of them employed in the company's last remaining building, a vast archive.
From the outside, the archive looks as melancholy as the rest of Hayes. Inside, it's just bizarre, an apparently endless steel vault containing not just records and master tapes, but aged recording equipment, gramophones, memorabilia and files of press clippings. "They've kept everything," notes Mark Ainley, co-founder of Honest Jon's, the acclaimed record label born out of the legendary record shop in Notting Hill, west London.
Ainley estimates he has spent around 20 months working in the archive's temperature-controlled environs, sorting through shelf after shelf of forgotten 78s, recorded across the world in the early years of the 20th century: he was alerted to their existence by former EMI chief executive Tony Wadsworth. Honest Jon's has become famous in recent years not just for the involvement of Damon Albarn - who credits Ainley and business partner Alan Scholefield with exposing him to Malian music - but for digging up and releasing impossibly recherché music. However, even Ainley seems slightly overwhelmed by what was lurking on the Hayes archive shelves. He has found recordings of Tamils impersonating motorised transport in 1906, Bengali beggars singing, and utterly chilling records from the first World War, intended to inform the British public of the different bells that would be rung in the event of a poison gas attack.
"It's basically a load of records on a shelf without very much other information. They've never been inventoried, they're not even stored by artist or country, but catalogue prefix, so there's nothing for it but to just go through all of them, just listen to everything." He sighs. "It's daft." The intention, he says, was to release a series of albums themed around different countries - as well as the recently released Give Me Love: The Brokenhearted of Baghdad 1925-1929, projected volumes include albums devoted to Turkey, Caucasia, Lebanon, Greece, Iran, Egypt and the Belgian Congo.
"I was staggered by what we found, in terms of the raw quality of it, the diversity of it, the condition of it and the volume of it. When the recording engineers went abroad, they recorded huge quantities. In just a couple of Iraq sessions, they recorded about 1,000 sides."
Yes, he concedes, it is a funny thing to be working on at the moment. The Hayes series is the last project Honest Jon's will undertake under the auspices of EMI: its six-year contract with the major ran out in May.
Honest Jon's archaeology has thrown up a fascinating, forgotten history of world music, packed with extraordinary figures, not least Fred Gaisberg, an American who worked with the inventor of the gramophone, Emil Berliner, before emigrating to England to work as a recording engineer for the Gramophone Company in 1898. Gaisberg is best remembered as a classical music talent-spotter - he was the first person to record Enrico Caruso - but in the early years of the 20th century, he embarked on a series of adventurous field trips abroad to record indigenous music: Russia in 1901, India in 1902, China and Japan the following year.
Gaisberg, it's worth noting, was not always hugely impressed by what he found. In Calcutta, he was horrified by English colonials, who "might as well be living on another planet for all the interest they took in Indian music", as he complained to his diary, and more horrified still by one female singer's habit of chewing betel nuts while performing: "It necessitated the presence of bearer following her about with a silver cuspidor into which she would empty her mouthful," he shuddered, "much to the distraction of her charms."
Nevertheless, it's hard not to be slightly awestruck by the conditions under which he and his fellow engineers worked. Gaisberg's trip to the Far East was considered so perilous that he made out his will before leaving England. "Sometimes they would travel hundreds of miles on horseback, carrying boxes and boxes of elaborate and delicate equipment, in order to make these quite tentative rendezvous with musicians," says Ainley, who found letters and notes from Gaisberg among the 78s.
Indeed, Ainley thinks the engineers' lack of local knowledge may have been to their advantage. "When they went to Iraq in the 1920s, they recorded Kuwaitis, Kurds, women, Jewish hymns, city music, country music. It's a snapshot of the city, it's more diverse because they hadn't decided in advance what they wanted." It's all grand, swashbuckling stuff, bolstered by photographs of the extravagantly moustachioed Gaisberg recruiting potential artists while sporting a pith helmet, or looking slightly perturbed in a kimono.
But Ainley cautions against taking too romantic a view of the pioneering sound engineers: for one thing, the records they were making were never heard in England, but exported back out to the places where they were recorded. "I don't think they were trying to memorialise this music, I think they were trying to make money." By the time EMI's engineers went to Baghdad, they found themselves engaged in that most 21st-century of record company practices: a bidding war for the most popular singers with a rival German company.
"It's good, innit?" chuckles Ainley. "Brings a bit of honesty into it. And it worked, they sold tons of records. The session they did in 1925 in Baghdad, they sold 11,000 records just from that one."
Nonetheless, he says, "when you read Gaisberg saying the colonials were on a different planet to the people whose music he actually wanted to hear, I don't think it would be right to say they were only interested in the money. There is something really optimistic and kind of . . . something that's gone. There's just a gentle idea of how you can make a change, how you can affect ideas about the world."
- Guardian service
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