Michele, as I’m sure you are aware, is currently afloat on the high seas and communication is intermittent to say the least. If you remember the days of dial up connections then take that as a bench mark, cut the speed in half and keep disconnecting it every few minutes and you’ll get an idea of how slow and infuriating it can be trying to connect to the internet via satellite on board a cruise liner. It’s just as infuriating when talking by phone. Ether you get a connection where only every other word makes its way through – giving you an instant Norman Collier impression – or the delay of several seconds means you’re constantly talking over each other! So with this in mind I have been charged with providing the news for this month.
I hope you have all been following Michele’s travel blog over at the forum,
Michele is still contactable via her e-mail address, but please don’t expect a quick response!
I currently have the task of running the day to day estate business, such as it is. Most people are aware that the Boss is currently globetrotting, so post has dwindled down to a trickle, but that doesn’t mean important work stops completely and new and interesting things still crop up from time to time.
On 10th February the BBC repeated a Gala Concert featuring Matt with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by the late great Ron Goodwin. The performance was originally broadcast in 1982 and was recorded at Fort Regent in Jersey. News of this repeat came it too late for last month’s news so fingers crossed that all of you managed to catch it. This repeat surprised us more than anybody else beacause the BBC swore that this concert no longer existed in its archives, we had some of air tapes recorded by fans but none of these were particularly good quality. We were contacted by both the BBC and Ron Shillingford from the Ron Goodwin Estate to tell us about it. It turns out that the BBC had the recording archived all along, but why it has never show up on previous archive searches is a bit of a mystery. I did asked for the archive listings to be searched once more just in case anything else had turned up, but nothing else has reappeared yet. Matt recorded a good number of both studio sessions and concerts in the late 70’s and early 80’s which would be great to find and perhaps to give us enough material for Matt at the BBC Volume 2 - we'll keep our fingers crossed for more finds in the future.
Ron Goodwin
Our global search for material continues and with Michele’s imminent visit down under we have for the last few months being trying to uncover TV & Radio performances in Australia. It’s a long drawn out process and most of the time you come up with the same items over and over again. But we did uncover one TV show previously thought to be lost from the late 1960’s, so you never know what else might be hiding.
For those who haven't seen them, there are two articles that discuss the staggering amount of missing material by Matt here and here.
One other item has just been discovered. There are many organisations that continue to search out long lost TV and Radio material and we are grateful to Charles Norton whose ‘Lost Show Appeal 2011’ listing has recently been published. On this list is one show featuring Matt. It’s not an unknown recording, in fact it has already been issued on CD, but this tape is of a quality that far surpasses the previously available source. This comes from the collection of Adrian Bishop-Lagget who was a Sound Supervisor at BBC Television specialising in music balancing for Light Entertainment, Music & Arts programmes. He would often record the direct studio feeds from TV shows to a 7 & ½ ips tape machine for reference purposes whilst a programme was being made and thankfully held on to many of these recordings over the years. Amongst the tapes was the complete studio session for ‘Matt Monro meets Nelson Riddle’. This is the complete studio session including fluffs and retakes. Whilst it’s not quite as good as finding the visuals, it’s still a fantastic find. It is crystal clear and is leaps and bounds ahead of the second generation off air 3 ¾ ips tape we have had to work from in the past.
One of the band members working on that BBC show was jazz saxophonist Tubby Hayes, and this month our spotlight section features an article specially written for us by Hayes specialist Simon Spillett. Many thanks to Simon for sending this to us. If there are any other specialists who would be interested in submitting an article to our spotlight section feel free to drop us a line.
Work continues apace for the upcoming release of Matt Uncovered – The Rarer Monro. I am currently remastering and restoring all of the material earmarked for the set. Not all of the material in the provisional track listing is controlled by the estate or EMI records which means that licensing agreements have to be made with third parties so a full track list isn’t available at present but hopefully I will be able to reveal a lot more next month. Should we be able to include everything we want to, the set will contain more than 2 hours of previously unreleased and extremely rare material dating from 1955 through to 1976. The rarer material will include Matt’s first professional recording and some songs recorded for the Top Pop Club label in the 50’s along with extended versions of three songs only previously released in edited form, film soundtrack songs and rare Spanish vocals. But what of the unreleased material? We have trawled the EMI and Capitol vaults and uncovered some great unreleased songs and some alternate versions/arrangements of songs you already know. Add to this, early radio appearances, acetates, rare jingles and more and you have the makings of a fabulous set.
I will of course list a complete run down of the remastering process on my own website nearer to the release date but here’s a little taster of some of the work going into the set.
The EMI material comes from several different sources. Mono and Stereo mixdown master tapes, Mono and Stereo session reels and multitrack session tapes (4, 8, 16 and 24 track). Some of the material had never been mixed or the tapes contained multiple takes of songs as a master had never been chosen. It meant I sort of had to put myself in George Martin’s position and choose what I think he would chosen as the master take had the recording gone on to be released at the time – and that’s not always the last take recorded.
The material from disc – vinyl, acetates and shellac – have all been newly restored. Whilst I have restored much of this material for Michele in the past, I went back to the original untouched transfers of all of these recordings and worked on them again. Why? Advances in restoration software means that it’s always worth seeing what improvements can be made. All of these items have had to be transferred from disc because the original tapes no longer exist – ether because they were made as demos or because the record companies that produced them ceased to exist many years ago and their tape libraries are lost – presumed destroyed.
The rest of the material comes from multiple sources – Original ¼” reels, Home recorded reel to reel tapes, promotional products (one jingle comes from an old 8 track cartridge!) and cassettes.
Over the next few months we will be revealing the contents of the discs and perhaps giving you a few sneaky samples of what to expect.
For those following Michele’s travels, here is a rundown of when and where she is going over the next few months.
Michele's itinerary for 2012 is as follows:
Thursday 1st March:
At Sea
Friday 2nd March:
Rabaul - Full Day
Saturday 3rd March:
At Sea
Sunday 4th March:
At Sea
Monday 5th March:
Cairns, Yorkey's Knob - Full Day
Tuesday 6th March:
At Sea
Wednesday 7th March
Brisbane, Australia - Full Day
Thursday 8th March:
At Sea
Friday 9th March:
Sydney, Australia - Full Day & Evening
Saturday 10th March:
Sydney, Australia - Early Morning
Sunday 11th March:
Melbourne, Australia – Disembark
Sunday 11th March - Wednesday 11th April – Australia
Thursday 12th April
Fly Melbourne to Sydney
Friday 13th April:
Sydney
Saturday 14th April:
Sydney
Sunday 15th April:
Sydney – Embark
Monday 16th April:
At Sea
Tuesday 17th April:
At Sea
Wednesday 18th April:
Fiordland National Park New Zealand
Thursday 19th April:
Dunedin (Port Chalmers), New Zealand
Friday 20th April:
Christchurch, New Zealand
Saturday 21st April:
At Sea
Sunday 22nd April:
Auckland, New Zealand
Monday 23rd April:
At Sea
Tuesday 24th April:
At Sea
Wednesday 25th April:
At Sea
Wednesday 25th April:
Suva, Fiji
Wednesday 25th April:
Cross International Dateline
Thursday 26th April:
Pago Pago, American Samoa
Friday 27th April:
At Sea
Saturday 28th April:
At Sea
Sunday 29th April:
Bora Bora, French Polynesia
Monday 30th April:
Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia
Tuesday 1st May:
Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia
Wednesday 2nd May:
At Sea
Thursday 3rd May:
At Sea
Friday 4th May:
At Sea
Saturday 5th May:
At Sea
Sunday 6th May:
At Sea
Monday 7th May:
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Tuesday 8th May:
Maui (Lahaina), USA
Wednesday 9th May:
At Sea
Thursday 10th May:
At Sea
Friday 11th May:
At Sea
Saturday 12th May:
At Sea
Sunday 13th May:
Disembark San Francisco
Monday 14th May:
San Francisco
Tuesday 15th May:
San Francisco
Wednesday 16th May:
Flight to Las Vegas
Thursday 17th May:
Las Vegas
Friday 18th May:
Las Vegas
Saturday 19th May
Las Vegas (Marion Flies Out)
Sunday 20th May:
Las Vegas
Monday 21st May:
Flight to Los Angeles
Monday 21st May – Tuesday 19th June – Los Angeles
Wednesday 20th June: Air New Zealand to London
Thursday 21st June: Land London Heathrow
Check out the ‘Rough Guide to mattmonro.com’, which is available towards the bottom of the Homepage. A few of you have mentioned that you don’t know how to access certain areas of the site or in fact are unaware of new areas, this guide will explain how easy this website is to get around, once you know how.
There is also another information box “How to Use the Forum’. I know a lot of people have been tempted to join in on some of our conversations but are slightly nervous of doing so. For that reason I have printed step-by-step instructions of how to access it. It really does only take a few minutes.
Michele will be in Australia next month and all being well will be back with the news.
