I found this article and I'm posting it here since it has to do with restoring music.
‘Spine-tingling’ lost Bob Marley tapes restored after 40 years in a cellar
A cache of lost Bob Marley recordings has been discovered after lying for more than 40 years in a damp London hotel basement.
The 13 reel-to-reel, analogue master tapes were discovered in cardboard box files in a run-down hotel in Kensal Rise, north-west London, the modest lodgings where Bob Marley and the Wailers stayed during their European tours in the mid-1970s.
The tapes – known as “the lost masters” among elements of Marley’s huge fanbase – were at first believed to be ruined beyond repair, largely through water damage. Yet after more than 12 months of painstaking work using the latest audio techniques, the master reels have been restored, with the sound quality of Marley – who died in 1981 but would have been 72 on Monday– described as enough to “send shivers down one’s spine”.
The tapes are the original live recordings of Marley’s concerts in London and Paris between 1974 and 1978, and feature some of his most famous tracks including No Woman No Cry, Jammin, Exodus and I Shot the Sheriff.
The concerts – at the Lyceum in London (1975), the Hammersmith Odeon (1976), the Rainbow, also in London (1977), and the Pavilion de Paris (1978) – were recorded live on the only mobile 24-track studio vehicle in the UK at the time, loaned out to Marley and the Wailers by the Rolling Stones.
The tapes were rescued from the rubbish by Marley fan and London businessman Joe Gatt, who had received a call from a friend saying he had found what appeared to be some old Marley tape recordings.
“He was doing a building refuse clearance that included some discarded two-inch tapes from the 1970s. I couldn’t just stand by and let these objects, damaged or not, be destroyed so I asked him not to throw them away,” Gatt said.
He passed the master recordings to business partner and jazz singer Louis Hoover, who regularly headlines at Ronnie Scott’s in London.
Hoover said: “I was speechless, to be honest. It was quite comical, looking back now, as Joe was so cool and matter of fact about rescuing these global artefacts that I actually had to stop the car to check that I had heard him correctly.
“When I saw the labels and footnotes on the tapes, I could not believe my eyes, but then I saw how severely water damaged they were. There was literally plasticised gunk oozing from every inch and, in truth, saving the sound quality of the recordings, looked like it was going to be a hopeless task.”
The tapes were handed to sound technician specialist Martin Nichols of White House studios in Weston-super-Mare, who said they would have been lost for ever if anyone had tried playing them in their decrepit condition.
“They really were in such an appalling condition they should have been binned, but I spent hours on hours, inch by inch, painstakingly cleaning all the gunge off until they were ready for a process called ‘baking’, to allow them to be played safely,” Nichols said.
He added: “The end result has really surprised me, because they are now in a digital format and are very high quality. It shows the original recordings were very professionally made. From the current find of 13 tapes, 10 were restored, two were blank and one was damaged beyond repair.”
When Hoover first heard the recordings, which cost around £25,000 to restore, he admits to being blown away. “It made the hair on the back of our necks stand up and genuine shivers ran up our spines with joy,” he said.
“The experience was comparable to, say, finding Van Gogh’s easel, paint pallet and paints in an old room somewhere, then Vincent emerges through a secret door to paint 26 of his finest masterpieces … purely for us.”
Link to article:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/feb/05/spine-tingling-lost-bob-marley-tapes-restored-after-40-years-in-a-cellar
[Edited on 2/7/2017 by The_Newt]
Great story! Thanks. These lost tapes tales often drive me mad, like hearing how all those Stonybrook tapes may never surface, and donating money to the Owsley Dead tape restoration project, only to never hear any results- am assuming the hippy who set up the website is just eating out at sizzler every night with the money . . . irritating tragedies like that - this is treasure!
saw an interesting discussion on the Hoffman forums - the feeling is most of this material has already been released and the tapes may have been copies. Hopefully some more info will surface.
saw an interesting discussion on the Hoffman forums - the feeling is most of this material has already been released and the tapes may have been copies. Hopefully some more info will surface.
Thanks, do you have a link to the discussion about them?
Live! was taken from the Lyceum shows in 1975, and Babylon by Bus comes from the Paris shows in 1978. There was also a DVD from the Rainbow Theatre concerts in 1977. So yes, a bunch of this stuff was released officially. The nickname "lost masters" implies there are bootlegs of more of it. But we're talking about runs of three or four shows at each location, so if they have complete masters of a bunch of them, that's a hell of a find.
Not to hijack the thread, but reggae doesn't come up too often here.
I'd like to see what people think of this clip of former Wailers guitarists Al Anderson and Junior Marvin playing together in 2009. I have seen them both live (with the Wailers) ten to fifteen years ago, and could not believe how good they were. They were the lead players for Marley's last two tours, and some earlier tours, but Al Anderson had left to play for Peter Tosh for a while before coming back to the Wailers. The band from 1978 through the end of Marley's life was really good, especially when they had the horn section included.
Reggae doesn't really give a huge emphasis on lead guitar usually, so it is a little surprising that the Wailers would end up with two awesome lead guitarists (sound familiar?). Plus - shouldn't reggae be considered "southern rock", geographically speaking? (Get it?)
There was a good reggae thread here a few months ago - I am a reggae maniac, saw Bob Markey on both coasts a week or so apart in 78. Unbelievable stage presence. Got Israel Vibration playing out this way soon.
