The grimy backstreet rooms where recorded music began
James Hall explains how a piece of British musical history is finally getting the recognition it deserves
This must be the wrong street, I thought. It was 2012 and I was standing in a Covent Garden backstreet looking up at the edifice of a pizza restaurant. I checked on my phone. No, this was it: 31 Maiden Lane, the former home of Europe’s first ever recording studio.
Opened by The Gramophone Company in 1898, this was where a group of slightly bonkers music pioneers first “captured” sound and etched it on to master discs. Under the guidance of 25-year-old Fred Gaisberg, they humped gear – conical recording horns, acid for burning grooves into zinc plates, a piano – into the grimy former smoking room of a hotel that was once here.
In doing this, they changed people’s relationship with music forever. Yet, as I gazed up in the drizzle, there was no reference on the building to its past. Surely, I thought on the bus home, there should at least be a commemorative plaque on the side of the building?
I’d visited Maiden Lane as part of the research for my novel, The Industry of Human Happiness. My Victorian protagonists, Max and Rusty, were – like Gaisberg – early recording fanatics. In the book, they get involved in “talking machine” format wars and some grizzly murders in Covent
Garden. The truth was only marginally less fanciful.
Gaisberg, an American, was a pianist who had already established the world’s first gramophone recording studio in Philadelphia for inventor Emile Berliner in 1897. Before Berliner, music only lasted for as long as the notes hung in the air. Now, Berliner dispatched Gaisberg to London with orders to commit as many artists as possible to disc.
At first, Gaisberg was met with indifference; musicians could not see the potential of the new technology and he was reduced to recruiting drunk music hall stars from Rules restaurant next door on Maiden Lane.
He recorded anything: bagpipe players, tap dancers, people whistling. A local publican called Mr Hyde acted as a runner, bringing both “recording artists” and a steady supply of stout to the studio. But, slowly, Gaisberg spread his wings, travelling the world with crates of equipment (including clinking jars of treacherous acid) to record backstreet musicians in India and Imperial orchestras in Japan. He was, he wrote in his diaries, “like a drug addict” in his pursuit of new sounds.
His breakthrough came when he travelled to Milan in 1902 and convinced Italian opera star Enrico Caruso to record. The great tenor demanded £100 for 10 songs, a figure regarded as astronomical at the time. But the session established the gramophone as a must-have accessory in every Edwardian drawing room. Within years, The Gramophone Company became known as His Master’s Voice and then Electrical and Musical Industries, or EMI, in 1931, just 33 years later. That same year, the company opened a studio on a hitherto-quiet St John’s Wood street called Abbey Road. The industry went from zero to The Beatles in 60-odd years.
And, after a seven-year campaign, I finally realised my ambition yesterday to see a plaque installed at 31 Maiden Lane (now home to the Fire & Stone pizza restaurant).
Queen drummer Roger Taylor pulled the cord in front of an audience that included Giles Martin, the record producer and son of Beatles producer Sir George, and descendants of Alan Blumlein, the man who invented stereo sound.
“Today, we can’t imagine living in a world where the only way we can listen to music is if someone plays it live in front of us,” says Martin.
“Without [Gaisberg and his team] Abbey Road wouldn’t have existed. Without Abbey Road my father wouldn’t have gotten a job out of the Guildhall School of Music, and without my father being in Abbey Road, there probably wouldn’t have been The Beatles.”
This building’s impact on music history really is that stark. And now, like the discs produced from here, it at last has a circular stamp of its own.