Olympic Studios

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Olympic Studios is a commercial recording studio located at 117 Church Road, in the south-western suburb of Barnes in London, England. The studio is best known for the many famous rock and pop music recordings made there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[edit] History

The original Olympic Sound Studios was established in central London in the late 1950s. It was owned by Angus McKenzie who had bought Larry Lyons' 'Olympia Studio' in Fulham. McKenzie then took a lease on a derelict synagogue in Carton Place, off Baker Street in London's West End. In conjunction with Richard (Dick) Swettenham, he opened Olympic's Studio One with the tube desk from Olympia. Keith Grant joined the company in 1958 from IBC studios as music engineer. Swettenham designed the first professional transistorised desk in the world and it was duly installed into Studio One around 1960, along with the first 4-track recorder in England.

Studio One was used by many important British groups including The Yardbirds, Alex Korner, and Graham Bond. The Rolling Stones' first single "Come On", many Dusty Springfield hits, and "Wild Thing" by The Troggs, were among hundreds of records made there. It was a popular studio with Decca, EMI, Pye and Philips recording A&R staff, as well as hosting London Weekend Television's music recordings. When the lease expired in 1965 the studio was bought from McKenzie by Cliff Adams and Keith Grant in 1965 and moved to its present location in Barnes in south-west London in 1966. The building that currently houses the studio was constructed in 1906 as a theatre, the Barnes Repertory Company. Guild TV had purchased it in the late 1950s and converted it into a film studio. In the mid-1965 it was purchased by Olympic Sound Studios. The conversion from film to recording studio was undertaken by architect Robertson Grant and acoustics were done by Keith Grant and Russel Pettinger.

The Rolling Stones were among the first clients of the new Olympic Studios in Barnes, recording six consecutive LPs there between 1966 and 1972, starting with Between the Buttons. The Beatles used the studio to record their song "Baby You're a Rich Man". The Who recorded their classic albums Who's Next, The Who by Numbers, and Who Are You as well. It was used extensively by Led Zeppelin, who recorded tracks there for all of their studio albums up to and including Physical Graffiti in 1975. Also in 1975 Queen used the studio for their groundbreaking album A Night at the Opera. The studio saw the production of many other landmark albums and singles by artists such as The Small Faces, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Hawkwind and Procol Harum, including the latter's megahit "A Whiter Shade of Pale". It was the venue for the recording of the original album version of the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970, and many film scores and orchestral pieces including The Italian Job (1969) and the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar (1973).

One of the prime attractions of Olympic was that it was the 'home' of British premier freelance engineer/producer Glyn Johns and his brother Andy Johns. Staff included manager/engineer Keith Grant, technical director Richard Swettenham, the late Keith Harwood, George Chkiantz, Eddie Kramer, Phill Brown, Phil Chapman, Chris Kimsey, Roger Mayer, and Alan O'Duffy. Also notable were the Olympic mixing desks, a creation of the maintenance staff custom-built in-house for the studios as 'Olympic' desks by Dick Swettenham, Keith Grant, and, later, Jim McBride. Swettenham later started to manufacture the consoles commercially as Helios desks around 1970. The first desk was commissioned by Grant as 'Helios 1' for Studio 2. Olympic desks (and their Helios offspring) are highly regarded today for their sonic qualities.

In 1987 Virgin bought the property and its goodwill and gutted the famous room after consulting with a famous Japanese acoustician/studio builder who declared Studio 1 'Unfit acoustically to record music in'!.. When Olympic moved its storage facility that year, an auction house was brought in to liquidate the old building. Barbara Jefferies, then manager for Virgin, had the studio's history dumped in skips on the pavement outside the premises, hundreds of precious session reels by the groups, film companies, and orchestral masters that were duly raided and sold at auction for substantial sums, providing a bootleg bonanza. Years later, as CDs and boxed sets became popular and required bonus tracks, many groups had to buy back their own reels from bootleggers, often at a huge mark-up and after years of illicit recordings being released by them.