What Were The Boys at EMI Up To?

[8749]

I read Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey's Here, There, and Everywhere My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles (Gotham Books, 2006), and he was complaining about how the EMI studios were always behind the times when it came to updating audio equipment. He said when EMI got a new piece of equipment in, "we weren't even allowed to use it until it had been completely disassembled and reassembled by the chief technical engineer. It was a ridiculous position to take, especially in an industry where change was beginning to happen so quickly, but the studio was never really meant to be profit-making, anyway--in essence, it was viewed as a research facility. EMI's real profits had come out of building radios and radar for military applications, not civilian use." ??

[MikeNL]

Aug 26, 2009 18:37:18 GMT -5 @8749 said:

I read Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey's Here, There, and Everywhere My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles (Gotham Books, 2006), and he was complaining about how the EMI studios were always behind the times when it came to updating audio equipment. He said when EMI got a new piece of equipment in, "we weren't even allowed to use it until it had been completely disassembled and reassembled by the chief technical engineer. It was a ridiculous position to take, especially in an industry where change was beginning to happen so quickly, but the studio was never really meant to be profit-making, anyway--in essence, it was viewed as a research facility. EMI's real profits had come out of building radios and radar for military applications, not civilian use." ??

have you searched the GOOGLE?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMI

the EMI Laboratories in Hayes, Hillingdon developed radar equipment and guided missiles. The company later became involved in broadcasting equipment, notably providing the first television transmitter to the BBC. It also manufactured broadcast television cameras for British television production companies, mostly the BBC, although the commercial television ITV companies used them as well alongside cameras made by Pye and Marconi. Their most famous piece of broadcast television equipment was the EMI 2001 colour camera, which became the mainstay of both the BBC and several ITV companies in the 1970s and early 1980s.

[8749]

I didn't have time to post this yesterday and I thought someone had researched "doings" at EMI.

In Emerick's book, he's describing the White Album sessions and says: "The three Beatles then gathered around the microphone to overdub backing vocals onto the previous evening's rendition, which ended up being the version on the final album. Interestingly, all the bad feelings of the past weeks seemed to evaporate as soon as they gathered around the mic and I fed tape echo into their headphones. That's all it took for them to suspend their petty disagreements; for those few moments, they would clown around and act silly again, like they did when they were kids, starting out. Then as soon as they'd take the cans off, they'd go back to hating each other. It was very odd--it was almost as if having the headphones on and hearing that echo put them in a dreamlike state."

Could EMI have used their equipment for "research?"

[8749]

There has been some talk on the board about subliminal messages put in music to influence people's behavior. I don't know when this began but I just found a book at my local library about subliminal persuasion so I'm about to find out. My point is, people have speculated about mind control involving The Beatles, but have never identified a mechanism for it. Emerick might be identifying one.