Above all else confusion reigns

Westside Records change their tune

On 27 March 1998 Bob Fisher of Westside Records e-mailed the following information to 'Beyond the Pale'

• The bad news is that after many hours of listening, both from the CDR and at the studios, to the Procol Harum tape we have had to come to the conclusion that the so-called Stereo master is in fact fake and we have reverted to all mono, albeit from a vastly superior tape, discovered with the others at Abbey Road, than the one we used for the box set.

We must leave readers to draw their own conclusions from this enigmatic communiqué; needless to say we have asked Westside for further details and will update this page as soon as they become available.

On 30 March BtP received copious clarification from Westside's General Manager, Tony Rounce:

• The 15 ips production tape marked 'stereo' that Westside were planning to use for their new Procol Harum ... plus album sounded fantastic on large monitors and it was not until Tony listened to it on headphones that he 'gradually and reluctantly came to the conclusion' that this was not the Holy Grail Stereo Version of the first album, but a later attempt by someone to recreate the effect of stereo by electronically re-channelling (as was often done in the late 60s). Thus every instrument, every sound, was present on both sides of the stereo, but eq-tweaking had subtly given the impression that the instruments were distributed across the stereo pan. Tony concluded that it had been well done, but he did not want to release rechannelled 'fake' stereo.
• Procol Harum ... plus will therefore not feature stereo versions of the cuts we have heretofore heard only in mono. But it will be pressed up from a better tape than has ever been heard on CD before. Westside have discovered (amid their Abbey Road trawl) 'a superior mono first-generation master' from which, they assume, the original Regal Zonophone album was mastered. This means that the CD they are about to release will sound identical to the original 1967 album except of course that we shall hear it digitally rather than via vinyl friction. It is said that this tape is audibly better than the one used to master the same songs on the Triple Box set: that was a 1967 safety copy made in case anything happened to the tape that they are now planning to release.
• So what about the stereo takes of those early songs that we have already heard? Tony says that those are 'true' stereo, but that there are no more in that series. Nobody now knows exactly why this is. He believes that the stereo takes that have become available are in fact slightly different from the original releases (this is certainly true of the stereo Conquistador), though undoubtedly recorded at the same sessions. When these songs were recorded on to inch-wide four-track tape they were neither stereo nor mono: that distinction arose only in the mix-down to the two-track master. Many bands in the 60s lavished all their care on the mono master and let the second engineer take care of the new fad, the stereo master. Evidently a few early PH tracks were mastered in stereo; Tony himself has done the stereo masters for the Harrison / Royer Mabel and Salad Days. But unless the four-track masters for the whole Trower / Wilson album miraculously turn up, the longed-for true stereo mastering can never take place. Tony points out that the primitive overdubbing-practices of the era effectively put paid to the possibility of stereo mastering in some cases (read what Gary Brooker says about this). For example, some four-track masters recorded at Advision (as its name suggests, this was a small jingle-studio) under the engineering of Gerald Chevin might well have been taken away and overdubbed at Olympic (the Wilson / Trower Something Following Me, for instance). In that case the completed tracks would have been 'bounced' on to a single, composite track and the original three then re-recorded (a process familiar to Portastudio users): the bounced-down tracks would be effectively perpetual mono: that is, wherever they were positioned in the stereo spread, the 'bounced' instruments would always remain together.