主播大秀

Brian tells Bob Stanley about his brief career as a music producer.

These albums, which Brian seems remarkably dismissive of, were massive sellers in 1976 and '77 when he considered his career was "at a bit of a low point."

A couple of weeks back, Brian told me about how - almost accidentally - he ended up . How had he got involved in record production in the first place?

"I was introducing a programme called Album Time which involved going along to talk to leaders of record companies and then doing a special feature on their products. There was a chap known to all and sundry as 'Fat Eric' because he was a most amazingly stout gentleman. He'd taken over one of the lower price range labels, Warwick. I went along to interview him and in the course of conversation he asked if I'd be interested in producing an album. So I said, yes I would, and I took over one or two projects there including one where I brought my wife Pamela in on the act. She wrote some children's stories as plays. We pulled in actor mates, and went to the 主播大秀 studios in Shepherds Bush and recorded the master tapes."

Next up, Brian produced an album of war songs with the Grenadier Guards and his old mate Clinton Ford, the deathlessly titled 30 Smash Hits Of The War Years Vol.2, which sold pretty well in 1975. "The owner of the company was quite impressed and carried away with that, so he asked if I'd like to do any more things on my own. I put together lots of ideas for albums, most of which he agreed to. Like film songs with an orchestra."

These albums, which Brian seems remarkably dismissive of, were massive sellers in 1976 and '77 when he considered his career was "at a bit of a low point." Anyone who remembers walking into a branch of Woolworths in those years will remember seeing Gold On Silver, Strictly Instrumental and several others with suitably brassy, shiny covers. Impressively, they were recorded at Olympic Studios in Barnes with engineer Keith Grant, a studio and engineer that - among many other great records - had made the Stones' Sympathy For The Devil.

"The engineer's brother was a 主播大秀 producer who I'd worked with. I booked Olympic, and did album after album there. I knew the engineer beforehand, and I knew the quality of the studios. By London standards, they were probably as well equipped as any you'd find. Good size, as well. You could fit an orchestra, a big band. We talked about which songs we'd do so we were all happy with the playlist."

Brian's biggest success, aside from the Bert Weedon album, was Instrumental Gold which featured a lot of fifties hits like Moulin Rouge, Oh My Papa and Limelight. The album was ever-present in the Top 10 in the long hot summer of 1976, a time when Abba's Greatest Hits was impossible to dislodge from the top spot.

"Oh yes, they were tremendous sellers" Brian finally admits. "I did those with musicians I had worked with in my 主播大秀 capacity, as a producer. I enjoyed that technical aspect. Getting things right that I thought a lot of recording people got sadly wrong."