Larry Schwartz
Tony Worsley and the Blue Jays. Ray Brown and the Whispers. Such names may mean little to most of us, but at Festival, Australia’s oldest independent record company, they are valued as part of a rich store of archival material being recreated on CD.
Festival has been cleaning up cylinders, radio wire and broadcast tapes, metal discs and old 78s, collaborating with the Film and Sound Archive on a project to re-release work by pioneering artists from music hall, dance palaces, comedy and radio. Is ‘E An Aussie Is ‘E Lizzie?: Australian Stars
Of The International Music Hall Vol.1; Hello Covent Garden: Dame Nellie Melba; and Down By The Old Slip Rail: Young Reg Lindsay are already available and there are more to come.
Festival Records’ group deputy managing director, Warren Fahey, says the company vaults hold “unbelievable treasures”.
“I think people underestimate the interest in nostalgia and it’s very hard to convince somebody at Sanity or HMV about a Bob Dyer re-issue when they’ve never heard of Bob Dyer, let alone Johnny O’Keefe.”
Festival has drawn on the Sherbert back catalogue to relaunch the Infinity label of the ’70s and ’80s. “There’s a bit of an argument whether the old scratchies are more authentic than the cleaned-up versions,” he says. “Personally I think if we clean things up, they’re far more acceptable to
listen to. It’s very expensive cleaning up these tapes. So we do have to see sales on them to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.”
The company has also revived the old Spin label and is reissuing early Australian recordings from Johnny O’Keefe, Johnny Devlin, the Joy Boys, the Delltones and others.
“Spin was one of several labels we had in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s,” Fahey says. “We wanted to do a series of reissues that focused on Festival’s pivotal role at that time. In 2002, Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary and we’re looking at a number of exhibitions at museums and so forth.”
So far, the new Spin albums include Brilliant From Birth, early to mid-’60s recordings from the Bee Gees, and Assault The Vaults, rare cover versions of Gibb brothers songs, written in the ’60s and recorded by the likes of Col Joye, Lonnie Lee, Jimmy
Little and Trevor Gordon – but not the Bee Gees.
These re-recordings did generate some misunderstandings. “The Bee Gees thought somehow we’d taped four tracks off television,” Fahey says. “But the reality was that they were recorded in the Festival studios as part of our agreement at the time … in those days, all artists mimed to
recordings on television. These were the acetates that were made by Festival and then used on television.”
And artists don’t necessarily favor such retrospectives. “I don’t think any artist anywhere wants to be reminded of their gawky period,” Fahey says. “The truth of the matter is that the Bee Gees were aware of these recordings. What they are not happy with – and neither are we – has been the
blatant copyright infringement all around the world of these early masters that we own. There are so many pirated versions.”
Festival has been joined by two international copyright agencies in legal action against a Perth-based distributor and “we are taking legal action right around the world to stop these releases of particularly the Bee Gees.
“We’ve got to be very protective. There’s so much sophisticated copying that you can’t tell a pirated album from a normal one.
“If you got a Midnight Oil album that was made in Asia, it quite possibly could be pirated off the American or the Australian production. You wouldn’t know.”
Fahey believes the Australian record industry has not maintained its archives well. Despite the efforts of the National Film and Sound Archive, much of the earliest material has been lost because metal ‘mothers’, on which recordings were deep-etched in a key stage in the recording process,
were recalled by the Government during World War II for use as shrapnel.
Festival started soon after the war, in 1952. “Because we’re an independent company … we tended to be more protective of our early material,” Fahey says.
It has paid off in more ways than one. When Gene Pitney, the American singer-songwriter who had his biggest hit in the ’60s with the Burt Bacharach song 24 Hours From Tulsa, lost his master tapes in a fire, he sent a desperate fax to Festival. Warren Fahey was able to oblige the singer with material he’d recorded in Australia.
The Sunday Age 10th of January 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 