The Matt Monro Catalogue has recently been in a little bit of an upheaval due to the sale of EMI. The problem is that it has been split into two with his Parlophone/EMI recordings now belonging to Warners and the Capitol years to Universal. This has made creating new product somewhat more problematical than usual.  All plans the Monro Estate had have had to be scrapped. Michele Monro and I put our heads together and discussed various releases that we could put together from the archives of the old EMI UK – Now called The Parlophone Label Group part of the Warner Music Group.  The project that sounded the most interesting was a collection of alternate takes, which we then took to Parlophone. We received the green light and Michele said to me “You’re the expert – I’ll leave this one to you!” – Thanks Michele!!!

So then the hard work began. I trawled through the archive listings and put together a list of about 50 songs that had the potential to have interesting alternate takes or vocals. This was a mixture of tapes from Mono to 24 track.  Of course, many of the session tapes from 1961 through to 65 no longer exist, but there was still plenty to work with.

The project, however, had a limited budget and the charges to transfer everything was WAY over what was available, but I was able to get copies of all of the Mono & Stereo tapes I wanted and I had number of multitracks already transferred from other projects to use as a starting point.

The problem still remained that in order to choose interesting alternates I would need to listen to  more material that we were going to use. So it was back to the archive listings to see what looked most promising. Amongst the listings I discovered six backup DVD’s of multitracks copied for a Cliff Richard Duet project in 2006.  These contained the contents of two complete 16 track tapes containing six songs.

I was asked to see if I could cut down the list even further, which I did, but unfortunately this was still too expensive. So I hit upon an idea. If I could be sent copies of the tape boxes and paperwork stored with the tapes it would give me more information on numbers of takes and how many were complete.

The tape boxes did just as I hoped and I was able to be cut the list to a point where it fitted the budget.

It took a while, but I gradually worked my way through all of the material I had amassed – Not as much fun as you would imagine. Listening to ten takes of the same song is not something I’d recommend. Some songs were discounted immediately as none of the other takes were suitable, others had a lot of good takes and choosing the best of the alternates was not easy. With Matt, songs were on the whole sung brilliantly every time, but his interpretation varied greatly.

Having lost access to the Capitol years I still wanted to see if they could be represented in some way. For year we had known about (and had an old cassette copy) of five songs Matt recorded for the US Air Force Public Service show ‘Serenade In Blue’ with the USAF Big band  ‘The Airmen Of Note’.  A number of years ago I had contacted them about the shows, but at that stage the research into its audio archives hadn’t reached any later than about 1961. So I contacted them again earlier this year  and found out that they had completed their cataloguing.  Unfortunately as it was public service programme none of the original tapes were kept. However the shows were issued on vinyl to radios stations. Being promotional items, only limited numbers of the records were made and the estate has never been able to secure its own copies.

Thankfully vinyl copies had been kept by the band the wonderful archivist at USAF was happy to let me arrange for copies to be made and be used on the album

Some technical notes on a few of the songs.

All tracks were transferred at 24bit 96k session or mixdown tapes apart from tracks 18 – 21 which were from vinyl dubs. All new mixes were made in 24/96.

Gonna Build a Mountain