Astoria (recording studio)
Astoria is a grand houseboat , built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno [1] and adapted as a recording studio in the 1980s by its new owner, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour . It is moored on the River Thames at Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames . Gilmour purchased the boat in 1986, because he "spent half of [his] life in recording studios with no windows, no light, but on the boat there are many windows, with beautiful scenery on the outside". [2]
Early history
Gilmour era.
The boat was built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno who wanted to have the best houseboat on the river permanently moored alongside his hotel, the Karsino at Tagg's Island . He designed it so that an entire 90-piece orchestra could play on deck. [3]
The boat is framed in mahogany and has mainly Crittall windows with taller, wider windows towards one end. It is topped by very ornate metalwork canopies and balustrades. [4]
I just happened to find this beautiful boat that was built as a houseboat and was very cheap, so I bought it. And then only afterward did I think I could maybe use it to record. The control room is a 30-foot by 20-foot room. It's a very comfortable working environment—three bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, a big lounge. It's 90 feet long. —David Gilmour [5]
Gilmour bought the boat after seeing it advertised for sale in a copy of Country Life magazine in his dentist's waiting room, just a short while after admiring it while being driven past its moorings. [4]
Parts of each of the last three Pink Floyd studio albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (2014), were recorded on the boat, as were parts of Gilmour's solo album On an Island (2006). His fourth solo studio album, Rattle That Lock (2015), was mixed and partially recorded there, as was his 2024 album ‘’ Luck & Strange ’’. It was also used for mixing the Pink Floyd live album Pulse (1995) as well as the Pulse film (1995), Gilmour's Remember That Night DVD/Blu-ray (2007) and his Live in Gdańsk (2008) live album/DVD.
Bob Ezrin has mentioned, however, that the floating studio posed a few problems when it came to engineering guitar sounds for A Momentary Lapse of Reason :
It's not a huge environment (...) So we couldn't keep the amps in the same room with us, and we were forced to use slightly smaller amplifiers. But after playing around with them in the demo stages of the project, we found that we really liked the sound. So a Fender Princeton and a little G&K amp became the backbone of Dave's guitar sound for that record. — Bob Ezrin , [6]
A video of longtime Pink Floyd recording engineer Andrew Jackson, sitting at the mixing console of the Astoria Studio, is available online. [7]
Numerous photographs taken in 1993 of the band recording The Division Bell on board the Astoria appear on the sleeve of the 2014 Pink Floyd album, The Endless River .
Dara Ó Briain , Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath visited the floating studio/house while rowing up the Thames for the BBC television programme Three Men in a Boat .
Gilmour's rendition of William Shakespeare 's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), set to piano, was also filmed on the Astoria.
According to an interview with Phil Taylor (Gilmour's guitar technician), [8] the studio on the Astoria was originally equipped with a DDA AMR 24 mixer console and UREI 813 studio main monitors with Phase Linear amps. The UREI 813s were replaced around 1990 by ATC main monitors. Customised ATC SCM150ASL active speakers are used for the main left and right channels with a standard ATC SCM150ASL active speaker used as the centre channel . The centre channel sits above an ATC SCM0.1–15 subwoofer . The surround monitors are two ATC SCM50ASLs. A variety of near-field monitor speakers are used including Yamaha NS-10s and Auratones depending on who happens to be working at the studio. The acoustic design was done with the assistance of Nick Whitaker, an independent acoustician, and much of the equipment was recommended by James Guthrie and Andrew Jackson . Nowadays the Astoria has a Neve 88R mixing console, as well as three Studer A827 multi-tracks and Ampex ATR-100 tape recorders, which were modified by Tim de Paravicini , Esoteric Audio Research's (EAR) founder. The conversion to a studio also required 14 miles (23 km) of cables, which were sourced from Van den Hul cables of the Netherlands. There are various compressors from Pye and EAR 660 tube designs, as well as EAR 825s for EQ. [8]
- Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (neighbour)
- Tagg's Island (Fred Karno)
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Frederick John Westcott , best known by his stage name Fred Karno , was an English theatre impresario of the British music hall. As a comedian of slapstick he is credited with popularising the custard-pie-in-the-face gag. During the 1890s, in order to circumvent stage censorship, Karno developed a form of sketch comedy without dialogue.
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- ↑ "Three men in a boat feat. David Gilmour" . YouTube. 23 October 2008. Archived from the original on 19 December 2021 . Retrieved 6 July 2020 .
- ↑ January 2016, David Roberts 27 (27 January 2016). "Locus Focus" . loudersound . Retrieved 8 January 2021 . {{ cite web }} : CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link )
- 1 2 "David Gilmour: Wider Horizons" . BBC Two . 14 November 2015 . Retrieved 15 November 2018 .
- ↑ "David Gilmour: Careful with that axe – Musician, Aug 1992" . Pinkfloydfan.net. Archived from the original on 2 January 2011 . Retrieved 2 November 2011 .
- ↑ "Alan Parsons & Bob Ezrin: Pink Floyd, Wall of Sound – Guitar World – Feb 1993" . Pinkfloydfan.net. 29 January 1993. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011 . Retrieved 2 November 2011 .
- ↑ "Andy Jackson – legendary Pink Floyd recording engineer feature at Astoria Studios" . Recordproduction.com . Retrieved 2 November 2011 .
- 1 2 Touzeau, Jeff (March 2005). "Phil Taylor" . Tape Op . Retrieved 2 July 2024 .
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Inside David Gilmour's Astoria houseboat recording studio
He has toured around the world with Pink Floyd and hit the road with his own solo show - but David Gilmour still reckons there is no place like home.
The famous British guitarist, singer and songwriter let us have a tour around his base, a houseboat moored on a tranquil stretch of the River Thames.
The place is his special hideaway, somewhere he discovered by accident - as Gilmour explains:
"Well I was driving down this road here one day in '86 I guess it probably was. I had been banned from driving for drink driving for a year, being silly. So I was being driven, rather than driving myself, and as you're driven you sort of look out of the windows a lot more and as we drove along we looked, I looked out, and I saw this metal work on the top over the wall, and I said to the chap driving: "Can we just pull over here and have a look?" And we pulled over and we stood on the pavement, we stood on the corner there and peered over and looked down and saw this incredible boat and this water and work on the top. And I though 'Oh, that's fantastic.'"
The boat is called the Astoria, it was built a century ago, at the then-enormous cost of 20,000 pounds, for Fred Karno, a music-hall impresario whose protégés included the young Charlie Chaplin.
It boasts Edwardian elegance with mahogany-panelled cabins, marble bathrooms and mother-of-pearl light switches.
Luckily Gilmour came across it again:
"About two weeks later I was in the dentist waiting room and I picked up a Country Life and there it was for sale in this Country Life by pure coincidence. So I rang them up and came down and had a look and bought it. I didn't even think about putting a studio in it at first. It was just very, very beautiful, a magical place."
Most of his work over the last two decades was mixed and assembled aboard the Astoria.
The post-Waters Pink Floyd albums The Division Bell and A Momentary Lapse of Reason were recorded here, as were Gilmour's solo albums, including On An Island .
David says: "Well it's lovely to be here, you know, to have the water gently drifting past us and all that, and I like to have windows. You know I've spent rather too much time in studios and most of them don't have windows, and I can't stand being in places that don't have windows."
Gilmour's latest project is a solo album and tour, captured on David Gilmour Live in Gdansk , a double concert album and DVD.
Recorded during the final date of Gilmour's 2006 On An Island tour, it's as meaty a package as you'd expect from a prog-rock colossus and features classic Floyd tracks like 'High Hopes', 'Comfortably Numb', 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' and the 25-minute 'Echoes'.
"I'm a musician, it's what I do. It's my chosen vocation and as you said that itch suddenly at some point every once in a while starts making itself felt and you want to scratch it," he explains.
"The visible part that you see, that the public sees is, you know, from the moment the album is released and the tour happens 'til the end of the tour, really. And that is a six months period, but that's a six months period that's sort of in the middle of a four to five year period for me of solid hard work of writing, recording."
David Gilmour Live in Gdansk is being released by Columbia Records on September 23rd 2008.
source: newshub archive
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