Factory work: how records get made

Tucked away in the Guardian's Money section the other week was a curious little article about what was supposed to be Britain's only surviving large-scale vinyl record factory, based in Middlesex.


Back in the 1970s it was owned by EMI and used to press 1million records a week, nowadays it's down to 100,000 a month and the equipment is all 40 years old. Check out this slideshow about the place.

It looks like something you'd find at Manchester Science and Industry Museum, just up from the old machines from the cotton mills.

Making records is a messy, sticky job requiring elderly gentlemen in overalls to tinker with large, complicated machines. Lovely. Some things is life are worth sweating over.

It's the equivalent of watching your photographs swim into view in a little basin of chemicals in a dark room you've set up in your cellar, rather than churning digital pictures out of your printer. We all need a little soul in our lives, after all.

However, a few days later, it transpired that the wonderful if rather unimaginatively titled Vinyl Factory had not been the country's only old-school LP producer after all.

Police raided an industrial unit in West London to find two 'German men' presiding over a large pirate vinyl operation involving 200 record 'stampers'. It sounds faintly like something out of 'Allo 'Allo. Presumably an Italian escaped through the toilet window.

Apparently these dastardly German chaps were printing up various hard to find records, including Rolling Stones live bootlegs, and they even the equipment to make coloured vinyl. Perhaps I should put in a cheeky bid to the police for the machinery - after all, it's probably leaking oil over a corner of the station at this very moment.

Most of their output must have made it's way on to Ebay and various record shops, with a fair few collectors nervously checking recent costly purchases for a scent of bratwurst.

Which goes to show that this recent trend for rubbish-sounding but incredibly limited edition records to sell for massive money simply due to their obscurity and lack of availability might not be the best way to invest your money after all.

I'm firmly of the belief that you should buy vinyl to play it, otherwise you're missing out on the best part of the fun.

I might even get hold of a few cheap Stones bootlegs on lovely coloured vinyl now...

Neko Case - Blacklisted (2002)

Consider yourself lucky if you're reading this in Europe because you can still legitimately consider Neko Case to be your own wonderful little secret, that amazing artist that should be massive but only you seem to appreciate.

Case finally cracked it in the States last year with Middle Cyclone, crashing straight in at No.3 on the album chart and securing performing slots on David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon etc.

But in the UK, she's still lumped in with the alt.country scene that went out of fashion in the mid-Noughties. When she played Manchester on the Fox Confessor Brings The Flood tour in 2006, there were barely 150 people in attendance - but we all went home with big stupid grins plastered across our faces.

Blacklisted was the first Case album I ever heard, taking a punt due to being intrigued by The New Pornographers power-pop tune Mass Romantic she sang on and the fact that the Calexico/Giant Sand folk were all involved.

The front cover just added to the intrigue - she lies shoeless beneath a van stuffed with someone's possessions while a plane flies overhead.

She'd already played dead on the front of 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby but here she looks straight into the camera with a faint smile on her face, despite her position.

On the back cover, she's again on the floor but this time her red hair is framed by golden hay and shadowy deer look on - the idea seems to be that Case is an untameable force of nature, which is never less than unpredictable and usually outright dangerous in her songs.

The gatefold sleeve inside includes a dedication 'for the ladies' and features a list of the impressive support cast she's rustled up, including Dallas Good, John Convertino, Joey Burns, Howe Gelb, Kelly Hogan, Jon Rauhouse and Mary Margaret O'Hara.

Put the record on and it doesn't take long for Case's dark and mysterious country noir to hook you in, particularly when it frames her honeyed swoop of a voice, frail and tender one moment, fierce and strange the next.

If Case was more interested in playing the record company game, she could have sold millions without breaking sweat. Just listen to her version of Runnin' Out Of Fools that appears on side two. Not many can take on Aretha and hold their own but Case does just that, wringing every ounce of regret, need and defiance out of the song.

But Blacklisted is far too twisted and unfathomable to have taken on the mainstream, as Case acknowledged at the time: 'I'm not out to become Faith Hill, I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it.'

She's stayed pretty true to those words ever since. Middle Cyclone is her most pop-friendly record to date but check out the video for single People Gotta Lotta Nerve (in which she only appears in cartoon form), featuring the chorus 'I'm a man-man-man-eater' and a verse about a killer whale 'eating your leg and both your lungs'.

Just in case you're still not sure if she's as tough as she makes out, enjoy this on-stage banter (Case is well known for her amusing mid-set rambles, as showcased on 2004's The Tigers Have Spoken live album).

Murder hangs heavy in the air from the off on Blacklisted, with the lyrics for Things That Scare Me sounding like they've come from the pen of Jim Thompson or James Ellroy: 'The hammer clicks in place/ The world's gonna pay/ Right down in the face of God and his saints/ Claim your soul's not for sale/I'm a dying breed who still believes/ Haunted by American dreams'

Deep Red Bells sides with the potential victim and was influenced by Case's memories of living in Seattle when the Green River Killer was at large in the 1990s.

The mood can only get lighter, so how about a two-minute love song?

Outro With Bees is slow and gentle, with Burns on cello and Gelb on pump organ, as Case lilting tells her lover, while he has a glass of wine in his hand, not to get too comfortable: 'So it's better, my sweet/ That we hover like bees/ 'Cause there's no sure footing/ No love I believe'.

Humour starts to creep in with Lady Pilot ('She's not afraid to die') and a cover of Look For Me (I'll Be Around) that strips out all the neediness and comes on smoky femme fatale in a manner part Eartha Kitt and part Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction.

But, as great as the covers are, it's the originals you want to listen to because Case's lyrics are so gripping.
Pretty Girls is a song to female solidarity in a doctor's waiting room, finishing with the line 'I won't tell you I told you so', while I Wish I Was The Moon Tonight bends heavy with sweet melancholy soul.

The title track explores youthful fever one day finding peace but it's the album's willfulness that makes it such a pleasure.

The fact that Case has become a major selling act in the States on her own terms in the States is to be celebrated. Just as long as everyone continues to ignore her over here and I can carry on feeling smug about it...

AC/DC - Powerage (1978)

Our starcross'd lovers met in 1971 when he stepped down from a stage in Adelaide and her observation of 'That's a well packed lunch' was greeted with the response: 'Yes, two hard-boiled eggs and a sausage.' Such backstage banter usually leads to a quick tourbus bunk-up, followed by a slightly awkward goodbye, but Bon Scott and Irene Thornton were married less than a year later.

A disastrous stint in England, while Bon failed to get his hippy prog band Fraternity off the ground, took the gloss of their nuptuals, though, and the couple split in 1974. The offer of replacing AC/DC's original singer Dave Evans soon followed in September, as the band realised their early glam rock incarnation wasn't really working out.

With Bon onboard, AC/DC begin their slow climb towards becoming the fifth-biggest-selling band in US history - and the singer quickly gained a reputation as a wild man, always to be found with a drink in one hand and a dame in the other.

Despite his hellraising public image, Bon continued to write lovelorn letters to Irene in Australia. In one he pretends to write as a friend of his, saying: "There is no one in the whole wide world he loves more. Bon is very lonely and he misses his beautiful young spouse with all his heart."

This strange state of affairs continues until 1978, when Irene declares that she wants a divorce. Bon agrees - and the experience inspires the lyrics to his band's finest 40 minutes.

Stirred into the usual Bon mots about booze, sex and rock'n'roll, this makes for a revealing look of a life spent forever on the road - moments of abandon and ecstasy mixed with loneliness, boredom and frustration.

Musically, Powerage is glorious runaway train of supercharged rock'n'roll boogie, the Young brothers churning out a seemingly tireless sturm und drang stream of classic riffage. Angus provides all manner of squealing solos to drive the songs to ever greater peaks of delirium, while Bon's leather-lunged caterwaul charges in over the top. The effect is as electrifying as Angus on the front cover - you can't help feeling a wave of energy off the vinyl.

But listen to the lyrics and it starts to sound like the walls are closing in - Rock'n'Roll Damnation is half a celebration of Bon's life of excess and half a rueful acknowledgement of what it's going to cost him (he started receiving treatment for liver damage a year later at the age of 32, so his body was probably already starting to rebel against the punishment).

Riff Raff sides with the unloved Common Joe while Sin City is a shopping listing of Bon's favourite indulgences ('Lamborginis, caviar, dry Martinis, Shangri-La!') that starts with the insistence 'I'm gonna win' before reality dawns in the mid-song breakdown that no one has 'a hope in hell' when the pack is cut and the dice loaded.

Perhaps it's easy to read things into the songs because we know that two years later he'd be found dead in a friend's car aving succumbed to acute alcoholic poisoning, but it's hard to escape the feeling that Bon already knows he's on a highway to hell, that escaping back to his wife and living quietly is a dream he'll never realise.

As he sings on Up To My Neck In You: 'I've been up to my neck in pleasure/I've been up to my neck in pain/I've been up to my neck on the railway track/Waiting for the train'.

He's fantasising about tying Irene to a railroad track on What's Next To The Moon, hoping to convince her to take him back. In the chorus, he confesses 'It's her love that I want/It's her love that I need'.

On Gimme A Bullet, he's bemoaning 'Long distant lips/On the telephone/Come tomorrow, come to grips/With me all alone' before the feelings of powerlessness turn to anger on Kicked In The Teeth Again, which starts with a desperate wail of 'Two faced woman with your two-faced lies'.

Throw in a song about a girl overdosing on Gone Shootin' (which may have been where the Bon on smack rumours started, though spending your last night alive hanging out backstage with The Only Ones probably doesn't help) and this hardly fits in with the image of the twinkle-eyed wild man, which perhaps explains why Powerage remains neglected.

But I've saved the best to last because not all of Bon's woes were woman-related as he reveals in Down Payment Blues, one of the finest lyrics he ever wrote. Angus and Malcolm slow the pace down a little and sashay out an ebbing and flowing groove as Bon uses dry wit to reveal the reality of having spent a decade playing in rock bands but still having to avoid the rent man and struggle to feed his cat.

As he puts in the final verse: 'Feeling like a paper cup/Blowing down a storm drain/Got myself a sailing boat/But I can't afford a drop of rain'.

AC/DC went on to hit paydirt with the 49million-selling Back In Black, featuring Brian Johnson on vocals, which was released in July 1980, five months after Bon's death. His last letter to Irene - Bon never stopped writing even after she divorced him - finally arrived in Australia around the same time.

Considering the millions ending their marriage must have ultimately cost her, Irene probably finds Down Payment Blues a tough listen nowadays.

In 2003, she was invited along as AC/DC were inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame, despite the fact that she'd split up with Bon by the time he joined the band. During the evening, Angus told Irene that she was 'the only one Bon ever trusted', which is probably about as gushing as a Glaswegian-turned-Aussie-ocker ever gets.