The London Daily Newsletter Wednesday 22 March

Decca Studios
Decca Studios was a recording facility in Broadhurst Gardens.

The Beatles failed their audition with Decca Records here on 1 January 1962, and subsequently signed with Parlophone. The site being the Town Hall originally, the building in Broadhurst Gardens London NW6 started off as The Falcon Works, an engineering company and was converted to a recording studios in 1933 for Crystalate Records. In 1937 the company was bought out by Decca and Broadhurst Gardens became the company’s third and final home base. The building housed three main studios. Many popular songs and albums were recorded at Decca Studios (for example, John Mayall’s 1968 Blues from Laurel Canyon and five albums by the Moody Blues). Britain’s leading Big Band, Ted Heath (bandleader) and his Orchestra recorded a succession of outstanding big band jazz records at Broadhurst Gardens for Decca during the band’s peak years from 1945 until Heath’s death in 1969. David Bowie recorded his first single, Liza Jane, at the studio in 1964. The studios also saw the formation of the original Fleetwood Mac, under the aegis of then-Bluesbreakers guitarist Peter Green, after John Mayall bought him studio time as a birthday present. Marmalade recorded most of their Decca hits in Studio 2, including Reflections of My Life. The Zombies recorded She’s Not There at the facility.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

“An Autumn Lane” (1886)

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster