Philip Newell entered the world of music directly from school in 1966, at the age of 17. His first job was as an apprentice in audio electronics, during which time he studied radio and television servicing at Blackburn Technical College, in England. He soon gave up his apprenticeship however, when offered a job as sound and light operator in a local ballroom, owned by the Mecca entertainments company. His work was well-liked, and he was gradually moved to larger ballrooms within the Mecca chain, finally arriving at the Orchid ballroom in Purley, just south of London, which was then one of the largest ballrooms in the country.
These were the days when musical groups did not travel with their own public address systems. They tended to rely on the house systems, and usually the house sound engineer, as well. So the Orchid, being such a prominent ballroom, was a natural choice of venue for many of the famous musical artistes of the time. It was just part of his normal work as the resident sound engineer for Philip to be working with artistes such as Booker T and the MGs, Junior Walker and the All Stars, Eddie Floyd, Arthur Conley, Sam and Dave, and many other stars of the Stax/Motown era, as well as groups such at The Who, The Small Faces and other British rock groups, many of which he would later meet again, either in recording studios or whilst making live recordings.
By the age of 21, Philip Newell knew a lot of musicians, and some had asked him to put together small ‘demo’ studios (the forerunners of today’s project studios) in which they could work, principally, on their song-writing. One such studio, Majestic, in Clapham, south London, began to grow out of all proportion during its construction, finally opening in late 1970 as a quite large, professional studio. However, its control room, much larger and more absorbent than most control rooms of the day, was not well received. The more usual rooms were heavily influenced by broadcast control rooms, and their specifications were quite rigid. Recording staff also tended to be quite conservative. Philip’s attempt to build a control room that he thought was more accurate than many other control rooms did not see much use. The owner decided that the control room should be reduced in size, brightened up acoustically, and filled with a proprietary stereo monitor system in place of the custom four-channel system. At this juncture, Newell went to work for Pye Records, in London’s West End, and would not attempt anything on the lines of Majestic for another 20 years, although he never lost faith in the concept of highly damped rooms.
Pye was a large studio complex with two studios, two mix-only rooms (reduction rooms, as they were then known), three disc-cutting rooms, two tape duplication rooms and a room for compiling the eight-track masters for the tape cartridges then used in many motor cars. Pye also had a mobile recording unit, and this appealed very much to Philip’s love of live music events. His experience of music on-stage made him an obvious candidate for the mobile recording crew. Until late 1971 he was working in the studios, principally as a maintenance engineer, and on the mobile recording unit as a ‘Jack of all trades’. Mobile recordings were then very much a team effort. During this time at Pye records, they built an articulated mobile recording vehicle, chiefly designed by Ray Prickett, the technical manager of the studios. This was used to record many live concerts, with artistes such as The Who (again), The Faces, Free, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Traffic and many other famous groups of that era.
However, the studio’s administration manager was beginning to take exception to the length of Philip Newell’s hair, and his tendency to wear multi-coloured boots. The ultimatum ‘get your hair cut, or else…’ resulted in Philip accepting an offer as chief engineer at Virgin Record’s almost completed Manor Studios, near Oxford, where the wearing of long hair and multi-coloured boots was almost de rigueur. Within weeks he was recording a solo album for John Cale (ex Velvet Underground) with musicians such as Ronnie Wood, now with the Rolling Stones.
Nevertheless, the ‘call of the wild’ (mobile recording) was still a strong pull, and much spare time was spent putting together a mobile recording vehicle, in a corner of the Manor’s 35 acre (15 hectare) grounds. For reasons still unclear, Richard Branson (Virgin’s chairman) took exception to this, but made an unusual offer, which was tantamount to ‘Give me all your equipment in exchange for me financing the building of the world’s best mobile recording studio – of which you will be 20% shareholder – or you are fired’.
Philip began plans for the Manor Mobile – destined to be the world’s first, purpose-built, 24-track mobile recording studio (using Ampex’s pre-production MM1100 24-track tape recorder) in January 1973. By the end of that year there was so much work that the Manor Mobile Ltd bought the Pye Records mobile recording vehicle. Around this time, Tom Newman, the managing director of the Manor Studios, left Virgin, and Philip Newell, at the age of 24, found himself technical director of a newly-formed recording division of Virgin Records.
1975 saw the rebuilding of the Manor Studios, with Tom Hildey, the then chief of Westlake Audio. During the same year, Philip also spent months working with Mike Oldfield on his Ommadawn album, which was re-mixed into quadrophonics in the newly completed ‘surround’ control room at the Manor. Shortly after he re-mixed the classic Tubular Bells into four-channel surround; a mix which was re-released in 2001 as one of the first Super Audio Compact Discs (SACDs).
In 1978, again with Tom Hidley, Philip led the Virgin team who built The Townhouse, in London. In 1979, he was back on the road again, as front of house engineer for Mike Oldfield’s 45-musician extravaganza, which toured Europe. But, not only was he doing the front of house mixing, he was also producing the recording of the live album, Exposed, which was a gold disc, on advanced orders, before it even reached the shops.
During eleven years with Virgin, Philip Newell was involved in a mountain of recordings, both in the studios and with the mobile recording units. He produced artistes such as Gong and Mike Oldfield (producer or engineer on six of his albums), recorded The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra; The Duke Ellington Orchestra; Hawkwind; Led Zeppelin; Don McLean; Captain Beefheart; Jack Bruce; Dizzy Gillespie; The Small Faces; Ben E. King; The Buzzcocks; XTC; Nana Mouskouri; The Motors; Jim Capaldi; Stevie Winwood; The Band; Patti Smith; Queen; Can; Tangerine Dream; Steve Hillage; Alvin Lee; The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – not to mention church organs; English brass bands; fairground organs; Welsh male-voice choirs; Scottish pipes and accordions; gospel choirs; The Edinburgh Festival Choir – the list goes on. The great lesson learned from this variety of recordings, plus an enormous number of long-forgotten recordings, was that a great recording usually begins with great musicians. What goes into the microphones is much more important than what a recording engineer can do with the mixing console.
As Philip Newell was later to say ‘The thing that I found most disappointing about being a recording engineer was the lack of correlation between the effort put into the job and the success of the results. I could work extremely hard, using all my skill and experience, trying to get a half decent recording from a group of mediocre musicians, or I could sit with my feet on the desk, pushing up a fader with one finger, and record an absolutely fantastic guitar sound from Dave Gilmour or Jimmy Page’. This no doubt contributed to his almost total departure from the recording industry in 1982. Virgin was also getting to be much more ‘big business’ and beaurocratic, which was not well suited to Philip’s somewhat free-spirit, so he sold his shares in the company and invested more in his seaplane fleet, which he had begun in 1979. This had been largely in connection with Richard Branson’s purchase of Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands, and on which they were planning to build a tax-haven recording studio. However, the collapse of the poundsterling on the foreign exchange markets, the very high spending by the Virgin group on other projects, and the election of Margaret Thatcher, who greatly reduced the higher tax rates in Britain, all conspired to squash the idea of the Caribbean studio.
However, it was perhaps the ‘call of the wild’ again, which drew Philip Newell to the wide-open spaces of the world of float-planes and flying-boats. He flew in many air-displays, and also for cinema and television work (and even a BBC radio programme), and by 1982 was a flying instructor, and an examiner on certain types of small seaplanes. However, without the income from the music business to support it, it was difficult to keep these operations afloat; both in the physical and financial senses. In 1983 he sold everything, and returned to music to produce an album for Tom Newman, the co-producer of Tubular Bells.
In 1984 he met Alex Weeks, who had a company called Reflexion Arts, specialising in the sale of very expensive gold and silver flutes. In the same year Philip had been asked to design a studio for Jacobs Studios, in southern England, so he joined with Reflexion Arts to begin a studio design division, and Jacobs ‘Court’ studio was their first endeavour together. He then designed a range of monitor systems under the Reflexion Arts name.
In 1986, he realised that he needed further, specialised help in the design of a more advanced range of monitors, and sought help from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at Southampton University in the UK. He had come into contact with the ISVR quite coincidentally, via flying. His aerodynamics colleagues in Southampton University’s Department of Aeronautics and Aerospace, where he was making enquiries about horn design with specialists in trans-sonic (i.e. through the speed of sound) wind tunnel construction, shared a building with the ISVR. These investigations drifted him across to the ISVR acoustics department, where he sponsored a 3-year doctoral research programme which eventually led to Keith Holland’s AX2 horn, somewhat revolutionary in its time (1989) which is still used in the current Reflexion Arts monitor systems.
The connection with the ISVR continues, where Philip has sponsored a number of students at undergraduate, Masters, and doctoral research levels. He was once heard to say to the owner of a school of recording engineering, who taught at the school but had never himself been a professional recording engineer, ‘The big difference between us is that students pay you to teach them, whereas I pay students to teach me’.
Philip Newell left Reflexion Arts in 1988, but has remained in close contact with them since Alex Weeks passed the company to new owners, in 1991. It now operates from Vigo, Spain, and has clients around the world. In 1992 he moved to Spain, where he has lived since, though he is rarely home. During one period of time, between late 1992 and early 1994, he spent one night at home in 18 months. Philip has now worked, in one capacity or another, in 33 different countries. He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, a member of the UK Institute of Acoustics and he still remains a member of both the US and Canadian Seaplane Pilots Associations.
His work now involves the designs of studios for music recording, film mixing, television shooting stages, concert halls, multi-use halls, music clubs, discothèques, screening rooms, rehearsal rooms, and occasionally he also gets involved in industrial noise control. From time to time, Philip still also makes recordings. He has designed hundreds of rooms, and written around a hundred articles for magazines, on the subjects of music recording and aeronautical issues. He has also written around a dozen papers which have been presented at Audio Engineering Society (AES) and Institute of Acoustics (IOA) conferences, and has also contributed technical works to their journals.
On occasions he is called upon to give talks at colleges, institutes, universities and learned societies, and has done so in the UK, Spain, Russia and the USA, to students of music, recording technologies, and engineering acoustics. This is his fourth book, following on from Studio Monitoring Design, Recording Spaces and Project Studios – A More Professional Approach.
On a more personal note, Philip is a member of the Institute of Acoustics, the Audio Engineering Society, the US and Canadian Seaplane Pilots Associations, British Mensa, and the League Against Cruel Sports. The latter is something very dear to his heart, as cruelty of any kind, to any living creature, is something that he abhors. He has absolutely no business persona, and tends to treat his clients according to how they treat him, and those around him, irrespective of how much money they may have paid. Consequently, he can sometimes be quite abrasive. He can also be volatile and highly explosive, but he tends to cool down as quickly as he blows up. Philip has never suffered fools gladly, even if they were his paymasters, and it has taken him a long time to understand that not everybody can be as totally committed to the work as he is. However, he has always had a lot of respect for people who try hard and want to learn, whether they succeed or not.