Phil Harding revisits unreleased mastertapes of some of his earliest work as a young engineer at The Marquee Studios – mixes he created of Gerry Rafferty’s highly-acclaimed ‘City To City’ album (released in 1978), which includes the iconic international hit ‘Baker Street’. The album sold in the millions around the world and reached No. 1 in America. Phil looks back at his work on the project during 1977… 

This first one has been influenced by the fact that it was mentioned in the recent podcast that I recorded with producer Steve Anderson. I’ve done many interviews over the years and quite a few podcasts in recent times, but no one has ever asked me about my work on the Gerry Rafferty album ‘City To City’ until Steve did (although that bit was actually edited out of the final podcast!). This coincides with the journey that I’ve been on since 2019, digitally archiving my reel-to-reel analogue tape collection. Having completed the transfers of many 4-tracks of my own demos and 24Club band recordings, I’ve since moved on to my stereo tape collection of various 70s and early 80s projects that I engineered. Steve began the question with crediting me for mixing the ‘City To City’ album. (Hear the full album here). I immediately had to correct him by stating that the final album does not contain the mixes that I did at The Marquee, and that my contribution was slimmed down to some minor overdubs that we recorded whilst going through what turned out to be the first set of mixes (which were not finally used). Looking back at these sessions after all this time, I think it’s good to call them ‘work in progress’, although at the time, it seemed like ‘failure’ to me.   

I probably had little or no idea who Gerry Rafferty was back then, but I’m sure I would have been familiar with his 1972 UK/US top 10 hit as part of the band Stealers Wheel, ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’  (Wikipedia entry). In 1977, I was only 20 years old and still very much a junior engineer. Looking back at this now, it was surprising that I was chosen by the studio for the sessions. I had been training for four years by that time, under the wing of some of the tremendous engineers at The Marquee Studios – Phil Dunne, Geoff Claver, John Eden and my fellow junior engineer, Steve Holroyd. I can only assume that they were all busy on other projects down in Studio 1. 

The studio control room was very small, with barely enough room for three people behind the MCI JH-500 mixing console. For the Gerry Rafferty sessions, I was on the right-hand side, controlling the tape machine remote control and the ‘master fader’ and ‘group fader’ section of the console. Co-producer Hugh Murphy was seated in the middle, and Gerry (also co-producer) was happy to be at the end, on the left-hand side. My memories of the sessions are pretty vague, but it seemed that Hugh was in charge of these mixing sessions. He was happy and confident controlling the fader balances, but would leave most of the EQ processing on the board and the external processing hardware, such as compressors and so on, to me. We had two reverb plates available to us, but very little else. Hugh had the vision of what was needed for the mixes, and was continually checking with Gerry, who was very relaxed and clearly trusted Hugh. I got the impression that Gerry’s co-production role had been completed throughout the recording process and he was happy to take a back seat throughout this initial mixing stage.   

Some overdubs were added during these sessions in the small-but-quite-comfortable overdub booth, to the right of the control room. Percussion overdubs were added to tracks like ‘City To City’, and some backing vocals were also added to a couple of songs. It seemed as though these were last minute additions that had maybe been missed at the main recording sessions at Chipping Norton Studios (in Oxfordshire), where the bulk of the album had been recorded. No extra vocals were added by Gerry and he seemed very happy with what had already been recorded.    

My memory of the final session was a typical ‘album playback’ set-up for the manager, label and musicians that could make it in. As I’ve said, space was tight, so this was an uncomfortable event, where only a couple of people could sit in the ideal central listening position. My lasting memory of this session, where all eight tracks were played, was that the bass player made a very damaging remark at the end, saying something like ‘I’ve heard this room can’t be trusted’. That created an edgy atmosphere for the people present, and I did my best to defend the quality of the room acoustics and their reliability, but once someone says something like that, it is very difficult to recover from it. I think that planted negative thoughts into the minds of producer Hugh Murphy and the record company executives there. I remember being very happy with how everything sounded, but clearly, at only 20 years old, I was very inexperienced.  

Other than those two major points, everything else on my Marquee mixes (vocals/keyboards and guitars) sound very similar. One of my lasting memories after these sessions was playing these mixes at full blast in the studio to some of my musician friends, including Dave Dale, and they were all blown away. Imagine listening to an unreleased ‘Baker Street’ for the first time, in a fantastic high quality studio environment! I was inspired that even though the sessions had moved on elsewhere for remixing, I had done a good job to the best of my ability at that time. My engineering skills and mixing abilities would improve from that point on – and the following year, I completed successful mixes for the Steve Hillage album ‘Open’ (released in 1979) and the huge Amii Stewart hit ‘Knock On Wood’  all in that very same mixing room at The Marquee.