Ian Davidson’s 40-year career in the music industry has included everything from working at the famous Abbey Road studios to helping translate blockbuster filmsi nto foreign languages, but it all started in 1964 with a 702-ton Danish passenger ferry.
“I got interested in vinyl through listening to ’60s pirate stations such as Radio Caroline, ships that were transmitting illegally from the North Sea,” explains Davidson.
“For people of my age, who were teenagers at the time, it was fantastic to get pop music played to you 24/7. I got into The RollingStones, The Animals, Small Faces – all those bands of that era.
“I went on to study mechanical and electrical engineering at Kingston Polytechnic, but at the end of that I didn’t really want to go and work in a greasy engineering workshop with oily lathes, so I applied to join a couple of record companies.”
The young Davidson landed a job as a vinyl mastering engineer at RCA, transferring final recordings from the likes of David Bowie and Lou Reed to vinyl, before going on to work at Phil Wainman’s Utopia Records and later serving as chief technical engineer at Virgin’s west London Townhouse Studios, then as operations director at Abbey Road.
“It all led me to jukeboxes, which combined all of those interests in one thing,” Davidson explains.
“I loved the sound; that deep, mellow sunken bass from three 12in bass drivers with a valve power amp on the end of it.
