C-come an 'Ave a Listen! Derek Tompkins and the Beck Studio Story

There aren’t many people who deserve to be called a genius. Derek Tompkins was one. When Mavis Tompkins and Roger Kinsey attended the book launch of my first title back in 2018, Roger told me of his dream of writing a book about Mavis’s late husband’s exploits in the world of recording sound. He’d attended a recording session at Beck Studio back in 1972 and the memory had stayed with him. I too had recorded at Beck- twice in fact- once in 1976 and again in 1981.

I met Derek and Mavis when they came to my gig with Nashville based singer/songwriter Jerry Arhelger back in 2008. This show was hosted by Barbary Coast’s singer Robbo. The band had backed Jerry on his UK concerts in the 1980s and played on an album that Jerry recorded at Beck in 1982. It was a happy reunion of old friends and I had a glimpse of just how much Derek was esteemed. He was in his eighties and looking frail, but still in good spirits.

I listened to Roger speak about wanting to write the book and decided to offer my services. I saw the vision and bought into it. However, two or three encounters in almost forty years is scant background for a book, so what followed was a year of painstaking research, study, interviewing people who knew and worked with him back in the 1960s, and looking through every edition of the Kettering Evening Telegraph dating from 1962 to 1969.

Each member of our team had an important part to play. I wrote the text while Mavis was a treasure trove of photographs and anecdotes. Roger was in charge of publicity and also helped track down people to interview. They both helped in the editorial process.

Getting ‘Back Street Genius’ into print was a real team effort and positive reviews came back from our many ‘angels’ who crowd-funded the printing of the first edition which sold out in weeks. Barry Noble helped us get a nice review in ‘Best of British’ magazine.

Roger had an underlying health issue that needed an operation, so we resolved to crack on with the follow up without delay. One week after a very positive interview on Bernie Keith’s BBC Radio Northampton radio show Roger died following complications after his operation. It came as a huge shock. I’d been speaking to him only two days earlier.

This sad episode strengthened our resolve to complete the project. Roger’s widow Chris said that he was elated that the publication of the book ticked off another item in his ‘bucket list’. I hope that this volume gets another tick.

Mavis commented that the first book didn’t have much ‘Derek’ in it. We hope that this one will put that right. If the first book was about what Derek did, then this follow-up is about who he was.

You may not have heard about Derek Tompkins, but you will probably have heard a song that he recorded. Some producers gain their reputation within a single musical genre. Derek’s CV covered every style from folk to funk, pop to punk, operatic to school choirs, country to rock. He also recorded voice-overs. As he might well have said:

‘C-come and have a listen!’

Dave Clemo. January 2021. back

FOREWORD BY DAVID FOSTER

I think most everyone can review their life in ‘chunks’ or ‘slices’; so cut to ‘The Derek Tompkins Slice!’

I don’t think Derek ever fully realized the impact he had on my musical life; although happily, I can say that I did get to tell him more than once in later years. He was such a humble man that I’m not sure his influence on me was ever fully realized by him.

I met Derek just before my seventeenth birthday. The only time I had been in a ‘recording studio’ environment before then was when my father took me to a local radio station in Victoria BC where I grew up. It wasn’t much of a place but it fascinated me. I was ten but I never forgot it. Derek burst wide open the door of that glimpse I had seven years earlier and pulled the curtain back and shared all that he knew with me- which was plenty.

He took an interest in our band, seven guys from Canada seeking fame and fortune. Derek was talented- a musician himself, he had moved into audio engineering and producing local acts. He knew more than he let on; he taught more than he realized and he influenced more than he would ever know. I learned so much about the art of recording during those few months. I was just one of his many students and he laid the groundwork for my future in the music business.

Derek was kind, gentle and extremely gifted. I just couldn’t have asked for a more perfect person to ‘show me the ropes’; having a happy (well maybe he wasn’t overtly that happy!), skilled, calm and giving mentor when you’re starting out in any business is a huge plus and should never be taken for granted. Thank you, Derek for taking us ‘under your wing’, and for giving so selflessly to me and all those countless others who can write the same story.

There was also another mostly ignored element to Derek’s ability to work and be so giving literally day and night. His mind was free to create because of his beautiful unselfish wife Mavis Tompkins. She not only tolerated dozens of musicians coming in and out of her home day and night- but she also fed us, listened to us and was a constant source of happiness and quiet inspiration to Derek. I admit all these years later that most of us (including me) had a crush on her, both her obvious beauty and her soft ways. She cleared the road for Derek to always be available and to be functioning at his highest level at all times. I imagine she was the one that kept the lights on and the trains running on time; it was a true partnership. She was very proud of her man and I know he felt the same way about her.

As a humorous footnote- none of us could figure out how Derek could have ‘pulled’ such a girl; he must have had some hidden talents that we never got to see!

David Foster.

Los Angeles, January 2021.

David Foster & his sixteen Grammys. (Image courtesy of KMJ PR) back

CHAPTER 1- A New Beginning

By 1969, Derek Tompkin’s Shield Studio in Cambridge Street, Kettering had a well-earned reputation as one of the best outside London. There may have been bigger studio complexes in the metropolis, many of them equipped with the latest 8 track tape recorders and the very best outboard equipment that money could buy, but no amount of gadgetry can replace the man at the controls.

It has been said that the producer is like an extra member of the band. Without the input from George Martin and Andrew Loog Oldham it’s debatable whether the Beatles and Rolling Stones could have found the sounds and the songs that propelled them into superstardom. The producer is in overall charge of the recording session and the budget. He will have overall say in how a recording will sound. The producer is the link between the musicians and the recording engineer who looks after all the technical aspects and is responsible for getting the performance on to tape.

Derek’s years of experience as a drummer with The Q-Men, his breadth of knowledge of music styles going back to the dance bands of the 1940s, and his unrivalled experience of repairing TVs and all things electrical and building amplifiers and PA systems gave him an almost unique blend of musicality and electronic engineering. He was well equipped to act as both producer and engineer on many sessions.

By late 1968 the studio was booked every week, with an increase in the calibre of artists using the studio. The masters he produced were of release quality and his acquisition of a disc cutting lathe added to the range of services he was able to offer.

When the manufacturing and repairing sides of the business were added in Derek was working flat out. He was also helping out at his brother Brian’s Tin Hat Club on Saturday nights.

However, as 1968 turned into 1969 it was clear that things were far from ideal at Shield Electronics. Despite a full order book and satisfied customers across the country, the company was £3000 overdrawn at the bank (about the price of a new semi-detached house). Mavis’ father had put money into the new company when it began in 1966 and was unwilling to put in any more. Derek, John and Mavis’ younger brother Alan worked in the factory building the amps and speaker cabs. John also ran the sales side. Did the large number of non-paying customers have any bearing on the sad state of the firm?

Things came to a messy conclusion in January 1969 when Derek finally gave notice to dissolve the partnership and stopped working on the amplification side. The recording studio was a separate business and continued unchanged.

The partnership was finally dissolved at the end of July. It soon became apparent that without Derek’s input, Shield Amplification was doomed, and so it proved to be. Meanwhile Derek asked Mavis to look for a suitable house with room for a shop and recording studio, and they cleared out the garden shed and began accumulating woodworking and other tools. He would continue to record at Shield for the time being.

Derek knew there was a ready market for his amplification. All he needed were some premises and a new brand name. Over the next few weeks Mavis tried out different names for the new venture. Derek wanted something easy to remember and towards the beginning of the alphabet. Her notebooks from the time show several pages of notes and ideas for a logo.

They eventually settled on Beck. The Cambridge Street factory was built over the culverted East Beck. The author wondered if that influenced the choice of name, but Mavis replied that it was purely coincidental. Derek wanted a name that was at the beginning of the phone directory.

(Would Aardvark Studio have been a better choice?)

That September, after what seemed like months of stress, broken relationships and bad luck, some good fortune came their way. Two young men, John Douglas and Vic White, called on Derek. They were both budding musicians and interested in recording. Vic’s father owned IVG White, a fruit & vegetable wholesaler based on the corner of Lister and Gisburne Roads in Wellingborough, and as luck would have it, had an empty building on the corner of their site. John & Vic thought that the premises would make an ideal base for manufacturing amplifiers and setting up a recording studio in partnership with Derek. They went and looked at the potential new premises. It needed plenty of work (and money) to bring up to standard. Mavis had been putting money aside to buy their dream home, but everything had to be put on hold for the time being. The money was needed to refurbish the new building. It was to be another fifteen years before they finally moved.

Pages from Mavis’ notebook. 1969. back

CHAPTER 2- Keith Sheffield’s story

1969 will be remembered for a host of events including the moon landing, Concorde’s maiden flights, and the ‘Stones in the Park’ free concert.

Early in the year Derek’s involvement with The Tin Hat came to an end as he concentrated on the studio. Whitesnake’s Bernie Marsden made his first recording with his band Skinny Cat in September, and Queen’s John Deacon also recorded at Shield for the first time.

During the summer term a party of schoolboys from Kettering Grammar School paid a visit to Shield Studio and were shown around by Derek. One of the pupils was Max Norman, who brought his guitar with him and recorded a short piece, thereby setting him on the way to becoming a world-renowned heavy metal producer of albums like Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Blizzard of Oz’.

Keith Sheffield also went on the trip. By his own admission Keith was hardly a model pupil. School bored him and he was always bunking off. He got to know Derek and Mavis and often visited the shop and studio.

During the autumn 1969 term Keith was absent so much that the school offered him an ultimatum. If he could find a job, the school would allow him to leave before his ‘O’ level exams. He would also have to enrol for a part time course at technical college. Keith knew that Derek was moving to new premises and was going to take someone on, so he got on his bike, cycled over to Derek’s and asked him for a job. According to Mavis’ diary Keith was interviewed on November 11th and was taken on the following week. He was fifteen/sixteen when he started at Beck.

Keith was still too young to drive so cycled to the shop every day to cadge a lift to Wellingborough. When the weather was bad, and they couldn’t get to the studio he’d help at the shop. At Christmas Derek made up acetates of Keith’s favourite tracks that had been recorded at Beck as a present.

Derek’s present to Keith Christmas 1970.

Mavis’ entry in her diary for October 2nd, 1969 said that things were progressing, and that Vic’s father was happy about the building being used as a recording studio and amplification factory.

When the partnership between Derek and John Dobson broke up all the woodworking machinery had to be left behind in Cambridge Street. Derek continued to acquire machinery for the factory, including a metal press. Planning permission for the studio was granted on November 26th, 1969 and the builders moved in. The room nearest the street was fitted out as a factory, with the main space given over to cabinet making with side rooms for wiring up the amplifiers and another for testing equipment.

When Keith started work the carpenters were still fitting out the premises, so he helped them. He also acted as Derek’s gofer when he was wiring up the studio. One of his jobs was to go down to the local shop and buy his cigarettes (Benson & Hedges, 200 at a time), and to make the tea. He remembers Derek taking great care when he constructed the triple glazed window between the control room and the live room. The middle pane had to be positioned in exactly the right place. It must have been successful because the window was still there when we visited the studio fifty years later in the summer of 2020.

There wasn’t a suitable electronics course at the technical college, so in January 1970 Keith enrolled on a radio and TV repair course. The course had begun the previous September and he was always playing catch up. He somehow completed the two-year course, but he admits that it was all a mystery to him. It didn’t help that he was colour blind and all the resistors were colour coded. Derek wanted to teach him everything about the manufacturing process, but Keith was more interested in the woodworking and cabinet making side of the business.

After he left Beck in 1973, he worked in several local mobile home manufacturers. He also did a summer season at Butlins which he said was great fun. He eventually ended up at Fairline Boats where he stayed for twenty odd years until they ceased trading about five years ago.

Keith reunited with an amplifier that he built back in 1970/1.

During the summer of 2020 he revisited his old workplace for the first time in 47 years. He was reunited with one of the amplifiers that he built all those years ago. As he walked around the building, he was able to point out to the authors the location of the various machines and workbenches and described his part in the manufacturing process in some detail. Afterwards he admitted that the experience was quite emotional, something he hadn’t anticipated. back

CHAPTER 3- Setting up the studio

Derek wrote these notes a few years before he died:

‘I started Beck with six individually boxed microphone amps feeding into a home built six in by two out mixer desk. This mixer was intended to be the prototype for a new amplifier range that we were going to introduce.

This fed to two Revox G36 15inch-per-second semi- pro recorders, I also needed a decent reverberation unit, so I made a steel frame in which I fixed a 4ft x 3ft rolled steel sheet on which were mounted home-made drivers and accelerometers. After thousands of hours of experimentation, it proved so successful that it stayed in use for the whole period of the studio.’

Unfortunately, there are no photos of the reverb unit but this photo from 1970 or 71 shows one of the Revox tape machines with Derek’s custom mixer in the background.

One autumn afternoon in 2019 the authors spent an interesting couple of hours chatting with Alan Course. He told us that he got to know Derek through amateur radio. It was Alan’s main hobby before he decided to build himself a synthesiser. After chatting to Derek, he decided to set up his own recording studio. Alan worked as a telephone engineer and was technically minded, so he wanted to know what kit Derek had, where it came from and how it worked. He said that he often called around to Beck in order to pick Derek’s brain. Alan also said that Derek rarely explained how things were done. He would give a few pointers and leave it to Alan to figure out the answer. Alan said:

‘Derek’s attitude was this: you had to be prepared to do the work yourself if you wanted to learn something. When you told him what you’d learned he would smile at you in a particular way if you were on the right track. He’d never give any information away. He told me early on ‘You can spend years learning something and in ten minutes you’d given it all away.’ Unless people were prepared to work at learning he was not prepared to offer any assistance. He taught me so much.’

Keith Sheffield said something similar. Derek would show him how to do a job and then leave him to get on with it, solving problems and working out solutions. He was often left to work on his own when Derek was recording in the studio next door, back at the shop or out on a service call.

Derek upgraded his studio to eight-track in 1971 and several years later Alan bought the Revox G36 recorders from him to use in his own studio. We asked Alan to explain how Derek used two machines to make the recordings. He said this:

‘Derek was one of the first to convert one of the machines to Sound on Sound. He used the Erase head, altered the wiring on it via a very complicated switching mechanism so that it would play back track 1 in synch with the record head. You recorded on track 1, bounced it across to track 2 by switching the heads so that the erase head was set to play and then recorded on the other record head.’

Dave: ‘That seems like a subtle twist on Les Paul’s method. Was there a downside in that it was destructive and if you made a mistake you couldn’t undo it?’

Alan replied: ‘Derek would switch off the erase head. He’d got it well figured. What a lot of people didn’t know was that Derek was a very accomplished electronic engineer and he invented quite a bit of stuff.’

Derek’s famous plate reverb unit lived in a cupboard outside the control room. It took many hundreds of hours of experimentation before it was ready to use.

The plate echo was essentially a thin steel sheet mounted in a bed frame. It was loosely based on the EMT Reverb Plate that was a feature of the bigger London Studios. There were a couple of differences- one being the size of the unit and the other being the price. The EMT cost as much as a house. Alan commented:

‘The steel plate was under quite a bit of tension. The easy part was fitting tiny speakers to the plate and feeding the signal which set the plate vibrating. The secret to Derek’s reverb unit was in how the signal was taken off and fed back to the mixing desk without compromising the quality. When I asked him, he said ‘It’s just a transducer’, but I said that it’s more than that, it’s better than that.

I was working for British Telecom and had some earpieces that I could use as transducers to emulate Derek’s unit. No matter what I tried I kept hitting the same problem. It was going to take years of experimenting before I would crack it, so I said to Derek- Give me a break. How did you do it?

He grinned and I said- ‘you’re not going to tell me, are you?’ The only thing I could think was that he was using a stylus or something like that. He grinned again and I knew I was on the right track. ‘You bugger. That’s what you’re doing isn’t it?’ He replied ‘Exactly.’

You could buy a very good high-quality stylus for about £30 and then suspend the point on the plate so it picked up the vibrations (what it was designed to do).

Making a plate reverb and getting to work is one thing but getting it to work musically is another. That took hundreds if not thousands of hours to perfect.’

That’s where the Beck sound came from. The unit lived in a cupboard outside the studio where it couldn’t pick up stray noises and footsteps. Dave Anderson thinks that Derek also placed some cushions in the bottom of the cupboard to soak up any stray vibrations.

Derek continued with the Revox recorders and hand-built mixer all through 1970 but it became clear that he needed to upgrade. Prior to 1968 most singles and albums were produced in mono, but stereo was fast becoming the norm. The quality of Derek’s recordings was undisputed, but if his studio was to progress to the major league, he needed to offer stereo as standard. That required more microphones and channels than the six he was using, so he decided to build a new mixer, one with sixteen inputs and eight outputs. He sourced every component, and then hand wired and soldered every pot, switch and socket. It took every hour of spare time over the space of a year to complete. Each channel strip was mounted on a pre-cut metal plate that was unfortunately ever so slightly oversized which meant that they didn’t sit exactly flat but had an almost imperceptible sag in the middle. This can be seen in some of the photographs.

Derek regularly went down to London with Steve Fearn, Barry Noble and others and saw how studios like Abbey Road were updating their equipment and while he didn’t have their budget he knew that he could design and build a mixing desk that was every bit as good.

Shield Studio in 1968.

Derek had built his own monitors when he set up Shield and brought them with him when he opened the new studio. He replaced them with a new pair of Tannoy Lockwood studio monitors which he used for several years before building his own monitor cabinets each containing two Tannoy Gold 15-inch speakers. They were perched high above the mixer desk on tubular metal stands. Mavis said that she was always worried that anyone bumping against the stand would bring the big heavy cabinet crashing down. Ray Brett said:

‘I remember standing between those Tannoy monitors listening to a final mix at a recording session and noticed one of the speakers on the left was out of phase. I told Derek. He said, ‘I don’t think so’, but then he watched the movement with a bass drum thump and sure enough one of the four Tannoys was moving backwards. Out came a screwdriver; speaker out; polarity sorted!’

When Alan Course bought the Revox tape recorders he also bought the