Wayne Fontana: A Noisy Fight with a Bingo Hall
- Place – Tangerine Studios, North London
- Time – The 70s
- Artist – Wayne Fontana
Welcome to Tangerine Studios
Situated in heart of North London was a small facility called Tangerine Studio, not a particularly well know establishment.
it was owned and run by two of my music business friends Dave Meyers and John Worsley.
Although this was a perfectly functioning recording studio it did suffer from one inherent problem, behind it was a working bingo hall and the main recording area shared a party wall with said bingo hall.
This slightly strange situation would often cause problems during recording sessions, but not quite as you would expect.
There were no complaints from disgruntled, blue rinsed fans of bingo not being able to hear two little ducks or any number of fat ladies. There was no mention of raucous drum solos, overly loud guitars wailing or thumping bass guitar.
In fact, it was the complete opposite, often Dave Meyers, prior to the recording session would have to enter the hall, walk to the stage and turn down the volume of bingo caller’s microphone.
Wayne doing his best
One particular example of this craziness happened during the recording a vocal overdub with Wayne Fontana of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders fame.
During the session Wayne was in the recording room behind the microphone and wearing his cans and singing away as best he could.
Halfway through the song he stops singing, the engineer stops the tape and Wayne says down the microphone to the engineer,
“Hey, I can’t hear what I’m doing, can you turn my voice up and the bingo down?”
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