D I S C O G R A P H Y
Lost Pearls (2004)
Released: 2004
Label: Talking Elephant
Martin Turner's memories:
"The spring of 2004 saw the release of Lost Pearls, a CD collection of previously unreleased Wishbone Ash songs, dating mainly from the No Smoke Without Fire and Just Testing sessions.
Andy Powell had located the masters of some of these recordings, while I also had some in my archives, and a deal had been struck with Talking Elephant records for a release of this long lost material. They’d had somebody mix the recordings and it just didn’t sound right, so Andy asked me if I would be interested in getting involved. I said “Sure, send it over to me and I’ll have a listen”. When they sent me a disc I just couldn’t believe my ears. Somebody had sat in a studio and mixed these recordings that had DBX noise reduction on them. Now, DBX noise reduction is severe. It totally trashes the sound and leaves it very mid-rangy and compressed. The recordings basically needed decoding, which I knew I would be able to do, and so I said to Andy, “Send me the masters and I’ll straighten it out.”
All of the songs featured on Lost Pearls were essentially outtakes – songs that had not been proceeded with and had been left in various stages of completion. Most of them were unfinished and demanded a lot of work before they were useable. I had to muster all my “wizard” energy to make those tracks sound good, they required a lot of repair work. For example, in one instance on one of my songs called ‘Football and Boxing’ I even had to re-record the lead vocal because the lyric had only been partly written and by the third verse I was singing a load of rubbish. So here I was nearly 25 years after the original recording finishing off the lyric and re-recording the lead vocal. Obviously it’s an album aimed more at the diehard Wishbone Ash collector rather than the mainstream fan and I guess you have to be pretty committed to want to listen to an album of previously unreleased tunes. Overall I was pleased with the way the album came out."
adapted from the book "No Easy Road - My Life and Times With Wishbone Ash"
