HOW ENGLAND GOT ITS ECHO

Another extract from my book The Home Recording Handbook

published by Dunlin Press earlier this year (links in bio/see Bandcamp). An ideal unwanted Christmas present.

HOW ENGLAND GOT ITS ECHO

In autumn of 1967 my family relocated to Balham in

south-west London. A pop-crazed 14-year-old with

my first guitar, I went out one day in search of

somewhere selling guitar strings.

As I walked down Balham High Road I came to a guitar shop called Watkins Electric Music and wandered in, cautiously. A rather friendly bald bloke in his mid-40s emerged from somewhere at the back of the shop and asked, “What can I do you for?”

I didn’t realise it then but I’d just met Charlie Watkins, British audio engineer, legendary backroom boffin and the creator of the WEM Copicat, a now world-famous gizmo. Invented by Charlie with some help from a designer, he launched the echo unit in 1958 – just in time to give British rock’n’roll its distinctive echo.

Not wishing to bog you down in technology, the earliest Copicats were the size of a small toolbox, with the incongruously camp appearance of a 1950s vanity case. When you removed the lid and plugged it in, what you saw was a loop of recording tape rattling quietly over four tape-recorder heads. The tape’s tension was regulated by a spring arm. The effect it gave was known as tape echo. Buttons on the appliance allowed guitarists to vary the effect from a short Elvis-style slapback or a stairwell-sized echo, right through to a full psychedelic freakout.

What the Copicat actually did was to make even mediocre guitarists sound exotic and slightly dangerous. It was what my learned colleague Captain Sensible would probably describe as a ‘talent booster’. Charlie Watkins, a London Eastender born in 1923, joined the Merchant Navy aged 15 at the outset of WW2. Serving on the unarmed Atlantic convoys, as a young seaman he played an accordion in his spare time. More of his shipmates, however, played guitars. In an age before proper amplification, the young accordionist noted, guitarists often complained about the problems of being heard whenever they played with a band. After the war, Charlie, by now a record-shop owner, observed the rapidly growing popularity of the guitar. Recalling his shipmates’ sound problems, he diversified into amplification, a subject which was still in its infancy in the 1950s. Thousands of British youngsters who’d taken up guitar during the short-lived skiffle boom now wanted to sound like their American rock ’n’ roll heroes.

Charlie soon found himself with a small factory, making amplifiers and speakers. Thus was Watkins Electric Music born, or WEM as it soon became known. Decades after first wandering into his shop, I telephoned Charlie to ask him about the launch of the original Copicat. Typically modest, he remembered, “I only made ten at first. I wasn’t sure how they were gonna do. But word must have got round. When I came to unlock the shop that Saturday morning there was a queue. At first I thought they must have been doing cut-price veg at the greengrocer’s up the road. But they all wanted the Copicat. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates had the first one. Joe Brown bought one for Hank Marvin.”

Over in their Chertsey factory, meanwhile, Charlie’s two brothers Reg and Syd came up with the first mass produced British electric guitar, the Watkins Rapier. With import duty on US guitars very high at that time, the Rapier’s price made the possibility of becoming a rock

star seem more do-able. It was the Copicat, however, that rockers of a certain age all remember. It gave early Brit-rock its distinctive shimmer, from 1958 right through the Sixties and beyond.

Near the turn of the Millennium when, after many requests, he manufactured a new version of the original analogue Copicat, Charlie told me that among the first people to make enquiries after it were Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler. Very famous rock stars knew Charlie and often prevailed upon his knowledge. In the days before really big sound-rigs were common, the Rolling Stones, prior to their famous Hyde Park free concert, approached him to come up with a massive sound system; something bigger than anyone had used before. I was there. So was Charlie. You can see him in photos of the event, sitting up onstage, looking rather out of place among the rock aristocracy of the day.

As a young teenager, on rainy Saturdays I’d often go into Charlie’s shop and just hang out. He never minded. It was strange sometimes, hearing this ordinary, dad like bloke talking so knowledgeably about the latest psychedelic bands. He once told me, “That Crazy World

of Arthur Brown – they’re gonna do alright. Just watch.” Sure enough, three months later, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown had a massive Number One hit with ‘Fire’. Displayed on the wall of his shop in the autumn of 1969, was a letter signed by all the Stones, thanking Charlie for the Hyde Park sound system. As I sometimes tell overseas music journalists, the people who made Britain great weren’t always those Victorian blokes you see on statues, sitting on horses with feathered coal scuttles on their heads. Some of them wore brown cotton work coats and carried soldering irons in their hands. Like Charlie Watkins.