A rare picture of Jack in the studio provided by his son Nick.
Sometimes recording history arrives in carefully catalogued boxes from an auction house. Sometimes it comes through the door of your studio because of a conversation you had in a boxing class nearly ten years ago.
My connection to Jack Clegg, a British recording engineer whose career stretched through some of the most interesting years of the recording industry, began in exactly that unlikely fashion. Almost a decade ago in 2016, I met Jack’s son, Nick Clegg, when we were paired as sparring partners at a boxing class. As you do when attempting to punch a relative stranger without causing them any actual harm, we got talking. At some point Nick casually mentioned that his father had been a sound engineer.
Being a recording-studio owner, this immediately interested me. When somebody tells you their father worked in recording studios during the 1960s, there is an obvious question to ask. Well, obvious to me, anyway.
“Does that mean you’ve got a collection of vintage microphones somewhere?”
Nick said that, actually, he did. And that was about it. We went back to hitting each other. Life moved on. Then, almost a decade later, completely out of the blue, I received a message from Nick. He still had some of his father’s microphones. Would I be interested in keeping them at my recording studio for safekeeping? There are certain requests that require careful consideration.
And so, nearly ten years after that throwaway conversation between two sparring partners, two vintage Neumann KM86i condenser microphones that had belonged to Jack Clegg arrived at my studio. Suddenly I wanted to know much more about the man who had owned them.
Jack Clegg — John Philip Clegg — belonged to a generation of recording engineers whose work we have all heard, but whose names most of us have not. We tend to remember the artists and sometimes remember the producers and the studios. The engineer, meanwhile, is often reduced to a line in the small print — assuming they received a credit at all. Yet in the 1950s and ’60s, the recording engineer occupied an extraordinary position. This was before digital recording, before plug-ins, before virtually unlimited tracks, before instant recall and before the ability to repair almost every decision afterwards. Recording was a physical process. There was a room. microphones, a mixing console, magnetic tape. And there was an engineer making decisions. Jack Clegg was one of those engineers.
His career took him through an extraordinary collection of British studios: IBC, Decca, CTS and eventually AIR Studios, the recording complex established by George Martin and his partners. It was a career that placed him directly in the path of the enormous technological and musical changes taking place in British recording during the 1960s. Clegg appears to have begun his career at IBC Studios, before moving to Decca, where he worked for approximately three years. Decca was one of the great institutions of British recording, with its West Hampstead studios handling everything from popular music to classical sessions.
How his legacy unfolded
One particularly interesting Jack Clegg credit comes from 1962. On 8 June that year, Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated entered Decca’s West Hampstead studio to record what became R&B from the Marquee. Despite the title, the album wasn’t actually recorded at the Marquee Club. It was a studio recording, and the recording engineer was Jack Clegg. That places him at a fascinating little junction in British musical history. Alexis Korner’s circle became one of the breeding grounds for the British blues boom. Musicians passing through or around that scene would go on to populate some of the most important British bands of the following decade. Clegg was sitting on the other side of the glass, capturing some of that movement as it began to gather momentum.
His abilities were noticed. Producer Jack Good, writing in Disc in July 1962, discussed the importance of engineers to his records and singled out Clegg, whom he used for his Karl Denver sessions, alongside engineer Terry Johnson. Good described the pair simply as “superb.” It’s a tiny fragment of contemporary evidence, but an illuminating one. Jack Clegg wasn’t merely somebody assigned to operate the equipment. Producers actively wanted him on their sessions.
In 1963, Clegg moved to CTS — Cine-Tele Sound Studios — in Bayswater. This opened another chapter of his career. CTS became particularly associated with orchestral recording, film scores and television work. Recording a large orchestra for a film is a rather different proposition from putting a pop group onto tape. Dozens of musicians might be playing simultaneously, and the engineer had to understand not only microphones and electronics but orchestral balance, the acoustics of the room and the complicated relationship between all three. There was no screen full of waveforms waiting afterwards. The sound had to be created there and then.
By the early 1970s, a profile of Clegg described him as having recorded music for hundreds of films and television commercials. Among his film work were productions including Eye of the Devil and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. But one soundtrack in particular has become associated with Jack Clegg, and it is a rather appropriate one for an engineer, because people are still talking about how good it sounds. The 1967 spoof Bond film Casino Royale was chaotic, extravagant and famously peculiar. Its soundtrack was something else entirely. The music was composed by Burt Bacharach, with sessions taking place at CTS in January 1967. The orchestra was enormous — accounts put it at somewhere around 50 to 60 musicians — and more than 100 musical cues reportedly had to be recorded. THat’s a lot of time and a lot of magnetic tape.
American engineer and producer Phil Ramone was involved with the project, but British union rules prevented him from engineering the London sessions himself. So the man actually sitting at the controls was Jack Clegg. And Clegg apparently pushed the equipment hard. The score was recorded onto three-track tape, and accounts of the sessions describe Clegg recording at unusually high levels to obtain the sound he wanted. It worked. The Casino Royale soundtrack subsequently acquired something of a cult reputation among audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts because of the extraordinary quality, dynamics and immediacy of the recording.
There is something I particularly like about this story. Modern recording gives us an enormous safety net. We can record conservatively, preserve vast amounts of headroom, capture countless takes and make decisions later. Clegg was working in an environment where the engineer needed to know the equipment intimately enough to understand how far it could be pushed. The meters might say one thing. Experience might say another. And sometimes the engineer was right. That is perhaps difficult to appreciate now. A recording engineer of Jack Clegg’s generation wasn’t simply documenting a performance. The entire recording chain became part of the instrument. The choice of microphone mattered. Where it was placed mattered. The console mattered. The tape machine mattered. The tape formulation mattered. The level hitting the tape mattered. And the room mattered enormously. A tiny change made at the beginning of that chain could affect everything that followed.
Which brings me back to the two microphones.
The microphones Nick entrusted to me are a pair of Neumann KM88i condenser microphones. For anyone without the peculiar affliction that causes recording engineers to become excited about old German microphones, some explanation is probably necessary. Neumann is one of the great names in microphone manufacturing, and its microphones have been fixtures of professional recording studios for generations. The KM88i was part of the company’s small-diaphragm condenser family and, importantly, was a transistorised microphone with three selectable polar patterns. Rather than having a single fixed pickup pattern, the engineer could select between omnidirectional, cardioid and figure-of-eight operation. In practical terms, that gave an experienced engineer a remarkably adaptable microphone.
And experienced is certainly the word that applies to Jack Clegg. I don’t yet know precisely where these particular microphones travelled with him, what they recorded or which sessions they may have been used on. That distinction matters. It would be tempting to put two and two together and announce that these microphones recorded some famous session simply because Jack owned them. That isn’t how historical provenance works. Unless evidence emerges connecting a particular microphone to a particular recording, the responsible thing is to leave the question open. But we do know something much more tangible. They were his. They were part of the working life — or at the very least the later equipment collection — of a recording engineer who spent decades making records and film scores. And now they have another home in a working recording studio.
By the end of the 1960s, the recording industry Jack had entered was changing almost beyond recognition. Three- and four-track recording was giving way to eight-track and then sixteen-track machines. The studio itself was becoming increasingly creative. Engineers weren’t merely capturing performances; records were being constructed inside the control room. In 1970, Clegg moved into precisely that world when he joined AIR Studios. AIR had been established by George Martin and his partners, and its new Oxford Circus facility represented the emerging generation of independent British recording studios. Clegg arrived from CTS with enormous experience of orchestral and film recording. A 1971 AIR advertisement listed the studio’s engineering team: Bill Price. Jack Clegg. John Punter. Alan Harris. It’s quite a list.
Clegg continued working through this new era and was involved with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” in 1972. Alan Harris later recalled Clegg in particularly glowing terms, regarding him as the finest engineer he had worked with and remembering the remarkable clarity and depth he could achieve in his recordings. Again, there is that same recurring theme. Among the people who actually worked alongside Jack Clegg, his abilities seem to have made an impression. Outside that world, his name largely disappeared.
There are markings and signs of use on Jack’s microphones. I intend to document them carefully — serial numbers, cases, clips, labels and all — because those details may eventually tell us more about where they came from and when Jack acquired them. Perhaps more of their history will emerge. Perhaps it won’t. But there is another source of history considerably more valuable than a serial-number database: Jack’s son. Nick has already very kindly entrusted the microphones to my care. He has also given me something that makes this story considerably more personal: a rare photograph of Jack himself in the studio.
For me, that photograph changes things. Until now, I had been piecing together Jack’s professional life through credits, old trade publications, a recorded interview, studio histories and the recollections of people who worked with him. Suddenly there is the man himself, photographed in the environment where he spent so much of his working life. The photograph and the microphones belong together. One captures Jack behind the scenes in an industry where engineers were rarely the people being photographed. The other consists of the physical tools of that trade, still here decades later.
Jack is stlll alive at this present day at 93 in aged care Bletchley UK. Perhaps this article might find it’s way to Clegg, and I’m rather hoping it might warm the heart and impress his carers. If you worked with Jack at IBC, Decca, CTS or AIR — or remember a session he engineered — I’d love to hear from you. Recording history isn’t only contained in famous photographs, master tapes and gold records. Sometimes it survives in people’s memories. Sometimes it survives in the equipment. And sometimes, quite unexpectedly, it walks through the door of your studio in the form of two old Neumann microphones.
Thanks for reading
Tony
