LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MARTIN BENGE
Our previous Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Richard Lush, and our latest awardee, Martin Benge, both entered the EMI system roughly a year apart. While Lush went straight into Abbey Road, hiding behind a tower of Fairchilds and trying not to erase John Lennon’s vocal takes, Martin Benge began his journey beavering away at the EMI factory in Hayes. In 1962, 18-year olds like Benge didn’t need recording aspirations to work for EMI; it wasn’t just a music company, it was a vast, vertically integrated electronics conglomerate. “They made everything,” recalled Benge. “Pressed the records, made the record players that played them, and the radios and televisions.” Benge embarked on what he thought would be a promising electronics engineering career with the company. He worked his way through a five-year apprenticeship that began with two weeks filing the same metal block down to a square within a couple of thousands of an inch. “It seems far removed from electronics,” said Benge, “but we had to build things, and we had to get our practical metalwork skills up to an acceptable level.” From there, he learnt soldering and circuitry, then started building projects like an ‘over the horizon’ airborne radar for a defence research project. AFTER TWO YEARS, HE MOVED INTO THE AUDIO DEPARTMENT AND STARTED BUILDING REDD.51 TUBE CONSOLES, THE EXACT ONES GEOFF EMERICK AND LUSH WERE USING TO RECORD THE BEATLES, AT THE TIME. EMI had studios in 11 different countries during that era, and all of that equipment came from Hayes, “right down to tape machines, consoles, and some microphones,” said Benge.
In 1965 Benge moved over to the technical department at Abbey Road Studios, where his first two weeks were the studio equivalent of filing a metal block; getting his cable coiling skills up to scratch. “You weren’t allowed to start tinkering around with equipment until you mastered the very basics of the job.”
Unlike todays studios, where, if there is an assistant, they’ll set up the equipment, as well as help operate it. Those two assistant roles were divvied up into the faintly derogatory cohorts of ‘button pushers’ and ‘boffins’. The boffins, like Benge, would pull out the session sheet and go about putting out the mics, wiring them up, patching in all the equipment, checking levels and biasing the tape machines, so when the engineer (and ‘button pushers’ like Lush) arrived they could simply position the mics and be ready
