Three by Gus Dudgeon

The Classical Ethos


"The classical engineers at Decca had a bit of a snobby attitude towards the pop guys, but then I started doing a few classical things — not engineering but editing — and then I found out that they get up to just as many things as the pop guys do, they just don't do it in quite such a blatant way," laughs Gus Dudgeon. "I did about four or five days' editing on a big classical project, a version of Wagner's Ring cycle, and I was putting in sections that were a quarter of a bar long, on analogue tape. The scary part was that in the pop department we used a block to cut the tape — not the classical guys, though. It had to be done with a pair of brass scissors, so you had to get the angle of the cut just right! You had to wear white cotton gloves, and after you'd done the join, you then had to dust it with chalk. By the time I'd finished, I probably did about 50 or 60 edits in the course of those four or five days, and when you played the tape it looked like a zebra crossing going past! Brown, white, brown, white, a long bit of brown, then white again... It was ridiculous. Their cheating was just as bad as ours, and I've been a bit more relaxed about the whole classical ethos ever since!"