06/06/2021
Trinidadian sound engineer Frank Agarrat is given credit as the man who not only helped to set up the first black-owned recording studio in Europe, The Coach House, but did the incredible work behind Eddy Grant’s smash hit "Electric Avenue."
The long overdue credit came in an article by David Simpson the UK guardian newspaper on “How we made Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue."
This is Agarrat’s story as published:
I came to England from Trinidad as a child. It was so cold when we got off the boat at Southampton that my father wore two coats. I met Eddy through my sister. She was a backing singer and told me that he wanted some help to build a studio. We found an old studio under a pub in north London’s Stamford Hill and used it to set up the Coach House, the first black-owned recording studio in Europe. Then, when Eddy relocated to Barbados, I did the wiring and electronics for Blue Wave, where we did Electric Avenue.
Eddy played every instrument on it. He’d lay down a drum machine track, build up the melody, then take the drum machine off and play real drums in its place. The chorus – “Rock down to Electric Avenue” – suggested cars or motorcycles, so I looped a snare drum roll and distorted it, so it sounded like a revving motorbike.
We recorded at night, when the workmen had stopped and before the studio had been soundproofed. Not that noise was a problem – our only neighbours were monkeys – but we did have problems with machines malfunctioning. The tape would suddenly spew out of the machine for no reason. One night, nothing would work at all. Eventually it turned out that a rat had got in through the air-conditioning and eaten through the wires under the floor. We spent the rest of the night running around the studio trying to catch it.
I was with Eddy in Barbados recently when he told me he was going to visit Electric Avenue. I couldn’t believe it. I never knew it was a real street.”
The full article is here:https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/sep/03/how-we-made-eddy-grant-electric-avenue
