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Gary: There's been quite a few people involved over the years and of course the availability of
equipment is far different to how it was. John R. T. Davies was one of the first people to be doing this
sort of thing or recognised at doing this sort of thing. I think he did it for some of the majors too, but
the way that he did it was I wouldn't say Heath
Robinson by any means, but he understood that
masters had been cut by different sized styluses

and all this kind of thing and he sort of worked
accordingly. I mean I heard one great story about
him, I won't spend too much time on this, but I
think it needs to be mentioned, I think it was a
Louis Armstrong 78, and it was extremely rare

if not an unknown copy, something like that and
it was in pristine condition other than it had
something like a half an inch bite out of the limb
of the 78 and what he did was he had apparently
some sort of bits of shellac from 78s that had
seen better days and he ground them up into like
a shellac paste and he had all sorts of different

turntables and these turntables they were all
angled, they weren't for playing the records,
they were for working on 78s, so the thing would
angle. So he got a piece of copper wire and he melted the wire into the rim of the 78, so it created like
a band and then he filled it with this 78 paste or compound that he'd made and then he went backwards

and forwards with a needle and bridged the grooves so that it played right from the beginning. Of
course, when it went over the compound, it would just be like a music-less sort of sound, but
nevertheless, it made it so that pretty much all of the 78 could be played. He was an absolute wizard,
but in more recent years now, it's all to do with software and very very sophisticated software too. So
there's been quite a few people involved both in Vienna and over in the UK. I do quite a bit of it myself.

BiTS: Tell me what you've got on the stocks at the moment in Document? I gather from Gillian that
you have been working on Christmas stuff, but is there anything special that you've got on the stocks?

Gary: The one that I'm working on and I've been working on for a fair old long time, a lot of the more
recent weeks and months, as you probably understand has been the documentary that we did of Sam
Charters. The film and CDs, ‘Searching for Secret Heroes’ and that took a lot of time. Off and on it was

a huge project and it was just released in April, and we've been very surprised and pleased by the
reaction to it, both by the reviewers and by people emailing us who have bought it. It's certainly gone
far far better than I expected. I mean what we tend to do, we very rarely look at something and think
let's do this, it will make our fortune. It's a non-starter of a thought and that was never how Document
was intended to be. It's a heritage label. It's a historic reissue label and the idea that Johnny had was
to make as much, if not all of it, available.

BiTS: It's historic because very often when I introduce stuff that you have produced on my radio shows,
I refer to them as historical documents, which I believe they are.

Gary: Yes, and so I mean one of the first things that I did and this was before I got involved with
Document and Johnny, I was reviewing for a magazine and the first thing they gave me was a couple

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