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studioreport Veale’s long and colourful career
embraces working alongside fellow veteran Ted Fletcher to introduce the (American) concept of self-operating studios a swathe of commercial studios in the ’70s, beginning with Wolverhampton’s Beacon Radio 303 and growing to three years’ worth of installations with 28 other new broadcasters. When asked to name his favourite projects, Veale lists Lennon’s and
and I, on the principles of design. The architects won.” Veale Associates currently employs
around 10 people in its Stevenage HQ. On a typical radio commission, Veale
says there will be “probably three of us: interior designer, architectural technician and myself. The client’s introduced to the team early on to build up a rapport.” The interior designer is important here because “appearance matters”, he says.
Dean Street Studios in Soho is just one of the facilities Veale was instrumental in designing
I think it’s becoming more understood that to produce music it needs a bit of soul, it needs musicians. It’s about a couple of guys getting together and bouncing off each other”
Eddie Veale
Harrison’s private set-ups, Gus Dudgeon’s Mill studio, and an unusual fourth choice: a new base for Carlton Television in the offices of London Weekend Television (now the London Studios) on London’s South Bank. This major undertaking involved the creation of a new transmission centre while incorporating nascent digital technology into the equation. “It was very entrepreneurial, very future-looking and also showed me how to deal with projects when people change their mind!” He remarks how he wishes he’d built
Metropolis in Chiswick. “I met with them in the early stages: we didn’t go ahead together. They’d got a group of architects involved and I think we probably locked horns, the architects
He remains non-partisan when it comes to equipment recommendations: “I quickly discovered if a room was designed specifically for one monitor system and someone brought another one in it might sound rubbish.” Instead, his methodology now is to “sit down with a client to determine what they want and determine whether the space is large enough and how you’re going to deal with acoustic treatments”. Veale says the “heart is being stripped
from local radio” (recently exemplified, perhaps, by the BBC syndicating one centrally-created evening show nationally across its local networks) and, having worked for so many years in radio, this concerns him. But for recording studio design, he is upbeat. “There’ll be a demand for studios… it might be slightly less demand but there’ll still be business there. We see the same amalgamation with television. Music studios… I can easily see a resurgence and there’s a move now where we’ve gone from analogue to digital back to analogue. “I think it’s becoming more understood that to produce music it needs a bit of soul, it needs musicians. It’s about a couple of guys getting together and bouncing off each other.” Veale has worked with so much technology, but insists that we don’t forget that human touch. Now there’s an axiom to live by. n
www.va-studiodesign.com
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