Five years ago, during a visit to the Hi-Fi News “Heathrow” audio show someone passed along an intriguing tidbit: EMI’s mothballed record pressing plant was back in business on the Hayes-Middlesex campus. Since it was but a short cab ride from the show venue, I paid an unscheduled visit.

What I found did not quite live up to my tingly expectations, though admittedly I hallucinated images of mid-sixties LP production at the storied original EMI plant, which had long since been demolished.

Instead, I was ushered into an unglamorous-looking contemporary corrugated aluminum building, headquarters not of EMI but an outfit called PortalSpaceRecords.

Inside the rubble-strewn facility I found a few forlorn presses operating but compared to what I’d seen at RTI’s humming Camarillo, CA facility a few years before, what I saw at Hayes-Middlesex was anti-climactic to say the least.

That is, until I spent some time with the plant’s manager, Roy Matthews. Mr. Matthews managed the original pressing plant for EMI. What’s more, he helped design and build the presses and the plating facility, which is key to the whole process.

Mr. Matthews was reeled in from retirement by the lure of restarting his beloved machinery and pressing vinyl in the 21st century, something he later told me that he never saw coming.

So while I was happy back then to see vinyl being pressed in Hayes-Middlesex and I was heartened to see Mr. Matthews back doing what he loved, I was disappointed to find it was not by EMI but by an independent company called PortalSpaceRecords in a rubble strewn space owned by some businessmen more interested, it seemed to me, in a tax dodge than in the wonders of vinyl.

Five Years Later!

When I returned this year (2006) I found a much different facility, one that was humming at full capacity. The number of presses in operation had tripled, the plating facility had grown to meet the presses’ demands, orders were being fulfilled, shelves packed with completed orders in the form of archived nickel plated lacquers lined a wall, and near the loading dock I found women slipping heavy vinyl into jackets for an EMI order of 9000 LPs for a reissue of George Harrison’s "Living In The Material World".

I was ushered into Mr. Matthews’s office by an assistant and given a seat next to his desk where I couldn’t help but read two printed out emails, one from Reference Recordings requesting a few examples of the plant’s pressings. So here’s a scoop: Reference is considering returning to the vinyl business! That’s good news indeed, as many of Reference’s all-analog recordings deserve to be heard by a new generation of analog devotees.

Then I noticed a second email from an Australian correspondent, from which I gleaned that Mr. Matthews and PortalSpaceRecords had establishing a vinyl “beachhead” there, helping some Aussies set up a small pressing operation “down under” using spare EMI presses.

When Mr. Matthews greeted me and sat down at his desk, I admitted my wandering eye. He didn’t appear to be upset. In fact, he was eager to fill in the details and that’s how the interview began. Be sure to take the “factory tour” posted elsewhere on the musicangle.com site—M.F.

Roy Matthews: The fellows owning this factory had contacts in Australia, saw a need there, I don’t think there are any manufacturers there now of vinyl, so we decided to get in the market, send the presses and the service equipment, and very fortunately, a chap who used to work for me many years ago when I was running (the EMI pressing plant), and as a young man I got him a job in the Australian plant, and we contacted him again, and he came, and he knew the press, had a lot to do with setting them up and he’s helped set this (Australian) plant up and it’s got off to a very good start.

Michael Fremer: And it’s probably the last thing he ever thought was going to happen!

RM: Absolutely! Absolutely! They thought it was all done and finished, as I did, I suppose.

MF: You know it’s like the EMT turntable, you know it?

RM: Yes, yes.

MF: So the EMT turntable…the company just put the arm back into production, the famous “Banana” arm…

RM: Yes, yes.

MF: And they found the gentleman who designed it and he had all the original tooling and he’s 85 and he never expected this and there’s a demand for it because it’s a legendary thing.