The Shot Jackson album that almost was !

[Basil Henriques]

This Month 34 years ago The Famous Shot Jackson recorded in Big Toms Studio in Castleblayney with another Famous Steel guitar player Basil Henriques

It's not the only time a master tape of an album of mine has gone walkies !

I also produced an album of Donna Darlene at that time. Unfortunately the master tapes of the duet album with Shot Jackson have been lost..Aaaagh..
Che sarà, sarà: Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur, talis vita est !

The Lost and resurrected album story:
In 1989 whilst I was touring with Foster and Allen, the manager of their record company Sen. Donie Cassidy, asked me to record an album of songs of F&A and also other artists on the CMR record label. Donie had spent vast sums of money recording his artists with backings by the Radio Telefis Eireann Concert orchestra and thought it would be a good idea to take me into the studios and using the original multi-track masters, record instrumental versions of the songs.

This we did, and as I was producing the records for Foster & Allen and Louise Morrisey, Tony Stevens and most of Donie's artists, it was left up to me to decide on the mix.The tunes were finished and whilst mixing them I recorded a cassette copy from the desk to give to Donie so he could decide the ones to use and the running order. (I also made a copy of the copy)

Subsequently, the main master and the multitrack masters were lost in a fire, and the only copy that existed was my copy of the original cassette . By this time I no longer had this cassette, I had sent it to my friend Ernie Tough in Aberdeen. I then promptly forgot about the album for the next 12 years, UNTIL, one day in 2003 when Pat and I were rummaging through a box of old cassettes we came across a copy that had been sent to Pat from John Marsden. The tape was a 4th generation copy and quite noisy, but, spurred on by the find, I contacted Ernie and 'Borrowed' his original copy of the copy. Because the original was in such good condition, I've managed to restore it and make a CD master.

[Ken Byng]

There is a moral to that story somewhere. The Shot Jackson / Donna Darlene connection is intriguing, and a real pity that the master tapes are inaccessible. In my humble experience, the price of 1" and 2" tape in the 60's & 70's meant that master tapes that weren't published to disc didn't sit on the shelves too long. They were re-used - degaussed, cleaned up and good to go. What a real pity in this case.

[Basil Henriques]

I THINK I have come up with a way of replicating how the duet album with Shot would have sounded.. More on that after some research..I may be able to overdub/edit and generally sweeten old recordings of Shot, take them to bits and reassemble and play with them. I will need to investigate the copyright implications, but it is possible to do with the technology I have..

In the case of the multi-track of the Shot Jackson album, the studio closed, and all the multi-track tapes were either sold off or left in a garage. No-one knows where any of them went..
The other album master tapes were lost in a studio fire in Moate..