Bill Armstrong And His Unwavering Passion For Music Recording

"I grew up listening to the radio and would have liked to have played the piano," the man behind one of the Australia's busiest recording studios of the '60s and '70s, Bill Armstrong remembers. "I don't know that was ever a possibility, but I mixed with jazz musicians and they all wanted to hear themselves so I built a cutting machine and a friend of mine built an amplifier for me where I could record onto a disc in my house, and that's when I got involved with recording, cutting a disc onto an acetate, which you could then cut at 78rpm and play back with a regular pickup. That was in the mid-'40s."

Armstrong has literally lived through every development in recording technology. Born in 1929, the year the movies found their voice and silents became talkies courtesy electric recordings, he was still in his teens when he built that disc-cutting machine.

"Though I called it Armstrong Studios it was the rec room in my parents' house. I started doing it professionally with a wire recorder, which preceded tape. The wire was a thousandth of an inch in diameter on a little bobbin, and the sound reproduction was pretty good, and it was portable, though it weighed 25 kilos," he laughs, "but you could go out and record on location, where a disc-cutting machine was quite cumbersome.

"After six years we sold that [EON FM] to Triple M in Sydney for $32 million."

"By 1956, I didn't have a studio but I had equipment that I could go to locations — good mics and good stands and a tape machine — and record. Generally, by and large, in those days, the only studios that existed, in Melbourne anyway, were mainly broadcast studios where they did live broadcasts and recorded programs. They were generally small studios recording for serials for commercial radio. The ABC of course had a large studio, which was a converted church hall, which became Broadcast House, but apart from that there weren't any big studios. They were all makeshift. If they wanted to record an orchestra for programs, they would use a hall or a town hall, something like that, and I did the same. It wasn't until I built my own studio in 1965 that I actually had my own place."

Before he built Armstrong Studios, he worked for W&G Records, initially setting up their disc-cutting room and then their studio, in Batlow Street, North Melbourne. In 1965 he was asked to manage Telefil in St Kilda, at the time the largest commercial recording studio in Melbourne, housed in a converted cinema where he recorded some of the early Bobby & Laurie records, some Lynne Randell hits and Normie Rowe's It Ain't Necessarily So. "And it was after that that I opened up my own studio, in December 1, '65 — so December 1 this year it'll be 50 years ago."

Originally housed in a single-fronted terrace house in Albert Road, South Melbourne, Armstrong's was where The Easybeats recorded the backing track for She's So Fine, Johnny Farnham recorded Sadie and pretty much everyone from Skyhooks to Daddy Cool cut their records. By the time Armstrong moved the studios to a much larger building, a converted butter factory in Bank Street, some 80% of all the hit records being made in Australia were being recorded at Armstrong's.

"By 1956, I didn't have a studio but I had equipment that I could go to locations — good mics and good stands and a tape machine — and record."

In 1974, it became Armstrong Audio Videos (AAV), "and the reason for that," Armstrong explains, "was that Phillip Adams, a friend of mine, and the Managing Director of The Age approached me, having bought a company called Video Tape Centre, just before colour television, with the idea to move the Video Tape Centre into my building and create an audio/video situation.

"But I was still running audio operations for two years and then I left and ran SBS Radio for 11 years in Sydney and Melbourne and then I was one of the licensees who set up EON FM, which is now Triple M in Melbourne, the first commercial FM station to go to air in July 1980. Then after six years we sold that to Triple M in Sydney for $32 million. Then I got back to my love of recording jazz and I've got a jazz label, Bilarm Music.

"And I do a lot of things with Barry Humphries using digital technology to clean up and restore old recordings from the '30s and '40s. So I've done a series of CDs with Barry called So Rare, collections of recordings of famous bands, originally on 78s. The quality of the recordings, made direct-to-disc, was sensational."

At the time of this conversation, Armstrong was preparing to meet Humphries in London in order to seek out original recordings of music of the Weimar Republic period for another So Rare collection.