The Guitarist Collection.

GUITCOLThrough the association with Terry Day at Music Maker Publications, we (Terry, myself and Nigel Reveller) prepared the first ‘budget priced’ sampler taking the best Guitar based tracks from all the albums featured on Bridge Recordings through Music Maker. This was a ‘pile em high – sell em cheap’ approach. Unusual for me as up until then I had not considered making a record specifically for the purpose of ‘selling’. The guiding force behind this was Nigel Reveller, the distributor, who felt that the album might encourage sales of the top price albums from which the featured tracks originated.

One new track was recorded for the release. A song I wrote that year called Stranger. Recorded at Dave Mackay’s studio, the musicians were – Ronnie Johnson on guitar, Geoff Dunne on drums, Phil Mulford on bass and vocals by Ken Anselm. The song, Stranger, was always well received at gigs, so I decided to take advantage of the release opportunity by making a good recording of the song to be included on the album.

Chris West, a talented musical all rounder and a friend for many years, was the engineer. The track was recorded at Dave Mackay’s studio in Woldingham, first take and mixed the same day. One thousand pounds all in for musicians and studio. The vocalist – Ken Anselm, unable to find a babysitter for his 11 year old son James, brought him with to the session and James provided the quite excellent ‘taken away’ line on the track.
The packaging design was by Stuart Catterson, and I mastered the album myself at Riverbank
The album was released through Grapevine/PolyGram, and moved over 8,000 pieces to retail.
The song STRANGER received some attention and generated some PRS for me. Other moments on the album include James Litherlands ‘Easiest way to go’ and Ronnie Johnson’s ‘BBHC’. Most of the artists who appeared on the album were also the subject of an interview with me for Music maker Publications.

iTunes STRANGER by Ken Ganpot ft Ronnie Johnson