VOX Amplification Ltd.

I always compare it to music because that's where it all started.

The creativity to a very young age was using a Roland keyboard through a Vox wah-wah pedal and an old Vox amp that was my brother's.

I blew up the vox pedal because I put too much through it with an echo pet you know what's one of them you couldn't cuddle it but it was a lovely lovely piece of equipment it was a massive reverb box if you smashed it on the side with your hand you got this thundering clash of reverb so you could be playing some funky keys and giving a whack and you'd get this thunder like keyboard sound that had burst through i digress massively from what i was looking at with rowan oh now because i've wandered on jabbering i'll describe now what i'm seeing we've lost the sky big pano lots of red berries three oak trees and an early one just at the back which reminds me need to talk about this hold on i'm just spinning the mic round there's a tree i found here its leaves puzzled me and for the life of me i thought i can't i did spend many many a time in a book over the past couple of weeks it might be longer actually might be a month when i first spotted it thinking what is that what am i looking at and now then got to find it was my plants here we go are you ready for this I still can't believe it and it has got the berries on now Swedish white beam any of you out there answers down below Swedish white beam tree beautiful it's not very big but it's all it's lovely and the leaves are very different listen to the sound of this little tweeter where's he gone Oh, he's gone over the top of my head.

Oh, there's two of them.

Exactly.

Um, I asked Ken, "You worked on that session," and he was really proud of saying, "Oh yeah, I took the piano track down into the room, put a Vox amp on the floor," and I went, oh, the mid-range boost.

MRB is what it's called, and it's like a, a filter that boosts low, middle, and high frequencies, and he was musically playing the knob as they recorded it through the amp, and I was like, "Wow, there's my question answered." Now-

From the guy.

It sounds as though they just showed up in the studio, plugged in, turned the amps all the way up, and, o- an, an interesting thing about it is that The Velvet Underground got a sponsorship deal, which, you know, like The Beatles had a sponsorship deal and The Monkees did.

Well, The Velvet Underground got a sponsorship deal from Vox Guitars and Amplifiers.

So they had the state-of-the-art amplifiers that could go louder than anyone else's.

They show up and turn up their amps, and it's, it's all, it's distorting, it's...

And then there's like a Hiwatt, which is just its own thing.

And then there's a Vox, which, you know, Orange and Matchless, those are versions of Vox, you know, based off Vox amps.

But then a Rickenbacker, it's like, it's just a fucking Rickenbacker.

You know, there's no real... you know, thing to compare it to.

You mentioned the Matchless.

I don't know if you're aware that Matchless basically came in existence because I kept... begging Mark Sampson, who was my Vox amp repairman at the time,

I

kept begging him to build me an amp that was not 30 years old, but still sounded like an AC-30.

He said, I don't have two AC30s, but I have this other one that has the same power section as an AC30, but it's a solid state front end.

And that was called a 730.

So it was one of the seven series Vox that came between the all tube and the all solid state in England.

Only built in 1966.

Influenced and inspired.

And, uh, you know, it was around about the time of Raise that I've, you know, got a reverb pedal and, uh, started playing a Jazzmaster through a Vox amp.

And that, you know, that kind of changed our sound a bit.

So, I mean, I'd say that, you know, by the second single we were kind of, yeah, we were kind of influenced by our surroundings somewhat.

What equipment would do that? And so years later, I meet Ken Scott and I asked him, you made that record.

He goes, oh, that's me on the floor of the studio running the piano track through a Vox amplifier.

The mid-range boost switch.

I know about that.