{"id":576733,"date":"2025-11-17T19:03:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T19:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/576733\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T19:03:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T19:03:42","slug":"exploring-chris-hewitts-mind-blowing-music-memorabilia-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/576733\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Chris Hewitts’ mind blowing music memorabilia collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Chris Hewitt passes me an unattached old-fashioned microphone that looks like a steel ice cream cone. It\u2019s surprisingly heavy. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the microphones the Beatles used at Shea Stadium.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris is a \u2018let\u2019s do the show right here\u2019 kind of guy. The 71-year-old from Rochdale is a Manchester music catalyst<\/a> who escapes the notice of the cool media gatekeepers fixated on the city\u2019s famous figures (you know who they are).<\/p>\n

He embodies the under-reported role of North Manchester\u2019s boroughs on the music scene, being the driving force behind the 1976 Deeply Vale free festival, which, for four years running, brought together the hippy and punk tribes in a picturesque valley near Bury.<\/p>\n

Who is Chris Hewitt?<\/p>\n

\"\"Chris Hewitt Photo credit: Andy Spinoza<\/p>\n

\u201cI was asked to leave grammar school in Oldham. They said my education would be better off at a more liberal establishment. So I went to Rochdale College.\u201d What did he study? \u201cPromoting bands,\u201d he wisecracked. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople like Screaming Warthog and the Pink Fairies. All the bands we read about in Oz or International Times,\u201d he said, citing the underground magazines that stuck it to The Man back in the late 60s\/early 70s. \u201cI definitely come from the counterculture. I don\u2019t like rock stars going to the Palace to get their OBE.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also assembled the sound system that united Rastas and punks at the 1978 Rock Against Racism festival at Alexandra Park, Moss Side<\/a>, and he joined Joy Division producer Martin Hannett at the mixing desk for his pioneering adventures in sound.<\/p>\n

Chris is not only an unsung mainspring of modern pop culture in Greater Manchester. He is an undisputed expert on live and recording music technology, having written four self-published books on the history of sound systems and two on Hannett, the aural explorer who told Joy Division\u2019s drummer to \u201cmake it sound more purple\u201d and recorded the lift in motion at Stockport\u2019s Strawberry Studios<\/a>.<\/p>\n

None of that is the reason fifty or so men of a certain age, and a few women, known as \u2018gear heads\u2019, are gathered at a cavernous industrial unit close to the M66 in Bury. They simply want to go back in time and stand, like me, in a faithful, small-scale recreation of Sun Studio in Memphis, USA.<\/p>\n

What does Chris have in his collection?<\/p>\n

\"\"Recording equipment from Abbey Road Photo credit: Andy Spinoza<\/p>\n

\u201cElvis sang into that mic, Frank Sinatra too,\u201d said Chris of a classic \u201950s stand-and-mic set-up. Black and white photos of Sun recording stars like Eddie Cochrane, BB King and Howlin\u2019 Wolf crowd the walls.<\/p>\n

Walk through an internal door and you are suddenly in Abbey Road studio. It all feels oddly familiar; the battleship grey metal boxes housing the equipment is recognisable from countless images of the Beatles in the legendary recording location in St John\u2019s Wood, London.<\/p>\n

Amplifiers, mixers, reel-to-reel tape recorders with names like RCA, Altec and Echocard surround us. The VOX amps are among his Beatles\u2019 gear. This is the kit the band went back to time and again in the 1960s, leading \u2018the British invasion\u2019 into the US mainstream culture and making regional English accents unfeasibly fashionable. <\/p>\n

Shea Stadium in Los Angeles was a highlight of their early US tours, when no matter how loudly they sang into the mic I have in my hand, it was drowned out by 55,000 screaming fans.<\/p>\n

\"\"Beatles amps from their 1969 London rooftop show \u2013 Photo credit: Andy Spinoza<\/p>\n

For anyone who thinks these may be clever fakes, Chris provides rock-hard provenance. Musicians like Bobby Elliott of Manchester\u2019s Hollies and the Beatles\u2019 George Harrison are pictured with the actual boxes of tricks in front of you.<\/p>\n

There is a photo of John Lennon with the \u201cTittenhurst DBX compressor\u201d used on the
electric guitar sound on Imagine; the video is better remembered for Lennon\u2019s white
grand piano at his Tittenhurst Park home. This stuff has an under-the-radar charisma. <\/p>\n

No matter how many retro dials, knobs and sliders it has, a metal box can never be as glamorous as a groovy guitar or a macho drum kit. Chris doesn\u2019t mind. All the fashionable focus on artist memorabilia, evidenced by the BBC\u2019s Antique Roadshow, means Chris can hoover up the gear that studios chuck out when they upgrade.<\/p>\n

Strawberry Studios owner Zeb White<\/p>\n

Chris paid \u00a370,000 for the Sun studio collection. When Strawberry Studios owner Zeb White died, Chris acquired all its assets at auction, including a bespoke drum kit assembled for Ringo Starr. Goodness knows what he paid for David Bowie\u2019s gold mic used on his Ziggy Stardust tour and Top of the Pops, but he nods when I say it must be worth at least \u00a3100,000. The collection\u2019s total value must easily be in the millions.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Chris\u2019 favourite piece in the collection?<\/p>\n

\"\"Pink Floyd 1971 Live at Pompeii mixing desk Photo credit: Andy Spinoza<\/p>\n

His favourite piece is clearly the mixing desk used by Pink Floyd for its 1971 concert movie Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, not just because the group\u2019s sound engineers, in Chris\u2019s words, \u201cwere responsible for shaping the modern PA system,\u201d but because having bought the original shell, he realised he could bring it back to life. His rebuilt 28-channel with six-channel quadrophonic desk works \u2013 it was recently used live by tribute act Dark Side at a show in Wigan.<\/p>\n

Not only can Chris explain why early British rock bands sounded rubbish live in the States (the UK standard voltage being 240 volts, needing to convert to America\u2019s 110 volts), he has some cracking stories. \u201cFlight cases on tour were waived through air freight customs, so the band and Howard Marks used them to bring his drugs in,\u201d he said. \u201cA bass cabinet was left behind at Montreal airport and a sniffer dog ended all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hewitt motherlode resides in deepest Cheshire, where several tennis court-sized units for farm equipment instead contain eye-popping quantities of old amp cabinets, flight cases, trailers and some motor vehicles, like a red 1970s long wheelbase Ford Transit van he hires out to period films.<\/p>\n

How does he know there aren\u2019t other rival collections? \u201cThe film companies keep calling.\u201d The movie biopics of Freddie Mercury, Morrissey and Elton John came to his collection to get their scenes right. \u201cThere were so many music films that were awful, using any old stuff. Bohemian Rhapsody was the first to really care about using the gear that Queen actually used.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t fool the gear-heads<\/p>\n

\"\"The Gear Heads Photo Credit Rick X<\/p>\n

Now authenticity is critical. \u201cGear heads can tell,\u201d he said. For the making of Pistol, the Danny Boyle-directed series for Disney+ about the Sex Pistols, Chris recreated two studios and eleven different concerts. On set, he had to advise the young art directors to replace certain bits that were just not around in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

He was active in that depressed, angry decade, after all. He managed Rochdale folk rockers Tractor, who set up a studio in Heywood with their advance from BBC DJ John Peel\u2019s Dandelion label. That led to Cargo Studios in Rochdale, where Chris was approached by the Tony Wilson<\/a> and Rob Gretton, of then fledgling label Factory: \u201cJoy Division recorded at Cargo and I built all theirs, and early New Order\u2019s stage gear. You\u2019re always on that na\u00efve promise that if you do it cheap, they say \u2018when we make it big, you\u2019ll get all our work\u2019, which of course they never did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could the collection find a permanent home in Manchester?<\/p>\n

Wilson is often cited as a guiding star by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and Chris tells me he is trying to interest Mayor Andy Burnham\u2019s people in finding a permanent home for the collection.<\/p>\n

I get the feeling it\u2019s hard for the hippy-punk veteran, who calls a spade a shovel, to talk the language of civil servants charged with cultural production strategies for the digital age. Yet it would seem daft if Manchester\u2019s visitor destination bosses ignore Chris and his collection.<\/p>\n

It has got global gear-head appeal. He recreated the Live Aid scene in Bohemian Rhapsody with the kit used by Queen at Wembley Stadium, and Pink Floyd\u2019s Nick Mason enjoys an annual reunion with his mixing desk for an event at his home. <\/p>\n

People travel the world for this kind of thing; look at the global brand that is the Hard Rock
Caf\u00e9, \u201creplica guitars, not authentic,\u201d snorts Chris. <\/p>\n

\"\"BBC 6 Presenter Mark Ratcliffe Photo credit: Chris Hewitt<\/p>\n

BBC 6 music presenter Mark Radcliffe was at Chris\u2019s open day. He said: \u201cIt\u2019s incredible that the greatest private collection in the world is in a lock-up in Bury. I genuinely think it\u2019s such an important collection; it would bring people to Manchester. <\/p>\n

It would be nice to see all this in a proper museum somewhere. I think people would love to see this laid out in the city centre or the outskirts.\u201d <\/p>\n

The day after my visit to the Bury drop-in day, the American country digital chart announced the first number one by an AI-generated artist. Breaking Rust sounds gruesome to me, but personal taste aside, it brings into sharp focus that Chris\u2019s bulky metal boxes are the physical remains of our shared pop culture\u2019s means of production.<\/p>\n

Today, music is made in the digital ether, often even without using any instruments. Large Learning Model may sound like a Factory band, but it\u2019s the AI training process that enables the hoovering up of music-making, something human beings have loved to do since the start of time. <\/p>\n

Will new generations lose interest in the pop culture that changed lives and challenged conventions? Chris Hewitt believes not. He has faith these old cabinets and cases with their knobs and faders exude a magnetic nostalgia, that of the dying analogue age. \u201cMark Radcliffe saw that John Lennon compressor. He said to me, \u2018So Phil Spector and John Lennon have touched this dial, can I touch it, can I get some magic out of it?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Mark, you\u2019re an educated man, but it still rocks your boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Find out more about Chris Hewitt\u2019s collection<\/p>\n

You can find out more about Chris Hewitt\u2019s musical collection by clicking here<\/a><\/p>\n

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