Dame Clara, Brittle Shellac, and My Dad’s “Permanent” Retirement

Digging through the shelves again of my Dad's CD collection has turned up another jewel from the Nimbus Records Prima Voce series: the legendary contralto Dame Clara Butt, with recordings spanning 1909 to 1930.

If you’ve ever heard Clara Butt, you know she didn’t just sing notes; she shook floorboards. Her deep, resonant register possessed enough low-end rumble to register on nearby seismographs. But back in the late 1980s, the folks at Nimbus had a rather pressing anxiety: historic 78 rpm discs were brittle, deteriorating, and very much approaching their natural “end of life.” If someone didn’t capture the magic embedded in those fragile grooves soon, a monumental chunk of acoustic history would simply crumble away into dust.

Enter my father, stage left.

For those of you relatively new to my blogs, a quick bit of lore: my dad was a BBC sound engineer through and through. When his retirement finally arrived, he made a solemn, iron-clad declaration to the entire family: he was hanging up his headphones for good and would never, under any circumstances, work again. He was going to put his feet up, potter about, and leave decibels to the next generation.

That resolute vow lasted right up until Nimbus Records came knocking with a project that was pure catnip to an old-school sound man.

They were setting out to transfer fragile 78s onto sparkling new compact discs, and they needed expert advice on how to breathe acoustic life back into them. The temptation was simply too much for a retired engineer's willpower. Off he went to Monmouth to inspect their giant acoustic horns and lend an ear, utterly blowing his own vow of total indolence out of the water in the name of a brilliant passion project.

Looking at this Dame Clara disc sitting on my desk, it’s not just a masterclass in early vocal power rescued from the brink of extinction, it’s also a monument to the total failure of my dad’s retirement plans. And true to form for a man of absolute principle, he didn’t even demand a cheeky consulting freebie: he went straight to the counter and bought his own copy with his own money, just to have Dame Clara’s ground-shaking tones safely preserved in the collection.