Not fade away
The Rolling Stones' Sixties back catalogue is - at last - about to get a major digital re-release. Robert Webb hears how this huge restoration project succeeded, and the surprises it uncovered

Across the table is Steve Rosenthal, the project's archive co-ordinator. With him is the restoration producer, Jody Klein, who's also the son of Allen Klein, the Stones' former manager and president of ABKCO, which now controls the Decca/London years. "In 1986, when the Stones first came out on CD, everyone was very excited because there were no ticks, no hiss, no pops," says Klein. "But we also lost depth and warmth." ABKCO resisted many requests over the years to polish the Stones. "We didn't feel that the incremental developments in technology warranted the public to go out and purchase these discs again." Until today. Cut from the best-quality masters available, rejuvenated by Sony's Direct Stream Digital process and pressed on to new Super Audio Compact Discs, the Stones' Sixties recordings are, once more, warm and deep. (...)

There must have been some eureka moments. Klein rummages in his bag and pulls out a photograph of a canister label headed "Beggar's Banquet". Rosenthal explains: "One of our team discovered this box in a closet. She took it down, dusted it off and we looked at it." The first-generation master for one of their quarry's seminal recordings had been found. Glancing down the handwritten track listing, I see that "Sympathy for the Devil" was originally titled "The Devil is My Name" and there's a nota bene from the engineer insisting that the distorted guitar sound is "not a fault in the recording, but a trademark of the group".

But the real revelation was in the playing, Rosenthal explains. "It sounded incredible, but it was at a different speed to what we were familiar with." They archived it, ticked their list and didn't speak about it for three days. "We just thought about the enormity of what that meant." To verify the discovery, Rosenthal played the tape against singles lifted from the same master. "Singles, as Andrew Oldham would say, were the gold standard in those days." They also ran it alongside the Godard movie One Plus One, which captured the Stones at work on the album. The two matched, proving that, somehow, Beggar's Banquet was pressed at the wrong speed, and no one realised. How detectable will this be to the average Stones fan? "You'll feel the difference," says Klein, with a twinkle. "It just sounds right now." [read more]