A West London hotel cellar was housing 13 tapes of Bob Marley and the Wailers to no ones knowledge. These tapes have finally been found and most have been transferred into digital format.
As reported by noisey, the 13 reel-to-reel analog master tapes were found in boxes inside the hotel basement in terrible condition. A man by the name of Joe Gatt recovered the tapes from a friend who was doing a building refuse clearance that included some discarded two-inch tapes from the 1970s, he told the Guardian. “I couldn’t just stand by and let these objects, damaged or not, be destroyed so I asked him not to throw them away.”
Gatt then took the tapes over to a business partner named Louis Hoover who then passed the tapes over to a sound technician specialist named Martin Nichols of White House studios in Weston-super-Mare.
Nichols then explains to the Guardian, “They really were in such an appalling condition they should have been binned, but I spent hours on hours, inch by inch, painstakingly cleaning all the gunge off until they were ready for a process called ‘baking’, to allow them to be played safely.”
From Nichols’ hard work came 10 out of the 13 restored live recordings of concerts in London and Paris between 1974 and 1978. The recordings include hits like “No Woman No Cry,” “Jammin,” “Exodus” and “I Shot the Sheriff.”
There is no word on when these recording will be available to the public.
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