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"I'm stranded on my own, stranded far from home."
So sang Chris Bailey of Brisbane band The Saints in 1976.
It's a lament that the mixing desk through which this seminal Australian song was recorded, if it could only speak, would be bellowing out at the top of its voice.
As the mixing desk which Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side Of The Moon at Abbey Road goes up for public sale, the quest to locate the desk through which The Saints recorded I'm Stranded has been renewed.
Sometime in the late 1970s Nick Armstrong, an audio engineer and record producer from Tasmania, travelled to Brisbane and bought the 24-channel desk, which was designed and built by Bruce Window Electronics (BWE).
With the help of a mate, Armstrong heaved the BWE console into the back of a rented station wagon, drove it all the way to Hobart and had it installed in his Spectangle Productions recording studio.
"I think it was about $4,000 which was pretty cheap," he said.
"We should have enquired a little further because I heard [later] it had been in a flood."
Armstrong knew nothing of The Saints connection until recently and is not overly bothered about what happened to this old example of analogue electronics.
There are others however who most decidedly are. None more so than The Saints' first producer Mark Moffatt.
Star producer's quest for desk
Moffatt is now a successful record producer in Nashville, but in 1976 he was a 25-year-old guitarist and part-time engineer working at Brisbane's Bruce Window Studios, recording bands and producing commercials.
The year before, he had returned from a stint in the London music scene, meeting guitar idols such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and learning studio-craft from the best.
He was on studio duty in Brisbane the afternoon four young blokes wandered in: "It was The Saints. They booked two hours a couple of days later and came in and recorded."
With Moffatt at the helm of the BWE console, The Saints blasted out I'm Stranded and the B-side track No Time - with Moffatt capturing perfectly vocalist Chris Bailey's sneer and guitarist Ed Kuepper's layers of distortion and windmill right-hand technique.
Gritty and urgent, and released on the band's own label, the single would cause a sensation internationally and win them a three-album contract.
"It's become this seminal record that's in the National Film and Sound Archives Sounds of Australia registry," Moffatt said.
"It just keeps coming up, it never seems to go away. Which is interesting because it's one of those things that wasn't planned or thought through in any way. It just happened one night."
The Saints would release an album the following year, also called I'm Stranded, with Moffatt's original recordings supplemented by eight new tracks, produced to mimic the Bruce Window Studio console sound.
They would go to England and burn brightly before going their separate ways a few years later, enshrined forever as true pioneers of punk who created the template with the sound they achieved during that first recording session with Moffatt and the BWE console.
Iconic piece of equipment still at large
The BWE console would record many bands at the Brisbane studios before Armstrong took it to Hobart, helped by Peter Hutchison, who wired the desk into its new home.
Hutchison, an audio technician and well-known guitarist in the Tasmanian scene, said he had heard the console had even passed through the Hobart offices of the ABC.
"I know Nick sold it to someone. Initially he thought that ABC Training had taken it on board, but I rang a couple of the retired technicians and they said they didn't know anything about it," he said.
A Hobart man, who asked to remain anonymous, told the ABC he helped take offload gear from Spectangle to the tip after Armstrong sold the business - but does not recall dumping an audio desk.
"I would remember if I had seen that," he said.
Moffatt and Hutchison have posted about the BWE console on social media pages around the country, asking for clues as to its whereabouts, to no avail.
"If you're listening, desk, hopefully you'll come out of the shed or small demo studio where you're hiding," Hutchison said.
Moffatt and Hutchison would love to hear from anyone who thinks they know what happened to this outmoded piece of electronic equipment which captured a moment when Australia was in the vanguard of a style and attitude which changed the face of popular music.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, music, hobart-7000, brisbane-4000
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