These are no ordinary reissues. Hutchison's purism as a collector, it turned out, was outstripped by his perfectionism in the studio. Many vinyl reissues are produced cheaply and quickly on contemporary machinery. Hutchison insisted on doing everything as it would have been done half a century ago, but with added perfection. "I want to have the best-sounding records in the world," he says.
Naturally, this wasn't going to come cheap. "The first challenge," he tells me when I visit him at his studio in Notting Hill, London, "was finding and restoring the equipment." A willowy man with long hair and a gratifyingly bushy beard, Hutchison is every inch the obsessive audiophile, and now he has the machinery to match. The EMI reel-to-reel tape recorder on one side of the room, which had to be fully restored, would have been used at Abbey Road to record the Beatles and the Stone
