Mike Vernon - Bring it Back Home (Blue Horizon UK 1971)

Size: 142 MB
Bitrate: 320
mp3
Ripped by: ChrisGoesRock
Artwork Included
Source: Japan 24-Bit Remaster

Mike Vernon produced some of the greatest blues records of all time. A full decade after retiring, he's back in the studio with some of the British blues scene's brightest lights.

Mention the name Mike Vernon to any self‑respecting blues fan, and you can guarantee that it won't be long before said fan is reeling off the names of classic records he made as a producer during the late‑'60s British blues boom. As well as manning the helm for many of John Mayall's recordings — including the groundbreaking 1966 album Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton — Vernon produced numerous other Brit blues artists including Chicken Shack, Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After, and US blues stars including Otis Spann, Champion Jack Dupree and Eddie Boyd also recorded albums with Mike, for his legendary Blue Horizon label.

Michael William Hugh "Mike" Vernon (born 20 November 1944) is an English music executive studio owner, and record producer from Harrow, Middlesex. He produced albums for British blues artists and groups in the 1960s, working with the Bluesbreakers, David Bowie, Duster Bennett, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, Climax Blues Band, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, John Mayall, Christine McVie and Ten Years After amongst others.

Vernon is best known as founder of the blues record label, Blue Horizon. He worked at Decca Records starting in 1963. He served as producer for the Mayall-Clapton collaboration Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966).

In 1973 Sire Records,(SAS 7410) Vernon released a solo album, Moment of Madness. He was also a member of Olympic Runners (1974–1979) and acted as producer for them. He was a producer and member of Rocky Sharpe and the Replays (1979–1983). With the Replays he sang bass under the psudonym of Eric Rondo. He founded the Indigo and Code Blue record labels in the 1990s.

Vernon came out of retirement to produce Dani Wilde's album Shine, and the second album by the British blues prodigy, Oli Brown. Brown's album entitled Heads I Win, Tails You Lose was released in March 2010.

In October 2013, Vernon was rewarded with a BASCA Gold Badge Award, in recognition of his unique contribution to music.

On 7 September 2018, Vernon's first album on Manhaton Records, Beyond The Blues Horizon, was released. It featured twelve tracks, including nine new self-penned originals, and three covers from the catalogues of Brook Benton, Mose Allison and Clarence "Frogman" Henry. The release was supported by a European tour under the billing of 'Mike Vernon & The Mighty Combo'. Vernon's band, The Mighty Combo, consisted of Kid Carlos (guitar), Ian Jennings (upright bass), Matt Little (keyboards), Paul Tasker (saxophone) and Mike Hellier (drums).

Blue Horizon Records was a British blues independent record label, founded by Mike Vernon and Neil Slaven in 1965, as an adjunct to their fanzine, R&B Monthly, and was the foremost label at the time of the British blues boom in the mid to late 1960s.

Blue Horizon's first release was a 45 rpm single by Hubert Sumlin, then working as Howlin' Wolf's guitarist. Other releases soon followed on the Outasite and Purdah labels, the latter of which released just four 7" singles; including "Flapjacks" by Stone's Masonry (featuring Martin Stone, later to join Savoy Brown and Mighty Baby); and another by John Mayall and Eric Clapton "Bernard Jenkins", and "Lonely Years". Only 99 copies of each are thought to have been pressed - limited originally to avoid purchase tax - although it has also been said that the number was as high as 1000.

45 rpm releases continued on the Blue Horizon label, generally reissues of rare and hard-to-find singles from a handful of American blues musicians, although two releases — one by guitarist J.B. Lenoir, and another, by Champion Jack Dupree and British guitarist Tony "T.S" McPhee — presented new material. Blue Horizon's first LP was by one-man band Doctor Ross, recorded in a London hotel room while he was on tour with the 1965 American Folk Blues Festival. 

A world-wide licensing and distribution deal with CBS, reached late in 1967, heralded the glory years of the label. Starting with two 7" singles with combined CBS/Blue Horizon stamps featuring Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and Aynsley Dunbar 's Retaliation, there followed a string of singles and albums by both British and American blues artists, both licensed and newly recorded. Some releases featured Mike Vernon produced recordings of US artists such as Otis Spann and Champion Jack Dupree, backed by British blues players including Peter Green, Rory Gallagher, Paul Kossoff, Stan Webb and Pete Wingfield. Other UK artists signed to the label included Chicken Shack, Duster Bennett, Key Largo, Gordon Smith, Jellybread and Christine Perfect (later to be Christine McVie).

The label produced chart hit singles for Fleetwood Mac "Need Your Love So Bad" "Black Magic Woman" and the number 1 "Albatross" and Chicken Shack 's "I'd Rather Go Blind" and a string of albums in imaginative sleeves mostly designed by Terence Ibbott. The distinctive blue label singles eventually gave way to red and then no-centre white labels as the blues boom died away, although further chart success was had with Dutch band Focus - "Hocus Pocus" reaching the UK top 20. The label ceased production in the early 1970s but all of its titles are collectible today. Later vinyl re-releases by Sire Records in the US kept interest alive but CD reissues were limited until Vernon himself re-emerged in the 21st century to remaster some of the material.

In 2010, it was reported that the label would be reactivated by Seymour Stein and Richard Gottehrer, whom with Mike and Richard Vernon were the US and UK directors of Blue Horizon Records, although it would not have access to the original catalogue - in 2012 Tank Full Of Blues by Dion was issued.

On 12 June 2012, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Cerys Matthews' Blue Horizon a documentary about Blue Horizon Records.

The label was lampooned by The Liverpool Scene with their song "I've Got These Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, John Mayall Can't Fail Blues".

Blue Horizon Records was also an independent label set up by Josie Wilson in Seattle, Washington in 1959-60 to promote The Ventures first recordings, and later some instrumental recordings by The Marksmen.

Where It All Started:
Mike Vernon fell in love with music at a very early age and was soon "sponging up” all the rhythm & blues, rock & roll and blues tracks he could find. He began working for Decca Records in 1962 while he was still in his teens.

"I didn't really have [a job description] in those days,” says Mike. "I suppose it was what you'd now call a gofer — 'Make the tea, go for this, go for that, take this up to the studio' — and that was about as far as it went. It was a stuffy old place, full of stuffy old people, and I just felt that it needed an injection. I was far too young to ever say such a thing, but I just felt that there would come a time where Decca would become part of the real world, and I'd like to think, actually, that I did have some major part in that, along with my immediate boss, Hugh Mendl, who gave me enough rope to hang myself 10 times — put it that way!”

It was Mike Vernon's obsession with the budding London blues scene that helped him develop into one of Decca's youngest record producers.

"I just took opportunities,” he explains. "I was such a blues freak, and I was always out at night in London at any one of about half a dozen clubs, listening to the Yardbirds and so forth, and that's how I got to meet Eric Clapton in the first place. I used to go see John Mayall at the Flamingo and we became known to each other and that's really how John Mayall got the renewed deal at Decca… I went to Hugh Mendl and said, 'We need to pay some attention to John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, especially now he's got this young ex‑Yardbirds guitar player, Eric Clapton, who's turning the blues scene completely upside down. He's going to be a major force as a guitar player in the future. We need to nab this band while we've got the chance.' And he said, 'If you say so, go ahead and do it!' so we negotiated the deal. I got involved as producer immediately, and that was really how it all started.”

Beano:
Mike Vernon tells us about the challenges he had while recording John Mayall's classic 1966 Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton LP, fondly known as the 'Beano album', due to the fact that Eric Clapton was snapped reading a copy of the famed kids' comic on the sleeve.

"The whole plan was to make that record as live‑sounding as we possibly could, and in those days that was not easy, because there were so many restrictions in terms of the way people used to do things,” says Mike. "Everything was always, 'Well, you must do it this way, you must do it that way, you must always have the microphone only so far from the actual cone of the amplifier and the amplifier must only be turned up to three or four for the optimum sound reproduction!'

"Clapton had said, 'This is going to be your biggest challenge, recording my sound!' We didn't realise how big a challenge it was going to be but, thank God, we had a young engineer who became a very famous producer, Gus Dudgeon, who was ready for any challenge whatsoever. Sadly, he's no longer with us [Dudgeon died in a road accident in 2002], but I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all! But he dealt with it in inimitable style, and after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked. I think all the solos, with the possible exception of 'Stepping Out', were done live. You can actually tell they were, because the drums suffer as a result of it. There was an enormous amount of guitar on the drums. The studio wasn't very big — it was big enough, but nobody had had to deal with a band making that kind of noise.”

In 1968, just two years after the great success of the 'Beano' record, Mike Vernon left Decca and went independent. The move was largely a result of the fact that Vernon's cult Blue Horizon label — upon which he'd been releasing small‑run blues recordings since the mid‑'60s — had gained such a great reputation on the British blues scene.

"It just sort of snowballed, to the point where Peter Green was going to leave John Mayall and form his own band and he said to me, 'I want you to record our records and I want them out on Blue Horizon. I don't mind if we're with Decca, but I don't want it on any other label but Blue Horizon,'” explains Vernon. "I did the very first demos with what would become Fleetwood Mac, and they got offered to Decca, and they weren't rejected, but they wouldn't put the record out on the Blue Horizon label… so we offered it to CBS and CBS took it and took the label identity as well. But once that record came out and was something of a success, I got the dreaded phone call from the seventh floor at Decca, got called in and was told, 'You can't produce records for other record companies!' I said, 'Well, I did offer it to you and you rejected it, so I took it to someone else'. And they said, 'OK, fair enough, but you can't do these two things at once, so you either have to resign or we'll fire you!' So I said, 'Right, I resign as of now,' went away, and about three weeks later I came back and signed an independent production deal with Decca, and that's how I continued on as an independent producer for Decca… and other companies.”

The rest, as they say, is history, and Mike Vernon spent the next few years as an independent producer, pioneering one classic blues record after another. After the blues-boom bubble burst at the beginning of the '70s, Vernon started a recording studio in Chipping Norton with his brother, Richard, which continued to be a successful enterprise through to its closure in the late '90s, just a few years prior to Mike's initial retirement.

Band members on the Album:
★ Paul Butler - Guitar
★ Rory Gallagher - Guitar
★ Laurence Garman - Harmonica
★ Richie Hayward - Guitar
★ Paul Kossoff - Guitar
★ Kenny Lamb - Drums
★ Dick Parry - Saxophone
★ Jimmy Reed - Composer
★ Mike Vernon - Harmonica, Percussion, Primary Artist, Vocals
★ Pete Wingfield - Keyboards

01.Let`s Try It Again  04:26
02.Move Away  04:16
03.Mississippi Joe  03:58
04.Brown Alligator  11:46
05.Come Back Baby  02:05
06.War Pains  03:46
07.Dark Road Blues  03:25
08.(She Said) She Didn`t Have Time  05:56
09.Ain`t That Lovin` You Baby  03:11
10.My Say Blues  05:56

1. Mike
or
2. Mike
or
3. Mike