You probably think I’m a bit of an opportunist. Well I don’t mind if you do, because I am. Anyone who wants to be in business has to be.

In the old days I thought: ‘Well, here is the Marino Marini Quartet, walking around with all the bouquets and the honours because of that lovely echo sound, but no one can do it live’. Hence the Copicat.

When I went to a gig, you could never hear the singers, so I hunted for months, probably years, to find a way of getting a sound system like Hitler had in Germany at the Nuremberg rallies. I figured that if he could do it, so could I, but in those days the only way was to find either two Hiwatts or two Marshalls and lash them together.
This was a disaster of course – one valve amplifier driving another valve amplifier and you’re looking for trouble, endless trouble too.

When the Byrds came over for their first tour, around 1965, I was offered the job of providing the PA for them. So I gathered together all the guitar amplifiers I had: some 50 and 60-Watt transistor and valve guitar amps. But singing through a guitar amplifier is as bad as playing a guitar through a PA column, you can’t hear what they’re singing. You need flat response for vocals.

I blew ten amps at the Byrds gig. It was commercial suicide, an absolute disaster. After the final show, Roger McGuinn said to me: “Charlie, don’t ask me to endorse your products because I’ve never heard such a rotten PA in my life. But I’ll do all I can because you’ve been so helpful and tried so hard”. And we had tried very hard. Every time they had a gig I was there to try out my latest disaster.

This was the same type of PA they were using for festivals, which in those days were mainly promoted by Harold Pemberton of the Marquee Club. He used to run a jazz festival at Windsor every year, with Chris Barber, the trombonist, and various jazz groups. He used to get an audience of about a hundred or so, but it wasn’t really a festival. Well, not what I had in mind anyway.

I thought, I’m going to do a festival. I’d always wanted to do one, but I couldn’t find a way of putting it into action. Not that I’m very technical, I had boffins, but they didn’t come up with the goodies. I had three of them, in fact, in the factory, but they couldn’t figure it out. I had better luck with my French agent, who used to sell my Copicats in France and my Belgian agent – some very clever people, very sharp. So I talked it over and borrowed a couple of their ideas.

At the time of my soiree to Belgium, they’d just brought out the RCA transformerless circuit. My amps were 70 Watts into eight Ohms, so I told one of my boffins he had to get me 90 Watts into four Ohms. And he did have to. When you connect two amplifiers together without the transformers, it leaves you with a disaster. One will blow the other – if you’ve got a train of ten, you’ll blow the whole bloody lot. That wasn’t common knowledge then because nobody had done it.

One of my boffins, Norman Sergeant, was already working on a guitar amplifier using the RCA circuit so I asked him what would happen if I connected two up together. He said: “Yeah, that’ll be all right,” so as soon as he’d finished it, that’s what I did. They worked together perfectly. We had created the SL100, the first true slave amp.
I live in Norwood in South London, as I did then, and in West Norwood was a firm that made speakers called Tannoy. So, I went down to the workshop and asked if I could hire a couple of the big four-by-12 columns that Tannoy used for its PA. Tannoy was the public address king and used to do the speeches in Westminster Hall, but this was different, this was rock groups. They were up against some very powerful backing gear and some very particular singers. Auther Brown was all the rage at the time. His band was called The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. I made him one of my first PA sets, it was 300 Watts and he thought I was bloody magic – just what I needed in my old age.
Tannoy didn’t really drive its speakers, it only had an amplifier of 80 Watts, but the speakers looked good so I hired a pair of them. That’s when I heard the difference between guitar speakers mounted in a column and flat response speakers mounted in a column. Enormous difference. Then I knew the way to go.

I put the cart before the horse, I freely admit, but one of my sound engineers was a guy called John Thompson and he used to work for Marquee part time. I got John to speak to Harold Pemberton and say that if he was going to do the festival that year, to let me do the PA for him. It wouldn’t cost him anything, but I’d give him 1,000 Watts, which was unheard of in those days. They use that for bloody monitors these days, but back then it was revolutionary.

I acquired some 12-inch Goodman Axiom 301s, which were high power hi fi speakers with huge, great magnets. They gave sound pressure levels of about 19dB, which was great in those days. Goodman also did a 12-inch bass woofer called an Audiom 60, so I got a load of them, too. Goodman was quick off the mark. It asked: “Why are you buying all these speakers, what are you doing with them?” I explained and the company even lent a hand. I got myself 20 columns from this factory in Kennington and fitted twin Axioms and twin Audioms in each. It was a bit ‘woofy’, so I made a further thin column with three tweeter horns in. Similar to the Motorola six by two-inch tweeters, Celestion made a horn about that size, the X3, and they were the only ones that would fit. It was a very narrow column and just tucked in beside two of the big four-by-12s. I lashed them together and they all stood up.

Back home, I set up a pair with one slave and got about five Ohms. I thought it sounded good, so I put another pair in and straight away you could feel and hear the difference, so I carried on to 500 Watts, up to 600 Watts and then when I got to 700 Watts it got a bit dicey. There was a knock on the door and it was the police. He said: “I’m afraid you’ll have to put a stop to whatever you’re doing in there because the neighbours are ringing the police station asking what’s gone wrong.” So, I had to call it a day, but it didn’t matter, I knew I was on the right track.

Off to Windsor we went and I set it all up. One of my SL100 amps would drive two WEM PA columns and at Balloon Meadow I used ten to drive 20 speakers. Nobody had ever heard that sort of sound before. Arthur Brown came on near the end with his number one single, Fire. He was a soprano, I think, and he always screamed at the end of that track, so I said to John Thompson: “When he does that scream, wind all the power up and turn the reverb on full.” I’ve never heard such a lovely sound in all my life – he even stopped halfway through his scream in amazement. It was so loud that I got arrested for public nuisance. The mayor came round with all the gold round his neck to stop it. He had the chief inspector of police with him and there’s me with my raggedy old shirt on.
Nevertheless, they were impressed. So impressed, in fact, that a few weeks later, Arthur Brown wrote me a poem. It was called Charlie and his WEM PA. Funny the things you remember, isn’t it?

Act accordionly

Although today it is a very genteel MI business, Watkins Electric Music has had a massive impact on rock n roll...

Seeing off the likes of Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley in the UK charts in November 1958 was Marino Marini and His Quartet with Come Prima, a song that inspired Charlie Watkins to design the Copicat – the world’s first single unit echo machine.

A veteran of WW2, Watkins’ weapon of choice was the accordion, although, during his service, he became fascinated in the structure and mechanics of the guitar. On returning home he set up a shop in Balham, London, with brother Reg, where they sold both instruments, while designing and manufacturing their own products, including the Westminster and V-fronted Dominator guitar amplifiers.

The Copicat swiftly became the most famous tape-echo unit ever and it’s sound was intrinsic to pop music of the late 50s and early 60s.

Today, WEM is still operational and managed, as always, by Watkins. Gone are the PAs, amps and guitars, but he still builds and imports