Mary Hopkin represented Great Britain at the Japan World Exposition in Osaka in 1970.
Accompanied by her friends Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, and an orchestra led by Tony Evans, Mary performed seven shows in the Expo Hall over 4 days.
No official recording has been released of these performances, but a bootleg recording was made at some point, and has been in circulation for several years. Jessica Lee Morgan, Mary’s daughter, and head of Mary Hopkin Music takes up the story.
“We had been aware of the bootleg recording that people were making money from, without paying royalties to Mary, so we decided to act and take control. We wanted to preserve the magic of Mary’s performances in Japan and add it to the Mary Hopkin Music catalogue. It’s now available, and fans can be assured that Mary will receive royalties when they buy or stream the album.”
It took several weeks to process the album, as each song required careful restoration to remove artefacts and distortion. Mix engineer Christian Thomas says “It was a painstaking and frustrating process. The recording is suboptimal at best, and the balance of instruments tends to be inconsistent. We’ve done all we can to remove as much noise as possible without affecting the performance, but some of the noise is baked into the audio, and as such there’s nothing we can do with that. It is a rough recording, on tape, and we have to treat it as an historical archive, rather than a pristine recording.”