Kevin remembered, by Keith Nichols

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I wish my Dad had been like Kevin – a real enthusiast – excited and motivated by music. I first met Kevin Daly in 1975, when he produced Richard Sudhalter’s New Paul Whiteman album for Argo. We hit it off – Kevin knew all that was to be known about my kind of music, plus owning a record collection of many thousands of discs. The Whiteman project was successful, and this led to my participation on many recordings, mainly conducted by Alan Cohen, who had recorded Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige for Kevin...

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The Yetties and Mr O'Dalaigh, by Bonny Sartin

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The Yetties and Mr O'Dalaigh, by Bonny Sartin

Kevin must have been worth his weight in gold to the Argo/Decca set up. We worked with him from 1970 until 1977 and he was always brim-full of ideas for new LPs with a slightly different twist, and he produced most of them on a shoestring budget. We used to take our sleeping bags to London and kip on his floor. There were no hotels for us in the early years, but in a way that suited us just fine because we would never have felt at home in them and staying with Kevin was much more interesting. His background was so very different from ours and between us we had a fund of stories that kept us laughing into the night over a glass of wine...

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Recording with Kevin, by Norma Winstone, MBE

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Kevin always seemed relaxed at recording sessions, as I remember. Even when we once turned up for a recording at ‘The Paramount Organ Works’ in Bolton which felt like someone’s house with an organ sunk into the lounge floor if I remember correctly! It was actually the home of cinema organist Ron Curtis’s three organs, one of which did actually rise up on its original cinema mechanism...

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Working (and drinking) with Kevin, by Martin Atkinson

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I was a recording engineer at Decca from 1976-1989 and knew Kevin, in fact I worked with him and Iain Churches recording Ron Curtis and one of his organs at Ron’s Paramount Organ Works in Bolton. We had to make two trips as the first trip ended in a drunken stupor at lunch time, with Ron being unable to play! As we couldn’t stay an extra day we had to re-schedule for a later date...

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Thanks Kevin! by Andy Leggett

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In October 1969 I’d given up the day-job building Concordes at Filton to strum guitar with the Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra – a comedy quartet selling primitive jazz and jug-band music on the folk club circuit. The name of Kevin Daly kept cropping up. He had produced Argo LPs for other folk artistes, similarly equipped with stringed instruments and too much hair. Several were suggesting we should approach him...

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Recording with the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, by John Whitmore

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I was a member of the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra in the late 1960s and 70s and was lucky enough to have taken part in two recording sessions for Argo in 1970. The sessions were produced by Fred Woods with Kevin Daly as the sound engineer. I remember both Fred and Kevin with great affection. We were only teenagers at the time but the Argo team treated us as they would any adult professional group...

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