Mike Sheady was one of the UK's finest classical recording engineers, working at EMI for 35 years. Mike joined Abbey Road Studios in 1964 as a tea boy. His background was very similar to that of other great classical recording engineers, like Decca’s Kenneth Wilkinson, starting their working life recording many different genres of music. The 1960s were an incredibly fertile time for recording at Abbey Road and Mike began assisting on as many pop sessions as classical. He worked with most of the artists who recorded at Abbey Road from The Beatles and Pink Floyd, to Sir John Barbirolli and Mstislav Rostropovich. 

It was the EMI producer Suvi Raj Grubb who encouraged Mike to work more in classical music and he begin engineering recording sessions. Mike started balancing classical recording sessions as the Abbey Road mobiles developed and soon embarked on a career that would take him around the world recording many of the world’s most celebrated artists and creating classic recordings. As EMI Classics' contracts opened new creative opportunities, Mike’s career became closely associated with many series of recordings with conductors and their orchestras. These relationships included André Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra, Muti and La Scala, Simon Rattle and the CBSO, Klaus Tennstedt and the London and Berlin Philharmonics, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Paavo Berglund and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Mariss Jansons and the Oslo and St Petersburg Philharmonics, and also on many of the Vienna New Year's Day concerts,

Instrumentalists Mike worked closely with included, Itzhak Perlman, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lynn Harrell, Martha Argerich, Frank Peter Zimmerman, Cécile Ousset, Stephen Kovacevich, Nigel Kennedy, Julian Bream, Kyung-Wha Chung, Peter Donohoe and Murray Perahia.

I know that Mike also had very fond memories working on jazz albums with Previn and Shelley Mann, and Stéphane Grappelli. Once Abbey Road Studios was open to third party work, Mike created a memorable series of Stravinsky recordings with Robert Craft and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He also enjoyed working on a variety of other projects which included the premier recording of Alex North’s original score to Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, conducted by Jerry Goldsmith, and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band recording the soundtrack for the film Brassed Of.

In 1987 Mike won the Gramophone Engineering Award for his recording of Mahler's Second Symphony with Rattle and the CBSO, recorded in Watford Town Hall. Mike was highly respected by his peers, and had an instinctive feeling for sound and the artists loved the passion he brought to their recordings. Jonathan Allen

Jonathan Allen is a freelance producer and engineer. He worked at Abbey Road Studios for 23 years, involved in hundreds of projects covering a wide variety of music and artists from around the world. He has won numerous industry prizes from Grammys to Gramophone Awards, as well as a BAFTA sound award for recording and mixing the soundtrack to Tom Hooper's film of the musical Les Misérables.