MI Pro

he news, just before this year’s Musikmesse, that father and son team Arthur and Neil Barnes were about to relaunch Fane loudspeakers will have brought a smile to the lips of anyone who values Britain’s MI heritage.

Though founded in the 1950s, Fane came to prominence in MI a decade later, when its speakers were found in backline amplifiers from companies such as Selmer, WEM, Laney and Orange. With Goodmans out of the picture early on, there were just two speakers used by the band of British amp makers: Celestion and Fane. It was Yorkshire-based Fane that was favoured by the majority of the ‘new generation’.

How Arthur and Neil Barnes came to own the brand is one of those stories that walks a tightrope between fairytale to true (Yorkshire) grit. Arthur Barnes was recruited as an engineer in 1966 and worked on Fane’s shop floor as press shop foreman. He went from there to production manager and ended-up as the company’s managing director during an era when Fane was a tremendous success, both at home and internationally.

Things began to go sour for Fane during the 1980s. The company’s ownership had become a complicated affair, its fortunes intimately tied-in with those of fellow Yorkshiremen, Audio Factors, which had acquired the Custom Sound brand and also handled UK retail sales of Fane. Both companies were, in fact, owned by Audio Fidelity, which owned a group of audio companies of which Fane was the cash cow. In 1989 Fane was put up for sale and though Arthur Barnes made a valiant effort to buy the company, he was pipped at the post by Wharfedale (in its pre-Chinese form). Wharfedale was unable to make a success of the venerable brand and it passed to Adam Hall.

You can’t, of course, keep a Yorkshireman down, so Barnes, by now working with his son, Neil, whom he had brought into the business in 1987 to take over selling Fane to UK dealers, went to visit Bob Gault, founder of US speaker maker Eminence and, as a consequence, set about establishing Eminence beyond its home shores.
Becoming uncomfortable with running a brand they didn’t own, the Barnes team then purchased one of Britain’s unsung audio engineering manufacturers – Precision Devices. Following this, the wheel finally came full circle two years ago when they were able to buy Fane.

Back home (literally, as they transplanted Precision Devices from Cornwall to Castleford) the Barnes team built a new factory and set about achieving the best of both possible worlds, starting with a clean sheet in terms of production facilities, but also recruiting some of the workers who had built the original Fane products. Among them was Susan Goodyear, who had been with Fane since the 1970s and whom they hired to run production. (The lady who today winds the coils of this latest incarnation of Fane speakers, has also been doing this for over 30 years, Barnes says.)

Determined to get the sound that had made Fane so successful in the past, workers with intimate knowledge and experience were brought back to help get Fane ready for this year’s Frankfurt relaunch – appropriately, just as Fane celebrates its 50th anniversary.

“Owning Fane meant a lot to us as a family,” says Neil Barnes. “All of a sudden we now have two businesses: Precision Devices, which makes Rolls Royce quality speakers – the finest in the world, used by the likes of Funktion One – and Fane, which has a wonderful heritage in music.”

The plan has been, Neil Barnes says, to get Fane back on track, both as a supplier to manufacturers, and to retailers for what is, he feels, still a very lucrative market: the replacement speaker business.

“The first job was to look after our OEM partners. We’d got to make sure we were building the speakers on time, every time for customers such as Tannoy, Funktion One and HiWatt. The aim is to have a loudspeaker manufacturer that Britain can be proud of. We’ve got a great music industry in this country and a great heritage in loudspeakers, but there was a real danger that Britain wouldn’t have a key loudspeaker manufacturer owned by a British company. So we spent the first year getting the products and supply right and now we are ready to start the next phase.

“To achieve that, we had to open a facility in China as well. That  manufactures components such as pressed steel chassis, which enable us to compete in every area of the market. What we wanted was not just a range of speakers with a Fane badge on them, but made in exactly the same way as we would have made them in England. It took some time to do that, but this year, with the UK factory in place, we are ready to start.”

The result is two distinct series: the Chinese-made Sovereign models, which duplicate the traditional Fane quality and the Professional series, made in Yorkshire.

“There are 17 Sovereign models on pressed steel frames aimed at the OEM market and the replacement and upgrade market,”  Barnes says. “These are still important markets. People have to be able to offer speakers for a guy that has blown a driver in his cab or wants to upgrade to something better. There are a lot of people who are looking to upgrade, but don’t currently have a lot of choices available.

“The components made in Yorkshire go to the pro audio marketplace – PA hire companies and to companies that are still manufacturing quality equipment here in the UK, like Funktion One and HiWatt.”

It’s worth emphasising the close friendship between that other Yorkshire (albeit by adoption) company, HiWatt and Fane. Right back to the amp maker’s earliest days with founder Dave Reeves, HiWatt has been associated with Fane, with links including so many British bands from the ‘golden era’ that continues today with a new generation of HiWatt endorsers being shared with Fane.

“Also in the catalogue are new models in the Medusa series, which was an original concept Fane had in the 1980s. We were looking at the elements that needed to go into the new distribution line and came up with a 1,500-Watt, 18-inch driver we describe as an 18 XB on steroids – a second generation of Colossus.

“Part of that research came about because I also had good contacts with the American boutique amp market, which is passionate about the old Fane tone. Old Fane speakers were selling for a fortune on eBay, with people believing they couldn’t be duplicated, so we went back to the hand-written archives. We identified a number of speakers we knew would be winners if we could make them again. We went to see if we could still get the original British-made Muller cones and found they still had the tooling. We found that we could still make exactly the same speaker – even down to the same precision Sheffield steel frames.” 

The result caused a minor sensation in US boutique circles. New speakers that matched the legends, as well they might, being made by the same people using the same materials.

Fane’s plan from here, Barnes says, is to put the brand “back where it belongs”. They are looking to recruit MI retailers that can see the opportunities. We’ve got a magical brand in British speaker history. It’s owned by people that have that history close to our hearts and who have been commercially successful in selling loudspeakers.

“We’re looking to set up Fane dealers that can sell the product and impart that knowledge to the guy in the street. We’ll be selective, to allow the dealers to make money, we’ll be doing some expensive, targeted advertising to the end-users and this will add value for the OEM manufacturer. We want to invite any guitar stores that feel Fane is an opportunity for them to contact us and get on board.”

The combination of the Fane brand and the Barnes gift for marketing and sales suggest that the 50 year old champion might be about to make a significant comeback. There is a general air of wanting to champion British brands about, once again, and it’s hard to think of many that are as rich in rock n roll legend as Fane – even harder to think of those that remain in British ownership.

FANE: 01924 224618