Why don't you give me a bit of a history of the studio. How did it start?
I was in a band when I was at university, and that band went through various lineups, personnel changes, and musical directions, but the upshot of it was that we ended up in a situation where we were looking to just get a kind of permanent rehearsal space.
How did you find the building?
I was literally just walking down the street, and I saw a "Rooms to Let" sign outside this old Georgian building, on a square that I knew from when I first came to Bristol. It was kind of between where I was living and the center of town. I popped in, saw the landlord, and explained that I was playing music and that I wanted somewhere that my band could leave its equipment set up and have a bit more flexibility. It was simply the practicality of not wanting to have to go to practice rooms, pay 30 quid for a three-hour spot, have to pack all our gear away, and then waste all of that time. He showed me a couple of rooms and said, "Oh, I don't know if any of these are going to suit you if you're playing drums and making noise." I think I was literally walking out the door, when he just said, "But there is the basement!" It's a massive building, across five floors. He took me down to the basement, which was completely empty, and he said, "Well, you could just use one of the rooms down here." We had to build a door, because there was a little bit of noise leaking up through the lift shaft which runs the whole length of the building, so we put a little doorway in, and then we just set up our practice room. I seem to remember spending most of a whole summer down there.
How did it move from a band practice room to a studio? Was it a gradual process?
I'm not really sure how it got into recording exactly. I think it happened over a period of time. The band wanted to record demos, and it was just a sort of natural progression that we have a little recording setup of some sort. Mixed in with that, prior to this I had been working as a post-production editor after I graduated, so I'd learned Pro Tools at university, sort of primarily on the job that I'd had for a couple of years running up to this point. Once I'd finished that job, I was kind of just concentrating on music over that year, really. I was on the dole. I took my final paycheck from that job, and I'd managed to scrape up enough cash to buy an Apple Mac and a little Digi 001, which was sort of an entry-level Pro Tools interface that had come out at that point.
Right.
I kind of bypassed the whole 4-track thing, I have to say. I did have experience with 4-tracks and stuff, but I didn't really get into it. I'm slightly ashamed to say that computers were the things that got me on this whole path, and they've also been what I have been doing at times, as well. With my last paycheck at that job, I managed to get enough cash to buy a little Mac, a little interface, and some microphones, and then the band was set up down there. We'd kind of get into this rhythm of writing and recording simultaneously rather than just jamming in a room, smoking a load of joints, and then going to play a show the following week, which was kind of how it had been up to that point. It became more like, "Ooh, we could experiment with this, or try samples." It was sort of a natural evolution of the writing process of that band.
So do you think the studio really affected the sound of Actual Size?
Yeah, very much. We were still based around a live setup of drums, guitar, keyboards, and a singer.
When we met, and you asked me to produce a track for Actual Size, what stage was this at? Obviously you didn't have the studio then, because I remember we went to State of Art to do that recording.
Yeah. I think we probably didn't have the studio when I met you, but it would have been just after that that we did get it, because I remember you coming to a practice that we had at Frontline Studios, and we did some pre-production together before we worked on that.
Oh, that's right.
Our band had recorded some demos and I was sort of really inexperienced and didn't know how to finish them off. I'd kind of gotten in too deep, I thought! I asked a local engineer who did live engineering, but also worked at this studio if...
That was Rik Dowding?
Yeah, Rik Dowding, who still works at State of Art Studios now.
And does FOH for Portishead doesn't he?
That's right. He was the only person I knew at the time who knew people in the Bristol music scene beyond our peers and the bands we were gigging with then. We'd only been there a year or two, so we were still getting to know the place. I'd make these recordings, and I approached Rik and said, "I don't really know how to mix. I don't know how to finish these. What do you think? Can you help or can you recommend anyone?" Your name came up. He suggested, "John might really like this. You should check him out." I looked you up online, sort of looked over your discography and who you'd worked with, and I thought, "Oh, this is really exciting!" I'd never considered having an external influence in the band. It had sort of been a self-contained unit up to that point, and we'd got used to just doing things our own way, probably as most bands do if they're left to their own devices.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it was Rick who suggested you. I phoned you up one day, and you said, "Yeah, drop something around," so I popped you a CD, or maybe even a cassette at that point — I might not have even had a CD burner at that point. And you phoned up and said, "This is good." There was one track that you liked particularly and that you'd be interested in producing that for the band. I think we started off with this whole thing of, "We'll do an album, but we've already got it all recorded. We'll just get someone to mix it," just to have someone go, "Hmm, yeah. That's a good song."
It puts things under the microscope a bit more, doesn't it?
Yeah, because I think we probably didn't have any perspective on what we were doing at that point.
And a good session it was, I remember. After that session, along with other things, you got a record deal, didn't you? Was that how the money came to upgrade the studio from the entry-level Pro Tools to more of a professional recording situation?
Yeah, it was. I'd put the idea forward, and the label immediately liked it, because they liked the demos we'd recorded, the single we'd done with you, and that combination. They were very keen for us to try and preserve whatever kind of naivety, stupidity, or innocence we had in those original recordings. They responded to that. Up to that point, the practice room had basically been a basement or a cavern space. I remember we'd soundproofed it, or tried to soundproof it. It's all stone, the walls are stone, and it's arched or vaulted kind of like a wine cellar. There was no carpet, nothing. It was quite a harsh sounding room on its own. I remember we went out and bought loads of cheap carpet.
Did you know anything about acoustic stuff? Or was it completely trial and error?
I went on what I'd seen in other practice rooms. It was just aping what I'd seen. We were kind of nailing things, and I remember we got these big bolts to be able to attach these carpets to the walls. The whole thing was like something out of a comedy sketch. It was very funny, just filthy old secondhand carpet. It was worse than a rehearsal room! It really was. I remember when we got a sofa down there for the first time, and we thought, "All right! We're classy now!" We got used to working in that space, and it was nice to be able to shut yourself away. When we got this offer of a record deal, and the record label came down and saw that we'd sort of been naively enterprising in our own way, that we had set this place up where we could write, practice, and make noise into the small hours, I think they got into that idea. It wasn't very difficult to persuade them to try and upgrade what we had, to buy some microphones and do a bit of acoustic treatment.
I think one of the reasons why Toybox has become such a successful studio over the years has been the choice of gear that you've bought. Everything seems to be have been a very considered choice. Specifically, it seems to be the sorts of things that people do not have in their home studios.
Yeah.
Was that a conscious decision, or was it sort of accidental?
I just research, really. The other big inspiration for setting the place up was State of Art Studio actually, which was the only other kind of semi-professional, big studio I'd been in up to that point. Going there, I thought how smart Geoff Barrow [of Portishead] had been in doing exactly that, taking money that they'd made from their band and setting up a workshop where he could do his own thing, but where other people could come and use it. It seemed like a smart move to me, and that completely inspired what I did. He kind of gave me the idea. Their choice of equipment was some quite esoteric stuff, a lot of old tube gear and things that have character to them. I suppose on one level it's kind of anything that really sets you apart but also gives your studio a bit of mojo. It's probably a mixture of seeing that place and the approach that they took, and then the same with other kind of producers and engineers and peoples' choices for equipment. It just led on from that. For the first bunch of mic preamps we bought, I bought them because I saw in a magazine that Adrian Utley [also of Portishead] had endorsed them. I thought, "I like what he does, so this is probably a worthwhile investment." I didn't know him at the time, but I liked the sound that they went for. I'd definitely say that the world of Portishead was quite inspirational to me, especially when I first moved to Bristol. They were into things that gave their recordings character and weren't just run-of-the-mill. As we all know, lots of older equipment, or the older generation of recording technology, invariably seems to have piqued peoples' interests and made them excited, so I'd just sort of go with that, really. They're also the kinds of things that I like to work with.
What happened to the band? I know that you made an album, but it never got released, and you didn't seem to be able to get it back. The band kind of imploded, so how did you end up with the studio?
I mean, maybe on some level or other, the studio was a bit of an insurance policy as well. At the moment when we entered into that agreement with the record company, I went into it completely believing that we were going to be able to do music professionally, and that it was going to be our means of income and our lifestyle for however many long years. A lot of things were changing in the music business at that time. Downloads were just starting, and Napster had just come about. I remember seeing that quite early on and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder what's going to happen with this." The band sort of went through the process that nearly everybody I know who's had a record deal has been through, which is to get a load of money chucked at them, live the lifestyle for a few years, and then nothing really happens, or nothing big enough to keep the record company prepared to keep plowing the same kind of money into you. In our instance, it was also mixed with the label losing their biggest artist [Tom Jones] at exactly the same moment. He'd just had a huge success with a comeback album, which this record label had released, so the coffers were full at the moment when we'd signed to them. After a year or so, we'd recorded an EP (at vast expense, I seem to remember). I learned so much in those couple of years. It was eye watering, some of it. We recorded the EP. We then recorded a single with you again. You had done the initial single that had gotten everybody interested, and we sort of got signed off the back of that. We did an EP with a different producer, and then we did another single with you. The thing with the label was that the way they'd sort of sold themselves to us was that we were going to get time to develop; they didn't expect us to have a big hit straightaway. Probably a lot of people have heard the same story, but then circumstances changed with Tom Jones leaving the label. I think the final straw was that they made our A&R guy redundant. He was kind of our interface with the label and the people higher up in the ranks we didn't know that well. The minute he went, I think we knew that our days were numbered. We sort of limped on a bit, and we recorded an album again at another studio. This was the crazy thing. We just kept on [going to other studios] after having put the money into building Toybox! Though we did record there with you. But we also ended up going to other studios and paying remixers huge fees to do radio remixes of these songs. The results were all good, but I kept looking at the bill at the end of it and just thinking, "We're never going to make this money back!" It seemed insane to me, but I went along with it. It was a crazy, bloated, overblown business at that point in time I think, and it's all been sort of culled back down to its roots a little bit now, which is probably a good thing in the long run.
