I wanted to start by asking you about the new record. It was recorded in different places.
Three songs were done in Seattle, two were done in London [at Milo Studios] and the rest were done in Los Angeles.
I noticed in Moss Elixir too, that you also had a kind of pattern of going different places to record.
I've always liked moving from one place to another. It has nothing to do with the technical quality of the studio — it's simply a psychological thing. I think if you get locked into doing a record for three months, you completely lose perspective of what you're doing. You drag your friends in and they say, "That's very nice, do you want to go out and have a pizza?" Or you take the tapes back home and you listen to them while your blind drunk and think it's great. You're too close to the project. For the last two A&M albums, there wasn't enough time between starting the thing and the final mixes to assess them. At the time I thought they were great, but that's just because I became a part of the collective hypnosis of making a record. Prior to that (except for an album I did called Groovy Decay, which was similarly done in one sort of spate and I also thought was disastrous) I've always done things in bits and pieces — right from the Soft Boys up to Queen Elvis. We tended to only work in one studio in one town, we had certain haunts. But it was all in little bits so you can listen to what you're doing, take it away and live with it for a couple of months and then go in and overdub and mix it. You really appreciate it.
Make sure it's the right basic take of the song.
Yeah. It's also like having hundreds of children, you can't focus when you have twelve songs running around your heels. You're just trying to get them in order. If you've got just three songs, you can cherish them more. It's just more exciting — I appreciate the recording process so much more if it's broken up like that. With the most recent records, I know people in studios all over the place. I can't afford to fly the Young Fresh Fellows over to London, but I can afford to fly over and record with the Young Fresh Fellows, or go record with Grant Lee [Phillips] and Jon Brion [#18] in LA for a week. It's just fun to have different people. I wouldn't have wanted to make this record with any one set of people. The whole thing, especially at this stage, should just be fun to make. I'm not looking for any other element — if there's fun on tape, then it should come through to the ears. I think this record is one of my enjoyable, confident records. It's not as somber, it may be the songs, but it's also just the fun of it.
I was surprised to hear a song like "Viva! Sea-Tac". It feels like an exuberant, off-the-cuff rock song. It something that you can obviously do, but it doesn't always come out on your records.
I actually wrote that song in London, but it was obviously a good candidate for recording with them [Young Fresh Fellows] in Seattle [at Hanszek Studios].
I wanted to throw a few different names at you, from different people you've worked with in the past. One of the most obvious would be Pat Collier.
Pat Collier sidled up to me in 1977 after a gig somewhere. I remember he came up to me in a club and said, "I saw your set and I kind of like it." I thought, "This guy's very suspicious." It turns out that his father was a policeman. About two years later we started working in his studio — it was very cheap. He also understood how to make really great 4-track recordings by bouncing things down. He was a real student of the '60s, he wasn't part of this "Steve Lillywhite" 24-track thing. We were just scuttling away in this dank sort of archway beneath the railway line at Waterloo. There's this special kind of fungus that grows there and if you take your guitar away — you can take it 6,000 miles away — unpack your guitar and that fungus comes wafting past your nostrils.
Was that Alaska?
Yeah. He then sold Alaska to someone else, I still occasionally rehearse there but... I had a guitar there, which had been there for a year and it stunk so bad I left it somewhere. I actually gave it to Pat to keep at his house until the fumes went. He had a big phase in the late '80s, he got quite trendy... doing people like the Darling Buds. I don't know what he's doing now, but he was always a really reliable guy to work with.
I put on [The Soft Boys'] Underwater Moonlight and I was thinking of which songs were done on 4-track and 8-track... the fact is that you can't really tell and some of the 4- track stuff sounds better than the 16-track. I think Pat did an amazing job and I was curious about how you guys went about doing those kinds of sessions. What would you track first?
I think the bass and... Well the guitars wind up being in stereo and then the bass and drums... he probably just recorded the whole thing in stereo and then... it's a good question. I know that by the end of it there was very little flexibility. The more important thing was that he did get a terrific guitar sound.
It was an example to me, when I first started recording, that you don't need 24 tracks to do really good recordings. You just need some ears.
That's good to know that it seems that way. I think at the time people were just getting out of punk and they were starting to get high-tech again. People wanted expensive drum sounds and all that. We couldn't afford it and frankly I didn't care anyway. I was more interested in the song than the sound, which I know is a failing in making pop music, but something about sound has always eluded me. Maybe I think it sounds okay and I imagine the rest and really I should put something else on that I'm imagining is there and it's not.
What do you find the difference is between working in a session producing yourself or having an outside producer like John Leckie [#42]?
It depends who they are. I'm very much at the mercy of other people's ideas. I don't go around telling everybody what to do. I sort of take the consensus of whoever is in the room. If there's nobody else I have to make those decisions myself and sometimes it's very important to do that. On the whole, I can work with whoever is there and get a good result. There are times when I feel like I've been steered by other people and maybe I'm not happy with the result in the end. At the time it seems like a good idea, it's not like anyone has ever hi-jacked me and put a gun to my head. It's always been the kind of thing I've wanted, but maybe the approach is the consensus between the other musicians and the producer and it gets swayed. It always winds up being by committee and I like to, every so often, pull away from everyone else and call all the shots myself. I think it's just partly my nature — I'll leave decision making to other people and that's a flaw. You've got to be able to make snap decisions or the whole team will be machine-gunned.
Do you feel like there's people you've worked with who have made decisions that you have been very pleased with?
I enjoyed working with Jon Brion a lot, because we're both quite impatient. He throws an idea at the take and if it doesn't stick he lets it fall off, he doesn't sit there with an agenda... "Now, let me try my idea, this is really... what I want to do." Sometimes you talk to people and you know they're not listening, because they've made up their mind that they're going to do it a certain way. They smoke pot or something and they don't listen to anybody anyway. I would say that I really don't like having drugs or alcohol around in a studio. I think that's one of the counter-productive things, especially if you're living with the music. I use to drink at recording sessions... the vocals on the first few Soft Boys sessions — I was drunk for all of those. I just thought that's what you do, you go to the pub and then carry on. My heart sinks if I walk in and there's a bag of weed on the desk for the engineer. Some people can all get stoned and do lovely ambient... I guess my stuff isn't stoner music. It's not drug music.
