When I was in high school, Sire Records was dumping copies Eternally Yours. We'd find cutouts [remaindered copies] all around Northern California.
Yeah, I know. A lot of them ended up in Australia too, and because they were cutouts they managed to sell more imported copies than the Australian issue, so we lost out twice.
Yeah, right. Musicians don't get paid for cutouts. They call it a loss and dump them somewhere.
I don't think I've met anyone in America hardly that has ever bought a copy off the racks. It was always out of the used bins.
It took me decades to find a copy of Prehistoric Sounds. I'd always be told it's in a similar vein to Eternally Yours. That's the record business for you, and there are a lot of notes about the record business in the 2004 box set [All Times Through Paradise].
Yeah, Sire didn't release the third album, so it didn't get a stateside release.
Yeah, that's too bad. I know things were coming apart anyway. Going back, I've always been curious about the studio session for “(I’m) Stranded” – making your own self-released 7-inch. Was that the first time you guys had been in the studio?
Yeah, definitely. The only experience with the art of recording that I had was a mono cassette deck, and sometimes I'd borrow someone else's cassette deck so that I could record something on one of them, then play something, and record that onto the other. That was my overdubbing experience.
Exactly. I did the same back then!
I heard that that's the way Chuck Berry did his overdubs, because in the ‘50s they would not have multitrack recording machines, so you’d just play the track in the studio and then overdub on it and re-record. Which explains some of the balance and stuff that you hear on those records.
You're stuck with them.
Yeah, but it works.
Were you demoing, or writing songs that way so you could put two parts together?
Yeah, to put song ideas down. I must have done half a dozen of these half-hour long cassettes where I would just do these long pieces. It all ended up getting condensed into what became “Nights in Venice” and that sort of thing. Yeah. It was just working with sound rather than trying to write songs – if there's a distinction. I mean, the sounds can be a song.
But the sound of the songs is important, right?
Oh, it's crucial. I think that it was the sound of the single that we did, the “(I’m) Stranded” single, even more than it was the song. It was our performance, and there was just something about it.
It was interesting that you guys were coming up with your take on what became called punk rock, at the same time but on the other side of the world from the UK and New York.
Yeah, it did sort of become that, but there was no real inkling that there was any mass movement about to happen.
It's true. It's true. So, your first session was with the late Mark Moffatt. I'd be visiting Nashville, hear his name mentioned, and I never put this connection together until doing some research.
Yeah, I saw Mark quite a long time ago now, 15 years ago, and he'd been working in Nashville and he had a successful production career. He said that out of all the hundreds of records he's produced, the only one anyone ever asked him about was The Saints’ record. [laughter] He was a really good engineer and a really nice guy, but he didn't really like what we were doing, which is the irony of it. He was in a group called Railroad Gin, who were progressive-ish serious musos with flutes and tasteful guitar. He was confronted with us, and he did a great job. But it was funny. It was a weird mix. But we were lucky; we could have had some incredible dickhead, which wasn't that uncommon. I had no experience, but you'd hear these stories about engineers who would have some moral, aesthetic, or whatever other issues they had with what bands were trying to do. We were lucky. It was good.
For the first record, you kept the two songs from the single, but you did the rest with Rod Coe, who'd been assigned to you. Was he assigned through EMI?
Yeah, that's right. Rod was the house producer at EMI, and he was a musician himself. He played in a number of tasteful adult-orientated rock groups. He also was the bass player for Slim Dusty; Australia's biggest and longest running country singer. Rod produced dozens of his records. Rod was a really nice guy. I think within minutes of coming into the studio, he decided that the best thing to do would be just to let us do what we wanted to do. He was great!
You and Chris Bailey, the singer, were producing these sessions, which was a little bit unusual for the time.
It was. But I think because the “(I'm) Stranded” single got attention overseas, especially in the UK, they couldn't argue with it. We'd already proved ourselves on our first record. I mean, I'm sure they would have liked it to be different; in fact, the local company only really signed us because they got told to by the head office. And, with the exception of Rod, I don't think we had a lot of friends there.
It was something they had to do.
There was a bit of a resentment.
You did the first LP at Window Studios. Was that an EMI studio?
No, that was just a small private studio in Brisbane. I'm not really sure what they'd recorded before. Ivor [Hay, the Saints’ drummer] found it. Ivor worked at a tape duplicating place, and because he was near the business he did some research, and we found Window Studio. It was also called Sunshine Studios at various times. But it was a jingle studio, and I think also a Christian music studio or something.
So, The Saints fit right in. [laughter]
Yeah, exactly.
That was always the case back then. Studios would be way more multipurpose.
Well, they did everything, but a lot of jingles. I would imagine that jingles probably kept them going.
That market really changed later. I was listening earlier today to I'm Stranded (Deluxe Edition) with the bonus tracks. I hadn't even heard those ‘til today, but what are the “Original Mixes” of the Rod Coe sessions? Rough mixes?
No, they were his mixes. We did the album in a weekend, we were listening to rough mixes, and then Rod took the tapes to Sydney to mix it. Sometime later, we got some test pressings, and I didn't like them. I thought the guitars were spread too wide. It was set up too much like a fairly standard ‘70s mix in a lot of ways. It was not the way that I heard things, which was more in mono. My experience was just playing guitar with the band, and so that's what I was hearing. That's what I wanted the record to be. So, Chris and I went down to Sydney and remixed it. But after all this time, I thought that it sounded really interesting to hear the band presented in the way that had we not had complete control, maybe it might have come out sounding like that. It's not bad, you know. It sounds like a good ‘70s rock record to me now, but at the time that that wasn't what I was after.
What I hear in the album mixes is that quite a bit of it sounds like you're taking one rhythm guitar and then doing a tape delay, like 25 milliseconds, panning left and right to widen it out.
Well, on Rod’s mixes, that's probably what he was doing.
Yeah. Sometimes if you sum it to mono, it kind of collapses because when you do that stereo tape delay…
It's probably some phase issues. I mean, the record was recorded really quickly.
I didn't realize it was recorded in a couple days!
Yeah. Well, we did the single with Mark in five hours. That was going in, recording, and mixing that night. And then I think we recorded nine songs. I don't think there was anything left off. I mean, there was one song that didn't make it onto the album initially, but that's on that reissue. It was pretty much what we played. We got to the end of it, and I really didn't think we could do it any better, so that's what it was. But it did need a a refocus in the mix, which is what we did.
And right around the end of this period, you guys decided to move to London?
Yeah. We moved to London in ‘77. First of all, we moved to Sydney, did some shows around Sydney and Melbourne, and then went overseas. That was really our only option, I’d say. I don't think we would have gotten to a point where we would have been able to record three albums in the space of time that we did if we had stayed in Australia. That was an important development – not meaning a musical progression or anything, because I don't really believe in a linear thing with music. The first album is what it is. I really like it. But we'd done it. So, we wanted to start doing different things. Being in a studio for more than a couple of days, you work out that you can actually do quite a lot, and that was great. That wouldn't have happened in Australia.
A lot of your guitar parts really benefit from adding in a little overdubbed accent.
Well, usually what I do is just put the first guitar part down to act as a base for the rhythm track, really. The other stuff is just a little coloration here and there.
I like how they jump in and out sometimes and add melodies or push a part forward. It's classic. It works really well. I didn't realize until recently that you'd worked so much with engineer Bill Price. The Clash records he did sounded so damn good.
Yeah. Actually, the first record we did in the UK, “This Perfect Day,” was recorded by Bill at Wessex Studio. I really liked working with him. He was unassuming and knowledgeable. A really decent guy. He was great to work with. He’d express his opinion, but there was no agenda or anything, which was nice.
