Having a commercial studio space that's running Pro Tools – like my studio where all the freelancers and everybody works – if Pro Tools is not up to date, we can be in trouble.
You've got them coming in and wanting it to be on a certain version. I see. I'm fundamentally antisocial and no one else is allowed to come in my studio, so it's okay. [laughs] I was actually astonished the other day to find out – I don't know if it's like this in the States – but we were getting a few quotes to do something over here, and some larger studios charge to use the Pro Tools rig! I was like, "Are you joking? I'll just bring my own and I can run that." It was just unreal the amount. It was an extra charge on top.
To just use Pro Tools?
Yeah. It was like a line on the quote. It was obviously the dry hire, whether you want an assistant or not, and then for the Pro Tools rig, there's another fee on top. It was unreal. I couldn't believe that. That doesn't happen, I'm guessing, in the States.
Not that I've heard of. Do you call your personal studio Black Lodge?
Yeah, this is Black Lodge. I've had that opportunity to build it, and that makes me quite self-sufficient, and I can therefore bring the cost down of making a record. The new record I kind of made across three spaces. A lot of it was done here, and then Door to the River, the Manic Street Preachers' studio. Pretty much all of the drums were done there. They've obviously been very generous with me in terms of helping out where they can. One of the things that they said was, "If you need to, come and use it." So, I have made quite good use of it. [laughs] And obviously James Dean Bradfield's got an amazing collection of guitars and amps. I can't even count them. I don't know that he would want me to say how many he has. I've done all my re-amping there as well. They've got a beautiful little upright piano that they rescued from a school. I did quite a lot of the piano here, and then I did some there because I wanted different sort of palettes and flavors of piano, because obviously you get a bit bored. I've got a couple of Challen pianos here. I've got a baby grand and an upright, which is obviously that classic Beatles-y sound. But I wanted something a little bit wonky, and they've got this beautiful, characterful one. As I say, it was just a school piano that they rescued.
I remember hearing one piano on the album and I was like, "Wow, that's a unique sounding piano."
Yeah. Well, it's the one that they play on. James really got into the piano. I think it's on "International Blue" and loads of big hits. I don't play anything like he does, but I've got my own way of doing it. But yeah, it's sort of their piano. And then there's Townshend Studios, which is where all of Pete Townshend's synths are. I'm sure you've had a chance to have a look at just how bloody amazing that space is. I was just like, "Whoa," like a kid in a candy shop.
I'm amazed he's still got so many of his home studio gear and all of his stuff for decades, right?
He's basically donated all of his synths, especially the rare ones, to this purpose-built space. Rather than just keep them for himself or put them in a museum or let a rich collector buy them he wanted musicians to have access to them. He's created this space called the Townshend Studios at the University of West London, which is the site of where he went to art college, Ealing Art College, as it was. He's got a personal connection with the space. He's created these four artist-in-residencies across the year that he's generously providing the stipend for. I didn't do one of those, but you can apply for them, and then you can go for like three months and spend every day there. They'll pay a living stipend. So, it covers your living costs, your travel, et cetera, so you can just go and create. Such an amazing space; such an amazing project. And obviously, the instruments are out of this world, and they're all maintained. Some of these instruments are very old and very specialized. I think it's also that the preservation of the instruments themselves is important. I couldn't go for three months because I have a young child, but I did it in dribs and drabs, which is pretty similar to how it's all been made anyway.
Can you just rent it for like the day or the hour?
When I was there they had all sorts of folk coming in. I don't know what the arrangements are, like whether people can pay to go in. But Mark Ronson [Tape Op #105] came in for a day and did some stuff. I imagine that it will turn into some sort of semi commercial hire as well. But I think Pete donated the synths with the view that they should be there for educational access. I couldn't have paid to have hired these instruments! I think I love the ethos of it; that it's about open access. And especially the artist-in-residencies are aimed specifically at people that wouldn't normally be able to do this. There's been a lot of women and people of color going through the program. That's good to see.
That's nice.
Yeah. Pete's an amazing guy. A lot of people get successful and rich and they don't really pay it back. I'm just very thankful and grateful that he's kept these instruments and that I was able to use them. It's amazing. There's a similar space up in Glasgow, the Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound. You can book it by the day, and it's low cost. It's not like a studio price. You can go in and get to know the modular synths. That's my ultimate aim, that one day I might be able to create my own synth library for people to come. [laughs] Because it's such a good example of how to be a practitioner that does good in the world. I like that. A lot of what we do is so selfish, right? It's art. [laughs] But here is an example of giving a bit back.
Oh, I wrote a piece about running a commercial studio a while back for Tape Op, and I was like, "This doesn't really make money." ["Do Recording Studios Make Money?" Tape Op #164]
I read it, yeah. [chuckles]
Obviously in the end, the selfish part is that I've built a place that I can go and work out of and get paid, right?
Yeah.
But, the non-selfish part is…
…you're not getting rich!
Yeah. That's why you have to charge for Pro Tools. [laughs]
No, I think these places are definitely making money! [laughs] I think Abbey Road's doing all right now.
We just recently added a surcharge to use tape decks at Jackpot!
Yeah, and it's the same if you're hiring a space and you've got a piano in it and it needs tuning.
Yeah, we do that too.
But that's what's so amazing about The Townshend Studio though, is because obviously you've got all of these incredible instruments that take a lot of specialist knowledge to maintain. That was one of the things that moved me, because I feel like in London, especially, there's this real sort of dying of the art of knowing how to fix synths. I have quite a lot of old vintage synths from the '80s. There used to be this guy who you could go to who would fix them and he's not doing it anymore. Where's the next generation coming up who know how to work with these kind of circuit boards? I haven't got a fucking clue.
Yeah. Right. [laughs]
I'm not going to open it up. [laughs] That made me feel emotional when I went there, to realize that at least here's a whole another generation of students who are going to be interested in synths, who might therefore look into the maintenance of them. Obviously the cost of maintaining all of these big ones, especially like the [Analogue Solutions] Colossus and the ARP 2500.
There are all these virtual instruments now. The wonderful thing is you could sketch a record out on vacation. But the sounds…
It's not the same thing, and I think the one thing that interests me when I make a record is to try and do something different each time, from a technical perspective. I'd never really worked with modular synthesis before. That was new to me. It was a steep learning curve, especially with the ARP 2500. It probably took me a couple of hours to get a workable sound out of it. Then I was like, "Shit, let's hit record, because if I don't capture this now, it's gone."
Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Actually, that was what appealed to me about it, and I've talked about this a bit before, the idea of it's so easy now, as you say, to make a record on your laptop, and you've got a lot of these emulated synths in the Arturia Vintage Synth Collection or whatever. They're great. I'm not knocking them at all. I've used them in the past. But you're not getting that serendipitous discovery of something that only you could make, or that subtle shift in pitch. All of that circuitry is creating something unique. There was a moment where I set up this arpeggiated sequence and I was like, "Oh my god, quick." And then it kept changing, the more it looped. I was like, "No, please don't shift because I need it right now." I was constantly in a state of panic, just running 'round hitting record just in case it changed. But that was enjoyable because we're so used to now, especially in Pro Tools, the idea that we can take as many takes as we like and we can just edit it. You can't really do that with this stuff. Obviously, I was compiling takes and then bringing it back here and then editing. But a lot of them you can't comp it together – the subtle differences in the texture and the timbre of the synth, you can't make those work together. Most of them have to be one-take wonders. That was quite tricky. As I said, I think I spent half a day trying to get one sound out of it. [laughs] Who does that anymore when you can just get a preset with a soft synth?
There's such a difference between the abstract mental idea of writing the music and the physical part of it happening. When people start treating the recording process as just getting parts down mathematically as opposed to letting the sounds breathe and develop in the playing and recording process.
Yeah. That was what was so enjoyable was almost rediscovering. I've been making records now for a decade. It's not long compared to most people, but there have been points where I've fallen a little bit out of love with the production process because I've become so efficient at it. What was lovely going into The Townshend Studio was rediscovering that playfulness and that creativity of, "I'm not 100 percent sure what I'm doing here." [laughs] I would go in with skeletons of the songs, obviously, because you've got to make the most of your time there. And then it was that conversation with the synths that would flesh out that skeleton and put the blood on the bone, as it were. I remember sitting down with the Moog System 35, which is on "Throw Over Your Man," the single that's just come out. Again, it's monophonic and you think, "Well, what can you do with that?" But it became such an integral part of the arrangement, and I hadn't got any idea that that was going to be on that track. What's wonderful about The Townshend Studio is all of the synths are on these custom-made, wheelable trollies. I could make my own Rick Wakeman- style vast synths around me. [laughs] I was in the middle with my mobile rig, and I was just spinning in this chair, going from synth to synth. It was crazy. I was trying to be so efficient. Once I found a sound that I liked on a synth, I'd be switching to a different track. I think it was the [Roland] Jupiter-8, that was on everything; put those beautiful horn sounds and strings on. I've got the soft synth version, right? But it's nothing like the real thing. [laughs] It's just so hard to express the tangible difference in the crunchiness of it.
I was mixing an album for a mostly electronic artist – electronics and vocals – and I mixed the whole thing and I'm like, "These sounds are great." I didn't know how it had been tracked or anything, but one instrument kept just driving me crazy, and it was the piano. Talking to the artist after the mixing, he goes, "Oh, well, that was the only virtual instrument."
Oh.
This is telling that, with no knowledge of it, that the piano was the one instrument that didn't sound right to me.
Yeah. And I think it becomes an ideological battle, too, now in the age of AI. I hadn't set out with this record to make a statement of sort of to be anti-machine. Obviously, the irony is in the '70s and '80s, synthesizers were thought to be the death knell of real music. [chuckles] Every technological innovation has always been greeted as the end of something. Now they're considered to be part of this big analog tradition. But I didn't set out in the beginning to do that. Because every record I've made has always been with real instruments in a very sort of old-fashioned and traditional way, that became, in the middle of the record, quite a programmatic standpoint to take. There was going to be nothing on this record that wasn't real. I was building it around these amazing vintage synths, but also I found this cassette tape of my grandmother's voice, which I then had to restore and took forever.
Yeah.
But it wouldn't have worked sonically if I tried to put that with a virtual piano. That universe wouldn't have sat together. Every element ended up becoming incredibly human and incredibly imperfect. Which is why it took so fucking long to make, right? Because that's the other thing. It's quick and easy to make a recording on a laptop, but I'm just not interested in that at all. I like the hard way through, because it feels like when you finish a record, it feels like a more substantial victory for yourself as well. I always like to do things the hard way. [laughs] I don't know if you remember when we spoke last time, it was that idea that all of this re-amping that I'd done – all these subtle little changes that probably only I know about, but I felt like it had incrementally added up to something.
Oh, absolutely
They feel it in the record, even if they didn't know it was there.
I was thinking about this yesterday. I was mixing a bunch of songs for different clients, and I thought, "There's all the work I'm doing that they'll never fully know in the background."
Yeah. You feel it, like it's an intangible. Dave Eringa mixed this album except for one song by Mikko Gordon. I don't want to give any of his secrets away or anything like that [laughs], but I think I'm right in saying he throws everything. For me, it feels different to anyone else mixing a kit. It's essentially sort of like re-amping every element of the kit. I'm very loyal, too. I just tend to work with the same people.
Yeah, I see this. [laughs]
Well, I think once you know it works… On the last record, Dave only mixed four songs. I wanted him to do the whole thing this time. I think when you're writing everything yourself, you're producing everything yourself, and engineering it yourself, you don't want to mix it yourself, too. You just don't have the distance. I mixed the whole of the last record, Versions, myself, and I just couldn't do that again. [laughs] Even Prince had other people in on the process. I think it makes for a better outcome. Dave's an incredible mixer. I know I drive him insane, though.
Do you do a lot of revisions?
Oh, yeah. Some of them we're on mix eight or nine before I'm happy. I don't know how normal that is, because obviously I don't work with anyone else.
There are worse. [laughs]
But I have a very specific vision, and I guess it's unusual that the writer, the artist, and the producer is all one person as well. It's my baby as well! [laughs] I let it go for a brief moment for the mix, and it's quite hard to let go. I'm a control freak. [laughs] Selfish.
I think collaboration is always good, even if you decide not to use the results of the collaboration, you learn something.
Yeah. It's definitely a more, I wouldn't say necessarily collaborative record, but a more social record than I've made before. I've got four guest vocalists on it as well. James Dean Bradfield from The Manic Street Preachers; Hannah Peel, who's an amazing composer; Gwenno, who's just brilliant; and Eaves Wilder all contributed vocals. Other people came in and did guest instrumental aspects as well. So, I had Charlie Cawood, an amazing multi-instrumentalist, who came and brought some strange esoteric instruments, like this thing that looked like a typewriter with strings [taisho goto]. I'm slowly coming out of my Anchoress shell. [chuckles] Obviously, the concept of that is to work alone, to work in isolation, and I might have to change my name at this rate. I worked with Robert Manning on a couple of tracks here. It's the most collaborative I've been as The Anchoress. That came out of some work that I did with him on his Band Spectra, so sort of we ended up reciprocating. He's amazing to work with. He battles with his MS and works from an adapted studio at his house, so we work remotely. But we work well together because we're sort of both in our relative isolation, and with our limitations around not necessarily wanting to be in that kind of commercial studio environment. But we've both found a way that we get a lot out of each other, I think. He's just done an amazing remix of "Throw Over Your Man" that I heard today. It's amazing.
Oh, cool. Yeah.
Obviously, normally when someone does a remix, you're thinking, "Oh god, what have you done to my song?" [laughs] This time I was like, "Oh my God, you made it sound even more like The Cure than it does on the record." I'm very happy with that. I'm already doing that with the album tracks as well. I'm pulling them apart and working on this idea of a follow-up EP, which will be reconstructed versions. I've been working with some string players, but they're just very different to the album. I feel like I'm not quite done with some of the songs. This is the shortest time that I've had from finishing a record to it coming out. I only got mastered three months ago, which, for me, is unheard of. With The Art of Losing, the label sat on it for a year and a half.
Speaking of Pete Townshend connections, you used Jon Astley [at his Close to the Edge] for the mastering.
Always.
You've used him before?
Oh, he's been with me from the beginning.
I didn't make that connection. I need to read liner notes! [laughs]
Jon mastered my very first release that I did back in 2011, Communion. It was just a live album I did at Church Studios. He did the first album, the second album, Versions, and he's done this one. It kind of comes full circle with that Pete Townshend connection with The Who. Which I hadn't actually thought of, to be honest. I think of Jon more in terms of the Tori Amos connection, which is strange, right? He does all her records, and Peter Gabriel as well. I hadn't really [chuckles] thought of him as The Who guy! Once I find someone that I like working with and they like working with me, I sort of feel like, "Why change it up?" I think loyalty is much underrated in this industry, too. Jon's just always been the right person for me. I feel really comfortable. He knows how much of a stickler I am. I might be a pain in the ass, but I'm a reliable pain in the ass. I've spent a lot of time putting in all the detail and the dynamics. I know the dynamics of The Anchoress records are quite extreme sometimes. The way that some people master would squash all of that out. We're always making that compromise between loudness and detail. I always love the vinyl master. [laughs] I'm like, "Can't we just use that for everything?" I feel sort of a little bit more at ease with that these days, where you've also obviously got the option to offer people the hi-res downloads as well.
It's been a treat to hear the new album. I think it's just always nice – with an artist whose music you enjoy – to hear the next steps and what grows differently.
Thank you. Do you ever find that you listen to music, though, and become quite critical from an audio perspective? Because I've found that the more I go into this role, I less enjoy listening to music for pleasure. I have to be in a very particular headspace, otherwise I'm sort of listening for the mix. Can you flip into that headspace quite easily?
It has to be something jarringly god-awful for me to go, "Oh, come on." Like mix-wise or something, that I would've changed if I was there.
Yeah. There's an artist that I love, and they released a single which was mixed by someone different to the album, and there was something about the mix that I just found really bright. I wouldn't have done it that way. I found it hard to enjoy the record because of that, because I just kept listening and going, "Oh, no." I couldn't get out of that producer, mixer headspace. I need to find a way to do that. Maybe it's just listening in a different space. Like not listening in the studio maybe would be a good idea.
