David Kilgour has recorded his songs on 2-track recorders at home, at amazing 24-track studios, and just about everywhere in between. His band the Clean, with his brother Hamish (now in the Mad Scene) and Robert Scott (of the Bats, the Magick Heads, and Electric Blood), achieved commercial success in its native New Zealand in 1981 and have influenced countless indie bands with higher profiles worldwide. Over 20 years, with the Clean, Stephen, and on his own, he's continued to write and record instantly memorable songs that explore different facets of the pop syntax he loves. I talked to David when he was in Chicago, playing extra guitar and keyboards for Yo La Tengo on a recent tour, and he shared stories of his diverse recording experiences.
"We'd been recording for a long time in our practice rooms on a Revox B77 2-track. We had lots of cheap, nasty old mics. We might have had a couple of Shures or something, but just always had it in our practice room and had it in our house. We were just always writing and recording on it. We did have a little 8 channel mixing desk which we sometimes used but I think we generally just plugged mics into it, two at a time. We'd bounce down to overdub, and use that slapback echo quite a bit too. There's a bit on those Revoxes, [where] the first time you record, you can use the other channel as an echo channel. You hear a lot of that stuff on the [Clean's] 'Oddities' CD."
The Clean's first release was the "Tally Ho" single on the new Flying Nun label in Christchurch. "For some reason, I don't remember why, we went into an 8-track studio and did 'Tally Ho'. It was sort of like an 8-track studio in someone's house [in Christchurch]. I think, looking back now, we would've gotten a better outcome if we'd done it on our 2-track Revox. It's a pretty trashy sound that we got out of the 8-track. We were pretty new to recording."
"It was like someone's house really. The lounge was the studio and some sort of kitchen area was the control room. I don't remember much about that studio at all, except the guy that recorded us had been doing heavy metal, sort of prog rock stuff, and he had no idea where we were coming from. I mean we didn't really know. We knew what we wanted to sound like — we didn't know how to do it in this particular studio. It was okay. Roger Shepherd put us on to it, because it was in Christchurch, which was Roger's hometown. Roger ran Flying Nun. It was a cheap studio, and we thought, "Oh well." I guess we thought we were going to get a better quality out of the 8-track. It's a learning curve."
The Clean's next release was the Boodle Boodle EP. "We hired a very small hall, wooden hall, and recorded it on a Teac 4-track with a very cheap New Zealand-made desk and probably with reasonable mics, [Shure SM] 58s, 57s. Doug Hood, who was a good friend of ours and a live sound engineer, engineered it. Chris Knox also helped us out. We mixed it in a very good old studio in Auckland. We mixed that LP twice. Chris went away on holiday and we mixed it in Doug and Chris's house and added lots of echo and all sorts of little tricks to it. And Chris came back from holiday and said, 'That's fucking horrible — how dare you?' He was right. So we went to Mascot and mixed it there. "Boodle's" pretty much live. On 'Point That Thing', there's one guitar overdub and Hamish's vocal overdub. There might have been like one guitar overdub on each song or something. We'd just record the basic track and then go, 'Okay, what are we going to do to it.' We didn't plan anything."
"We'd become quite good at playing live, and reasonably good musicians, so we sort of knew what we were up to by then. It was good to have total control over the studio environment. We were very weary and very paranoid of going into established studios. One example — I went to one studio, and this guy, I don't know why, but we gave him a demo tape of our stuff. We were thinking of using the studio. We went down there to meet the guy and the first thing he says to us is [that] there's no commercial potential here. 'Aw fuck, you know we're just here to, you know...' and I walked out — it was like, 'Fuck you.' I was a pretty arrogant young man as well, but that's kind of the attitude. The Clean, even to this day, we're up against this attitude that we couldn't sing in tune and the guitars were out of tune, which, 50% of the time back then was probably true. That was generally the attitude we were up against. That attitude is still there in some areas of New Zealand."
"We did another 4-track recording, 'Great Sounds Great Good Sounds Good Rotten Sounds Rotten' blah blah blah blah blah. That was done on a 4-track in Christchurch, again in someone's house. It was Chris's again, the Teac pretty similar setup. We did the 'Getting Older' single back in Auckland on a 4-track, back in the original hall where we did "Boodle", at the same time the Chills recorded 'Rolling Moon', the single. And then we split up."
"In a lot of ways the Clean, their power has never been captured on record or CD. There are live recordings, but I don't think it was ever captured. It was never really our desire at the time, I don't know why, to really capture it. We heard a lot of '60s music and we were trying to make mini classic pop records with '60s slap, to a degree, because we loved '60s stuff so much. We were interested in making interesting recordings, not so much capturing what we were about. One example is 'Anything Could Happen' — that was written in the late '70s and that was a full-on punk, sort of a Ramones song, really flat-out. We basically turned it into a little country song by the time we did "Boodle"."
Two live Clean records did get released. "The "In- A-Live" thing came along in the late '80s when we re- formed for two gigs in London and they recorded it and they put that out. I don't know what that was recorded on. [Fostex 16-track, it turns out] ["Live Dead Clean"] was just from cassette recordings, a couple of live cassette recordings. Some of that might have come from a 2-track live tape, done on an old Ferrograph 2-track."
The Clean broke up in 1982, as David had grown tired of the expectations of his band, and preferred to pursue painting. In 1984, David and Hamish released a set of rough home recorded sketches under the name the Great Unwashed. "That was done after 'Getting Older'. Hamish bought a 4-track Teac, and we just started playing around on it. We had absolutely no desires to put anything out, and we ended up with an LP's worth of material. It was done at Hamish's house and my mother's house, over a period of one summer, playing around. It was a Teac like the one that Chris Knox owns. I think we had a 58, and [plugged it] straight into the machine. [It was] mixed back in Auckland, through good gear. We actually had a good experience doing "Boodle" there. I wasn't actually at the mixing of that, and at the time. Hamish mixed it, with Chris I think. I thought there was a bit too much reverb on it, but it's lasted quite well. I still quite like it, it's got a freshness to it — it's fun."
In 1988, Kilgour began to pursue music more seriously again, and he formed the group Stephen with bassist Alf Danielson, drummer Geoff Hoani, and later Stephen Kilroy. "I think the Stephen EP, 'Dumb', I would have liked that to be a real big Beach Boys production. We got a grant from an arts council in New Zealand and we did that at a studio called Mascot Studios. It was probably a 24-track tape, believe it or not. I can't believe how thin that recording is, but I think it was done on a 24-track, state-of-the-art studio in Auckland. Victor Grbic engineered that one, who had also done some Verlaines records, and Stones."
The Clean recorded their reunion album, Vehicle, in 1989. "We did that in London because Geoff Travis from Rough Trade came and saw us play and said, 'Let's do a record.' We made that in 3 days in a very good studio, which I'd like to go back to, called Blackwing."
"The first day we had in-house engineer, and then Alan Moulder did the last 2 days, before he was famous. He's done Smashing Pumpkins, Al Green, he's done an enormous amount of acts. He's done Jesus and Mary Chain quite a bit." He also recorded My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. "He was really good to work with. He was just an engineer at that stage for us. The [house engineer was] Ken Kennedy. Geoff Travis, he was good to us. He came in and checked it out one day, but just left us totally to our own devices, and suggested afterwards, 'We should mix these 2 songs. If we don't like it, we won't use it.' They did a great job on them. He was great. He gave us a list of studios to go and look at, and we just picked the one we liked the best. It had a stone, sort of concrete room, and it had kind of a dead room, and it was a Neve and Studer I think. That concrete stone room is pretty cool. It's square, but it's got these rocks from Spain or something in it, and every rock is not at the same angle as each other, and a concrete floor. Not that large, but large enough to get a good sound out of it. There was a big glass window/door going into the next room, which was in front of the control room, and that was like a deader room. You could see into the other room through the glass. Hamish was in the live room with the drums, right in the middle of the live room, and Bob and I were next door with a bit of baffling around the amps."
"Bob [Scott] and I were obsessed about getting back to New Zealand, we were really homesick and really tired. And we thought, 'Oh, we've got 3 days.' I think, we recorded it all in 2 days and mixed it in the other day, but Alan Moulder and Geoff Travis went back to 2 songs."
"I was still using my battered old Ibanez 59, which I could never really get perfectly in tune and a Fender Twin. I had a New Zealand-made amp for many years called a Gun Classic, but being in London, we hired gear. [The Gun Classic is] what I used on all those early Clean recordings. Just two big JBLs and you couldn't get any bass out of it, it's just an incredibly trebly amp. I used to play it on full, with no bass and all treble and all reverb. I've still got the amp, and when I turn those old settings on, I just cannot be in the room with it. I can't believe I used to submit that to soundmen. As a kid, I loved the Velvets, but I also loved Public Image, and I think I took a bit of both. Definitely Keith Levene, his playing was really fantastic."
In 1991, Kilgour recorded his first solo record, Here Come the Cars. "Bailter Space and the Skeptics had a studio in Wellington, and I kind of knew those guys, and I did it with them. That was done on one of those Tascam or Fostex 16-track 1/2" machines, through an old Soundcraft desk maybe, and pretty good mics. Fish Street [Studio], Stephen Kilroy from Dunedin, had a couple of Neumann 67s, I think they're called, U 67s, and it was called Writhe studios, they had a really nice selection of mics, some old Sony, old valve mics, and modern Shures. I think we did that [album] over about a week or two."
