In your early career you worked at Advision and Lansdowne studios?
Yeah. I was kind of trained in really quite a formal way — these orchestral sessions and all sorts of things where there are tried and tested, specific routines and methods of recording instruments properly.
One thing I dug up that was really funny — you've been a tape op on Yes and ELP records. So you got in the studio and you sort of jumped into the game in '74 or so?
Yeah, although it's not strictly true because I never tape op'ed on the ELP sessions.
No? It's written down somewhere.
I know. Unfortunately there is certain bullshit or mistakes. What happened was I worked at Advision Studios, that happened to have Yes and the ELP records made there.
So in some journalist's mind, you were there.
Well, it's written down like that and then they twist that I did that, but no, I didn't. I did tape op on a Gentle Giant album and Mott the Hoople and some good stuff there, but I think ELP, I definitely didn't. I did work with Yes later in my career at Townhouse.
Was that Drama?
Yes, which was a rather strange, strange record.
J: I liked that record.
There were bits of it that were all right. At Advision I would do moonlighting sessions. People still did 8- track sessions in those days because it was cheaper. It was like, four pounds an hour for 8-track, six pounds an hour for 16-track, ten pounds an hour for 24-track. At Advision we had a Scully 8-track, which was never designed for punching in on. It was horrendous. When I was the tape op, to punch in you had to go from ready to record — you had to go from sync to line in and press the record button. You couldn't do all those in one go so you had to try to hold a pencil between your belly and the record button — so you balance that there and then when the time [came] to punch in, they would actually shout, "Okay, coming up now" and you'd go, "Oof," like that — two switches and a push with your stomach. All these things you take for granted now. No tape counters. When you were doing jingle sessions you had to put all these different time graph marks on the tape. You'd put a white [mark] for the squiggly at the beginning and a white squiggly for the end. If you were doing jingles, there'd be four different verses for the jingle and you had to go to the right one, so you'd have white for the first and second, yellow for the twenty-second, or something. It was a nightmare being a tape op in those days. The session is only three hours and you've overbooked and the next session started a half an hour after the last one finished, so if you got it wrong you were seriously bollocked. My first few months of working in the studio were like living hell, because it was really serious shit. When you fucked up in those days you would get seriously hammered whereas now, well, okay, just undo it. There wasn't an undo in those days if you wiped the bass drum or something.
Who were some of the engineers early on at Advision or Lansdowne that you picked up a lot from?
There was this guy called Martin Rushent, who was quite famous and went on to produce Human League — he did loads of stuff.
Buzzcocks.
Yeah, lots of stuff. There was a really, really nice guy who I think left the business and became a carpenter or something — Gary Martin, who did a lot of the Gentle Giant stuff.
There's a good story about you riding your bike over to The Manor because it was near where you lived when you were young.
Oh, no. It was near where I went to school. That was in the days when it [The Manor] only would have just have started, as well. When I started working in '74 I thought I'd missed the boat — rock n' roll wasn't even twenty years old. I looked at rock n' roll being like mid-'50s — it started in terms of Elvis and Carl Perkins. It wasn't even twenty years later, and now I look at it and I've been in the business for over thirty years. And I thought I missed the boat then!
J: You kind of hit it right before a good, creative peak. I think that the early '80s saw so much cool stuff happening again.
Yeah, I met a guy the other day who was a maintenance guy in the '80s at the Townhouse (where I used to spend eighteen hours a day, seven days a week) and he said, "The thing is, it's not so much that the gear has changed or the budgets have changed and all that. The thing that I miss the most is the fun has changed. There isn't the fun anymore."
J: It's not so much fun staring at computers.
And you have this unbelievable pressure, whether it be financial and/or record company pressure or whatever. The act knows that they're going to be dropped after their first three weeks if it's not successful, so they're all hyped up from the beginning as well. I remember the days where I used to go into the studio and say, "Let's just make a record and have fun." They would listen to it at the end and they would go, "Well, let's choose that one as a single," whereas now, if you don't have a single they wouldn't let you into the studio in the first place.
Or the record never comes out because no one hears the single and it gets shelved.
Well, they would rather shelve a record that's cost them say, two hundred thousand dollars to make — they'd rather shelve it then if they don't feel there's anything there, rather than having to go through the motions which would cost a million dollars, probably.
How did working on these progressive records lead into working on the XTC records and working with Steve Lillywhite [Tape Op #93]? How did you two meet up?
What happened was I left Advision and I went to work for a studio called Lansdowne, which is still there now — it was the second oldest independent studio in England. The first was a studio called IBC, which doesn't exist anymore and was an important place in the West End. Lansdowne was a really, really great studio. It's a famous studio for doing Acker Bilk in the '50s, lots of jazz stuff and then things like The Dave Clark Five. When I joined in the '70s, it was a studio where you did jingle sessions in the morning, formal sort of music recording in the afternoon and then you'd tend to do bands at night — it wasn't always like that, but it was very rounded. It was well known for good string sessions there and the boss was quite a tyrant really, but everybody who worked there really loved their trade well. We learned how to record string sessions, how to record jazz bands, how to record classical music, how to record avant-garde jazz, how to record rock bands, how to record pop bands — you know we had the whole thing in there. In those days there was a massive sessions scene going on as well so it would often be "x" session in the morning, "y" session in the afternoon, "z" session at night and then bands that would be heavy bands — I remember working quite a lot with this band called Uriah Heep, who were quite big in the '70s in America. It was a really good mish mash of all sorts of recording and I think it was really good. Then what happened was in '77 or '78, I figured I'd kind of had enough and I wanted to do more bands — that whole era of the punk thing that happened here. I just felt like I wanted to get out and work for more bands if I could, so the question was, "How are you going to do that?" At the time I had a client [Trevor Morais] who had a rehearsal studio in the country, which later became quite a well-known studio called Farmyard Studios. He bought this house that had a barn [which] started off as a rehearsal studio, but it became quite well known fairly quickly as a place to do location recording. Manor Studios in Oxford started this mobile studio called the Manor Mobile, which was quite famous, so very often the Manor Mobile would come to Farmyard Studios to record. Now, Trevor became a great friend of mine because I lived just down the road, so I got to know the Virgin lot through the mobiles. The long and the short of it is I befriended the guys who were the engineers on the mobile and then got to speak to their boss. It turned out that they were going to start this studio in London, which was going to be like an extension of The Manor. I was lucky enough to get on the short list straight away of potential staff. I got to the stage at Lansdowne where I was just sort of engineering sessions, not like heavy-duty sessions, but doing sessions — the gradual climb up the ladder as it was then. I kind of negotiated my position at The Townhouse to become a junior staff engineer there, I guess, so when it started in late '78, I was lucky enough to be on staff there. It's just being in the right place at the right time. It was very state of the art for the time, as well. Everybody wanted to record there, so everybody came — and that's how I met Steve Lillywhite, who came in as an independent producer. He worked for Island Records for a while, but somehow he got the job of doing XTC — I think that the first job I did with him was a song called "Life Begins at the Hop" for XTC. That was the first time I met Steve and I guess we were both in our mid twenties then — the same age exactly. We just sort of struck up a friendship and we had success with those XTC records. We made two albums together that were more critically successful than financially successful, I think, and through that Steve was asked by Peter Gabriel to do a record.
The third record?
The third solo album. I ended up doing that with Steve and that was a major string in the bow so to speak. Through that I met Phil Collins, who played the drums on two of the songs on the record and obviously through the Gabriel record we — I don't know if invented is the right word — but the big drum sound thing.
Yeah, I wasn't going to ask you that question because it's been covered so much.
Phil took note of that, so he then asked me independently of Steve if I was interested in working on his solo album, so that's how I met Phil. That's how I got involved doing him and then obviously through him, I met the other guys in Genesis. So that came on, and while all that was going on, I got to work with The Police.
Right. That was all intertwined in that time.
That was intertwined because XTC used to tour with The Police a lot. The Police were fed up with this guy who was producing their records.
Nigel Gray?
Nigel Gray, who basically turned them on to cocaine and various other pharmaceuticals — so they were looking for somebody else. I think Sting would have been chatting to Andy [Partridge] one day and Andy would've said,. "Why don't you use the bloke whose working with us? He's great." So that's how I got asked to do The Police. I always remember Miles Copeland, the manager, ringing me up and the only question they asked me was, "Do you take drugs?" It was like, "No, of course not!" "Okay, you got the gig." That's how it was in those days. I had met Sting once before because we did a session at The Townhouse — he was originally signed to Virgin Publishing. I did a session with him when he was producing a demo for another songwriter. Anyway, going back to The Police — we kind of met at the airport on our way out to record that. Nowadays you have protracted negotiations and meetings with the band and all this sort of thing.
Had you heard demos or anything? You just sort of jumped in?
Yeah. I mean, you would, wouldn't you? Having had three successful albums before them, they were one of the biggest bands around.
That was Ghost in the Machine, wasn't it?
Yeah, that was the one I did.
Yeah, which really — not to knock on Nigel, because the first records sound fine, they hold up good today as well — but that was a sonic leap forward for them too, with more textures and stuff.
It was a whole different trip, really, wasn't it?
Were they pushing in that direction, too? Did you feel that they'd been a little restricted before?
I didn't feel that they'd been restricted. I just seemed to sort of flow with the songs, I think.
You were co-producing with them. Things like the synth textures — were those from you or from the band?
We just turned up in Montserrat [AIR Studios] with a bunch of gear, you know. They had a deal with Oberheim and they had given us a bunch of synthesizers. I remember the Minimoog, and it had all of these sticky things on the keyboard with numbers and I said, "Well, what are those numbers for?" And they said, "Oh, those are the order of the notes for one of the songs." In other words nobody was, in their own admission, a keyboard player, really. Sting has obviously improved a lot over the years, but in those days it was one-finger stuff. Of course polyphonic stuff was just coming in, so we had the Oberheim and the Prophet so you could actually play chords. It is very easy to forget that in those days, it was like — I think Ghost in the Machine was done 24-track and Synchronicity, I think we did 48-track analog. Even I amaze myself thinking back on those days. How did we make records on twenty-four tracks?
It seems like for quite a while, you kept on the path of engineering. Steve Lillywhite was much more in the producer's chair and you were engineering. He was also qualified to engineer as well, to a degree.
Yes, but not as much as me. He started producing a bit earlier, whereas I had a longer, more formal education — well, if you use the word education. He knows roughly how it works. He would be the first who admits he's not as technical.
One of the things I hear with your sound, or the kind of sounding records you're working on, from '77, '78 on, was bringing the drums really far forward. Is that partially your own vision of how you like to hear records?
Yeah it was, really because I just thought records in the '70s sounded... if you stand next to a drum kit it kind of hurts. Really flat out. If you go to a good gig — a gig where the acoustics are really good, it's loud! Drums on records never sounded loud to me. I don't mean volume-wise, but sound loud. One of the first records I heard in the '70s that I thought did sound good was Little Feat with George Massenburg [Tape Op #54] engineering, where he actually did have a bit of room sound in there. Otherwise, it was the whole thing in the '70s with very, very dry and dead studios. I wanted to change that, and when we started the Townhouse, particularly with this whole British punk movement, it was loud, raucous bands, a lot of whom were terrible — but we wanted to sort of make it sound loud. We had the opportunity to make a couple of rooms in the Townhouse really live and that's where that whole room ambience thing came out of. I made a conscious effort to try and make the drums not only be loud, but appear to be loud as well. I just felt that room thing was where it was at. The other thing was, I just think that people, from an engineering point of view, didn't understand tape saturation well. I think people very often used to over-record — therefore, you would loose the transients. Quite often, I used to use Dolby A, and then Dolby SR when that came out.
To bring the record levels down a bit?
To bring the noise levels down. I used to hardly tickle the tape with the snare drums to try to retain maximum transients. I would be very careful how I mic'ed the snare drum up — the preamp that I used — not to overload it onto tape so that it would retain the transients. I would look at some records like the Police, and I'd think, "Oh my God, in the mix the snare drum is so loud," and it is! I'm sort of embarrassed about it now, but every time I say that to somebody they say, "Oh, no, we love that! That's what we love about it." It was three people — The Police with the three personalities, and the drums do need to kind of come forward and make that balance. We didn't have effects boxes in those days where you could plug in a room sound, so to speak, or use a plug in or whatever. You had to use what you had in those days and therefore, the acoustic area that you recorded in was vitally important.
The strangest thing to me is that some of your work actually led to you going in a different direction.
It had to really, because there's only so far that you can go — I remember for a few years after that "In the Air Tonight", every waking day of my life people were ringing up wanting me to record the drums. "Can we get that drum sound?" In the end I think I just kind of reacted against it.
It's funny because at the same time you were creating stuff like XTC's English Settlement, with a very nice room drum sound on most of that record, and then Peter Gabriel's "Intruder" sound.
Well, "Intruder" was the first one. That's when we kind of discovered that sound.
That led to a thing where people made a canned version of that sound with digital reverb and stuff.
Yeah, I was talking to someone about this the other day. Right in the early '80s was when AMS started making mad stuff, and that non-linear reverb was one of the first instances of trying to recreate that sort of thing. We had one of their boxes at the Townhouse and the famous setting that is called "nonlin2" that everybody loves — that is my invention. Everybody said, "Well, what was nonlin1?" Nonlin1 was like nonlin2 but only one side. It was like a stereo thing, but only one side had that "schhhh" thing and the other side some sort of strange or normal sounding reverb. I said to them, "Why don't we make it stereo, but both sides sound like that?" I listen back to "In the Air Tonight" now — I was always trying to be subtle about it, but I heard a Springsteen record the other day that Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84] must have mixed — who's a good friend and I love Bob, but this was like "Born in the USA" or something, early mid '80s and [makes a blasting sound] and it's like so fucking obviously digital reverb to the max! I don't know if it was Lexicon or AMS or whatever, but it was like, "Oh my god that is so unsubtle." We all thought it was great at the time. There isn't one record I've ever made that I listen to now and don't go, "Oh shit. I wish I could remix that."
Everybody has that feeling.
We did a remix many years ago now of "In the Air Tonight" — like a '91 remix or something, which Phil and I did for a laugh.
Did that come out?
It came out on a b-side or something.
How did you change it?
I can't remember. It was probably the fact that we mixed it to half inch as opposed to quarter inch. I remember we used to complain that the echo on his voice was out of time. [sings] "Do you remember — buh, buh, buh"
Oh, I like that!
In those days you mixed pretty damned quickly.
