How did you get your start in studios?
I was quite fortunate. The studio where I learned to become an engineer was Ca Va Sound, in Glasgow. It had a couple of rooms, one of which ended up a Neve room — an Eastlake-designed room. That was a good studio and a great place to start. I went to college for a year after school and then I got a job there as a runner making tea. That was the biggest studio in Scotland with the best equipment — a proper place. You got all the bands, producers and engineers coming in.
Do you feel that was a good way to learn?
Much better way to learn than, I imagine, going to college for four years. I think the college route is good, but I think you still come out needing to do a few years of the bare bones. We used to call them "Saturday bands". You know, they'd come in on a Saturday, do four songs and then you'd mix them and they'd be gone by eight o'clock at night. [laughter] They'd always be drunk by the time they finished. There'd be the guy at the back, the friend of the band who "knew about sound." Many days of that!
That was your graduation into recording?
That's what teaches you to work quickly and efficiently. I suppose the bad side of that is you have a whole set of "go to" sounds. "Here's the kick drum sound. Here's the snare sound." But that's what you have to do if you have two bands coming in one after the other. You've got to be quick.
Did you ever leave the mics set up for the drum kit between clients?
No. [laughter]
I was always wondering if that was a faux pas.
I don't think so. I always thought it would be a great idea. Have everything set up and have triggers for the drummers — those kinds of drummers can never play consistently! I've worked with plenty of bands that have needed help and made them better. But great bands — you turn on all the lights and off you go.
When did you graduate from the "Saturday bands" then?
You never really quite graduate from them! One minute you're doing an orchestra in the big room and then Saturday afternoon you've got to go do a band in the rear room. I was doing bands like Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian, working on those records for months. But then you still have to go back to "Saturday bands". I think it's slightly unfortunate in the way I work now — I don't really get to do that. I only get to do sessions that are going to be commercially released, which is fine. I'm not mourning about it. But you don't have that, "I've got to get everything done in a day" kind of thing. I don't think I've done anything in one day in a long time. You should be able to go in, record a song and it's done. But then there's mixing, and then there's recalling the mix...
Punching in the vocal.
Yeah, with a different microphone! Then you've got to match it. Nothing really ever seems to get finished until you get it back from the mastering.
You moved up from assistant engineer and you started getting co-production credits with some of the bands. Who were you learning production from?
Ca Va was a large studio and Scotland had a lot of big bands like Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry and Deacon Blue. All those bands used to come record at Ca Va. You were fortunate that there were lots of good producers like Jon Kelly. Mick Glossop came through one time for a month and scared the living daylights out of me. In retrospect, he was just being kind of the way I am. If something doesn't work I'll go, "That's not the way it should be!" I want it to work while I'm here. If you plug a mic in and the jack's hanging out of the wall, that drives me nuts. There were a couple of in-house guys that were really cool too. Robert Rankin was good. In the latter days there were people like Calum Malcolm, a Scottish producer. I thought it was a bit of a mystery as to what a producer did. Even now I think the guys that go in and sit there while the engineer makes the record and they bark orders — I don't get that. That's for somebody else to do. That's not what I do. I'm an engineer — I record and I produce records. But a lot of those guys were great. I think for a long time you're an engineer, then you're comping all the vocals for them without any input and then you're comping all the drums. Then you're telling them to do it again. I was always doing that — probably to my detriment — I couldn't keep my mouth shut.
You'd be a producer's nightmare! [laughter]
Oh, I probably was. But that's what you do. Suddenly somebody says, "We're going to call you co-producer on this record." And then, because you've been doing it so long anyway, that's what it is. Then you get known as somebody who produces and records. It's quite a handy thing for people to have, because it can be just one guy to do the whole thing.
With Belle and Sebastian, even though you haven't done all their recordings it seems you still work with them a bit. Even on the last record, you mixed a few songs.
I still keep in touch. All those guys are really good friends. That's the one thing that the Glasgow scene is, a whole bunch of folks who know each other really well. I recorded a lot of music that came out of here. Even though Belle and Sebastian were working with Trevor Horn, on the first record they did when they went to work with Trevor I ended up mixing some of those songs. It's just a different ear, and I quite like doing that. It's interesting to me to see how somebody else has approached recording a band that you've worked with for years.
How did you end up working with Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai and Teenage Fanclub?
It's because I was at Ca Va. I was one of two in-house guys that were young engineers at the time — I had just graduated from tea boy to intern engineer. Teenage Fanclub had a producer working with them from Manchester called Andy MacPherson — he was great. He let me run the console and basically do all the engineering. You get really good skills like punching in, which is a slightly lost art.
If the technical thing is getting pretty easy for you, people notice.
That's definitely what happened with me — very quickly, working at the studio. My whole family are engineers — I've got mechanical engineers, electrical engineers...
Well, you should build a studio then! [laughter]
Well, from a very early age that's what I was into. I was the assistant, but I started doing all the maintenance in the studio as well — recapping consoles and sorting out all the tape machine transports. When computers came along I did all the diagnostics. That was a parallel career for me in the studio and that's still something I like to do. It's almost as interesting to me as making records. "Oh great, it's not working! Let's spend two hours doing that."
You're perverse! [laughter]
Well, exactly!
Your records have a real natural sound to them. It sounds like you're staying out of the way.
Well, occasionally I'll get into crazy amounts of editing in Pro Tools, but I suppose I always record backing tracks as a band playing live, if they can do it. Although, in saying that, I'll get in there and edit the hell out of it. If it's out of time, it's out of time. There's no way that's going to sound good.
What's the most unnatural thing you've done to something where's it's ended up being not that apparent, besides editing?
Probably things like changing speeds of songs and cutting them up. Expanding the whole waveform. If you've got a backing track and you think it's a bit slow, just go in and "snip".
Is that when you tell everyone to go home, sit in here all night and...
Well, not all night! [laughter] I try and work a ten-hour day — I don't really want to work much more than that. In the old days I tended to work morning, noon and night. I just can't do it anymore — I don't want to do it. I want to go home and watch TV.
Do you set parameters with bands before you start a record?
I try to say, "Let's get in at ten in the morning and finish at eight at night. Enjoy your stay while you're here in Glasgow!" Somehow we still end up finishing at 10 p.m., but I really don't like going any later than that. If I'm mixing I'm fed up by 6 p.m. Mixing is probably the least enjoyable thing for me. I find I end up having to mix things on my own. You get left to your own devices. For a lot of people that is great, but I like having some input. You get to a stage where you're like, "Is this good? Is this bad?"
You did many albums for Belle and Sebastian.
I did five albums with them.
Was that enough? [laughter]
We spent months and months and months on some of those albums. We spent a long time doing The Boy with the Arab Strap. They didn't go on tour for the album before — they just started recording another record. It wasn't because we didn't know what we were doing. We recorded a lot of songs and they ended up with a lot of EPs and tracks. It was a lot of experimentation with where to record. We would record songs in the studio. That takes up time. We would record the same songs at Stuart Murdoch's home. He lived in a church hall — all wide with the big reverb. We would do a live vocal. You had to be very careful with compression and not using very much of it at all. I remember recording things with no EQs, no compression, and no nothing until I got into the studio to mix. Then it was very, very minimal. A lot of those Belle and Sebastian records don't have that "in your face" sound that most things do now, but most of them don't have any compression whatsoever. That was several years of them. By that point, they needed to work with other people. You can't just work with the same guy, day in and day out. I think I was on my fourth record with Mogwai. I recorded with them last year and they actually finished off recording at Chem19 Studio. They mixed it in here with Gareth Jones [Tape Op #110]. I think it was time for them to do something else as well.
You and Mogwai were the co-owners of Castle of Doom.
Yes. We still are. This is what's left of Castle of Doom.
This is the Room of Doom. [laughter]
