How did you guys first get into music and recording?
J: When we were about 12 we both started playing the guitar purely because we were obsessed with all the guitar bands of the time, like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden — grunge was massive then. We formed a couple of covers bands that we played in for a few years. I stopped doing music when I was about 18. I went off to waste a lot of time at university and Rob kept going with the band and recording.
R: We had our rehearsal room where we basically spent all our time, but our dad bought a little Fostex 4-track. We ignored it for about half a year, but we had to get something down. I think it was our bass player [Matt Winsor] who got this thing out. We very quickly moved off 4-track and went on to a Mackie 24-channel desk with an Akai 1/4" tape machine — pretty small stuff. After that we got a small studio on the island here and I started recording local bands. I went onto ADAT and stuff like that and then when Jim came back from university, we started to play again and we built the studio around the band.
Jackson Analogue got signed up by Universal. How did that happen so fast?
J: It all happened in a really funny way. We started playing for the sake of playing while we were waiting for other bands to come and record. Before we knew what we'd done, we'd accidentally demo'd an album and then almost by accident again, we signed a deal with Island/Universal! It was completely ridiculous! We gave away a couple of songs to a few people and within a week we had a meeting with the label. Then we did a gig in front of them and we literally signed a major label deal a couple of weeks after that. We were barely even a band — we didn't have all of the players yet or anything! It was absolutely crazy times. We did the major label thing, the touring, the singles and the videos and all of that, which was fine......
But......
J: But we disagreed a lot with the record company and their vision of us — we got lumped in with a lot of bands we were nothing like. We were a small fish in a very big pond is the best way to put it. So we left Universal and spent a lot of money fighting to get the first album back from them over the course of 18 months. We eventually got it back and licensed it to a load of other labels around the world.
The water tower sounds like an amazing place. When did you find it?
J: We've been in here for five years in loads of different guises. It was a rehearsal room at first and we had it as one big open room — it's over 1500 square feet. Then we built a drum booth and a control room, so we had those and a big live room. Originally we weren't meant to physically be in the building, because it was on Queen Victoria's land and we'd actually only hired it as storage. We used to get thrown out! Now we have a proper lease with them and we've had that for two years.
So what's the current studio layout?
J: The difficult thing for people to appreciate is how odd this building is. From the outside it doesn't actually look too crazy at all, but inside there are three floors. You've got the basement floor, which was an old joinery shop from when the place was a naval college. Then you've got our studio floor, which was a meat locker and the floor above us is a 32-ton steel tank for the water, which is begging to be an echo chamber if we can make it happen. But it means we've got this great big chunk of metal in the ceiling, which is boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. We've moved the control room out into the big room now, so we've got a really big control room — about 800 square feet — and that's because we like to have a lot of room around us. We've recently acquired the downstairs, so we now have a 1000 square foot live room downstairs.
What have you done as far as soundproofing and acoustic treatments?
J: As with everything in our place, it's a magical mix of applied science and whatever we could afford at the time. The basic trick to the soundproofing was making the walls ridiculously thick, doing the air gap, doing the wall over again and covering it in carpet tile or whatever we can get our hands on. The ceiling is made up of folded blankets and wood chip over the top — it's pretty makeshift in that way! The rest of the room was a big, boomy square, so I sloped the walls off a couple of years ago when Rob went to Glastonbury, and put these big baffles over the desk. That works fine for us. We've also always had this weird obsession with carpets, proper old '60s and '70s revolting carpets, so we have them slung all over the place. The room is quite lively, but at the same time it's controlled enough for us.
And you use the stairwell for recording too......
R: That's one of the joys of what we've got — being able to use the whole building when we're recording. We're forever using the reverb of the stairwell. It's wooden stairs with old Victorian brick and it goes right to the top of the building — it must be at least a good 60 or 70 feet. We record most amps at the top at the stairwell with a mic halfway down and the same with vocals and acoustic guitars. Our schooling with the space was when we did the first Jackson Analogue record. We were there on day one thinking, "Right. How the fuck do we make this record?" We'd put an amp on and we'd walk around it with a mic until it sounded good and that's how we've built up our knowledge of everything. We've tried, tested, played around and had a lot of fun.
You mentioned earlier a favourite secret weapon when it comes to reverb......
J: We're completely obsessed with the reverb in the [Roland] Space Echo RE-201. We absolutely love it, but it's completely broken and only the spring works in it. We've tried the Great British Spring and all types of lovely springs, but we always come back to that.
R: It's probably because we didn't have any other reverb, so early on we made our sound using the broken Space Echo. Now we can't find anything to recreate that reverb, so it's like, "Well, let's just keep using it!"
J: And that kind of ethos has stuck with us through everything. We have enough outboard gear, but we don't use it an incredible amount really. We run most things through one of three outboards and that's it really. We use the Empirical Labs Distressor a lot, Thermionic Culture Phoenix Stereo Valve Compressor and we DI nearly everything straight through the JoeMeek [Studio Channel VC1Qcs] and into the desk.
As well as your 48-channel Audient ASP8024, you've also got an old Audix (ex- BBC broadcast) desk. How did you get ahold of that and what do you use it for?
