LC: I heard that you worked as a session musician in the '70s.
Well, my father was a bass player in a dance band, as well as being an engineer. I played double bass in the school orchestra and then I started to play electric bass guitar. Bass guitar was a very new instrument in the mid-'60s and few people could read for it. I could sight read. I made my way from the provinces down to London. I worked in London throughout the '70s and played on all kinds of shit records for people. Then I went home and built a recording studio with another guy; but I came back to London again and I kind of made up my mind to try to be a producer. It took me about five years.
LC: Were The Buggles factored into the production part of it?
The Buggles were a fantasy band — it was 1978 when we wrote "Video Killed the Radio Star" (with Bruce Woolley) and we could all feel that a lot of new technology was coming. We knew, because we had heard [Kraftwerk's] The Man-Machine - to me The Man-Machine was about 20 times more exciting than punk rock. Punk rock was just badly recorded rock. The way it's been made into these super-slick American records — Foo Fighters are a great example of punk that's been beautifully crafted. But to me it was pretty boring back then. The Man-Machine was fascinating — the idea of a mechanical rhythm section, as well as being able to control things. If you think of the end of the '70s, there was that whole school of beautiful recordings that everybody admired, like Elton John and Led Zeppelin. They still stand up today. But when you're not part of that scene and you're coming from somewhere completely different, you have to find something that you want to do. And technology was the most exciting thing to me.
LC: As far as MIDI programming and synthesis?
MIDI I never liked too much. I always preferred CV [control voltage] and gates. I think I was the first producer — definitely in England — who had a "rig." It was a [Roland] TR-808 with special triggers on it that Dave Simmons built for me. I had a set of Simmons drum modules, which were synth drums. I had this very simple sequencer made by Roland, as well as a Minimoog. You could put lists of notes into the sequencer. If you triggered it from one of the outputs on the 808, you could get it to do other things. Having that really gave me an edge when I worked with ABC. I also did all the Dollar records with it. The Buggles was pre- technology. There was nothing programmed — we were playing like sequencers. Geoff [Downes]' keyboards on that record are amazing to this day. He's a beautiful keyboard player. All of the things we liked about sequencers — we could hear Giorgio Moroder do it, but we couldn't [replicate it]. We rented one of those Oberheim [Mini-Sequencer] things and we couldn't get a fucking squeak out of it. The Buggles was all played [live] and we used echoes and things to get effects. But by the time I started producing, I had that rig. With ABC, when we did "Poison Arrow," it had a tricky little bass part — if you're a kid from Sheffield, it's not the easiest bass part. The drummer from ABC, Dave Palmer, was a good drummer back then, but they'd never made a record before. So when they first played "Poison Arrow" in the studio, I remember saying, "Well, that's how you sound playing it. Is that what you want?" They said, "What else is there?" and I said, "Well, we could really go into it..." They said, "What would that entail?" and I said, "It will take me about ten hours, but I'll program the whole drum part and the bass part into my rig." So I did it with the Minimoog. I programmed the whole drum part and [Palmer] kept telling me what he'd played as a fill. I said, "When I've done this I'll put it down on tape, and then you'll play the drums on top of it. Play as close as you can and then we'll play the bass." Of course it came out much tighter than a bunch of guys just playing it.
JB: Did you keep both drum tracks on that record, or did you scratch the sequenced track?
All we had was one 24-[track], so we wiped all the sequenced stuff that it was played over. It would've been fun to keep it.
LC: That's one elaborate click track!
Yeah! But it was a map — a map for people to play over. It was the first time I realized how much focus you get out of that, rather than just recording people playing.
LC: Giorgio Moroder's a great example. It was really difficult for him to create those synthesizer sequences at the time.
Hans Zimmer was in The Buggles for a while. I remember it was the first time I'd ever heard sequencing applied retroactively. I think it was for "Johnny on the Monorail." He got us to play it to a computer click; it was quite an annoying thing to do at the time. Then he went off into a room; he programmed a load of stuff, brought it back in and it all played in sync. We didn't like it so we didn't use it, but it was the first time I saw something applied [retroactively]. I was astonished that it was possible. As the '80s started, it got more and more astonishing. If you think about it, it never really stopped. I think everyone sees technology change in their lifetime, but to see kids working with "pictures" of equipment that I grew up with — it's kind of funny.
LC: Yeah, all these virtual synths and plug-ins. One of the stylistic things we see with your work is a very controlled, focused way of compartmentalizing sounds.
Playing live is a train wreck in comparison to the studio. In the studio you see everything through a magnifying glass. But it still relates to the outside world; you have to think of people. A record isn't just a recording of a piece of music. It's a thing. That's what makes it so interesting. Some of the records that I spent months doing back in the '80s, you could re- record in two hours now. They wouldn't be the same, but they'd be close enough that the average person might not notice. All of that is much easier when you know what you're doing. When you're actually making a record, you don't know what you're doing half the time. I was never afraid to scrap stuff in the '80s. That's one of the great things about the music business — records certainly can cost a lot of money to make, but it's the cost of time. It's nothing like a movie. If you don't like the movie, you usually can't go back and re-shoot it. A couple of times I have said, "Right. We're going to start again, because this is not going to do what we want." And I can do that.
LC: John and I were discussing your production of the Yes album 90125. That was the Cinema band project that mutated into a Yes album. What were your thoughts going into that, especially after being the vocalist for Yes on the previous album, Drama?
Well, I actually went into that for one reason and one reason alone. At the time I was coming off of ABC and I was really hot as a producer. My wife, who was my manager, thought producing Yes was a lame idea. Yes didn't feel particularly relevant in the '80s. Drama had been an interesting experience, but trying to be [vocalist] Jon Anderson for 44 shows in America [for the Drama tour] had taken its toll on me. What would make me want to go back there again? I went to see them rehearsing as Cinema in L.A. before I decided to do it. Trevor Rabin [guitar], Chris [Squire, bass] and Alan [White, drums]; they were playing some of the tracks and I was so fucking knocked out by the way they sounded. But my wife was like, "What are the songs like? Where are the songs?" Trevor played me a set of songs. About two-thirds of them made it onto the album, but they were quite changed by the time they were finished. We were all in his studio in Topanga Canyon; he went to the loo and left the tape running and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" came on. The intro on the demo was kind of like the intro on the master — this great big heavy metal thing with a jump cut into the verse, and I liked that. Then this awful verse came on, [sings] "We don't wanna go dancing" or whatever, but then the chorus [sings] "Owner of a lonely heart." Immediately I said to him, "This is a hit. This is a number one." He was just coming out of the loo and he said, "No, no, no. That's not for Yes. That's another thing for somebody else." I said, "No. This is great. We're going to have to look at the verse, though." The funny thing about a band like Yes was that they'd played stadiums all throughout the '70s. It never really got anywhere near technology, the way I knew it. Just dropping in a few sounds in the Fairlight [CMI sampler] was starting to get them really interested. And the drum fill...
LC: That's Alan, right? [The crazy drum/horn fill on "Owner... -ed.]
Yeah, Alan White. He was just fiddling around on the
keyboard. He played that and everybody leapt in the air and cheered. It was so funny! But I said, "We can't use it. It's too over the top!" [laughs] And then Chris Squire said, "No, no. It's staying." And that's Alan. On "Leave It" — all those mad sampled drum fills is Alan again on the keyboard — the way he switches the beat around. The album took a year. The vocals were quite amazing on that record. It was the last album I did analog.
LC: To do something like that in the analog realm requires a lot of assembly — putting ideas down, taking them out...
Well, we did the backing tracks to analog 16-track, 30 ips, no Dolby. Then we copied the 16-track immediately to a 24-track — locked, obviously — then we put the 16- track in a cupboard and didn't get it out again until we mixed. I think on "City of Love" we did some edits at the end. We did a tiny bit of correction where I thought they'd laid back on it a bit too much, at one point. We'd taken a 1/8th-inch sliver of tape out of the tape then re-laid the time code on the 16-track and did the whole thing again. Those were the days where you'd have two 24-tracks locked; I had a system for that by the time I did 90125. I had a whole set of rules: the first rule was that you had to have all the information there at any given time. I needed to hear exactly what was in there. "You're telling me there're two guitars on this slave. I have to hear them." Otherwise time will be wasted. The amount of planning you have to do... There was one little disaster. We spent two days doing harmony vocals to a slave reel on "City of Love." They were really layered. It took us two days and I thought they came out really well. I came into the studio the following morning and the tape op was doing something. I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "We had a little drop out on the time code. There are vocals on the read stripe of the time code." I literally dove across the studio to hit the machine in order to get it out of record. He was re-laying the time code! He was fired that morning — we didn't see him again. We had to fly in all of those vocals by hand as a result.
LC: Oh, shit.
Have you ever tried to do that? It took hours and hours. We had one reel and had to chalk-mark it, then see if we were feeling lucky. And tape is like elastic — you didn't just hit it once and it ran all the way through! You're hitting it and having to drop in bits of it. He didn't know! You don't re-stripe time code on a slave. You can't possibly do that! Where are you going to be?
JB: If it drops out you can jam-sync it...
Yeah, jam-sync it. We had that ability.
JB: You mentioned Yes was kind of losing relevance and that you helped make them relevant. Part of that is in your recordings, every five or ten seconds something new happens. How much of that was you and how much of that was the band coming up with ideas?
Well, "Owner of a Lonely Heart" was a good example of something happening every few seconds. Initially I thought the verse was so bad that if I gagged it up a bit, people might not notice. With Yes the gags come at a slightly slower pace, but not on that one. I used to call those things "whiz bangs." We were having fun with them at the time; I've used them on a couple of other records.
JB: I remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood sounded similar, just layered with neat sounds.
Yeah, I guess I was trying to make music entertaining. I wanted it to feel full of life, changing and "moving the camera around." Playing the studio. With the studio, the more control you got, the more it became a musical instrument. Just buttoning [muting] things in and out. On the demo mix of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" I had done the button-out on the drums at the end of the guitar solo. I had just caught the end of the drums as I buttoned them out. Chris Squire insisted that [the final mix] should be just like on the demo mix, catching the end of the drums. We spent ages. I really don't want to go back to analog...
JB: That song has different ambiences, as well as hard edits where the ambiance changes. It's not a lot of the big, gated snare drum.
We used to call [the EMT 140 plate reverb] the "crash box" because you couldn't get a good short plate sound out of a real plate. It didn't work in the same way. When EMT came out with the 250 [digital reverb] I was knocked out. I felt, "Wow! It's like we can move the 'camera' around to different places now." We couldn't do that before. You were stuck. I've found that the actual acoustics of the studio are only really of interest to me if they get in the way. But yeah, the big, gated snare drum turned into a fetish for some people. It was a big bone of contention on 90125 because one of the producers Trevor [Rabin] had worked with was [Robert John] "Mutt" Lange. Mutt Lange is a terrific producer, but he and I are quite profoundly different. Make no mistake, Mutt's made some fantastic records. Anyone who could get Foreigner 4 out of Foreigner, believe me, that's a testament of what the man is capable of; also those Boomtown Rats records that he did. And "Drive" — I love that album [Heartbeat City] that he did with The Cars. Anyway, Trevor thought that the snare drum should be really big and he tried a few times to make us [do that]. I had a great engineer at the time, Gary Langan, who was a very bossy and very opinionated guy. Every time Trevor would try to get on the board, Gary would say, "Get off! Get off!" Eventually it got on my nerves so much that I said, "Okay, Trevor. Get Alan's drums the way you want them to sound. Gary and I'll go down to the joint and chill for a little bit. You give us a shout, alright?" So, Trevor got a load of those graphic equalizers and he tried. It sort of worked, a bit, but Alan would play the rim shot and it would all trigger badly — it was all garbled. Alan hated it — he's a rock drummer. He doesn't give a shit about some fucking snare sample! We had a laugh and I think Trevor realized that we couldn't get that sound out of Alan. In a way, that's where the drum sound of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" came from — I tried to be a bit mad. I thought, rather than having this snare drum pitched low, why not try the "Stewart Copeland" and tune it up to A?" And the crew was shocked. They hated it!
LC: "It's not supposed to be that way..."
I heard them talking as I came out of the studio. I heard Nunu [Whiting, Alan's drum tech] saying, "That fucking Trevor Horn and the way he's got those drums! They sound like a fucking pea on a barrel!" Then he saw me and said, "Sorry, Trev..." [laughs] But it was funny. You can imagine it caused ruptures. Even in the end — there is a mix of the song with the snare tuned down a fifth — but not by me.
LC: You did the Belle and Sebastian record [Dear Catastrophe Waitress] in 2003. Their records have been loose and very organic. It seemed like an odd choice of producer.
But Catastrophe Waitress is still organic-y, isn't it? It's focused, but it's pretty much all played. There's one programmed track that I didn't program. I didn't like the programming. I told them, "People will think this is me," but whatever. They liked it.
How did you first hear about the band?
My daughter used to play their records. I had a woman working for me who also did the dressing rooms for [The] Coachella [Valley Music and Arts Festival]. She met the members of Belle and Sebastian and they got to talking about me. They called me up soon after that conversation. They're Scots and they have their own little world up there, but they are all well educated, nice, caring and considerate people. They had worked with this guy Mike Hurst, who'd made some good records in the '60s. They ended up with a big orchestra, with them playing live in a big studio. They asked him, "Is this what it was like in the old days?" And he said, "No, we never did it like this." So, they had sort of a bad experience with a producer. After I went up to Scotland and first talked to them, they played me a bit of the album and I was hooked. I loved all the songs. I went back up there with a little Pro Tools rig and got them to play me the whole record, in a day, into eight channels of Pro Tools. I had it to listen to and I thought about it for a while. They asked me to do it analog and I made this famous remark that they put on the Internet about how "I wouldn't build a house with an outside toilet." I had an outside toilet when I was a kid! They were lovely to work with. It was a different kind of production. They didn't want any musical ideas from me; they already had seven or eight people in the band. They have more musical ideas than you could cope with. It was more about trying to put them in the best situation. I got them a great engineer because I realized there was an interesting dynamic between how loud the singer sang and how loud the drummer played. I loved how the drummer played because he played like a '60s drummer — very lightly. You didn't have to have that big, horrible "rock-y" sound. It was like a funny old sound, and they use funny old guitars. They had all the tracks down. They just needed someone to really listen to them and say, "Yeah, this is the take. You've got that. It needs a bit of that." They were very hard working. That one song about Thin Lizzy, "I'm a Cuckoo," was a bit of a hit over here. They played that 20-odd times [in the studio]; just played it and played it and played it. Most of the other tracks were whole takes. They wouldn't let me do certain things like layer up any vocals, so everyone had to get 'round one mic. That was interesting to get that to work. I don't mind a challenge! One of the things that makes that record great are the arrangements — the strings and the horns. I did have to tell the French horn player, "I don't know what you're trying to do with this bit of this song. It sounds wrong to me." And he said, "I was in a club and something was playing. The DJ mixed in a Buddy Rich record. It sounded amazing." I learned from them and they were fun. They're still going strong. But that's a nice kind of production because you can be on the phone a lot and walk in and out. It's like Bob Johnston [Tape Op #80] with Bob Dylan, I suppose. He was always credited as the producer, but I don't know if he even knew what "Gates of Eden" was all about. [laughs]
LC: No. He's making sure that the record gets done.
Exactly. Personally, I thought the guy that did the next record [The Life Pursuit] was a bit heavy-handed.
LC: Tony Hoffer? It's, uh, very compressed.
Very compressed, yeah.
