Can we hear a bit about your career trajectory and how you got interested in recording?
It was from an early age. I was the geeky one looking at the back of albums to see what studios they had been recorded in. I wasn't even sure what production meant. Everyone else knew the names of band members. I never knew that, but I could tell you who the engineer was! My father used to be a photographer and he was very interested in creativity. He had a tape recorder that I used to play around with. I learned very quickly about feedback and being able to edit and cut things up.
What bands were you listening to around this time?
The Beatles played a big part. The thing that really sucked me in though was the Tamla Motown era. Those Marvin Gaye recordings were just honey to my ears. I'll tell you what also really did it for me: The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." That was such a magical trip of, "How on earth do they do those things?" I think I must've worn that single out in a day, just listening to it over and over again. I loved listening to the layers of vocals. I felt, "I have to be able to do this!" I remember sitting on the steps of my parents' house with a phone book and looking through it for recording studios. I rang every one of them, starting with Abbey Road! Eden Studios, a small studio at the time in Kingston, West London, took me on in the early '70s. They had a Scully lathe. Anyone who recorded there would go away with a 7- inch acetate of the session. This was before cassettes. So, they wanted to train me to do that. Record companies would want 20 cuts of the next single to have as references for their departments.
That's some labor there!
It was very tedious. They trained me in the basic skills of mastering with this lathe. At the time it was mono. In the middle of doing that, there would be sessions going on in the studio. It was quite a small affair — they'd built it all themselves. It was really old school and everything was totally dead. The desk was based off an old BBC design, with the reverse operating faders and all of that. I got a taste of the process and got to assist on a few sessions by moving microphones around and what not. They had an Ampex 4-track at the time.
At this point, you were college-aged?
Yes. They had to move from the premises two years after that. They found this old warehouse in Chiswick, London. They had a studio designed and built from helped build the desk and wire the studio. I was studying electronics at college, so I had some background. It opened my eyes an awful lot. Two of the owners were BBC-trained. They felt it was important that I get a really good grounding, so they sent me off to a Tonmeister Course in England. That's like a three or four year thing.
What is that?
Tonmeister is an engineering standard in Germany. You have to be able to read music, but I was sent there more for the engineering side. You take microphones apart so you can learn how they work. You learn what compressors do. When you compress something, what's actually going on? Curves, release times and things like that. I got to learn an awful lot; I'm very grateful they insisted I have that kind of grounding. In those days it was very standard. If you worked at EMI, there was a training procedure you went through. You needed to know how to line up a multitrack.
In the late '70s and early '80s you engineered and produced a lot of records for Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Rockpile and Squeeze that I love.
The Undertones were another band around that time, though I don't think they did much in America at all.
I got their first album in high school and just played the hell out of it.
The Undertones were great! [Sire Records head] Seymour Stein called out of the blue. He said he had this band from Ireland and he really wanted me to work with them. I met with their manager, Andy Ferguson. He's a great guy — he's still looking after their affairs. He had a couple of tracks and I loved them right away. This was probably my first real offer as a producer. I'd done a lot of coproduction odds and ends. Obviously I jumped at it! We organized fees — I took whatever they told me because I had no idea what I was supposed to be making! We booked the studio and then I met the guys. We didn't rehearse or anything.
They sounded ready.
We just bashed through the record. We had fun every day. They were young and full of energy. They were just kids and they were absorbed in the excitement of being signed by a label. Suddenly they were in London, staying in hotels and being driven to the studio. We did it in Eden Studio. My first hit album, I think. The album was a breakthrough and the singles worked pretty well.
Most of the records you were working on in that era were done at Eden. Maybe it's partly your style and partly the studio, but it's a distinctive sound. It's a very bright, but dry and powerful sound. You didn't seem to need to get a lot of ambience.
Yeah, they're all from Eden. The room was actually fairly natural sounding. It wasn't the biggest room — it had a relatively low ceiling. There were multi- reflections all over the place, but they were pretty well-controlled. You could mic stuff at a distance or quite close — it would never be a big room ambience. I grew up in an era where people were close-mic'ing more. Drum kits seemed to have hundreds of mics around them. Some of it worked and some of it didn't! People were also moving away from tube mics. Things were becoming more FET [Field Effect Transistor] and those mics were generally brighter and quieter. That was the great thing about locking up all those tube mics; the background noise was so horrible, especially with tape. It was not an ideal situation, since there's a certain grandeur to old tube mics that electronically FET doesn't really give you. But in those days we didn't hear things as well as we do now. I had a small set of speakers. It's the clarity and quality of reproduction that has moved on much more. That's why people are going back to old equipment — you can actually hear it now! Before, it was lost in noise and cabling. You can hear the desk and you can hear the old preamps. Nobody used that stuff in those days. Why would you use that? I used to listen on JBL 4350s — huge, multi-range speakers. They were the size of a wall!
Do you think there's a big difference between "British" and "American" recording aesthetics and philosophies?
I was reading something interesting the other day about how American records were more honest about the way things were recorded, whereas in Europe they didn't really care. They'd use tons of EQ to get it right, or they'd use an effect. In America you'd be moving the mic around until you got the sound right. I remember the first time I worked in America I was astonished at the insane preoccupation of every single sound. I never got that in England. Mics where thrown in a cupboard and no one really thought about it. That bright, attacking "British" sound is a part of that generation.
Because the Brits were more likely to reach for the EQ?
Absolutely. Personally, I had no hesitation. I was never afraid of reaching for the EQ. But, actually I do remember a lot of engineers I used to assist, old school guys, would barely touch it. Boosting the high-end half a dB would be enough. I'd quite happily crank 12 dB, if that's what it needed. If it sounds good, it is good.
That said, the records you worked on sound quite natural to me. You seemed to resist the sonic trappings of the '80s effects. The crazy snare drum, the gated reverb...
Well, I sure did try things on a few records.
But with restraint. As a result, I think those records are still really listenable.
Thanks. I think you're right. Recently I started transferring everything I've done to digital and it's quite surprising to listen to some of the records. It's amazing how good those tapes sound now. I really didn't expect it. I thought they'd sound small and thin by comparison to what we have now. Actually, there's a real depth to these recordings. The technology really does hold up. I'm pleasantly surprised. It'll be interesting, when I start mastering these things, to see how they turn out compared to the originals.
There are occasional little bursts of runaway flutter echo on some of those records. It becomes a little piece of ear candy that you look forward to. Do you remember consciously going for that?
I do remember using those effects, but why I don't know. I think those things were dreamt up by any one of us. They would've been a conscious decision. I think those kind of effects were a part of that time as well. They were probably derived by a couple of ReVoxes spitting out tape delay that was set on some sort of feedback. Obviously mixing at that time was done without a computer. That's something I love to this day. These days it seems the life gets sucked out of it, the more you employ computers to move this and move that. I can understand if you have a hundred tracks going, but otherwise I think it's crazy. Doing a change on the fly is like dancing. You're dancing with the faders and it's a performance! For me, a lot of those records standout because there's a sense of excitement. It comes from adrenaline!
Do you still do "manual mixes" from time to time?
I try to. One of the things that's great about Pro Tools is anything that would take too much time to move while you're mixing live, you can trim on the computer. A pan, level or EQ change — you can do all the complicated stuff in the computer. One of the things I always did, and still do, is ride the vocal through the mix. I feel you need to, with compression. Some singers are not good at performing in front of a mic, at least in the studio. They tend not to be dynamic. So, you need to reintroduce that performance and sense of dynamic into the record. That's very much a part of the process for me. I don't want the computers to be doing everything.
