I've seen Gareth Jones' name on records since the '80s and have always wanted to meet him. My imagination created a stuffy, meticulous character; an engineer/producer driven by a need for electronic perfection and a slave to the technology of recording. This is the man who engineered albums by Depeche Mode, Erasure, John Foxx, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nitzer Ebb, and Wire, and made them propulsive, fresh, and new sounding. Little did I expect to meet up with an incredibly passionate, thoughtful, and friendly bike riding gentleman with whom I felt an immediate connection. Gareth has kept busy over the years, working with groups like Interpol and Grizzly Bear, and current work that even includes a New Order remix. We met at his studio, Strongroom, in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, not far from where his career initially took off at The Garden Studio with John Foxx, where we had a wonderful chat and a lovely lunch at the Strongroom Bar.
You've had a pretty fun career.
I've had an amazingly fun career.
I didn't know about your Pathway Studios connection early on. That place was churning out some interesting underground records in that era.
It was amazing. Mike Finesilver was the one who gave me a break, which was fantastic. He was really one of my first mentors. I'm like a gifted amateur, in the sense that I never had the privilege or pleasure of studying as an assistant under a great master. Most of my mentors have been musicians. I've learned a hell of a lot from bands, as well as all the incredibly creative colleagues I've worked with. Mike gave me a bit of a break. He said something great to me, as well. He told me, "Don't worry about this." [He said that] because I was thrown into the 8-track world, by myself, with no assistant. He said, "Okay, go." I'd done a bit of recording on my own at home, and had had basic training at the BBC, so I knew a little bit about signal flow. It seems ridiculous, looking back — I didn't know shit. But I felt I knew a little bit, like lining tape machines up. He really underlined the importance of getting on with the bands. He said, "The great engineers are geniuses at their audio work. Plus, they get on with the band." Obviously 90 percent of it is facilitating a situation for the band where they can flow. I was always obsessed with trying to do the best headphone mixes I could, making a creative and comfortable atmosphere for people, while I was really winging it. I'm forever thankful to Mike for giving me that break. Pathway was pretty cool, because we did loads of demo work. It was like a cheap-ish 8-track analog studio. Also, there was a lot of records that came out of there from the punk times. It was a great starting point for me, because there was a real mixture between demo work — where I had to learn as much as I could, as fast as possible, and still do a good job for people — and the challenge of actually working with people who'd perhaps made two or three albums already and were in there to make a real record. One of the great things about Pathway was that it was homebuilt. Barry Farmer was one of the previous engineers who had built the console and an echo plate. We had an echo plate, which was an unfeasibly expensive thing. I'd probably love it if I had it now. I still like spring reverbs. I've got tons of springs hooked up for my modular synths. Guitar amp springs, Fender springs, Ampeg springs. They're still readily available, and cheap. Back then, there were no other spatial effects in there, apart from three 1/4-inch tape recorders: one to master onto and two as delays.
You had to be creative.
Certainly you must have started with 8-track, or 4-track, or something?
2-track, 4-track.
So you know all about building sounds and committing the whole sounds to track.
Mix the drums to a track.
Exactly. That's a different world. I've been working in Woodstock with a super nice guy, Christopher Bono, who's become a friend. We were working on his project, called Ghost Against Ghost. It was huge, like lots of these projects are. He was stemming it himself, and I went over to help him finish the stems. One of the things we did was stem the drums down to stereo. It was wonderful. It reminded me of the start of my career. Not quite to one track, but to two tracks. I finished up using the stereo drum stems on both mixes, so it's nice.
Context: When Daniel Miller recorded his first single (as The Normal) "T.V.O.D." b/w "Warm Leatherette" on a TEAC 4-track recorder with a Korg synthesizer and dropped off copies at London record shops, he probably never imagined where his love of electronic music and his Mute Records would end up. In this issue, we catch up with Daniel and engineer/producer Gareth Jones — two men who have quite a history together working with artists like Depeche Mode and, to this day, remixing groups such as MGMT and Neu! as the duo "Sunroof."
That type of system helps move the project forward.
I love it. I really do.
How many years were you at Pathway?
I was there a couple of years. It's where my electronic career started, with John Foxx's Metamatic. He was an example of someone more experienced. He had already made three albums with Ultravox, and he'd also worked with Brian Eno. John was clever. He wanted a solo career, and he took a publishing advance to make the record. From having worked at Conny Plank's, he thought, "I want to do a minimal electronic record, and let's use minimal gear." He had one [Roland] CR-78 drum machine, an ARP Odyssey [synthesizer], an Elka [Rhapsody 490] String Machine, and, of course, his MXR Flanger. That was it.
I just bought a copy of that record.
That was , one that I recorded and mixed for the whole duration.
Did that throw you for a loop at the beginning, having to build it bit by bit with overdubs?
I loved it. I was always a bit of a geek. I loved [Wendy Carlos'] in the '60s when I was a teenager. I was open to that. Kraftwerk I was discovering a little bit. I loved Joe Meek's work. It blew me away as a kid, before I ever thought that I might work in a studio.
That was around 1980, right?
Yeah. John and I started working on Metamatic in 1979. It was brilliant. It was a great break for me, because it was just the artist, with me engineering. I think, a bit later, I got a couple of my friends in to play keyboards and bass. But a lot of it was just me and John. It was really intense. He had a real vision. He's a trained graphic artist as well, and he had a proper artistic vision. Looking back, I realize how much I got from it all. We made that record; and then he sold the record and took an advance from a record company, then bought a studio. That was The Garden Studio, now shut down. It was later owned by Matt [Johnson of The The], who bought it off John, and then Matt rented it to Craig Silvey. This is a very fashionable/touristy area now, with bars and restaurants. When John moved here in the '80s, it was completely derelict. There was nothing here at all. It was empty warehouse after empty warehouse. This studio wasn't here. There was one Italian cafe, like a breakfast cafe, a workingman's café, and a couple of old pubs. I think a bunch of artists bought the warehouse. John bought the basement, a sculptor bought the top two floors and lived there, a photographer had a floor with a studio, and they were able to pool resources. It was affordable then. They were ambitious, but not hugely wealthy. No one wanted this area.
That's a pretty typical cycle. Everyone goes, "Oh, the artists are all over here!"
It is. Now it's unaffordable and everyone's moved east, like five miles away. John invited me to help. We became friends, and he stayed my employer. He had the vision and the money, and I helped liaise with the guys who were selling the gear, even though I didn't know much about it. I obviously thought I was very knowledgeable and really into it, so I did everything, from having meetings with console manufacturers and tape machine distributors, to soldering up the tie lines.
You have a history of jumping in.
I think that's what I got from punk. I was like a bit of a hippie. I wasn't a punk, for sure, but I did get the atmosphere of "we can do this." That's just been my path through life. How wonderful it would have been if I'd managed to get a place at Trident, AIR, or Abbey Road, and studied with the masters. But, as it was, the masters I studied with were the bands I had the pleasure of working with. Some of us kind of grew together. They were learning, I was learning, and we were all doing it together.
Working with John was a good start to that.
It was indeed. As I said, Metamatic was his fourth album. He had an overview about how to make records that I simply didn't have.
You worked with him on his second solo album, The Garden.
I did, yeah. We did it partly at Andy Fernbach's [Jacobs Studios] down in Surrey. It was where I worked with Tuxedomoon and made Desire as well. It was pretty cool. John took me to my first 16-track studio. I think we worked where The Buggles had a studio, in Camden Mews. We rented that for one song on Metamatic. John felt it [the song] would benefit from having a few more tracks for him to try ideas out. Then he took me into Sarm East Studios where I met Julian Mendelsohn. We did some cheap, all-night session where I was starting to grapple with the idea of more tracks. John's studio, The Garden, was a 24-track studio. We had a funny thing about that, technology-wise. At that stage, not really having the experience or the training, there was this idea that transformers were not that good for the sound, because they affected transients in a way. There was a fashionable era where the modern electronics were transformer-free. As John's engineer, we selected an Amek console and an MCI tape machine, none of which had transformers. Now, of course, our lovely audio can't go through too many precious transformers.
That's funny. I forgot about that era.
It's like when we got seduced into thinking early digital sounded great, because our attention and ears were drawn to one or two things only, like brightness or lack of noise. Then, gradually, everyone's like, "Oh, hang on a minute. I'm not getting where I need to be. Why's it so brittle? Why is it two-dimensional? Why is there an offset between the two channels?" The Garden Studio was cool. John had a minimal visual aesthetic. It was a modern studio. There wasn't lovely stonework, carpets, and everything that we now embrace from the '70s. This was a move away from the '70s. We were doing modern, electronic music. It was about synthesizers and drum machines. It was a clean, streamlined, urban, modern aesthetic.
There were a lot of people on a similar path after punk.
Exactly. A lot of the early electronic musicians I worked with couldn't play, but they could program, and they had a musical idea and vision. They couldn't, in a sense, play in the way that the great prog bands could who had amazing chops. None of these dudes could play. But they had an artistic vision. Like Wire, who came out of art school. That's a classic art punk rock band, isn't it? They're like actually, "This is what we do. We make sonic art."
That's true. I just saw them a few weeks ago in Portland.
We've been friends for years. They're great guys.
With what John Foxx was creating with Metamatic or The Garden, you'd need to have 25 synthesizers to play it all live!
Yeah. This is really the thing about the studio being an instrument, which is very much how I felt about it at the time in the '80s. I played a lot, badly, as a kid. All kinds of different instruments. I loved music, but I never felt like I was in a band, or that I was a performer. After a while, people would ask what I played, and I said, "I play the studio." Now of course everyone plays the studio. Most modern musicians have a massive studio. When I was coming through in the '80s, they didn't. The musicians had their area, and the studio was my thing. It was what I did. The fact that I embraced that meant we were a good fit.
You've worked a lot with re-amping synthesizers and trying to capture more depth within electronic music.
I was really keen because I had a huge love of orchestral and classic music when I was a kid. I was very late to jazz and rock. I didn't really get into that until I became a college student. Also, with my training at the BBC... I have a huge admiration for public service broadcasting, especially at that time in the '70s. They were a big research organization too. There was this idea of not using many mics to record a symphony orchestra. My training involved being allowed to attend one session, say nothing, and sit at the back. I never recorded a symphony orchestra, but there was this huge idea of depth. If you listen to concerts from the '70s in the Albert Hall, the main sound is coming off a pair. There's this huge depth going on. I loved that. I was trying to get away from a lot of the early DI synthesizer work, which now I can embrace. I was thinking about mixing it. I was into re-amping. In the circles I was moving in at the time I was lucky, as it wasn't being done much. It was one of the things I was able to bring to the party. If you used to just play your Mini Moog DI-ed into the speakers, to then hear it paralleled out, sent to a room, amped with three mics down the room is amazing.
I feel like the first time I ever messed with a synth, I felt like, "Oh, it needs spatial effects." It needs something to keep it from being right at the front of the speaker.
All of the modern synths are now loaded with special effects.
Aren't they now? I'm always telling people to turn them off.
Exactly.
"Let me put my own reverb on this."
Then there's the extra harmonic element we get from re-amping as well. It's still wonderful to play sounds into real spaces. We all love it. That can be from a really clean monitor in a space, to being really crunched up. There was a huge, extra palette arriving on the console. I loved it. It was really fun hooking up the chains and getting everything going. It's something I played with for years.
You also set up a system where you might get something back that you're not expecting. Happy accidents.
Isn't that the fun of playing with pedals, or wires, or cables? I might be wrong, but in my experience, it's much easier to have a happy accident with analog gear than it is with digital gear. Obviously we can have lots of horrible accidents with digital, where it completely melts down.
You don't get randomness.
When we've got a mess of cables, amps, pedals, rooms, and mics, it seems like all kinds of stuff happens that maybe we weren't planning. John Foxx gave me a great lesson about that once as well. It happened to me on the 8-track. When I was young, it was all about trying to control the technology. It was a huge achievement to get sound from the microphone to the speaker. Something happened — some incredible sound came out of the speaker, different from what I was intending. I immediately went over to break it down. John was like, "No, stop! Listen!" I was like, "Oh, I see. I didn't mean it, but it's great. Let's track it." After that I was like, "I get it. Keep listening and stop judging." It's letting go of the ego, isn't it?
Were you still working at Pathway when you were working at John Foxx's studio?
No. I moved down to John's for a bit. John's studio first went to Surrey, because the building wasn't finished. The warehouse wasn't converted, but he'd bought the equipment. He did a deal with Andy Fernbach at [Jacob's Studios]. The equipment went in there for about six months. That's where Tuxedomoon approached John about making a record, and John kindly passed them on to me. . I was working with John's equipment in Surrey a little bit, making a couple of albums. Then the building was finished, and we bought a Lexicon Model 224 [digital reverb]. John has a thing for reverbs and spaces. He really wanted one of these newfangled, high-quality, digital reverberators. I proposed to John that I go to San Francisco, buy one, and bring it back. He was kind enough to go for that. I had a great vacation, my first trip ever to America. I also bought a Sony Walkman, the first one that had just come out. I couldn't really afford it, but I looked at it and had to have it. It meant I could hike out into the cliffs or mountains somewhere and listen to music.
They were really expensive when they first came out.
It was kind of life changing. For me, it wasn't as much about going around with headphones on in the world. It was about going somewhere and being able to listen to Wagner on the clifftops, or Pink Floyd in the mountains. My first one was a playback-only one.
I feel like you've always been working with new technology and embracing it.
I've always enjoyed the technology. In fact, I have to be very firm with myself not to let the technology run away. I try to encourage our younger colleagues to realize that we've got enough equipment. Lack of equipment was always a creative bonus, actually. I try to preach the message now, like many people from our generation do, that actually it's not about the equipment. I am a technophile for sure, but it's so important to tell stories. I try to seamlessly go into a world where I'm helping, in my professional work and my uncommissioned work, where I'm just trying to tell a story with the equipment that I've got. When The Haxan Cloak can mix Björk's record [Vulnicura] in Albelton Live on a laptop, we have to focus on doing the best we can with the tools that are available to us. I've been an early adopter of many things: bulletin boards, huge transatlantic telephone conversations on slow modems, digital Internet, and early technology. I was a very early adopter because of Opcode's Studio Vision [MIDI sequencer/DAW], which blew me away. "We can put audio into the computer and have clips like MIDI? Cool!"
You were probably waiting for things like that to happen.
I was lucky because I was generating some record royalties. I had some funds, so I could buy into the early stuff. It was expensive, at the time.
What was the path that took you from working with John Foxx to working with Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller?
Because John was an electronic artist, his studio resonated with some of the other electronic acts and labels in London. The [third Depeche Mode] album that became Construction Time Again — the first of the "Berlin trilogy" records I made with them — they wanted to work in a different studio. They'd been working at Blackwing Studios, and had a great time, obviously; but a lot of things had changed in the band and they wanted to work somewhere else. They'd heard about John's studio and thought, "Oh, cool. Not an old-fashioned rock studio. A proper electronic music studio." They wanted to check the studio out. John said, "Look, this is an interesting label." I'd already heard [The Normal's] "Warm Leatherette," which Daniel Miller founded the label [Mute] with.
I wish people in America knew what that meant. That single was really revolutionary.
It was very important. John brought that record into Pathway and said, "." That's home recording on 4-track, with a punk, do-it-yourself aesthetic. I guess all these early labels were the same: Mute, Factory, Rough Trade. They weren't working at a major that had been making records since the '20s or '30s. They were like, "Let's just do it." John said, "This band [Depeche Mode] is interesting. They want to come check the studio out for the album. You need to do this." I was really interested in jazz and minimal music. I was working with a band called The Lost Jockey. Depeche Mode were basically a pop band on the radio, and I wasn't interested.
Their first record [Speak & Spell] had big, poppy hits on it.
Yeah. Famously, "Just Can't Get Enough." My dear friend Vince [Clarke] had left the band by then. They were struggling, I think.
They lost a major songwriter.
They lost a major songwriter right there, as New Order/Joy Division did when Ian [Curtis] passed away. In a way, the second string songwriter had to step up. There are some very interesting parallels between the bands. Martin Gore had to step up and Bernard Sumner had to step up. Perhaps they wouldn't have done that if they both hadn't suffered these cataclysmic losses. Anyway, they wanted to make this album, and I said, "No," because it was on the radio and it was pop music. I was like, "That's pop music. It's not my thing. I like to do weird stuff." John probably thought I was a complete stoner idiot, so he said, "Whatever." They came and checked the studio out. Luckily the universe gave me another break. They liked the studio, but they didn't like the engineer they'd been assigned to. John came back to me again and said, "Gareth, I'm telling you, they like the studio, but they don't like the engineer. Go and meet them." I'd just come back from Morocco. I'd been dropping acid, and I was wearing this weird Moroccan coat I'd bought in the desert, plus black nail polish. I was a real freak. I went over on my bicycle to Mute Records to meet them. I was pretty young, but they were younger than me, and Daniel was older than me. They seemed like nice people. Somehow, they gave me a break. Then we started working together. It's really interesting how those things happen in life. I think how we judge what's good and what's bad is nonsense, because we can never tell. We're full of opinions about what's right in our life. It's not really about fame and fortune, of which I've only had a little anyway. It's about the valuable creative relationships and friendships that come out. I still feel very close to the members of Depeche Mode. We had such great, formative experiences together. When we do meet, it's one of those relationships we all have had in our life, where we can just be very honest immediately, from the start, and pick up from where we left off. Daniel, at Mute Records, became a friend, and he's stayed a very dear and important friend in my life for all these years. Yet, at the beginning, because of stupid, blind prejudice, I just said, "No." So then we embarked on this. We obviously got along as people. I was a great fan of how they were trying to work. It was a wonderful introduction for me to pop songwriting, with Martin Gore's melodies and lyrics, their production skills, and Daniel's production skills. It was a great learning phase. We were blessed with success as well. Back in those days, relationships were built. I made three records, back to back, with Depeche Mode, always tracking in London and mixing in Berlin. We only tracked one record in The Garden. We did the next two records tracking in different places. We always mixed at Hansa [Tonstudio]. At that time that was a really funky, incredible tracking room.
When did you first go over there to work?
I went over there in about '82. I worked with a German new wave band called Ideal. Very successful. I got involved in their third album [Bi Nuu]. I think the main singer/songwriter wanted to record in Vienna. There was some studio outside Vienna. I co-produced that record with a German musician called Micki Meuser. He was super nice; a very supportive and helpful guy. We went to Vienna to track, and the band was living in Berlin. I was a young, relatively inexperienced engineer and producer, and I wanted the security of coming back to London and mixing somewhere that I knew. The manager said it was obviously much more convenient if we were to mix in Berlin. He was quite diplomatic, but he said, "Come and see this studio in Berlin." He took me to Hansa, up the famous lift to the fourth floor penthouse mix room. We walked in and there was this seemingly massive 56-channel SSL [console]. I'd never seen a console that big, and I'd never worked on an SSL in my life. I walked in and was like, "Okay. We'll mix it here."
Did the console and studio feel forward thinking to you, technology-wise?
Yes. I wasn't that experienced with studios. Obviously the automated console — with the one [SMPTE] track — timecode driven, and not bouncing between tracks — that was life-changing for everyone. They had quite a few effects, but really, it was about being able to deal with cuts and levels independently. On the early 24-track many tracks would have five different parts on them, because we had to fit them in. The fact that you could mult that out to multiple [console] channels, then program mutes (with the "Play Cuts Only" function) and still have all the levels running live was incredibly powerful, in terms of transitioning from a very rough mix phase to some kind of decent mix. It seemed like the so-called "space age." So every sound came down its own track. You could work on timbre, dynamics, and effects on every channel, but you still had this free-running fader level. It's still part of my working method, I would say, because I can't start writing level automation on a mix too early. I love to be able to have all the levels free to tweak. At some stage lots of level automation might need doing, and then we have to start committing and nailing it down. With the SSL, there was a real sense of freedom, the wonderful opening up of the multitracks, and the free fader levels. This was before we mixed Construction Time Again.
That makes a lot of sense for that kind of work.
I mixed that Ideal record there, and then I went on to work with the singer of that band [Annette Humpe] on another project [the band DÖF], which I mixed in there. It was like a comedy project; really lighthearted Austrian rock, and hugely successful in Germany. It was number one for weeks and weeks. I mixed that for her in the same room. At that time, we'd started tracking the album that became Construction Time Again. Daniel was visiting Nick Cave, who was downstairs in the big hall with [his band] Birthday Party. I said, "Come and see this mix room!" I was obviously thinking this was where we had to mix Depeche. I was loving Berlin, and the whole complex was amazing. Daniel was enjoying Berlin as well. There was a very good exchange rate — Pounds could buy a lot of Deutschemarks in those days. "We can move the whole band to Germany for three or four weeks, they can stay in a hotel, and we can rent this incredible studio. We can ship all the gear we need, and it's still going to be cheaper, or the same price, as working at an equivalent facility in London." That gave the extra incentive. So we did it.
You were doing other records along the way there, like Einstürzende Neubauten.
Yeah, because I'd moved to Berlin. This studio was blowing me away. They had a particularly good system going, where the studio would be rented, and I would be employed by them as a freelance engineer. I was bringing all these projects there and was getting paid by the studio. I fell in love with the studio because of the high-tech mixing rooms, the massive tracking rooms, and the big halls, as well as the loads of interesting nooks and crannies, and great acoustics. I fell in love with a woman in Berlin as well, so with this dual thing of love, art, and work going together, I moved to Berlin. I had the great pleasure of bringing some bands from London into Berlin as well, like Fad Gadget and Wire.
Wire are one of my favorite bands.
The Ideal Copy was Wire's first experimenting with MIDI. I worked with other German bands. I was spending my whole life in the studio. That's where I got my 10,000 hours in, just being in the studio all the time. That was really a great adventure. Adventure has been one of my key themes.
Were you coming back to England for other sessions?
Yeah, I was doing some sessions in England, and traveling around Europe as well. I went to Brussels to work with Blaine [Reininger, of Tuxedomoon]. I mixed a record for him called Night Air. I was certainly getting a lot of experience under my belt, and working with a lot of different kinds of artists. Diamanda Galas came to Berlin, and I made some wonderful records with her at Hansa. In the '80s, I'd become one of the relatively few engineer/producers that Mute Records were using. Nowadays everything's very open and diverse, which is wonderful for all of us. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work for some of the other bands that Daniel was curating on Mute.
Working with Daniel must have been quite fun too. He seems like a really open-minded person.
Yeah, he's super creative. He was a very creative guy when we first met, but he was a very demanding taskmaster as well. Very driven. If you weren't as driven as Daniel, you weren't on the team. Now we're all a lot older and wiser, and Daniel's a wonderfully chilled out and very creative guy. When we made Black Celebration, we had this concept — I think Daniel had the idea inspired by Werner Herzog — that we should live the album, so we didn't have a day off. We worked from the first day of tracking to the final day of mixing without any time off. It was unbelievably intense. After that, Depeche Mode went on to work with other great producers.
They're like, "Not doing that again!"
But it was a super amazing experience. Of course I was learning and progressing all the time — the first Depeche album that I did for Mute, I engineered. I had to summon up my courage to ask to be taken onto the production team for later albums. I was learning massively about song structures and radio friendliness. A lot of the early mixing we did was on tiny little radio speakers, because mono AM radio was so important in those days.
It had to project and come across somehow.
It had to slam out of a tiny little radio, which it did. Looking back, we paid a price. The records are wonderful and stand in their own right, but sonically I have a lot of issues with my older work. Now, my work will sound good on the little tiny speakers; and hopefully if I get it right, it'll sound great on big ones. At that time, so much focus was on the radio that the bottom end wasn't quite what it could have been. I guess that's a lot of the '80s sound as well. There was a lot of focus on slamming stuff. I mean, obviously Bob Clearmountain was in charge of his bottom end. But a lot of us weren't paying attention to the weight and warmth. I certainly wasn't.
The '80s recording path has cautionary tales and brave experiments.
Of course. What I was very interested in was experimental pop. We were trying to boldly go into uncharted territory. There was no use of presets. Everything had to be designed from the ground up. Everything was about, "What can we do that we know hasn't been done?" That was the whole thing. It was all about experimenting and pushing the envelope. We felt uninfluenced and unique. It was new. That was the point. That was what we were trying to do. And what a great time to do it, as technology was racing ahead as well. It was really productive.
What took forever then would be so much easier to do now.
Like syncing the sequencer, for instance. Now obviously every soft synth is sample-locked to the sequencer. Sync was a big one for us; a really big one.
You had to spend a lot of time making things work the way you wanted.
Yeah. Even now, there are still loads of issues out there. The offset between the boxes changes every time you boot the computer with the early aggregate audio. Syncing the Synclavier to tape... it's all about jitter. "It's playing along, but it isn't the same offset all the time." Some of the musical sequences were jittering so much that it was musically apparent. If a musical sequencer is jittering by a millisecond, I'm not going to notice. But when it's jittering enough that it's 20 milliseconds or something, then the feel's not right. There were a lot of those kinds of issues. Same when early digital started to happen. We went from extremely tight MIDI, with Creator and Notator on an Atari with a Unitor, to very sloppy MIDI down serial cables on a Mac. Things have settled down a little bit now.
There are times now where you can overcome the situation by sheer processing power.
Yeah. Hosting synths inside sequencers seems to be stable. That seems to have been worked out. There were a lot of emerging technologies, and we were all growing up with them. There was a lot of experimenting. Thank god there were enough record sales for there to be a budget for the time to get through these hurdles. Some of them were really time consuming. There's no way that could ever be affordable now. You couldn't spend a whole day in a big studio working on sync.
When you hit those technical roadblocks in the middle of trying to be creative, that can be a bummer. You can lose momentum and mood.
Yeah, I guess that's part of our skill set, when we're trying to help keep the session rolling, is to sidestep those issues immediately; to always find a way around. As I've gotten older, that's something I'm able to do. I see my assistants or engineers get stuck sometimes and I say, "Look, it doesn't matter. Move on and let's forget about it. Use that other channel, or let's forget that mic." Whereas in the past, when I had less of an overview and was more stuck in the details, that would seem impossible. To keep the session flowing is so important. It's so much more fun for us as well, as engineers and producers, to come away from a day having made music. Most of my commission work now seems to be mixing, which is fine, and I enjoy it very much. But when I do track records, I want to get set up in the first half of the day, and I want to be making music by the second half of the day so that at least we've got something to listen to the next morning. I get depressed now if I'm in this room all day and for some reason I don't make music. That's a bad vibe for me.
When did you start working with Vince Clarke and Erasure?
It was really through my work with Diamanda Galas. She was making these Plague Mass records. Her brother, who I never met (and whom she was very close to), was dying of AIDS. He died in the process of her making these records, and Diamanda and I became very close. She had met Andy Bell from Erasure, and had spoken highly of me. Funnily enough, you couldn't imagine a more pop act and a more avant-garde, underground act, but it was through Diamanda that I met Andy Bell. That was an amazing link. The album we did was Wild!, and the first single was called "Drama!" That was in '89. Initially, my brief was to track vocals. Diamanda was kind enough to say that I was very sensitive to vocalists' needs and got great vocal sounds. She's got a huge voice, and Andy's got a great big soulful voice as well. I came to London to do that. We tracked vocals in The Church, which is Paul Epworth's studio now.
Was that Dave Stewart's place?
It was Dave and Annie Lennox's, at that time. There was this huge tracking room, which was where we tracked the vocals for Wild! I was into running high-quality mic cables through the door, at that point. I had some Van Den Hul silver mic cable. It had an incredible sound, but it was not very robust mechanically, so the cable got shorter and shorter. I gave up on it in the end. I moved to Mogami, which had good sound but was completely robust. I had a wonderful mic I'd bought in Germany, a 1934 Telefunken CMV3; a great big, bottle mic. We took the capsule and modified it by turning up the polarizing voltage on the capsule and lowering the noise floor. We had this going through Rupert Neve Focusrite mic pres in the control room. We had this wonderful vocal chain, and a great sounding room — it was very inspirational. I mixed half of that record as well. It gradually moved into mixing. There started a long creative relationship.
It seems funny that you were working with Depeche Mode, and then you came full circle back to Vince, without directly coming from Depeche Mode.
Yeah. I'd got to know Vince as a result of working on this record together. That record was co-produced with a guy called Mark Saunders. He was basically working on the music with Vince, and I was working on the vocals with Andy. When it came to mixing, we had this kind of shootout, where we were both mixing the tracks. Mark would mix a track, then I'd listen to it and think, "Oh, I don't know. He hasn't quite gotten it." I'd try to mix it and then bounce it back to him and so on. We finished it up with about half the tracks each. It was really great. Luckily we had the budget to do that. That was super fun, especially with the single. That went around quite a few iterations. I'd do something rough and punk-y, and he'd do something a bit more polished. It just went on, and on, and on. Then some of the tracks on the album we just conceded. I heard a couple of tracks Mark mixed and said, "Hey, I'm done. I'm not even going to try that." We were working in different studios — his was about three miles away. It was great comrades working together, because everyone wanted the best possible record. It wasn't an unpleasant competition — it was a really supportive competition.
It's not your ego. I think collaboration is clearly a key thing.
A key word in my career is collaboration. I've always felt that I'm not the kind of genius who makes something great, no matter what. It's almost like chemistry. If there's a connection, it can be great. That's been my experience in my work. If there's an aesthetic or personal connection, some kind of connection, it can be great. I've done extended pre-production projects once or twice with great writers where they've developed a song, but it's so fragile that it might only be a melody, chords, and lyrics. Then part of the wonderful voyage of discovery has been finding out about arrangements, tempos, styles, how much acoustic guitar, how much electronics, and so on. That can be a great voyage.
But it takes a lot of energy.
Sometimes it takes a bit more funding, because everyone has to commit more time to it. Like you, I never got involved in this business to make money. In fact, I was absolutely delighted when I realized I could make a career out of it. All those years back when I thought, "Wow, I'm actually going to be able to support myself doing this!" That was really amazing, but we do have to find effective models, don't we? This might be one of the great things about mixing records out of a room like this. We can guess that it might take ten days to mix the record. We might budget for ten days, and pay a room rate for the ten days; but if it takes 12 days or 15 days, and everyone's positive and in good spirits, on a vibe if you like, it doesn't matter. I can swallow that cost. I never could do that if I were mixing in a massive console room. I don't want to put any work out that isn't everything we want it to be. There's no point. Life's too short! It's not good for the artist, but it's not good for me either. It's not good for me spiritually. It's not good for my reputation. You can only do that when, to some extent, you've got the means of production. You're swallowing the cost, basically. In the first iteration of this room, in the '90s, it was much more about doing some remixes, as well as lots of vocal tracking and pre-production. Now it's about making finished records, because it's doable with the power of the computer and the summing amp.
It's pretty amazing.
I feel that there's something great about going into a big commercial room, where time is very limited and you have to turn out one mix a day, even if you put down stems and tweak it later. It forces you to focus and get work done, which is great. But I also find that the way that we can iterate mixes when we're in a totally recallable environment like this suits my method of working. By the time I get to mix four, I might be somewhere where I think, "Actually, that's pretty good." My way of working benefits from the ability to mix five tracks of the album, get a bit of the vibe going, and understand what the band are all about. Then I can go back to track one and say, "Okay. I see the beat is heavier," or whatever. "More effects on the vocals." Anything. I'm not talking about panning the hi-hat. I'm talking about vision. Gradually I spiral up and get to an album that sounds pretty good, without it being too time-intensive.
When you use analog gear, do you just run a sound out and print back in?
Well, the analog gear that I use in this room is more or less the little modular synth rig, which I've built into my mixing a bit more. It started off as noise generation and expanded into some effects. I love this Make Noise Echophon, for instance, or some of the spring reverbs or filters. My approach to the modular is that I'm not skilled enough to make the same sound again. If I'm making a noise that sounds good, it has to be recorded. That's the only way it's ever going to work. If I'm building a mix, quite often I might have those effects running live on the Mackie for a couple of hours on something: vocals, drums, whatever. Then, before the afternoon or evening is over, I print it, and it's in. So, for the recall, all that I do is the [Thermionic Culture] Fat Bustard summing amp gets photographed [for recall]. The [Thermionic Culture] Culture Vulture is on a send, so I can use parallel thickening. If I do something extreme with the Culture Vulture, I track it; but a lot of times it's just on the thickening setting so that I can send beats, vocals, bass and stuff to it in parallel. Then the Kush Audio Clariphonic high-end boost is on the mix bus, and that gets photographed on the iPhone in an EverNote notebook for the session.
So you had this exact same studio space years ago?
I moved into this room in 1992; it was built for me, and then I moved out for many years. I was here for about ten years, and I've just come back about three years ago. I just needed a room to work in for a couple of months. I rented an office down at the end and set up in there. I had quite a portable setup. This room became available in that period, and Phil Sisson, the studio manager, said, "Oh, Gareth, your old room has become available." It seemed like fate.
We work with people who come and go in this business. You had such an intense run with Depeche Mode.
It's quite remarkable. In our world, it must be the same in other artistic endeavors like theater and film, but it's a very, very close relationship, but it's kind of bounded. The album finishes, and you might not see each other for five years; but you've been through this incredible, emotional journey together, and it's been really, really important.
Sometimes I feel a little weird at the end. You're hugging; all the mixing's done...
All teared up, I know. I used to call that "post-album depression." "Hey, let's be aware of this. We've finished this journey together now." Everyone's going to feel a little low next week, but it'll be fine. It's a very close coming together, because we're making art together. Sometimes we have to be very sensitive to the artist's story and the baby that they've brought into the world, which actually we're just helping deliver. It's a very nurturing, supportive, and hardworking environment. Everyone's very close and involved. Then it all goes away. But we've got a piece of vinyl, CD, or something.
www.garethjones.com
