How did you get your start? You went to the Royal Academy of Music.
Yeah, that was to be a classical composer. Halfway through that year I realized it probably wasn't for me, and I changed to the commercial music course.
Which was more like composing and recording?
It had more of a recording element, and it was to do with writing for film. What I found was that as soon as I changed into it, I started writing a lot of aleatoric, atonal music; completely abstract. I thought, "Well, I'm rebelling here," but I didn't know against what, exactly. Then I got a phone call from this manager (who I'd been bothering with my demos since I was 15). He said, "I've got this artist who's looking for a guitar player. Do you want to come and do an audition?" It had honestly never occurred to me to play guitar for anyone. I went to the audition and got it. It was Imogen Heap. That really chimed with my growing interest in strange guitar sounds, because she didn't have any guitar on her songs at that point. I thought, "What am I going to play in this audition?"
You're not just blocking out chords.
Yeah. I thought, "I'm going to make drum or keyboard sounds with these pedals." I did that, and it went really well. At the end of that year, I'd met Ed Harcourt and a couple of other people. I was beginning to make a living. Imogen took me down to a club where Ed was playing, and that was the night he got signed. It was fortuitous for me. He gave me an interview and said, "Do you like Tom Waits?" I said, "Yes." He said "Right, your first rehearsal's next week."
Good answer!
Yeah! Then people started trusting me to do their string arrangements because of the fact that I'd been to the Academy. It sort of grew from there, quite naturally. I was living above a recording studio, Cafe Music, in east London. It was actually the first studio I'd ever been to when I was 15. When I turned 22, the flat above it became vacant, so I moved in and lived there for ten years. The owner, Mark Sutherland, was really encouraging and generous. It meant that I could go down and play around in the studio whenever I liked.
You had keys?
It wasn't even locked. It was part of the same ramshackle house. Mark still owns it; he's really good. It was a very gentle initiation to recording. I was never anyone's assistant, which I regret. I feel like I missed out on a lot of engineering lessons. When I started producing seriously, I tended to have a budget for an engineer a lot of the time. It's surprising how little you actually learn until you start having to do it by yourself, as well as when you're not in your own place all the time.
Patch bays and...
Well, it was more like the architecture of a mixing desk, or how to treat rooms that one isn't familiar with. I was very comfortable in my space, but once I started to go into other peoples' studios where I didn't know the room...
The control room and how you're hearing things?
Yeah, as well as the live room and what sounded good in the live room. Because I came from a music background, rather than an engineering background, I spent all those mental hours thinking about music. I feel like I was playing catch up on engineering. I still am, in a way. I haven't put as many hours into it. For the last few years, it's been a lot better.
How often are you tasked with engineering work lately?
Well, I've done a bunch. It depends on what the budget is for the project, obviously, and it also depends on what I'm required to do. On some records, I have to play nearly all the instruments. If I have to do that, as well as engineer, it's tough. I have done it, but I find it's not a wholly pleasant experience. It's a lot of plates to keep spinning, and a lot of responsibility. Also, I sometimes feel I'm not giving the artist as much personal attention as I'd like, because to produce, edit, engineer, and give love is a lot to do in one go.
You put a bunch of work in front of yourself.
Yeah. I like work, but it's easier when someone else is doing at least one of those jobs. If it's a band, and I don't have to play, I'm more than happy to engineer. If it's a solo artist where I have to play everything, I prefer that there be someone else there, at least in the initial tracking stages. Although sometimes I've found that if I can't do that, I'll be so not thinking about what I'm playing that it ends up being great. Sometimes undeveloped parts actually turn out to be the best parts.
I read that Brian Eno found you playing in a guitar shop, heard the sounds you were making, and was intrigued.
Yeah, it was really pretty crazy. I was in this secondhand music shop around the corner from his studio. I was trying out a guitar, and I was testing the intonation. That was it. He walked in and came over. He was incredibly polite and nice. He introduced himself, and I said, "Yeah, I know who you are." He said, "Sometimes I need a guitar player. Would you like to come to the studio?" I said, "Yeah, I'd love to." I didn't hear from him for six months, and then he called and asked if I could come over. When I arrived, everything was already set up with the guitar plugged into an effects thing. I'd read about his techniques of moving musicians out of their typical comfort zones. I picked up the guitar, and it was completely out of tune. Not just out of tune, but the strings were actually hanging off it. I said, "Okay, let's start the track." I improvised a load of percussive, bendy, and talking drum sounds. I got to the end of the song. The next song comes on, and I said, "Oh, excuse me, but would it be okay if I played my own guitar? I'd like to play something melodic." He said, "Yeah. I wasn't expecting you to play that guitar. I was using it to test the line. But I think what you got out of it was really good."
Always welcoming chance!
I think that's why we kept working together. To this day, if I'm stuck for an idea, I'll throw something out of tune or create something that's totally unstable.
It's good as you know, as a producer, to be working with someone and know if they're sticking to the tried and true.
Yeah. It's working out whether people respond well to being pushed, or whether they don't. It's not a 50/50; it's a continuum. It's working out how far to push those people, and sometimes it's at some cost. Sometimes it's good to make singers a bit angry or feel a little bit insecure. Not in a vindictive way. But yeah, you have to work out what buttons to push in people.
I guess you worked on [Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm's] Drawn from Life album initially, right?
Yeah. The thing that I think is part of his genius is that he's genuinely curious and enthusiastic. It's such a beautiful quality. I think that before I met him I hadn't really seen it in such an innocent form in anybody. It's so motivating. That genuine spark of curiosity facilitates everyone else's participation. Suddenly there's not this hierarchical "world famous producer" and everyone else now has to live up to that. It's everyone working together, in a spirit of curiosity. That was so great. It made a huge impression on me. I think it's also something to do with people who come from a more art school background, rather than a music or band school background. Somehow the work doesn't seem as tied up with ego. People like Brian, or David Byrne [Tape Op #79], or David Bowie look at each project in its own terms. It's not like, "I'm making this album. It's an expression of my soul, and it has to be the best album ever." I'm oversimplifying a bit. It's just liberated from that kind of personal over-investment.
I think it is like art school. You create something and it's just the singular piece that it is.
Yeah. I think it's really that kind of distance. Still a commitment, but that kind of a distance is a way of circumventing the demons that can come up when you're working on something.
I feel sometimes people get on a track where they want recordings to be this "other thing," instead of what it's naturally gravitating towards.
Yeah, exactly — and you have to depersonalize it. I think sometimes it can be good to actually make that explicit. [You've got] to somehow explicitly frame it as something external that you've put yourself into, rather than something that is meant to be some manifestation of yourself. It depends who you are, but I feel like it's better to work on something from the outside.
It's always going to be seen by everyone else from the outside, at the end of the day.
That's right. It's a really good point.
You worked on the second David Byrne/Brian Eno album, [Everything That Happens Will Happen Today]. When I interviewed David, he was saying you were getting MP3s sent and then having to find the proper files and rebuild tracks that David was chopping up.
Well, the instrumentals started their life as songs that Brian was working on around the same time as his Another Day on Earth album, or even before. Then he took the vocals off and sent them to David. There was some kind of file management issue, but luckily that wasn't my responsibility. There came a point where Brian said he'd like my help in finishing up the tracking of the album. I took care of the guitars, drums, and other overdubs. Then I'd receive David's vocals and comp them a bit. That was a real joy, because David sounded so happy when he was singing. He was recording in his apartment, and you could hear the traffic going past. In between verses, when he didn't have something to sing, he was going, "Whoo, yeah!" He was really enjoying it. There's actually one part on the track "Life is Long" where he starts yodeling at the end. I thought it was killer, so I put it in. He was a bit taken aback because he said it was just him, having fun. But everyone liked it so much that it stayed in. It was ridiculous, really, that I ended up working in that capacity on that record. It was probably my first co-production credit. Not a bad one to start with.
I also interviewed Pat Dillett [Tape Op #79] who mixed that.
Oh, he's a great guy. He really knows how to let music breathe. I love what he does. He was so kind to me as well, because at that point I think it was probably the first time I had to consolidate files and send them off to someone. He was lovely and gave me a lot of encouragement. The other learning curve for me was learning how to let go of things that I'd seen in a certain way. Some things came back, and I thought, "Wow, that wasn't what I was thinking," but it was good. I was learning how to see things as "right," even though they weren't what I'd intended. That record was a major learning experience for me, and I'm really lucky to have worked on it.
It seems like that would be interesting to see how songs changed and morphed along the way.
Yeah. The overall feeling was so light. That says a lot for both of them, I think. You know, following up [My Life in the] Bush of Ghosts, even though it's a completely different record, there was not an ounce of pressure that I felt at any time. In retrospect, that really says a lot for them. I've done many less significant records where it seemed like it's the end of the world if something goes wrong.
What's the sample library you created, [Spitfire Audio's] Enigma? How is that used, and how did you create it?
It's a lot to do with the textural side of my playing, and these long chains of plug-ins I have. That came about because I wanted to start making synth sounds, but not to have to have a synth because I like the feeling of a string under a finger and the way that infuses even heavily-processed sounds. When I first started experimenting with processing guitars in real time, I liked the ambiguity. It doesn't sound like a guitar, but there's something in there that sounds stringy. Back when I started doing that, there wasn't quite so much out there to work with; certainly not hardware. Now, because so many stompboxes are DSP-based, it's like, "Preset 2, huge reverb." There's a very complex architecture of sounds, straight away.
We've seen some really interesting pedals come out lately.
Yeah, it's really great, and I love them. I'd built this kind of virtual pedalboard in [Apple Logic] MainStage using a lot of plug-ins. It was like having a mini pedalboard, but it never got updated because the Mac OS started changing really fast. I realized it would be obsolete pretty soon. I figured that I could carry around the laptop as a pedalboard for the rest of my life, or I could sample it and then leave those sounds behind. It got to the point where if I went to a film session and was using a sound I had used on a couple of other sessions, I sort of felt like I was cheating.
One-trick pony?
Yeah. It was still finite, even if I tweaked them. I thought I should stop doing it, but I wondered how I could stop in an interesting way. I wanted to draw a line under that phase of my sound-making approach. It's been great. It didn't quite turn out how I thought, but it grew a lot when the programmers at Spitfire took it a bit further.
Did you come up with certain sounds or parameters you were looking to build?
I went through and played all these chains of plug-ins. It took two or three days to do all that.
That's a lot of passes.
It was. Then I set up extra processing behind it, which you can bring in on the plug-in. I also wanted to make a virtual instrument out of my metal James Trussart guitar, because it has a unique tone, both acoustically and when it's plugged in. And I always liked the sound of playing behind the bridge, with the overtones you get. Obviously you can only have six of those at a time. I ended up getting all my guitars that had an area behind the bridge and I made a chromatic chime instrument out of it, with fuzz.
You're doing production, you're playing on peoples' sessions, you're doing records where you play and produce, there's the soundtrack work, the sample library, and collaborations with people. I like that there are a lot of different things you're doing.
I like that as well, on a day-to-day level. It enables me to only do the things that I really enjoy. It's also variety, beyond the variety of whatever different artists that I'd work with if I were exclusively a producer. But I have big attacks of guilt about it as well. I'll think, "Oh, if only I concentrated more on production, then I'd be better at it." Or, "If only I said I'm only going to play guitar, then I'd have created some kind of audience for my guitar playing." I genuinely can't work it out, but I've never really had a plan. I've followed, with some discernment, the opportunities that have come to me. I really enjoy every aspect of my work, but I think it wouldn't be a bad thing if I specialized a bit more. I've recently been thinking that I want to explore guitar playing really seriously in the next couple of years. I'm building this system that is hopefully going to enable me to do solo shows in an original way. It's going to be essentially performative, but not purist. I know that if I don't spend at least a good few months looking at that seriously, it's not going to happen. I've also got my own record, Daylight, coming out. Although that's not a guitar record, it seems to be pointing to something that's a bit more to do with me, rather than me working for others. It's the first solo record I made that I actually feel I can stand by.
How do you describe the style of it?
Well, it feels like an electronic record, but most of the elements are acoustic — although there are synths on it as well. Stella [Mozgawa] from Warpaint is playing drums, and that's a big contribution. I did a lot of album productions and co-productions the last few years and really enjoyed it, but I still ended up wanting to make my own music — and I also wanted to have a calling card of some sort, given all I'd learned since the last time I released something. Also, I think I was always aware that there's this kind of upper echelon of producers, and that if I work hard enough, one day I'll be one of them. But it feels like that's not for me now. I think because I do so many different things, I'm perennially going to be a bit of an outsider. I'm not necessarily seen as a safe pair of hands by a label. All of the bigger records I've done came through the artists themselves.
Maybe that's safer.
Maybe so. I'm not complaining. But that's how it's been for me. It can feel a little bit unstable, but then everything's a little unstable in this business.
I think that when we diversify like that we also have more sources of income than someone who says, "I'm just going to produce."
Yeah, that's definitely a consideration. For a while, I think I saw the sessions partly as a form of insurance on one hand, and also as a way of making sure that I didn't have to take on productions that I didn't like. There are plenty of engineers who could do a better job than me, and I'm going to contribute to the music in some way. If I don't, then I normally won't take the job. I can go and play guitar on a record I don't love; and I can still do my job sincerely, and in a committed way and go home.
It's not two weeks of sessions.
I don't think I could do it as a producer; to give what I think needs to be given, day in and day out, on something I didn't like. I've also really come back to valuing guitar playing on its own terms. Doing a film session feels like being a good carpenter. It's artisanal. I really like that. I try to approach production in the same way; but I find it way more complicated, because it's not a purely artisanal thing. Maybe engineering is, in a way. I do a few gigs a year now, and I love it, but I'm glad I'm not on the road anymore. I never was, in a big way; but it fucked up a relationship I was in one year when I was doing a lot of touring. I also thought, "Why am I sitting in Australia in a five-star hotel getting paid quite a lot of money to play amazing music, yet I'm bored and depressed?" I was like, "This is not for me." I did one or two sort of small projects after that that weren't going to make me go on tour, and I was fine. I got my stage fix. Then when I got asked to join Pulp. I did say yes to that, because that was too good to refuse. It wasn't really a tour, just festivals.
