You're currently sitting in your studio but there have been several Swamps over the years, haven't there?
Yes, The Swamp has been the name of my home studio everywhere I've moved. In the '70s, in my hometown of Suffolk, "The Swamp" was originally one of my teenage mentors; a really good lead guitarist who was the brother of Johnny Hates Jazz member, Mike Nocito. He figured out how to use two 2-track machines and overdub. That was probably '74 or '75, when we had a band and did cover songs of the Eagles and bands like that. The Nocitos were Italian-Americans, and their dad was the principal at the high school on this US Air Force base. That's where a lot of my musical influence came from, those guys getting Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, or albums that weren't necessarily on the radar for British radio at the time. These Air Force bases were incredible; it was a real culture shock going into those places. That's where I got my first bass guitar, a fancy Fender Precision, from the PX [post exchange].
How did that American immersion affect you in the mid-70s, while the punk rock explosion happened all around you?
It actually divided a lot of people. There were the people who were still listening to the Eagles and Steely Dan, and then there were guys like my best friend Chris, who bought right into the Ramones and threw all the other records out. I sat on the fence and thought, "Well, I still like those old records too." I liked the punk records, and I was in a punk band where we would cover the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but then I was also in a nine-piece soul band that played the American Air Force bases.
Do you remember the first moment you became aware of recording gear and that recording was a "thing"?
Yes, absolutely. I had all the studio gear in my bedroom, like TEAC and ReVox tape recorders, and it would move from one guy's house to another, depending on when the parents would say, "That's it! Get that stuff out!" We'd rehearse, and I had a tiny bedroom with a piano and a set of drums in the corner. I had a go with these 2-track machines. You know that Todd Rundgren tune, "There Are No Words," where it's improvised, multitrack singing? I tried that. I started by singing the bass note, sitting at the piano going, "And then I'll sing this note, and then I'll sing that note." It was totally out of tune, but in a way it was like looking in a mirror and thinking, "Wow. I look good!"
And with recording, you can overdub.
Yes. Our band owned one pedal, which was this amazing phase/flanger thing. You know how Electric Light Orechestra's "Strange Magic" had this [flanged guitar]? I would put the mic through this phase pedal before it got to the tape machine. I'd use it on the piano and the drums, and it made it sound exotic. I'd be thinking, "Oh, I wonder what that would sound like?"
One of your song titles from Astral Drive is "Summer of '76", which is around the time you had discovered Todd Rundgren, right? What happened when you started to hear what Rundgren was up to on those records?
I was hanging around the Nocito household with Mike. We both loved Burt Bacharach and all kinds of "uncool" music like Jimmy Webb. One time Mike said, "You've gotta hear this!" I put on my headphones and he played me Todd's "Useless Begging." That was my big epiphany. From there I wanted to know how you could make a record sound like that. Of course now I can deconstruct it and hear that he'd borrowed some Beach Boys influences in the percussion, temple blocks and echo, the drum machine, and that he was probably playing a synth bass. There's also a very inaccurate clavinet or piano just about playing some chords. Yet it all adds up to a beautiful song, and it moved me. It still does.
How did you end up apprenticing with Mickie Most at RAK Studios?
My mum could see I was going nowhere academically, but that I was quite passionate about music and recording. RAK's studio manager was a friend, of a friend, of a friend, so I got an interview and I guess he liked the cut of my jib. At that time, the studio was very much that of, "you sit in the corner, you operate, and you shut up." The chief engineer on the first session even told me something to the effect of, "Don't talk. Do what you're told, and you'll get on." At a very young age, I got to see the recording studio as a career, first as a tape op, and as a tea boy at RAK Studios. Within the space of the first six months, I'd worked on orchestral recordings. I was the assistant on the sessions for Barry Manilow, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Jam. I'd done pop, punk, new wave, middle of the road, and all the music that came in. For the first two days I thought, "What is this crap?" Then, two weeks later, after the producer or whoever worked his or her magic, I'd realize, "Oh, actually yeah. I see what this is about."
Mickie Most made his name in the '60s with acts like The Yardbirds, The Animals, Donovan, and Herman's Hermits. Does that make you kind of a bridge to another era?
Before I was working for him, Mickie had had all these hit records. Some of them had very bizarre arrangements by people like John Paul Jones. He took me under his wing, for some reason. Even though I was the assistant, we would look at each other and he knew that I had a sense of what a good performance was, just as he obviously did. A band would be playing; there'd be nobody else in the control room, and Mickie would look over at me, and I'd say, "That just slipped." He'd say, "You're right. Start again!" He'd hit the talkback, and the band would do another take. Mickie liked to do take after take until he got it right. I kept a little notebook, and one time we got to take 113, but the final track went to number one. Mickie talked in colors – I think that's actually a recognized condition now [synesthesia]. He would say to the band, "We need some green," and then he'd get an arranger in who would add the overdubs, like strings, brass, and backing vocals – the big colors – onto these massive but simple bed tracks.
I sense that what drew you to Rundgren, and what you saw with Most, was the concept of feel, this idea of capturing excitement on a record and not just going for cold, technical perfection.
I'm glad you mentioned that. I worked with Mickie, and later Steve Lillywhite, and these were both people who were looking for feel, and it didn't have to be recorded nicely. It was about capturing a passion or a moment. It was fantastic to be exposed to that. When I joined RAK in '78, Mickie was still having hits with acts like Hot Chocolate and Kim Wilde. My first session probably would have been Hot Chocolate backing tracks for songs like "Every 1's a Winner." Mickie had real clarity about listening to what he was doing, and he would only take ten minutes to do a mix. Mickie would be bam, bam, and the [VU meter] needle would be clicking. He actually liked the gritty sound of distortion from the over-compressing of the tape. Mickie used to do tricks, like putting the bongos through a wah-wah. That's him operating the wah-wah pedal on Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing." He was basically trying to replicate that Donna Summer sixteenth-note synthesizer sequencer sound, but on the bongos.
I wonder if such an in-depth apprenticeship might be a lost tradition?
It was a great education. Record sales were not great, so producers no longer had the budget to bring in some brilliant engineer from America, like Al Schmitt or Bill Schnee. They had to use the house guy. It meant that after 18 months I was engineering sessions, or mixing The Psychedelic Furs with Steve Lillywhite, who was a very capable engineer but, at that point, was more interested in trying to create a vibe for the band. You could tell when a band came in full of angst, with no confidence in their playing. Steve would do a trick like, "Oh, what's that over there?" Before they knew it, the track was done! Steve showed me this neat trick about putting limiter on the drum ambience. RAK Studio One had this big wooden room, and we would have close mics on the kick, snare, and toms. But Steve was the first person I ever saw put a [Neumann] U 87 a far distance from the drums and then put an UREI limiter on it. That made it so it sucked the room up and made drummers, who were perhaps technically not that great, sound kind of like John Bonham. It was over the top. When I saw him do that, it was like, "I don't want drums to sound like drums. I want them to sound like they're busting out of the speakers." Then, of course, as the years went by, working with other producers I realized that you can compress the close mics as well. You can really control the sound.
I suppose part of the skill set for the job of a producer or engineer is working around the ego, or the vision, of an artist. Do you think that skill was nurtured during your apprenticeship years?
Mickie and Steve both knew how to handle the psychology of dealing with artists, either with humor or with presence. Another great thing happened when I worked with the producer Sandy Roberton on a John Martyn album [Well Kept Secret]. By this point I had a very strong opinion of what was good and what was bad, but Sandy was in the producer's chair asking, "What do you think, Phil. Is that any good?" I'd say, "No, do another take." I started being more vocal, and maybe a little arrogant. Sandy saw that I had potential to be a producer and started managing me. He actually became a very successful producer manager, and still is. I didn't know any A&R people, so [Sandy] would go and tout my wares. He'd say, "This kid is good, and he knows how to program drum machines," which, in those days, made you a genius! I had read the first three pages of the manual. [laughs]
But you had probably logged a lot of "flying time" on your own?
Yes. I used the down time to do my own songs, and muck around with the synths. This is more on my demos, but then I'd get a flavor of, "Oh, yeah. This is the sound I like." I'd worked with an Oberheim DMX drum machine on a song called "In the Name of Love," which Steve Lillywhite produced for the Thompson Twins when they were still this seven-piece, Talking Heads-type band. The Oberheim had a particularly bad sound, but with compression, gating, and EQ, you could turn the sounds into something. It was all about ducking out the mid-frequencies on the snare drum, adding lots of top, compressing it, and gating it.
You also worked closely with the Thompson Twins later on, but this time with another mentor, the late Alex Sadkin, producing. How did that come about?
Alex Sadkin was not only a true mentor; he also became a good friend. He had been Chris Blackwell's right-hand man at Island Records. He came from a very different philosophy; he was very controlled, and he was a lovely, lovely guy. He had actually been the tape op on [Todd Rundgren's production of Grand Funk's] "We're an American Band" at Criteria Studios in Miami.
I wrote a whole book about Todd Rundgren, and yet I'd never heard that!
Alex told us that story while he was producing the Thompson Twins [Quick Step & Side Kick]. Alex was great; we got on famously, and he was very generous. He loved it when I would put on crazy reverbs, delays, and over-compressed sounds. If I went too far, he'd dial it back; but usually he loved it. For instance, when I first worked with XTC, it was actually Alex and I as a pair, but since I was on fire Alex would sit at the back of the room. One of the XTC guys came up to me and asked, "What does Alex do?" I said, "When things are going right, he's letting me do my thing. When something goes wrong, you'll see that he knows how to fix it."
You engineered two great Thompson Twins records with Sadkin, including their subsequent breakthrough album Into the Gap, and the single "Hold Me Now."
That was a great record for me, because that was the first one I had a royalty on that did really well. It was right after Alex and I had done Duran Duran's Seven and the Ragged Tiger. I was parachuted in to finish off Duran, got on a plane, went back to England, and went straight from the airport to the studio and mixed "Hold Me Now." I was so hot! I was at the board and I was like, "I know what reverb is going to work here."
That's when everyone seemed to be "sacking the drummer," to use the English expression, and reaching for the machines.
