Can you hear me?
Okay, yeah. I'm miles out at sea. We're heading east. I'm in on the [RMS] Queen Mary 2, going to England on a huge ship. We're a bit upside down. We only arrived on this boat last night, and we haven't quite worked it out yet. I was walking down the corridor trying to find somewhere with a good wi-fi signal, and I went, "Oh, this is good," but it was the Captain's Boardroom! They said, "Excuse me!" So, I'm back in my cabin.
Don't upset the captain.
Oh, no; I didn't want my wi-fi changing direction on the boat! [laughter]
Right? You and I have met briefly before. We'd both sat in on one of Mark Rubel's [Tape Op #47] Blackbird Academy classes.
Oh, right.
For the new record, Ebony McQueen, quite a lot of it was done there at Blackbird Studio with John McBride, right?
Yeah. It's a pretty unusual recording, done in very unusual circumstances, because it was the pandemic. Some of it was done at Blackbird Studio with [recording and mix engineer] John McBride [Tape Op #97] and our usual "Wrecking Crew" gang; the great players like Tom Bukovac [guitars], Chad Cromwell [drums], and Mike Rojas [keyboards]. I then had the Budapest Scoring Orchestra, and various other players and backing singers.
You and John McBride are both big fans of some of the same music.
We hit it off as soon as we met, because we went straight into The Beatles. He was showing me all the vintage gear that he had. I hit it off with Martina [McBride] and John years ago. I said, "Oh, I'm coming back here to make an album." He thought I meant sometime, and the next day I sent him the cover. I called it The Blackbird Diaries since that's where it was recorded, Blackbird Studio. He was pretty amazed. What he didn't know at the time is that I'd turned up with no songs and made the album in four days, writing the songs in the bathroom or the cupboard, and it turned out great. He loved it, and we got on great with the band. He helped me pick these great players. From then on, I've made maybe 12 albums with John.
He's built such a wonderful complex there, and then the Blackbird Academy, too.
Oh, yeah. He's crazy, but he's good crazy. But it was madness, basically, to make all those tracks during lockdown.
Right. Trying to make sure people can work masked, and not in the same room singing.
Oh, god. It was pretty difficult. I made about four other peoples' albums at the same time. Joss Stone's album [Never Forget My Love], Iris Gold's album [Woman], and writing a musical. It was a very busy time!
Ebony McQueen has 26 tracks. That's a lot to take on in the studio.
I was writing a story about a slice of my teenage life and everything that influenced me. If you can imagine being 14 in 1964, hearing a blues record for the first time, and realizing, "Oh, there's music!" Then suddenly putting on the radio to The Beatles, The Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Small Faces, and all this music coming out of [BBC] Radio One. It was pretty mind-blowing.
The story of this album is the story of a lot of people at that time, where this music's coming from another world from your own, right?
Yes! It seemed like that at the time, and it does now. I didn't make it as a record produced how a lot of records are made now. A lot of records are made for radio, or in a way that is trying to keep up with contemporary music. I was not tied to do that at all. I was not only making music that hearkened back to the '60s, but I was making old fingerpicking, blues-type sounds that go into a ukulele with a hint of Burt Bacharach. It's all those songs that I was hearing, including the orchestrations that my father played [off LPs] when I was five years old, blasting Rodgers and Hammerstein at home.
The new album has a lot of roots in psychedelic rock from that era, like The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Zombies.
Being 14 in 1966. Between 1966 and 1968, you can imagine the radio was bonkers.
Experimenting. That's something that you have always been well-immersed in as a writer and producer, experimenting with sound. That was a classic era.
And how exciting it was, because you didn't know what sound was going to come out next. Nowadays, a lot of the time we can expect a certain sound, apart from the few specific kinds of bands or artists who experiment a lot. A lot of it is very homogenized, a bit like a lot of food is.
The way that pop music's being created now probably has more to do with the early Eurythmics' process than it does with how you made this new record.
Exactly. It's experimentation and no fear of going off into the void. Where I jump off the cliff and don't worry about where I'm going to land.
You worked with producer/engineer Conny Plank many years ago on the first Eurythmics record [In the Garden]. What drew you to working with him?
We were brought there, by chance, by a guy called Creepy John Thomas; an Australian guy who asked if we'd play on his record. We had no idea how to even record a record properly. I was watching Conny and the way he worked, and it was a very tall learning experience. Then Annie [Lennox] and I went back there to record the early Eurythmics. We'd decided to make our first album, In The Garden, with Conny, and that's when I learned how interesting his experimentation could be. Dangling mics over the edge of a well, recording the drums 15 feet from the drum kit, and moving microphones around instead of using various reverbs. "Let's put the mic as far as we can up in the air in the barn." This was a great, great learning curve for me as a record producer.
Did that experience help you feel more comfortable to go in and purchase your own recording gear?
Well, yeah. That was it, really. I talked to Conny a few times, and he said, "You have to do it yourself." He was basically saying that explaining thirdhand to somebody is not as efficient or as accurate as actually getting hold of the damn desk, the EQ, and the delays and the reverb yourself. At that point, I'd bought a tiny little setup with a [TEAC 144] Portastudio, a drum machine [Roland TR?]606, a synth, and a [Roland] Space Echo machine. I'd sold two guitars from The Tourists [his pre-Eurythmics group] to do that. I decided I was going to learn this as opposed to going back and making a guitar record. The punk movement had happened and had annihilated anything to do with guitar records. If you were in England, it was a joke if you just made a normal guitar record. That's how a lot of "new romantic" groups were born, or New Order, or bands like that. It was like, "Hang on. How do we say something without actually being as bland," I suppose.
That era was all about looking for a new way to express rock music, pop music, or whatever it was going to be.
It was a funny time in England, because I loved punk music, and I loved reggae music and dub music, and the two of them were merging together at festivals like Rock Against Racism. But I was wondering, "Where do we fit in?" We had to design a place to fit in, not being too studious about it, like, "We have to find a niche." As we sang in a song ["In This Town"], we weren't "looking for a scene," we were the scene.
