Grant Showbiz. His name pops up on records by The Fall, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, Alternative TV, Mood Swings and more. The name alone conjures up some flamboyant character, which he is! He got his start doing sound with a bunch of rootless hippies known as Here and Now, where he danced on the soundboard and pulled off crazy effects and mixes in a live setting. Then the hippies discovered punk, asking The Fall to come play shows with them, and eventually Grant produced The Fall.

It was my first professional record. I did Dragnet in '79 and I suppose the last thing I did was this "Chilinist" thing, which I suspect is the basic track that they still used on the single, which must have been '97. The third album with The Fall was Slates. Adrian Sherwood came in and did some time with it. He had the whole kind of snare mic'd up on the stairs, put through the reverb and then fed back in. I thought, "Okay, I like this. I'm not going to spend as long as Adrian does getting it, but if it happens, go with it." You've heard a sound, it's worked really well, and you spend 3 hours setting up in your studio and it just doesn't work. I've really learned lots of things like pointing the mic down away from the [kick drum] beater, make sure it's right in there. And then one day you don't do that, you mic it from the front. The mic is outside the drum and it sounds great, and you're like, "Oh my God! Everything I've learned is wrong." But I can look back at The Fall stuff and think, "I don't mind." It's looked upon as brilliant stuff. I think The Fall are probably the best band in the world. 20 years of sheer brilliance.

Grant's career with The Fall lasted until leader Mark E. Smith's erratic behavior and alcohol problems made things difficult.

What you see is people going over their peak. Certainly with Mark E. Smith I was thinking, "Well you're not making sense anymore." It came to head for me when we made "Chilinest". I was up there working on it, and Craig Scanlon, who was one of the great guitarists of The Fall, had gotten a clarinet and we tried really hard to get it to work, to get a good sound. Then Mark heard it and said, "What the fuck is there a clarinet on this song for?" He told us to wipe it off the track. He went back to the pub and came back three hours later. We played the mix again and Mark was like, "This is shit. Where is the clarinet? That was the best thing on the track." I've seen Mark since then and he's much more stable now and I support him dearly — the last record he made was absolutely fantastic — but I just thought it's not for me. You make a decision. You say, "I can't do this anymore!" I'm very close to Mark, I'm in contact with him 8 or 9 times a year. The last time I saw him he was very, very sober after a lot of this trouble with the band and Steve Hanley finally leaving. So he cleaned up his act. He did say, "We should work together," and then I thought, "You've got to actually ask me to do this." I can't phone him up. He never did and I thought, "Okay, well, I'll leave this. I'll just carry on buying their records." As a kid, you think you're going to say to a cabbie, "I worked for The Fall. I've done about half a dozen albums. They're a seminal punk band." And the guy's like, "The Fall?"

After some of his early productions for The Fall and Alternative TV he opened his own studio. Briefly.

I formed a studio in '79 called Street Level. It was myself and a guy called Kif Kif. He was the drummer of Here and Now. We had lived on a bus together for five years. We went off and did this studio — and did a lot of great work — but he really didn't do a lot after that. He's kind of out of the loop, and if he had a little bit more sense at the time he would still be making music. I hate when people do that. He was a great producer, great musician, but the tide's gone out and he's been left there. The problem I had running the studio (until '82, when it closed) was that we definitely had to have heavy metal bands in. Now I look back at those times in affection, but it was the pressure of doing too many bands like that that got to you. It was like, "I can't do this. It's too much for me." I had a 1" 8-track which is what I started working on. It got dismantled and then it was in a house that got repossessed... I never saw it again. If It was around I'd still be using it I guess.

During a lull in The Fall's schedule he stumbled across The Smiths.

I was there from the beginning. I was taken by Rough Trade to their third or fourth gig. It was me, John Peel, the writers from NME, the writers from Sounds, and the writers from Melody Maker. There were about twenty people in the audience. I was like, "Oh, this is really interesting." Then I went along and produced an album for them [Rank] and did some tracks for them and I had nothing written down on paper.

Then the band broke up. I went back to Rough Trade and said, "I've got points on this album." They said, "What are you talking about? Of course you haven't gotten points on it." I found Johnny [Marr] and I said, "Johnny, they're saying I haven't got any points on this record." He said, "You've got points on this record, Grant. I'm going to find out and tell them." If he just said, "I'm sorry, I got something better to do. See you later." That would have been it.

After that I managed to think, "Okay, I'm not going to leave it to Johnny Marr now." If I hadn't have gotten that then, I'd be sitting here whining about all that stuff like so many of my friends do. Passion and dreams will only take you so far. Then you have start thinking about some return on it. I was so lucky that The Smiths came along. I can remember them asking me how much I wanted to be paid. I said, "Oh 13 pounds." Because 13 is my lucky number. 13 pounds a gig, and that lasted for quite awhile. People thought it was crazy. I did basically all the live sound. I must have missed only four or five gigs.

During a Smiths' concert he caught an opening set by a young man playing electric guitar and singing with no backup band. This led to work with Billy Bragg, live and in the studio.

When I did Don't Try This At Home, which was the "big" pop album for Bill, we did the three singles, three videos and a world tour. But at exactly the same time that this was happening, which was '91 or '92, Mood Swings took off so I just didn't do the world tour with his group. It was a very unhappy tour and at the end of that Billy got a psychosomatic illness and decided not to tour for five years. I was so pleased that I missed out on this horrible tour. That meant that I'd never done any bands [with Billy].

This new tour's been going on for about a year now. Hopefully we'll do the next album together — I really want to. I'm really excited about this band We've got Ian [Mac] McLagan from the Faces. When I was 14, I used to go see the Faces and I loved it. It was the first time I thought, "Maybe I could do something." They looked so normal and had such a good time. We've also got people like Ben Mendelson and Lou Edmunds. Lou was in the Damned and Public Image, but Ben was also in a band called 3 Mustaphas 3 who were this fake Eastern European band. They were fantastic, and now I'm working with these guys as well. So they're putting in this weird Middle Eastern thing into the band. We got a bouzouki, saz and a cumbus, which I had never seen in my life. We have this mix of Ian and these weird ethnic instruments. It's great. Like Bill says, we've spent so long in the studio, saying to people, "Play like Ian McLagan, play like the Faces."

Mac has got all these great stories about the fantastic tape phase on "Itchycoo Park" [by the Small Faces]. How really it was just an engineer saying, "I was just over at the Beatles session the other day and they were doing this weird thing, let's see if we can do it," and they did it. I love that shit, and I think people imagine it's all been done, all that magic and excitement is over, and now it's just a science. That just isn't true.

On William Bloke, the album before we did the Guthrie stuff [Mermaid Avenue], we had a mandolin player and we worked out the track in the front room [of the studio] with a double- bass player and a baran player and Billy. We went into the studio and after about a half hour, we went back and did it in the front room. It sounded really good in the front room. So we set up a couple of mics in a room which wasn't designed in any way for recording. Suddenly we've moved out of the expensive, spectrum analyzed studio, and we were back in the front room, with [mic] leads that were too long. Of course I have to say the engineer came back and said, "What the fuck are you doing?" And I said, "Too late, we've done it."

Along with James "Fred" Hood, Grant started an electronic-y dance band that became somewhat successful.

With Mood Swings, it was like James and I were so fed up with engineers and producers telling us what we could and couldn't do that we just built our own recording studio and did it they way we liked. If you're going to spend three months on a track, you can go and do a stoned day or a speedy day. The thing we found with dance music was if we set up all the really complicated stuff and then took drugs it was great, because you could just sit there. I think there's a period when you're smoking dope and you think, "Oh, I can smoke dope and do anything." Then you realize that mending a car engine is not very good when you smoke dope. I think that a lot of my friends who never went into the professional music business still think that actually smoking dope is the most important part of the process in making music.

When they first came out, James bought 14 8- track ADATs, and when we made the Mood Swings albums, we never had less than 60 tracks running at the same time. James is a real perfectionist so my job is to say, "It's finished. Stop." Then again, he has no gun at his head. The whole thing with ADATs is that James was just obsessed with the cleanliness of tracks. It wasn't something that interested me at all. My job in Mood Swings was to dirty things up, you know put a bit of black against the white. Now I've got 3 of the 14 ADATs; I bought a couple and James gave me one. I record on ADAT because it's cheap and it doesn't fuck up. I've worked with them for about 8 years so I kind of know the signs of when things are going to go wrong. I know when to see an error message and think, "Fuck that, that's got to be perfectly alright."

Mood Swings is still going, but I left it when the Woody Guthrie album was gathering steam. It was really good timing. What happened was that we made three albums for Arista and we did very well, and we got paid an awfully decent amount of money. We sold about half a million records of the first album over a period of about five years. The first album is called Mood Food. It kept going real nicely and I must have spent ten years doing it. James is independently rich and doesn't need to make money. I'm not sure he really likes playing live, and I have this really obsessive thing of playing live and breaking even financially. So it became a bummer. We made an album and it was really dance-y. James turned around and said, "I don't want to play drums anymore." I was like, "But we're a dance band." So it was all coming to a confrontation, and then the Woody stuff came along. I think I would have stayed in Mood Swings for the rest of my life if James hadn't said anything.

He's made a new album, which is very, very good. It's got Julee Cruise, the Twin Peaks woman, on two tracks, and I think it's a world beater. James and I are closer now than two years ago. In fact he spoke to me last week, and said, "Maybe we should go back into the studio again."

Working with Billy led to producing Mermaid Avenue, a collection of Woody Guthrie lyrics fleshed out with music by Wilco and Billy Bragg.

I used to do things so you could never overdub drums later, you could never do that. Now on some of the best records I've been involved with, like "Sexuality" which was a great hit for Bill, the drums were done later. You set yourself up with rules 'cause it's such a big playing field, in a recording studio. Then, once you've got the focus you can let go of the rules, it's about getting the focus and knowing where you want to go and sometimes the rules help you. Wilco was obsessed with getting the first take of everything. One time I missed the first take of something and Jeff Tweedy was like, "You didn't record it?" From then on I realized that it was the rule: The first take had to be recorded. Record everything that they did and make a choice later. I never had so many reels of tape; we had 40 reels of tape, we did 40 songs and 15 songs came out. We put away about 15 to 20 songs at Kingsize studios, which in a way was supposed to be a demo — knocking ideas around. Then we went to Dublin for six weeks and ended up doing one song a day.

People kept saying, "Is Woody playing with you?" You're like, "No, he's been dead for thirty-five years. He wrote "This Land is your Land," you sung it in school." "No. No. Woody did a gig last year." You're like, "Did he have long gray hair, and did he do 'Alice's Restaurant'?" We went to the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because Woody was being inducted. They were saying, "Is Woody going to come?" and we were like, "I hope not. It would be really scary if he does."

It was really good fun, 'cause we were all live. If we have a live band with Bill, we would put the band together so they would pretty much do what we were asking. With Wilco it was interesting to suddenly work with guys who had their own agenda. We would do a heavy metal version of a song and a jazz version of the song. Jay [Bennett] would decide that he wanted to play the drums and the drummer would come and play the guitar, everybody switching around.

He doesn't get very technical about what gear he "must have" or what works for recording what.

There are some mics that I'll ask for. Obviously mics are different, some are great and some aren't. But you know, you use a [Shure]SM58 on a vocal, bass guitar and guitar, and then you're like, "Well, it's alright." You can use it for anything. I've got a 202, which is a hi-hat mic, but I use it on the bass drum. I've got an Electro-Voice which looks a bit like an SM58, and a couple of Sennheiser 421s and that's it I think. I'm sort of going back to basics, a lot of the drum tracks are only 3 mics. It's more of a distraction to have 16 mics on a kit — if I've got 3 on the drum kit you can move the mics or something if needed. Accidents are great too, like when you suddenly realize you've been recording a vocal on the mic over there instead of the mic over here, and your like, "Wow, that was great!"

Part of what makes Grant an asset to any project is his positive attitude and youthful energy. Plus he's a rampant record collector.

The thing I think with music is that it's not good or bad, I just haven't got the key to it. Sometimes I will sit and play a record fifty times until I get it. I know it's good, and I guess I just don't have the key to it, and I want to get the key to it. I can remember doing this when I was ten. Thinking that I've got to find out what it is, because I know this is good. It's like you know that Motown is good, you know that it's great, and you're like, "It just sounds like fucking pop music to me." Then suddenly you start hearing it, and you're like, "Wow!" To me, there are 2 or 3 gods in the world. One of them is The Fall, Al Green is one of the others. A lot of people say, "He's just a soul singer, isn't he?" I understand that attitude because I was like that once. Soul music to me at some point in my life was like... I didn't get it. "A black guy singing about love, great." Then you get in to the intricacies of it all and you realize that it's just a magic world.

Despite all the time he's in the studio Grant still spends a decent amount of time on the road doing live sound.

I just love it. I love live work. It's been this way since when I started. It's great when you know the dynamics. I don't think people realize or care about the live sound engineer. But then again they don't care about the producer either, do they? They don't care. That's why you need TAPE OP magazine. Just so people care about these things. Say to someone, "He produced this record!"