If I look at my record collection, there are so many favorites that John Wood engineered, mixed, and produced. This notably includes the first Pink Floyd singles, as well as albums by Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Judy Collins, Squeeze, John Cale, Nico, and John Martyn. I've wanted to interview John for years, and when a fellow writer mentioned John'd be into it I jumped at the chance. John, along with his partner, Geoff Frost, started Sound Techniques studio in London in 1965. When producer Joe Boyd [Tape Op #60] showed up, John and Joe began a long working relationship making records with many of the above artists. Geoff built Sound Techniques consoles, shipping them all over the world for a while, and John eventually became a freelance engineer working in many cities as well. He currently resides in northern Scotland, and he still keeps busy with album and mixing projects.
Did you ever play any instruments?
I played the violin a bit for a couple of years, and then it was probably too much hard work. I was about nine and my father took me to see [Yehudi] Menuhin in Croydon, and that sort of finished it!
Yeah. Was it a feeling of, "I'm not going to get there"?
Pretty much, yeah. It was way before the ideas of the Suzuki method or anything like that. When I first learned the instrument, I was just playing pizzicato on open strings. They wouldn't let me touch a bow. It was very formal, and the idea of ever getting a tune out of anything at the end of the day was very remote.
I know you were considering being a metallurgist.
Yeah.
How old were you when you first applied to, and ended up, at Decca?
Nobody would be employed that way now. I would have been about 19 or 20. I was going to be a metallurgist and it just didn't work out at all. It was a stupid thing to do in the first place, but there you are! [laughter] I was brought up in the era when, to some extent, the ambitions of your parents were foisted upon you, careerwise. Metallurgy didn't work out, and I didn't really know what to do. I had an interest in a hi-fi, in record collecting, and I used to go to a lot of classical concerts. I thought, "Maybe I can get a job listening to music and twiddling knobs." I wrote to Decca [Studios], I wrote to Abbey Road [EMI Studios], and I wrote to Philips [Studios]. I didn't know anything about independent studios at all – not that there were probably many in those days. I went to Abbey Road and Decca for interviews. There were extraordinary differences between the two. At Abbey Road, I was probably there for an hour and a half. They took me everywhere and I saw all the studios. I remember walking into Studio One, and they were rearranging after a break. It's like the whole of the LSO [London Symphony Orchestra] was in there, and I thought, "This is it. This is what I want to do."
That room is quite large.
I think [Edward] "Chick" Fowler was the studio manager in those days. He asked me loads of questions, and then he said, "Well, we haven't got anything at the moment, but if something turns up we'll be in touch." Off I go, thinking, "Oh, well, I'll probably never hear another word." About three weeks later I got a letter from Decca, went to Broadhurst Gardens, and it's completely the opposite. I had this ten-minute whirlwind tour, and five minutes with Arthur Haddy, who was the studio manager of Decca. I can't even remember the questions, but he turned around and said, "Well, boy" – he used to call everybody boy – "would you like to work here?" I said, "Why, yes, Mr. Haddy." He said, "All right. Start the first Monday in January." That was how I started.
Were you mostly in the cutting room at that point?
It was the early days of stereo mastering. They had two Neumann stereo lathes, and I was on the second one. It was being run by Peter Attwood, and I was put with him. I'd been with him about a week, and then he said, "Oh, I'm off to my clarinet lesson this afternoon." And that was it. They left me to it in the room. Decca did a lot of licensing in those days. They licensed RCA, and there was a label called London American, which was a conglomeration of the likes of Liberty and Atlantic. I used to do the monthly releases for RCA and Atlantic and – I can't remember them all. If you got through that, you might do a Decca one if the guy upstairs doing the Decca releases was getting behind time. If I got through that, I'd maybe get sent off to do editing. These were the days when they used to do mono and stereo separately.
Would you have to match the edits on different reels?
Oh, yeah. I'd go with the classical A&R guy, and they'd already done the stereo, so we'd be doing the mono.
That's difficult to do with classical edits.
Yeah, that's all done with scores. It is interesting that people don't realize the consistency of classical recording, certainly at Decca, in that we would be editing between takes sometimes that had not even been done in the same week.
But hopefully in the same hall!
Yeah, some of their operas – some of the famous Wagner recordings – they were recording them months apart. One act would be one month, and they'd come back and do another act later. I mean, that's consistency for you.
And the Decca trees [three omnidirectional microphones arranged in a “T” pattern], of course!
Oh, yes.
So, a week after starting you were cutting vinyl?
Yeah. It wasn't long.
Were they worried about you blowing out cutter heads?
Well, we used to have to do everything at half speed.
Really? Do you think that improved the quality?
No, it was because it was the only way we could get the level up. There were basically two systems, if you go back to that era. You either used Westrex heads and Scully lathes, usually if you were an American. Or you went the Neumann and Teldec route [Telefunken/Decca]. The Teldec cutters, in fact, were lateral hill and dale, 90 degree coils. They weren't 45 degree coils even. We had to sum-and-difference everything to put it into the 45 degree mode. They wouldn't take a lot of current. So, as the HF [high frequency] goes up, the current increases. If you chop the HF in half by going at half speed, then you effectively could get more level. Or you'd just blow the heads up.
Throwing somebody into this seems pretty crazy!
I think the reason that they did it was to get our ears attuned. How would you get your ears attuned to working unless you were in that environment?
Mastering songs coming from the United States must have been a great ear-opening experience; to hear different productions.
Well, yes. Sometimes I'd think, "What on earth is this?" The RCA label was interesting because there was RCA classical as well. Decca used to license RCA in those days. In fact, Decca used to record for RCA in Europe. Anyway, that's how it all started. Then I got frustrated because sitting and listening to music at half speed all day can get a bit boring. One of the classical A&R guys had moved to the Rank Organisation. Rank had a record label; they were going to put in their own Neumann lathe and do their own mastering. They were talking about doing their own mastering and their own mixing, because, by this time, 4-track had just about arrived. I thought that might be a bit more interesting, and they offered me more money. I took the job. When I went to Rank's, the lathe was in boxes. I put this whole Neumann system together. I actually cut one single that was produced by Joe Meek [Tape Op #100], which ended up on EMI.
Oh, wow.
I met Joe Meek.
What did you think of the Joe Meek production?
I remember him going on about the artist, John Leyton. I don't remember a lot about it. It wasn't particularly memorable. But after four weeks, Rank decided they were going to fold the whole Rank Records and I was out of a job. I got approached by Levy's Sound Studios, who'd also bought a Neumann off the shelf. The Decca Neumanns weren't straightforward at all; it was only the lathe they bought. They built their own amps, EQs, and all the rest of it.
Which was common back then.
Yeah. But Neumann also did an off-the-shelf, complete Neumann/Telefunken kit. Levy's had bought the same package, and they didn't understand it or know what to do with it. I ended up working there, and I sort of got trapped for the next few years. The interesting thing then was, in those days, there were loads of small labels. I was doing a lot of custom, turnkey label work for Westminster classical and Riverside jazz. They were two of the more interesting ones. Levy's was an associate company with a record company called Oriole. They were pretty hopeless pop records. At this time, I was not particularly interested in popular music at all, I have to say. I was just doing the job and earning a crust.
What were you listening to? Were you still a fan of classical music?
Oh, yeah. And some quite interesting jazz. I started cutting Reprise [Records], because Pye had their own system, but they didn't use it. I used to do all the Reprise catalog for Pye. It was quite interesting and very varied. Then, through the turnkey work, I started doing sessions for people as well.
How were you learning mic'ing up instruments and singers?
I don't know. To some degree, from what I'd seen. In other ways, intuitive and observational. One of the other bizarre things about Levy's was this associated company, Oriole, had a sideline, which was making soundalike pop records for Woolworth's [Department Store].
These are like The Sounds of Today, and then it's a bunch of covers of current hits?
They used to do it as singles, even. Oriole had this A&R man who tried to predict what was going to be in the charts in two or three weeks, and they would go in and do covers. That was the most frustrating. The covers were always engineered by the guy that ran the studio, Jacques Levy, who hadn't frankly had a clue about popular music. Why would he have had? He was 20 years out of date. I would be given the original version and the tape of what he'd done that afternoon, and I was then expected to somehow make the tune in some way compatible.
You'd be listening to the original song that they covered?
Yeah. I'd be getting a Phil Spector single, and they haven't even got a bass guitar in the band there because the guy that did the arranging didn't like bass guitars. So, it's got a double bass.
Wow. That sounds frustrating.
Obviously, you learn a lot from it, if nothing else. Then the associate record company, Oriole, in a move to catch up with the 20th century, employed this A&R man, John Schroeder, who'd been responsible for writing hits for Helen Shapiro, an EMI artist and quite a big deal in whenever this was – '63, '64. The one thing that he'd brought to the party was he negotiated a deal to release Motown Records. For a year, Oriole, as well as their own label, which didn't produce many hits and the Woolworth's stuff, were also releasing Motown. I don't know why, but I really did find that was interesting.
Like the production of the music?
Yeah. The first three records I cut were "Beechwood 4-5789" by The Marvelettes, "Please, Mr. Postman," and Mary Wells' "Does He Love Me?" It's just so different, and I suppose in some way that's what got me interested in it. I've never been a much of a fan of English pop music. I think there's only ever been one great English pop record that can hold its head up against the Americans. It's Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me." Listen to that, and it sounds as good as anything that was coming out of America.
She had a heck of a voice.
Oh, yeah. She knew what she wanted.
You were also doing bands like Downliners Sect at that time.
Yeah, the first album I ever did.
That's kind of garagey R'n'B, right?
That was a second division R'n'B band at the time, hoping to be like the Pretty Things or the Rolling Stones. I did some people like Richard Rodney Bennett. The sessions that I did do were quite wide. I did an album [Alone with My Friends] with Memphis Slim [John Chatman], believe it or not.
When I first opened a studio, and I started tracking people day after day, my understanding of where to put the mics and set levels got so much better and quickly. Did you feel that growth in your own skills?
Well, you learn by the seat of your pants a bit, don't you? On the Memphis Slim session, I can't remember who played bass on it, but the guy who it was for was Ed Michel; he was running Interdisc in London. It was very jazz and blues oriented. He was an American, and he said, "Memphis Slim's in town. We're going to make an album with him." I don't know why, but I remember taking the lid off the piano. When it came to mic'ing the bass, Ed said, "You should get that [Neumann KM] 56." He said, "This is what I do in America. Wrap it up in a scarf and wedge it into the bridge." That's been my go-to way of recording double basses ever since – when you can get hold of an KM 56. But [John Martyn's] Solid Air, which everybody raves about the bass sound, that's all I did. By that time, I was using a bit of sponge rubber and stuffed it into the bridge of Danny's bass. All you need is Danny Thompson, and then a decent-sized booth! [laughter] But that's the other thing people don't understand: Players and instruments.
And singers, like we mentioned earlier.
Oh, yeah.
If I look back at early recordings I did, the ones people love are usually because the songs are good and the players are good. It's not that I was a great engineer.
And the fact that you're capturing a performance.
For sure.
Yeah. Well, don't get me going about that!
This is the place to talk about that.
I just do not understand it. I probably do about three or four projects a year at most now. But of those, at least two will be mixing other people's recordings. It seems that the way that the industry – if you call it an industry – works now is that people like me are in this sort of no man's land between a producer and an artist where we're trying to sort it out afterwards. I've just been working on an album for an American country artist – god knows why he got me to mix it. But anyway, he's really happy. Funny enough, I've got a couple of English guitarists overdubbing on it. But if I'm not there at the beginning, I don't really have a plan of how it should sound, or what I want to do with it. If I'm working with music that I'm recording, when I hear the song, I've got a sonic blueprint. Which, of course, I don't get, coming in to do all that afterwards, unless I'm very lucky. Sometimes it works well.
We're trying to make production moves at the end of the session, as opposed to being on the floor, going, "Take that up an octave," or, "Play quieter."
Or just, "Do it again, with feeling." I'll say to people, “It really doesn't matter. Just because there's a mistake, or you're ending up at a faster tempo than you started, I don't care.” I used to just say, "That's the one." But that's out the window.
It's a different era now. Speaking of eras, when you were working at Levy's, you met Geoff Frost.
Yeah. We got more and more frustrated with it, particularly with the amateurism of Jacques Levy. We thought, "What the fuck can we do?" In the end, his mother put up £10,000, and we started our studio. You wouldn't dare do it these days, probably.
But you'd been exposed to these independent studios, and you were working with independent labels.
Yeah, there weren't that many studios, really. There was IBC, Olympic, Lansdowne, and Star [Sound]. That that was about it. Anyway, we made the leap. The arrogance of youth! Geoff had always been very smart about making gear. When we were at Levy's, I remember he took a Pultec [equalizer] home one weekend, stuck it in the oven, and melted all the wax out of the coils! We'd always pushed the envelope. When we were at Levy's, they put in this mixer made by EMI Broadcast Division, and it was a load of rubbish. It was still valve [vacuum tube]. We got hold of an early Fairchild transistor – germanium, I suppose, in those days – and that sounded great. Geoff had always had a very inquiring mind. When we got to do Sound Techniques, everything we could do ourselves, we'd do, like make a mixer. Before we'd finished our own, we'd made one for somebody else.
Where did that first one go to?
It went to Freddie Baker. I think he used to do mobile recordings. A bit of an eccentric character. Years later, I did a remote recording for a track on the second Fairport album, What We Did on Our Holidays. They said, "Oh, we want to record this in a church." They organized the mixer, and it was this bloody mixer that we'd built for Freddie Baker! So, that's how it started. Then the usual thing: You start the business, get it going, and all these people say, "Oh, we'll come," and then none of them bloody show up. We spent a year chewing our fingernails. Luckily, we were saved by a contract recording background music for 3M America. We were doing 60 titles a day of this.
Library music?
Yeah, 3M had come up with some hardware that they wanted to put out for background music.
Like Muzak?
Yeah, to put in the banks, lifts, or whatever. We had months of recording that, which kept the wolf from the door.
How big was the live room at Sound Techniques?
Around 1000 square feet. Nobody thought that you recorded anywhere that was much less than that.
Were there isolation booths or gobos?
Well, we had gobos. And when we started, we had two floors: The first floor and the floor above it. We chopped out the middle third, so the middle of the studio was double height. In one end where we hadn't chopped it out, we had the control room. The other end was the workshop where we were making mixers for the two years we were building them there. We made one for Sunset Sound, and the one for Trident we made in the workshop over the top of the back half of the studio. We had to have a red light in there to shut everybody up when we were doing takes.
No drilling!
Yeah. But that's the way it was. After a couple of years, we moved the manufacturing side out to Suffolk, and Geoff went off and stayed in Suffolk. I then changed the acoustics. I killed the studio down a bit. We made it so the back third could be completely shut off if we wanted.
Oh, wow. Like doors that would close?
Yeah, it wasn't a hundred percent, but it was enough. When we started, the idea of the double height was going to be for strings and orchestral sessions. But we discovered that it was better putting the rhythm section in there. We were recording with the rhythm section in the middle, brass and woodwinds at one end, and strings in the other. That was the way we used to work it. The highest number of people we ever put in there was 47. That's actually quite a famous recording. That's Judy Collins doing songs from Marat/Sade.
On the In My Life record? That's a beautiful sounding record.
That was a turning point for us. A turning point for me in my life, really. We'd already done a couple of sessions for Jac Holzman [the head of Elektra Records], with arranger Mort Garson, and it was great. He was lovely to work with. Judy Collins wanted to make a record in England, and we got the gig. She came over with [producer] Mark Abramson and [arranger/conductor] Josh Rifkin. It was a groundbreaking record, but nobody in Britain ever picked it up. We never got any reputation in the UK through it.
John Wood & Joe Boyd on Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, 1978. "We were mixing Julie Covington's album [Julie Covington]." -JW
Then through Elektra you had the Joe Boyd connection.
It started with Elektra, and then Joe turned up. I don't know why Joe and I got on, but we always have, in one way or another. That started me off on whatever career I've had.
Working with Joe brought in a whole cache of great artists.
Yeah. We learned a lot from one another. Joe was ambitious, but hardly experienced. The great times that I spent with Joe usually were in America. With Kate and Anna [McGarrigle's self-titled] album, Geoff Muldaur [Is Having A Wonderful Time], and living there in the summer. It wasn't so much that I enjoyed doing that, it's just the people who played on them. I don't think the current generation even realizes what it's like to work with the stature of musicians that we had on some of these projects.
Like Steve Gadd?
This was also a flush time for the music industry, like being able to fly to L.A. to mix a record.
Yeah.
What was the first session that you did with Joe at Sound Techniques?
I think the first thing we ever did was Alasdair Clayre from Cambridge [Alasdair Clayre]. Joe says it was a record with [David] Swarbrick and Martin Carthy, so it might have been Swarb' and Carthy's Rags, Reels and Airs. Then we did the Incredible String Band [their debut self-titled album].
Oh, wow.
I remember the first Incredible String Band album we did was when there were three of them; they stood in a line on a Sunday afternoon, and we just recorded it. Interestingly enough, the Incredible String Band was special because they were what liberated Joe from Elektra. Joe went into management with the Increds, and, on the back of that, he became independent. Of everything I did with Joe, I don't think they've stood the test of time in the way that everything else has.
It feels more of the era, maybe.
Oh yeah, it does. Whereas the Nick [Drake] music is obviously timeless. Kate and Anna's first album, same thing. I remember when we did the first Kate and Anna album, which we did in A&R [Studios] in New York. There's a waltz, "My Town," a song of Anna's. We did a take, we listened to it, and it sounded pretty good to me. Then Anna said, "Well, I'm not sure. It doesn't really make me want to dance." And [drummer] Steve Gadd said, "Oh, maybe I should just lay back a fraction on the one on the bass drum." I thought, "He's full of shit." They went out, did another take, and of course it sounded wonderful. If you want to make records, work with people like that. It makes me redundant!
[laughs] It makes you look good.
Yeah.
One of the bands that Joe brought to you, that you probably never had to see live, was the early Pink Floyd.
I did see Pink Floyd live.
Did you see them at the UFO [Club]?
Yeah, we went to UFO one night. Taking my first wife to UFO one night, and…
How different was that from when they recorded the singles?
Completely different, yeah. I thought, "What's going on here?" Joe had rented the Blarney Club, just off Tottenham Court Road. I remember taking my wife, Sheila, and Yoko [Ono] was trying to get people for her film with bottoms [Film No. 4 (Bottoms)].
Oh, yeah!
She was trying to recruit people for that. Lava lights, Pink Floyd playing, and so what? I didn't get it. But when we were recording them, it was very interesting. Joe had always been friendly with the American producer that did The Doors [Paul Rothchild]. He'd said to Joe that they'd been DI'ing guitars. Joe said, "I've been talking to him, and he said about this." I said, "Oh, I'll see what we can sort out." I spoke to Geoff, and Geoff came up with this idea of not, in fact, doing it the way you would normally expect to do it, which was straight off the guitar itself. But we did it off the back of the amps on the speaker. We clipped on clips.
Oh, like off the speaker?
Yeah. We'd got these old GPO 600 ohm transformers. We used a mixture of the two [with the mic] – and I don't think anybody'd ever done it in the UK before.
On Syd [Barrett's] guitar?
No, no. Particularly on the bass. It has got quite a unique bass sound on that. I mean, it doesn't sound bad for when it was done.
My introduction to Pink Floyd was The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. They're very high fidelity. When I went back into their catalog and heard "Arnold Layne," I thought, "They sounded just as good when they started. How is that possible?" Norman [Smith]'s work on the first album [The Piper at the Gates of Dawn] is clear and focused as well.
We did "Arnold Layne," and then Joe got carved up [removed as the band's producer]. They signed to EMI, and Norman Smith got it [became the band's producer]. Norman had been the engineer for The Beatles and wanted to be a producer. I knew Norman quite well. When it came time to do the follow-up, "See Emily Play," they had to come back to Sound Techniques to do it.
Did you engineer that?
Oh, yeah.
It sounds as good as "Arnold Layne."
Yeah, I did it. I find it a bit gimmicky. It's a bit engineer-gimmicky. That was Norman, clutching at straws a bit. I knew Norman – in fact, I had quite a few ex-Abbey Road people work for me. One of the pictures I sent you shows the control room with Vic Gamm, who engineered the first Jethro Tull album [This Was], amongst other things. Vic was ex-EMI. Jerry Boys [Tape Op #112] was ex-EMI.
Yeah, I've interviewed Jerry before; he's fantastic. You were talking about how Incredible String Band maybe didn't stand the test of time, but the Nick Drake records have become more famous over time.
As soon as I heard Nick, I knew it was something out of the ordinary.
Was it the intensity of the music, or the perfection of his playing?
Somehow Nick has a rare quality in that he has an aural presence. Even the demos that he did on a Ferrograph [reel-to-reel recorder] in Robert Kirby's [Nick's string arranger] room, he's just there. I remember before I actually got to record Nick, Joe had a partner in those days named Tod Lloyd. I remember Tod saying, "Yeah, but you wait until you hear Nick Drake." Nick came in, he sat down, and he played about four or five songs. It was an audition tape, and it never come out. It's part of a box set, which is waiting to be released. But it's startling, for somebody to come in and do that.
Did he always play acoustic guitar and sing simultaneously?
Yeah. Just did the two, and the guitar was like a metronome. He was extraordinary. I don't know why, but I always got on well with him. Probably not the first time, but when we started recording after that first day we'd had, I remember sitting down and saying to him, "Well, Nick, what are your influences?" I couldn't really see where he was coming from. He mentioned the Beach Boys and Randy Newman, and I didn't know who Randy Newman was. I thought, "Oh, well, I don't know." You couldn't Google it in those days! So, I get the first Randy Newman [self-titled] album, and I'd already recorded "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" with Judy Collins two years earlier! [on In My Life]
Oh, that's right.
I thought, "Who's this Randy Newman?" I have to say that if I would like to have been in the studio with anybody, it would have been Randy Newman. I just think Randy Newman is the bee's knees for me.
That's interesting that Nick would bring him up. What were your mic techniques with Nick Drake and his acoustic guitar?
Well, it would depend.
Did you ever do a single mic?
Oh, yeah. Well, Five Leaves Left is all single mic on the guitar. There would have been a [Neumann] U 67 in those days on the vocal. If Danny Thompson was on the session, I probably would have used a [Neumann KM] 54 on the guitar, because the [Neumann KM] 56 got reserved for Danny's bass.
You only had a handful of mics?
Well, this is how you had to work in those days. One of the tricks would be if I was using a 67 on the guitar and getting too much spill, I would put it on figure of eight.
Right. Put the null of that pattern pointing to the vocal, or vice versa.
Yeah.
I love that technique.
Yeah. It's a narrower pickup. You just get around these things, don't you?
Did you ever do a single mic for both the guitar and vocal?
No, no. But he wasn't a loud singer, either. In fact, when we did Pink Moon I might have used a [Neumann U] 47 because it's a bit poppy, which would indicate me using a 47 because they were buggers for pops.
Yeah. Plosives.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I never had an [AKG] C12 or C24. If I'm in a studio with a C12 or a C24, I'll use that on an acoustic guitar before anything. But you have to go with what you've got.
How many mics did you have at Sound Techniques around that time?
In the mic cupboard we had one [KM] 56, one [KM] 54, four or five [U] 67s, AKG D19, AKG D20, and an AKG C60, which is an unusual microphone. What I think is the one of the most underrated microphones going was the Sony C-38.
The 38? Because everyone wants the C-37?
Well, yeah. But I'll tell you how we came to get 38s. When we sold a mixer to Sunset Sound, I was hanging around and went and had a peep at a Doors session, which Bruce Botnick [Tape Op #74] was doing with Paul Rothchild [producing]. Jim Morrison wasn't there. They were playing about with a Moog synthesizer. I remember saying to Geoff, "We ought to get the agency for this," but he wouldn't buy it. Otherwise, we'd have had a Moog agency for Britain. We missed out there. But I noticed over the top of the drum kit, Bruce had this pair of Sony C-38s. I was intrigued. I don't think I even asked him what they were. Anyway, when we got back to the UK, we were always strapped for cash. At that time, EMI broadcast division, who were still in business, were acting as agents for Sony. I think they were 80 pounds, which in those days was about 200-odd dollars. I said, "Oh, I'll have a couple." As soon as I got them – well, the Sandy Denny vocals on [Fairport Convention's] Unhalfbricking, that's a Sony C-38.
I love the sound of that record.
So, we had a couple. I got so frustrated, because they're not common in the UK. I've been fortunate; I've got a sequentially numbered pair that I imported from Japan a few years ago.
When I've used the Sony C-37s, they have such a wonderful mid-range presence.
They have a quality that you'll get with ribbons. A sort of a blending quality that you get with ribbons, which you don't get out of condensers. In fact, I got frustrated, and I swore for years I would never buy another microphone. Because I kept all the microphones for years from Sound Techniques, and then got fed up with bloody carting about power supplies and everything.
All the tubes go out.
I got rid of them, unfortunately. It's a shame, because they'd be worth quite a lot of money now.
Why did Sound Techniques close?
Our lease came to an end in 1976. In '75, we went to the bank to try and get the money to buy the freehold. It was not just the freehold of our bit, it was the freehold of two shops at the front, two apartments over the shops, and the building we were in, which was three floors with a thousand square feet. The bank wouldn't lend us the money, so we started looking for other premises. I started to get pissed off with it. Cliff Adams was one of the proprietors of Olympic [Studios], and his daughter had worked for us when we first started as an office receptionist. Anyway, I knew Keith [Grant, Olympic's manager] very well, and Cliff had always been keen on property investments. I thought, "Well, maybe we can capitalize on what we've got." So, we sold him pretty much everything we had in the studio, he bought the freehold, and he ran it as a satellite of Olympic. But I'd been using Barnes [the original Olympic Studio] for years anyway, and carried on using Sound Techniques, now known as Olympic Chelsea. I was using it on a freelance basis.
Right.
In the meantime, with Sound Techniques consoles, to try and keep the business under control, Geoff got interested in computers. He decided that the way to keep track of the manufacturing side was to invest in a computer system. This is before PCs. This smart-talking bloke turned up one day from Trafalgar House Investments, and they were flogging GRI Computers. These were scientific application computers with no software, just the hardware. Geoff went for it, bought it, and decided that he would computerize stock control and that sort of thing.
Right. Which makes sense now.
Yeah. And made sense then! So, he gets this GRI, and we've got this bloody thing with disks the size of saucepans. As I said, he was always very, very smart, so he starts writing his own software. This glib salesman, in the meantime, goes off and sells a system to a magistrates' court, like a local court. This ambitious clerk of the court wants to make a name for himself, so he buys this to be the first one in Britain to computerize. He buys this thing, then rings up the company and asks, "Oh, where's the software?" They say, "Oh, you don't get software, but there's this chap that's not that far away from you." So, the business got involved in software.
I never knew this part!
Yeah. That started taking over. That was about a year before we'd actually finished, and we're starting to do something else. That's basically what the company ended up doing. In the meantime, we'd already embarked on making two – they only ever made one, but we were originally going to make two mixers for my next studio, as it were. They were very different to anything we'd made before, because Geoff and I by this time weren't seeing eye to eye about what I wanted and what I didn't want. So that got made, and it's still somewhere in France. I'd love to have had it. I'd worked out all the mic amps and the EQs, and it would be equivalent to mid-'70s discrete Neve circuitry.
You also had seen so many console manufacturers come along. Trident bought one of your consoles, and then they started building their own.
I'd worked on APIs, Harrisons, Neves, Quad-Eight, and MCI. I've forgotten what the hell the one was out at Amigo Studios [Los Angeles]. That was great; a sort of a lash-up of API modules. I had a very definitive idea of what I wanted in a console, but I never got to do it. I got fed up, so I decided I'd just freelance.
It was probably good to free yourself up from being a studio owner and just work freelance at that point.
Oh, it was great. I didn't have to put up with anybody moaning at me. It was great not employing anybody! Which is unfair, because all the people who worked for me were great. I was very lucky.
You were still doing records with Joe Boyd, of course.
Well, what happened with Joe, which he doesn't say too much about in [his book] White Bicycles, but Witchseason [Productions, Boyd's management and production company] overreached themselves big time, and Joe basically had to bail out. Island [Records] took it over. Joe's leaving present to me was, "Do you think you could produce a solo record with John Martyn for two thousand pounds?" I said, "Yeah, I'll give it a go." So, the first official production I did was Bless the Weather by John Martyn. From then on, Witchseason got run outside the normal way that Island was. The next thing is that I was recording all the Island artists.
Were you doing a lot of work at their Basing Street Studios?
If I couldn't get into Sound Techniques, I'd use Basing Street. I really liked the big room at Basing Street. One of the last things I ever did at Basing Street was three titles for Sandy Denny's Rendezvous album, as a one-er with the strings; her playing the piano, and the rhythm section in 1977. The tape op had never seen it done before.
A live session?
Yeah. I mean, people had stopped doing things like that. I remember Sandy was really nervous about it, but I talked her into it. I was indulging myself, to tell you the truth. But, at the end of the day, we did three titles in three hours.
She had such a beautiful voice, but I know she was nervous a lot of times.
Very, yeah. She had no confidence at all.
Did she have a wide dynamic vocal range in the studio?
Yes, she did. I remember when we did [Fairport Convention's] Unhalfbricking, I remember having to ride the vocals live.
To control the level going to tape?
Yeah. It's absolutely tragic, because she ended up getting steered in the wrong direction, and not being allowed to do her own thing enough. I suppose I knew Sandy well; the same with Nick. I used to see them socially quite a lot. Sandy used to stay at the house sometimes and got on very well with my first wife, as did Nick.
You engineered and mixed one of my favorite records, Fear, by John Cale [Tape Op #156]. I interviewed John last year.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, right. The first time I met John was recording Nico's Desertshore. Joe and I were in New York mixing; it must have been Fairport Convention's Full House album. We used to use Vanguard [Records'] studio, which had a nice Neve [console]. That was easy; I could handle it. They had great plate [reverbs] – everybody's plates sound different. I don't care what anybody says.
I agree, they do.
I enjoyed Vanguard. So, we were mixing at Vanguard. We'd been there a couple of days, and Joe announces, "Oh, we're going to do this record in the evenings with Nico." I asked, "Who's Nico?" "Oh, she made this great record, The Marble Index. We're going to do it. It's John Cale of the Velvet Underground." My thought was, “Oh, great, you know? Thanks a lot.” [sarcastically] So, the next evening, six o'clock, Cale turns up with Terry Riley. Nico wasn't there that first night. They're both completely off their faces, and we don't do anything. The following night we get Nico. Vanguard was this long, old ballroom, about 30 foot wide and 50 to 100 feet long. I sat Nico right in the middle. She sits with her harmonium, and she insisted on having her back to the control room. I'm looking at Nico, harmonium, and her back. John stood in front of her and must have started off on viola or something. They spent most of the time shouting at one another. By the end of the first night, John came up with a list. He said, "I would like this tomorrow." His listed included timpani, carillon bells, celestas, etc. By the third night, there's this arc of percussion instruments. Cale is shouting at Nico all the time and she's sitting there. During the day I've been mixing. At six o'clock we'd started the Nico thing, and by the end of the session I could just about stagger two doors to the Chelsea and throw myself into bed.
At least Vanguard was right next door to the Chelsea Hotel.
Right. That's my introduction to John Cale. We didn't finish it; we finished it in London. John came to London to mix it. That's when he heard Nick Drake, and he came in and did [overdubs on] "Northern Sky." They're great. He just came in and rattled it off, take, take, bang, bang. He got signed to Island Records, and next thing he was making Fear, and I got the shout. We did some of it at Sound Techniques and we did some of it at Olympic. I remember when we finished mixing Fear, he made me play it with the lights out.
I'm a bass player and I love some of that…
It is absolutely madness on the bass.
Especially on the song "Fear." It sounds like it's going through a guitar amp.
I can't remember what it is. Then we did Slow Dazzle? I mean, "Mr. Wilson," I think, is an extraordinary track.
You tracked that? I wish I had some of your experiences! "Mr. Wilson" is not a song that comes up very often, but it's amazing.
It's fucking brilliant. It was a nightmare mixing it. Can you imagine?
It's very layered.
I think it was 16-track. John used to have this thing about mixing – he'd stand behind me. He never actually pushed any faders. He had this philosophy that it was my turn to perform when it got to mixing. He'd only let me do so many and then I'd have to choose.
That's a cool sounding track though. The drums are really reverb-y, and there are those great little cinematic interludes.
Oh yeah. There's sitar guitar on it by Chris Spending [Spedding], as we used to call him! It was almost as though I was maybe his minder. He came out and said, "Do you want to come to New York and record Patti Smith?” [Cale produced her debut, Horses.] I thought, "Well, do I really want to go to New York? With John? Is this sensible?" I said, "Okay, yeah, I'll do it." It was before the days of business class, so I said, "Yeah, but I want first class, round trip." They balked at the airfare, so I didn't do it. That was the biggest mistake I made, not doing that Patti Smith record. When the record did come out, there's a quote; I've still got it somewhere. She was asked why she wanted John Cale, and she said because she liked the sound of his records. I did meet her a few years later. In fact, it was when I was mixing Dancer with Bruised Knees [by Kate and Anna McGarrigle]. The Fillmore East had a New Year's Eve party, she was there, and she said she was sorry I hadn't worked with her. I also met Tom Verlaine. That was interesting, because he started on about Nick Drake. This was in '76 or '77.
One of the things that Joe Boyd did right was when he sold the Nick Drake catalog, he said it had to stay in print.
Yeah. Island always kept it in print.
Your sessions with John Cale also led to working with Squeeze, right?
Oh, yes. John got very cross with me. It wasn't really my fault, but there was obviously some aggravation with John and Island over the Helen of Troy album, and I got caught in the flak of it. I hadn't heard from him for a couple of years, and suddenly I got this call. Would I like to go and mix this album for this band he's been doing? He'd been hired to produce Squeeze because we were now at the height of the punk era in Britain. The guy who was managing them, Miles Copeland, obviously thought it's punk to get John Cale. I turned up at Morgan Studios, and they hadn't quite finished the album. They were still doing a few overdubs. We tried doing a few overdubs. John was really at his peak in direction, in directing the way he thought it should be. We did two or three days, and, by the fourth day, he didn't turn up. I never saw him again. I carried on mixing. Then the record company said, "There's not a single." [Squeeze's songwriters,] Glenn [Tilbrook] and Chris [Difford], say, "We've got this idea." Glenn said, "I need a sequencer," and we did "Take Me I'm Yours."
Yeah, which was kind of prescient for where music went later.
It was nothing like any of the rest of the album at all. They had this octave thing with the vocals. I remember I said, "What the hell am I going to do? This is something new." I flanged the vocals, and I could never get the same sound again. I did two more albums with them, but I could never get back to whatever I did. Maybe it was the Eventide Instant Flanger at Morgan. It was mild hit, but I never got bloody credited with it. That happens all the time.
But you went on to do more with them, so you got credited properly then.
Yeah. The next album [Cool for Cats], I co-produced that. They were great. I really enjoyed working with them.
Great lyrics.
Brilliant, and they still are. I did some work with Chris about ten years ago, which was extraordinary. Lyrically, he just moved on to being in his fifties. The lyrics were just brilliant again.
In 1983 or so, you decided to step out of the music business?
Yeah. I'd had enough. By that time – and I suppose it's even worse now – but by '83 or '84, you couldn't really do anything without having to deal with some hairdresser in a bloody record company called an A&R man, who thought they knew how things should be. On all the best records I ever did, we never saw the record company. We just went and did it, and they trusted that we weren't going to spend money stupidly. The record company kept out of the bloody way. But by the early '80s, it was like, "Oh, it's great, but why don't we get so-and-so to mix it?" I mean, [Squeeze's] "Up the Junction," the first reaction of the record company was, "It can't be a single. It hasn't got a chorus."
Oh, I can imagine.
My personal circumstances had changed as well, and I thought, "Do I really need to do this?" So, I did something different. I did it for ten years until "something different" went tits up.
You opened a place in Scotland?
A hotel. What happened was, we ran into terrible financial problems with the second hotel, not of our own making. We retired and ran a bed and breakfast, and I started working on records again.
What year did you start getting back in the studio?
I went back in 1989 or '90. When we still had the hotel, I did a couple of albums with Boo Hewerdine, and then started working with Joe again. Then that went quiet, and the business really tightened. I had the only proper job I'd had in the last 60 years, which was an arts administration job – which was interesting, but it drove me nuts. Then we moved to the north of Scotland, and we did a bed and breakfast. I finally got a few royalties sorted and put a mix facility together.
In your own private space here. You started with a Neotek Essence console?
That's right. I had a Neotek. My personal circumstances changed about four years ago, so I sold the Neotek – I sold everything. I thought, "I'm just going to stop."
You kept trying to stop. [laughs]
Then, two months later, I got asked to do albums for a couple of people. Now I'm running on a bit more of a hybrid system. I'm still summing on a Neve. I still think it's different to mixing in the box. I don't care what anybody says. I have a few bits of outboard, like a couple of 500 Series clones of Neve compressors [AML 54F50] made by a company called AML, which are very interesting. I'm using Klein & Hummel monitors. I don't know how much longer I'll keep doing it.
I heard August Gilde's record, A Different Kind. That's a beautiful sounding album.
Thanks. The most interesting project I've done recently was actually only mixing. That was for Pete Townshend; The Bookshop Band's Emerge/Return. It reminds me of the Incredible String Band. I don't know why, because they're not really anything like the Incredibles. It's a husband and wife duo. Pete obviously liked them, so he produced it and plays a bit on it as well. Out of the blue I got this email, "I think you'd be the person to mix this." It's great, and everybody's very happy. I've done a few sessions with Clive Gregson over the last couple of years. I've known him ever since he was in a band called Any Trouble, back in 1980.
Do you stay fairly busy on the mixing front, with submissions online?
No, no.
Are you selective?
I'm very wary about it, because people think I'll have some magic touch. Most of the time I won't! If they send me dross, they're going to get dross back. The other thing is I won't work for less than a day at a time. If somebody's got one title, it's still going to cost a day.
It's hard to set rates for mixing remotely.
Oh, it is. I have a daily rate, and I increase it when I'm mixing. I figure I'm using my equipment, so it's worth it. But I'm much happier to start from the ground up. There's nice studio I use outside of Edinburgh, The Slate Room, which suits me and it's sensible. He's not wasted money on anything. It's not a big room; it's about 400 square feet. I can just about get a rhythm section in there, and it's got a little booth. He hasn't got any rubbish, and there's so much these days. At one point it was a BBC drama studio, so the acoustics are very neutral. Something I find now with a lot of studios is like, "We've got a drum room, and we've got this room." I don't want that. I just want a big, neutral room. If I can't have a big one, I'll have a small one. Apart from Sound Techniques, my two favorite rooms were A-1 at A&R Recording [New York], which was the old Columbia Studio A; and Olympic's Studio One, when it was first done. They were both neutral. They weren't rooms where we wanted the drums to sound like kitchen cabinets falling downstairs, or an area just for this or an area just for that. You could go in, mic things up, and put a couple of screens around.
In the early '80s, people began tracking everything dry and then applying a reverb to it.
Well, if there's no bleed, there's no cohesion to the sound. Maybe it's cohesion to the playing.
Part of the problem with recording in general is there's just never really a right, wrong, or an absolute. You have to use your ears and say, "To me, this feels right."
Yeah, exactly. It moves you, or it doesn't. But I think the sound of the records is fairly low on the priority list. The first thing is the performance, the artist, and the material. How does it sound? You can get away with all sorts of nonsense! Sometimes the harder I work on something it seems no one cares.
The more you don't want to hear it, that's for sure.
Yeah, that's the other thing. When I listen later, I always think, "Oh, why didn't I do that?"
"I should remix it." It was really enjoyable to talk to you, after all these years! As a music fan, I've always appreciated the records you've worked on, and as an engineer/producer I appreciate them even more.
Well, I think I've just been lucky, really.
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