Where are you at right now?
This is Jack [Antonoff]’s B room at his L.A. studio, Tamarind.
Jack has a space in L.A. as well as one in New York, right?
Yeah, they’re both amazing studios to get to work in!
How did you and Jack Antonoff meet?
I was working at Real World Studios in the UK, Peter Gabriel's studio. We made a record with The 1975 [Being Funny in a Foreign Language], and I was brought in by the band because I was working at the studio – they wanted someone familiar with the setup. Right before the sessions started, they also brought in Jack to co-produce and his engineer Laura.
Laura Sisk.
Yeah!
I was going to say that you must know Laura. I assumed you two had worked together…
Every day! [laughter] I'd been at Real World for eight years, from making the tea, cleaning up the studio, then assisting, and all the way up to being the main engineer there. I loved working with Jack and Laura on The 1975 record – I felt like I’d learned so much from them. They have this incredible way of making you really feel like you're a part of the team. Jack invited me to work on another record with them, and then from there it continued.
You took the Tonmeister course before working at Real World. That's pretty rigorous training, isn't it?
At University of Surrey. That course is amazing – it was a very safe environment, and I made the mistakes there so I didn’t make them later. [laughter] The program was good at putting your ego in check and reminding you that you are starting from the bottom with a lot to learn. They had a placement year, and I went to work at Real World.
You’d do a full year while you're still in school, but you work out of a studio?
Third year, yeah. They have them at Abbey Road, AIR Studios, Real World, and many other studios, audio companies, and broadcasting/post-production houses. After I graduated, one of the assistants at Real World left. I did the interview process, and they gave me a job as an assistant/whatever we want you to do. It’s a small team for a big studio.
One thing people probably don't understand is that most studios don't need a lot of people working there.
Most studios can't afford it. It's three or four people working hard. The job was “do everything.” I built the Real World website; it's still there. I loved it, because if we could imagine it, we could do it. I could say, “When the sessions aren’t happening, I want to go in the workshop and build this.” Peter [Gabriel], and by extension his team – like Mike Large, who runs it – everyone was about fostering ideas, and nothing was too crazy to try. It was such an amazing group of people. I have really fond memories of working there. I went there on my first day, in 2012, imagining I’d probably be sat in the corner and told to be quiet, or they’d give me an admin job. Day one, Peter's engineer at the time said, “He's going out on tour in a month. You need to build all the playback systems and program Ableton [Live].” The take-home from that was that somebody trusted me. Real World was always busy, but it wasn’t often that major-label artists came through back then. I remember Alicia Keys and Harry Styles came through, and I assisted Harry’s session. When the next record [Harry’s House] came around two or three years later, I was still there. Kid Harpoon [Tom Hull, Tape Op #172] called me and said, “Hey, our engineer can’t make it – would you mind filling in?” I said, “Yeah, obviously.” He and Tyler [Johnson, co-producer] took a bit of a chance on me. Harry ended up winning Grammy awards for that record and, by extension, so did I! Peter saw that I'd done that record, and when he came to do his I/O album sessions he asked, “Do you want to step in and help me finish this?” I even got to work on some of the songs on the upcoming record, O/I. We could do a whole interview about Peter. He's one of one.
Yeah. I've massively respected his studio approach for so many decades.
