David Kilgour | TapeOp

My first exposure to New Zealand pop band the Clean came several years after the release of 1990's Vehicle, and I discovered their early singles and EPs after that. While the songwriting on Vehicle still impresses me, the band's early releases surprise me far more. Their combination of the songwriting of '60's pop with the raw intensity of punk rock resembled little else from the era, with the early singles of the Human Switchboard and the Subway Sect as very remote reference points. The somewhat lo-fi recordings capture this combination perfectly.

David Kilgour has recorded his songs on 2-track recorders at home, at amazing 24-track studios, and just about everywhere in between. His band the Clean, with his brother Hamish (now in the Mad Scene) and Robert Scott (of the Bats, the Magick Heads, and Electric Blood), achieved commercial success in its native New Zealand in 1981 and have influenced countless indie bands with higher profiles worldwide. Over 20 years, with the Clean, Stephen, and on his own, he's continued to write and record instantly memorable songs that explore different facets of the pop syntax he loves. I talked to David when he was in Chicago, playing extra guitar and keyboards for Yo La Tengo on a recent tour, and he shared stories of his diverse recording experiences.

"We'd been recording for a long time in our practice rooms on a Revox B77 2-track. We had lots of cheap, nasty old mics. We might have had a couple of Shures or something, but just always had it in our practice room and had it in our house. We were just always writing and recording on it. We did have a little 8 channel mixing desk which we sometimes used but I think we generally just plugged mics into it, two at a time. We'd bounce down to overdub, and use that slapback echo quite a bit too. There's a bit on those Revoxes, [where] the first time you record, you can use the other channel as an echo channel. You hear a lot of that stuff on the [Clean's] 'Oddities' CD."

The Clean's first release was the "Tally Ho" single on the new Flying Nun label in Christchurch. "For some reason, I don't remember why, we went into an 8-track studio and did 'Tally Ho'. It was sort of like an 8-track studio in someone's house [in Christchurch]. I think, looking back now, we would've gotten a better outcome if we'd done it on our 2-track Revox. It's a pretty trashy sound that we got out of the 8-track. We were pretty new to recording."

"It was like someone's house really. The lounge was the studio and some sort of kitchen area was the control room. I don't remember much about that studio at all, except the guy that recorded us had been doing heavy metal, sort of prog rock stuff, and he had no idea where we were coming from. I mean we didn't really know. We knew what we wanted to sound like — we didn't know how to do it in this particular studio. It was okay. Roger Shepherd put us on to it, because it was in Christchurch, which was Roger's hometown. Roger ran Flying Nun. It was a cheap studio, and we thought, "Oh well." I guess we thought we were going to get a better quality out of the 8-track. It's a learning curve."

The Clean's next release was the Boodle Boodle EP. "We hired a very small hall, wooden hall, and recorded it on a Teac 4-track with a very cheap New Zealand-made desk and probably with reasonable mics, [Shure SM] 58s, 57s. Doug Hood, who was a good friend of ours and a live sound engineer, engineered it. Chris Knox also helped us out. We mixed it in a very good old studio in Auckland. We mixed that LP twice. Chris went away on holiday and we mixed it in Doug and Chris's house and added lots of echo and all sorts of little tricks to it. And Chris came back from holiday and said, 'That's fucking horrible — how dare you?' He was right. So we went to Mascot and mixed it there. "Boodle's" pretty much live. On 'Point That Thing', there's one guitar overdub and Hamish's vocal overdub. There might have been like one guitar overdub on each song or something. We'd just record the basic track and then go, 'Okay, what are we going to do to it.' We didn't plan anything."

"We'd become quite good at playing live, and reasonably good musicians, so we sort of knew what we were up to by then. It was good to have total control over the studio environment. We were very weary and very paranoid of going into established studios. One example — I went to one studio, and this guy, I don't know why, but we gave him a demo tape of our stuff. We were thinking of using the studio. We went down there to meet the guy and the first thing he says to us is [that] there's no commercial potential here. 'Aw fuck, you know we're just here to, you know...' and I walked out — it was like, 'Fuck you.' I was a pretty arrogant young man as well, but that's kind of the attitude. The Clean, even to this day, we're up against this attitude that we couldn't sing in tune and the guitars were out of tune, which, 50% of the time back then was probably true. That was generally the attitude we were up against. That attitude is still there in some areas of New Zealand."

"We did another 4-track recording, 'Great Sounds Great Good Sounds Good Rotten Sounds Rotten' blah blah blah blah blah. That was done on a 4-track in Christchurch, again in someone's house. It was Chris's again, the Teac pretty similar setup. We did the 'Getting Older' single back in Auckland on a 4-track, back in the original hall where we did "Boodle", at the same time the Chills recorded 'Rolling Moon', the single. And then we split up."

"In a lot of ways the Clean, their power has never been captured on record or CD. There are live recordings, but I don't think it was ever captured. It was never really our desire at the time, I don't know why, to really capture it. We heard a lot of '60s music and we were trying to make mini classic pop records with '60s slap, to a degree, because we loved '60s stuff so much. We were interested in making interesting recordings, not so much capturing what we were about. One example is 'Anything Could Happen' — that was written in the late '70s and that was a full-on punk, sort of a Ramones song, really flat-out. We basically turned it into a little country song by the time we did "Boodle"."

Two live Clean records did get released. "The "In- A-Live" thing came along in the late '80s when we re- formed for two gigs in London and they recorded it and they put that out. I don't know what that was recorded on. [Fostex 16-track, it turns out] ["Live Dead Clean"] was just from cassette recordings, a couple of live cassette recordings. Some of that might have come from a 2-track live tape, done on an old Ferrograph 2-track."

The Clean broke up in 1982, as David had grown tired of the expectations of his band, and preferred to pursue painting. In 1984, David and Hamish released a set of rough home recorded sketches under the name the Great Unwashed. "That was done after 'Getting Older'. Hamish bought a 4-track Teac, and we just started playing around on it. We had absolutely no desires to put anything out, and we ended up with an LP's worth of material. It was done at Hamish's house and my mother's house, over a period of one summer, playing around. It was a Teac like the one that Chris Knox owns. I think we had a 58, and [plugged it] straight into the machine. [It was] mixed back in Auckland, through good gear. We actually had a good experience doing "Boodle" there. I wasn't actually at the mixing of that, and at the time. Hamish mixed it, with Chris I think. I thought there was a bit too much reverb on it, but it's lasted quite well. I still quite like it, it's got a freshness to it — it's fun."

In 1988, Kilgour began to pursue music more seriously again, and he formed the group Stephen with bassist Alf Danielson, drummer Geoff Hoani, and later Stephen Kilroy. "I think the Stephen EP, 'Dumb', I would have liked that to be a real big Beach Boys production. We got a grant from an arts council in New Zealand and we did that at a studio called Mascot Studios. It was probably a 24-track tape, believe it or not. I can't believe how thin that recording is, but I think it was done on a 24-track, state-of-the-art studio in Auckland. Victor Grbic engineered that one, who had also done some Verlaines records, and Stones."

The Clean recorded their reunion album, Vehicle, in 1989. "We did that in London because Geoff Travis from Rough Trade came and saw us play and said, 'Let's do a record.' We made that in 3 days in a very good studio, which I'd like to go back to, called Blackwing."

"The first day we had in-house engineer, and then Alan Moulder did the last 2 days, before he was famous. He's done Smashing Pumpkins, Al Green, he's done an enormous amount of acts. He's done Jesus and Mary Chain quite a bit." He also recorded My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. "He was really good to work with. He was just an engineer at that stage for us. The [house engineer was] Ken Kennedy. Geoff Travis, he was good to us. He came in and checked it out one day, but just left us totally to our own devices, and suggested afterwards, 'We should mix these 2 songs. If we don't like it, we won't use it.' They did a great job on them. He was great. He gave us a list of studios to go and look at, and we just picked the one we liked the best. It had a stone, sort of concrete room, and it had kind of a dead room, and it was a Neve and Studer I think. That concrete stone room is pretty cool. It's square, but it's got these rocks from Spain or something in it, and every rock is not at the same angle as each other, and a concrete floor. Not that large, but large enough to get a good sound out of it. There was a big glass window/door going into the next room, which was in front of the control room, and that was like a deader room. You could see into the other room through the glass. Hamish was in the live room with the drums, right in the middle of the live room, and Bob and I were next door with a bit of baffling around the amps."

"Bob [Scott] and I were obsessed about getting back to New Zealand, we were really homesick and really tired. And we thought, 'Oh, we've got 3 days.' I think, we recorded it all in 2 days and mixed it in the other day, but Alan Moulder and Geoff Travis went back to 2 songs."

"I was still using my battered old Ibanez 59, which I could never really get perfectly in tune and a Fender Twin. I had a New Zealand-made amp for many years called a Gun Classic, but being in London, we hired gear. [The Gun Classic is] what I used on all those early Clean recordings. Just two big JBLs and you couldn't get any bass out of it, it's just an incredibly trebly amp. I used to play it on full, with no bass and all treble and all reverb. I've still got the amp, and when I turn those old settings on, I just cannot be in the room with it. I can't believe I used to submit that to soundmen. As a kid, I loved the Velvets, but I also loved Public Image, and I think I took a bit of both. Definitely Keith Levene, his playing was really fantastic."

In 1991, Kilgour recorded his first solo record, Here Come the Cars. "Bailter Space and the Skeptics had a studio in Wellington, and I kind of knew those guys, and I did it with them. That was done on one of those Tascam or Fostex 16-track 1/2" machines, through an old Soundcraft desk maybe, and pretty good mics. Fish Street [Studio], Stephen Kilroy from Dunedin, had a couple of Neumann 67s, I think they're called, U 67s, and it was called Writhe studios, they had a really nice selection of mics, some old Sony, old valve mics, and modern Shures. I think we did that [album] over about a week or two."

He wanted the album "to not sound like anything I'd done before. The actual sound of it I wanted to be soft and warm and cuddly. In retrospect, when we were mastering it, Nick [Roughan] was just begging me to take the bottom end fluffiness out of it — it's quite fluffy. I'd become such a purist, I said, 'No don't mess with that.' In retrospect he was dead right — I'd love to remaster it and just take a bit of that wooliness out, but you know what, I still love that LP. It's like it's got a blanket over the speakers when you hear it, it's just a little bit too soft." He employed "lots of overdubs. Probably overused the old echo, a bit too much echo on it, I guess that was the times. It was a Roland Space Echo. They had a great Lexicon reverb unit too."

"I was starting to get a little better aware of the fact of not messing with the signal as you recorded, with mic placements and the right amps and stuff. I was kind of aware of it by that stage, so we really tried not to EQ much. I got a wee bit obsessed with it and drove my engineer pretty crazy. 'Any EQ on this? Stop it.' There probably was a lot of EQ'ing at mix time. I think the last LP I made, the Heavy 8s LP, there was absolutely no EQ'ing at all on that, until at mastering stage."

"There's a lot of acoustic and piano on that LP — just an old upright [piano]. There's a lot of fuzz guitar and a lot of electric guitar but it's all really subdued. Nick Roughan, who was in the Skeptics and is still continuing to be an engineer these days — it was a learning experience for him. He'd never recorded an acoustic guitar. I don't think he'd ever recorded a piano either. I would imagine [he] just pulled out the U67 and just dumped it in front. It wasn't too much. Those mics are so sensitive."

His second solo record was 1994's Sugarmouth. "We did that in a real rush, and forced the issue a little bit. All the studios were booked out in Auckland. I wanted to do it in Auckland, and we ended up hiring a house in the country, just out of Auckland. Revolver Studios hired us a lot of equipment. By this stage Bailter Space owned a 24-track 2" 3M machine, which I've actually got. Me and Bob Scott and Fish Street own that now. That's in my house now, which is fantastic. ['Sugarmouth' was] done on a really beautiful old Yamaha desk, which is still in operation in Wellington. Again, we had lots of Neumanns. Done in the house, over a couple of weeks. It was great. The house was surrounded by cows. Quite bizarre, but it was great. We lived in the house as well. I think we might have done a couple of vocals outside but most of it was indoors. For the rhythm tracks we kept the bass in one room and the drums in a big lounge area. It was mixed at Revolver Studios on a Neve desk. We did a little bit more recording at Revolver before we mixed it."

"I had no ideas at all. I just treated [each song] completely differently. I had no overall vision, I just wanted to make another interesting record. We just treated each song separately. At the last part of making it, we realized that we lacked the sort of pull-together song to bring the running time up to an album length. We went back to Auckland and there was a TV studio in Auckland, and we set up the same gear, in this sort of television studio, and I think I wrote another one on the spot. We [also] re-did one song, called 'Look at It'. We did a pop version of it, and I decided I didn't like it. That ended up on an EP. We re-did that in a very down, sort of messy way — it was kind of loose."

"I think that was the first time we had mixed onto those one of those classic 2-track Ampex machines — it was nice. 'Cars' was done onto a portable DAT machine. I've always gone back and mastered the LPs in the same studio, and you can definitely hear the difference. People come into the room and the house engineers would go, 'Wow, I wondered what the difference was.' It's coming off tape. So I always try to do that — try to keep it pretty analog all the way. But I have no aversion to digital really — the mix of both worlds is fine by me."

Concurrently with Sugarmouth, Kilgour released a collection of home recordings called First Steps and False Alarms. "That was done on a totally beat up, had- it, [Revox] A77 2-track. We'd stupidly sold this beautiful B77 that we had, and years later I bought this A77, which was actually on its last legs. I did all that stuff as messing around at home, just getting ideas down on tape. The only reason it came about is there was a fanzine in Dunedin called "Alley Oop", and the guy says, 'Let's do a cassette give-away of some of that stuff.' And I did that. I think Peter Jefferies really loved that stuff, and he knew Tim [Adams] from Ajax, and said, 'Come on, let's put it out.' I went, 'Yeah, okay, that'd be great.' And about 2 years later I actually got around to doing it. What you get is what you get. It's all right. Things on there I quite like. Kind of kooky, you know?"

When Kilgour has toured the US, he's brought singles to sell, which were cut on an old record-cutting lathe by Peter King. "I was thinking about doing it again this time, but the quality just hasn't gotten any better, and I just started feeling bad about charging people so much money for them. It's a really nice idea, but the quality just hasn't got much better. The last lot I did, I asked the guy, 'Has it got better?' and he said, 'Yes, because I'm now heating the vinyl, or the plastic, before I cut it. I'm getting a deeper groove and it is better.' It was marginally better. They get better the more you play them."

"It was in his garden shed. The playback monitors are some crap, but it's pretty fun. I've gone there to do test-pressings. He's a bit of a genius really. He actually bought one at a junk sale, found in someone's shed or something, got that one going, and then made a complete replica of it. The guy is pretty talented. He uses both so he can cut two at a time. When I was last there he was building this huge trailer. I said, 'What are you building that for?' He says, 'I'm going to make it mobile.' He did an order for the Beastie Boys, and they wanted 6000, so he hauled a lot of unemployed people in the area — he lives out in the country. He got them all working on it, and it just took way too long and he said it drove him crazy because he kept getting interrupted and he had all these deadlines. So he thought, 'Next time I get a big order like that,' he was gonna buy a house in the mountains — he's near the mountains. He was gonna take the mobile up into the mountains, all on his own, and do the big jobs up there, so he wouldn't be disturbed. Crazy. Some bands have gone there and actually set up in his driveway and cut a song at a time."

In 1994, the Clean regrouped again and released a new album. ""Modern Rock" we hired a hall out in the country near Dunedin. [Hamish] flew over for that. That was done on 16-track half inch probably through a Soundcraft desk. We had good mics again. This time we actually had the control room in the room with us, which was really fantastic, although they blew up a lot of monitors. Then we mixed it in a room back in the city. Stephen Kilroy did a lot of it, and then Tex Houston did a lot of it as well. Anything basic was all done live, and then quite a few overdubs."

"I think Hamish might have come back for a holiday, and we did some Clean gigs, and Flying Nun put up the money for us to go and do it. I mean that's the other thing, those two LPs, that and 'Unknown Country' were written in like a week, and then recorded in about a week, and mixed over a few days, so it was very rushed. I really like both LPs, but actually there are some moments we're like eeeh, not so great. Some stuff on those LPs I really love. We're always trying to find a new way to not sound like we are. Just want to do something different each time. We don't really want to replicate what we've done before too much."

"We made ["Unknown Country"] at Fish Street Studios. We also completed tracks and recorded some more tracks about a year later in Auckland on the same gear. We tried to mix it while Hamish was in America for that year, and we would send him tapes, and he'd say 'Nah, do that, do this,' and we'd do that and send it back again. 'Nah, do this, do that.' And we're actually coming up with vocal ideas and extra instrumentation and sending him tapes, and we weren't getting very far doing it, so we just stopped and waited for him to come back. It was mixed in someone's house in Careys Bay, which is near Port Chalmers, in Tex [Houston]'s house. It was really good — same equipment."

"We've always used [Yamaha] NS10s [to monitor], but also Stephen Kilroy at that point had some really lovely old Tannoy speakers, and they were fantastic. I think they also had some modern Tannoys, which I didn't like very much. We always had the NS10s for backup anyway. They're okay, but we've discovered, I think you've got to really crank 'em. If you listen to them too quietly, mixes can come out not trebly enough, the high end kind of disappears. So it's one neat trick I've learned is to crank them up a bit when you're monitoring on them. I think they're fine, they're just a good ground to work from."

In 1997, Kilgour released his most recent solo album, David Kilgour and the Heavy 8s. It "was done in another studio in Auckland called Air Force, and that was an old Trident, supposedly Brian Eno's [ Tape Op #85 ] old Trident desk. I think it's an MCI 24-track, and again great mics, Neumanns, whatever. [The studio has] quite a good room, half-live, wooden, half-dead, [and a] control room where you could totally kill the sound if you wanted to get separation. By this stage I was into the 2 amp thing, micing up 2 amps for live tracks and overdubs. You just get a great stereo sound. You don't need an extra guitar — well there it is already. It was a Vox AC30 and a Fender Twin. I love that mix — it's great. I have a lot of favorite mixes of amps but that's a goodie. I had like 10 guitars in the studio for that recording, but a lot of it was done on the Rickenbacker. I've got a Rickenbacker, they call it a 360 deluxe, or some people call it a 370, and I had a lot of other guitars. I had some Bob Scott guitars, which is a guitar maker in Auckland. I had all sorts. I had these old English guitars, Melody Makers. An amazing Hummingbird Gibson which I hired, acoustic, which was just absolutely mind-blowing and beautiful. Mainly the Rickenbacker — it's not my favorite guitar. I really want a guitar that's got a whammy arm on it and is really open for playing lead on it, and this Rickenbacker really isn't. It's just a really good all-round guitar. It's great in the studio, [and] it's great live. I can get an enormous amount of tone, from incredibly bassy to incredibly trebly and everything in between. It's a stereo output too, which I haven't used all that much because I've got the stereo amp thing happening anyway, and I just use a splitter box. I send all the effects to one amp and the other amp's dry."

"Years ago I heard that Bailter Space were selling their 3M because they were living in New York, and Bob [Scott] and I and Fish Street bought that. Fish Street has been pretty quiet over the last few years, and they had a lot of the stuff in storage, so I just thought, well, I might as well have it in the house if no one's going to use it. Bob Scott's just done a solo LP in the house. I haven't actually done too much work on it yet, because every time I use it I've got to hire or borrow a desk and use it. I think most of [Bob Scott's solo record] was done through the old Fish Street Soundcraft."

For monitoring, "I've got my stereo which is cool. If we're getting serious we'll go and get Fish Street's NS10s, and grab the lovely old AKG reverb unit. Go and get a few toys, and grab the Neumanns. I've got this really lovely huge wooden hall in the house, so that's where we do most of the recording. I [monitor with my stereo] because that's how I'm going to listen to records. I've just got old Audio Research speakers which I got at an auction for 35 dollars. An old New Zealand amp, an old linear amp, and yeah, it's fine. The NS10s are quite trebly, I suppose. So are these ARs, but they kind of break up a bit — it's kind of nice. The difference is I'm in my lounge listening on my stereo, and that's the acid test, apart from listening to it on a cassette player or ghetto blaster or something. I can just go into my lounge and listen to what we've just done."

"The last few years I've been doing all my stuff there, but I haven't actually released anything yet. I'm thinking I'm going to take all the in-between 4-track stuff and complete it in a more established studio."

The Clean are "negotiating with someone at the moment, who might help us put out [a new album]. Perhaps we'll do that, hopefully within the next 6 months — that is the plan [US release]. Bob and I are adamant that we want to spend a lot of time writing it, instead of a week, and to make it as good as possible. Maybe do it in Auckland, yeah. We'd love to tour" the US.