Sometimes we interview people who have had extensive careers in recording, yet my record collection only contains a few things they have worked on. With Hugh Padgham the case is different. He's worked on some of my favorite records by the Police, XTC, Peter Gabriel [Tape Op #63], Split Enz, David Bowie and Paul McCartney — and that doesn't begin to cover his work with Sting, Genesis, Elton John, Phil Collins and many more. In fact, his work with Phil Collins on Peter Gabriel's third album is what became that drum sound — the gated reverb sound that haunted us all through the eighties. More recent history has seen his name grace albums by McFly, Mansun and 311.
Not only does his resume boast many great bands, he's worked out of some great studios like Advision, Lansdowne, Townhouse, AIR Studios Montserrat and Sofa Sound Limited. What? Sofa Sound? Housed in a semi-industrial looking building in London Purchased recently by Hugh and a partner, the somewhat industrial looking building is home to several music and writing studio spaces, and a great rooftop view. Sofa is a modest yet powerful studio with an SSL console, small yet effective live room and racks of nice outboard gear. The "sofa is often sort of a focal point in a studio control room, so it sort of fit," says Hugh — and with acronyms like "State Of the F'ing Art" and "SSL" (Hugh's favorite consoles) there's a bit of fun going on as well. We visited Hugh one afternoon and had a pleasant chat in Sofa's upstairs lounge area. And no, I couldn't bring myself to ask him about that drum sound, though I did write up a sidebar to explain its origins once again!
In your early career you worked at Advision and Lansdowne studios?
Yeah. I was kind of trained in really quite a formal way — these orchestral sessions and all sorts of things where there are tried and tested, specific routines and methods of recording instruments properly.
One thing I dug up that was really funny — you've been a tape op on Yes and ELP records. So you got in the studio and you sort of jumped into the game in '74 or so?
Yeah, although it's not strictly true because I never tape op'ed on the ELP sessions.
No? It's written down somewhere.
I know. Unfortunately there is certain bullshit or mistakes. What happened was I worked at Advision Studios, that happened to have Yes and the ELP records made there.
So in some journalist's mind, you were there.
Well, it's written down like that and then they twist that I did that, but no, I didn't. I did tape op on a Gentle Giant album and Mott the Hoople and some good stuff there, but I think ELP, I definitely didn't. I did work with Yes later in my career at Townhouse.
Was that Drama?
Yes, which was a rather strange, strange record.
J: I liked that record.
There were bits of it that were all right. At Advision I would do moonlighting sessions. People still did 8- track sessions in those days because it was cheaper. It was like, four pounds an hour for 8-track, six pounds an hour for 16-track, ten pounds an hour for 24-track. At Advision we had a Scully 8-track, which was never designed for punching in on. It was horrendous. When I was the tape op, to punch in you had to go from ready to record — you had to go from sync to line in and press the record button. You couldn't do all those in one go so you had to try to hold a pencil between your belly and the record button — so you balance that there and then when the time [came] to punch in, they would actually shout, "Okay, coming up now" and you'd go, "Oof," like that — two switches and a push with your stomach. All these things you take for granted now. No tape counters. When you were doing jingle sessions you had to put all these different time graph marks on the tape. You'd put a white [mark] for the squiggly at the beginning and a white squiggly for the end. If you were doing jingles, there'd be four different verses for the jingle and you had to go to the right one, so you'd have white for the first and second, yellow for the twenty-second, or something. It was a nightmare being a tape op in those days. The session is only three hours and you've overbooked and the next session started a half an hour after the last one finished, so if you got it wrong you were seriously bollocked. My first few months of working in the studio were like living hell, because it was really serious shit. When you fucked up in those days you would get seriously hammered whereas now, well, okay, just undo it. There wasn't an undo in those days if you wiped the bass drum or something.
Who were some of the engineers early on at Advision or Lansdowne that you picked up a lot from?
There was this guy called Martin Rushent, who was quite famous and went on to produce Human League — he did loads of stuff.
Buzzcocks.
Yeah, lots of stuff. There was a really, really nice guy who I think left the business and became a carpenter or something — Gary Martin, who did a lot of the Gentle Giant stuff.
There's a good story about you riding your bike over to The Manor because it was near where you lived when you were young.
Oh, no. It was near where I went to school. That was in the days when it [The Manor] only would have just have started, as well. When I started working in '74 I thought I'd missed the boat — rock n' roll wasn't even twenty years old. I looked at rock n' roll being like mid-'50s — it started in terms of Elvis and Carl Perkins. It wasn't even twenty years later, and now I look at it and I've been in the business for over thirty years. And I thought I missed the boat then!
J: You kind of hit it right before a good, creative peak. I think that the early '80s saw so much cool stuff happening again.
Yeah, I met a guy the other day who was a maintenance guy in the '80s at the Townhouse (where I used to spend eighteen hours a day, seven days a week) and he said, "The thing is, it's not so much that the gear has changed or the budgets have changed and all that. The thing that I miss the most is the fun has changed. There isn't the fun anymore."
J: It's not so much fun staring at computers.
And you have this unbelievable pressure, whether it be financial and/or record company pressure or whatever. The act knows that they're going to be dropped after their first three weeks if it's not successful, so they're all hyped up from the beginning as well. I remember the days where I used to go into the studio and say, "Let's just make a record and have fun." They would listen to it at the end and they would go, "Well, let's choose that one as a single," whereas now, if you don't have a single they wouldn't let you into the studio in the first place.
Or the record never comes out because no one hears the single and it gets shelved.
Well, they would rather shelve a record that's cost them say, two hundred thousand dollars to make — they'd rather shelve it then if they don't feel there's anything there, rather than having to go through the motions which would cost a million dollars, probably.
How did working on these progressive records lead into working on the XTC records and working with Steve Lillywhite [Tape Op #93]? How did you two meet up?
What happened was I left Advision and I went to work for a studio called Lansdowne, which is still there now — it was the second oldest independent studio in England. The first was a studio called IBC, which doesn't exist anymore and was an important place in the West End. Lansdowne was a really, really great studio. It's a famous studio for doing Acker Bilk in the '50s, lots of jazz stuff and then things like The Dave Clark Five. When I joined in the '70s, it was a studio where you did jingle sessions in the morning, formal sort of music recording in the afternoon and then you'd tend to do bands at night — it wasn't always like that, but it was very rounded. It was well known for good string sessions there and the boss was quite a tyrant really, but everybody who worked there really loved their trade well. We learned how to record string sessions, how to record jazz bands, how to record classical music, how to record avant-garde jazz, how to record rock bands, how to record pop bands — you know we had the whole thing in there. In those days there was a massive sessions scene going on as well so it would often be "x" session in the morning, "y" session in the afternoon, "z" session at night and then bands that would be heavy bands — I remember working quite a lot with this band called Uriah Heep, who were quite big in the '70s in America. It was a really good mish mash of all sorts of recording and I think it was really good. Then what happened was in '77 or '78, I figured I'd kind of had enough and I wanted to do more bands — that whole era of the punk thing that happened here. I just felt like I wanted to get out and work for more bands if I could, so the question was, "How are you going to do that?" At the time I had a client [Trevor Morais] who had a rehearsal studio in the country, which later became quite a well-known studio called Farmyard Studios. He bought this house that had a barn [which] started off as a rehearsal studio, but it became quite well known fairly quickly as a place to do location recording. Manor Studios in Oxford started this mobile studio called the Manor Mobile, which was quite famous, so very often the Manor Mobile would come to Farmyard Studios to record. Now, Trevor became a great friend of mine because I lived just down the road, so I got to know the Virgin lot through the mobiles. The long and the short of it is I befriended the guys who were the engineers on the mobile and then got to speak to their boss. It turned out that they were going to start this studio in London, which was going to be like an extension of The Manor. I was lucky enough to get on the short list straight away of potential staff. I got to the stage at Lansdowne where I was just sort of engineering sessions, not like heavy-duty sessions, but doing sessions — the gradual climb up the ladder as it was then. I kind of negotiated my position at The Townhouse to become a junior staff engineer there, I guess, so when it started in late '78, I was lucky enough to be on staff there. It's just being in the right place at the right time. It was very state of the art for the time, as well. Everybody wanted to record there, so everybody came — and that's how I met Steve Lillywhite, who came in as an independent producer. He worked for Island Records for a while, but somehow he got the job of doing XTC — I think that the first job I did with him was a song called "Life Begins at the Hop" for XTC. That was the first time I met Steve and I guess we were both in our mid twenties then — the same age exactly. We just sort of struck up a friendship and we had success with those XTC records. We made two albums together that were more critically successful than financially successful, I think, and through that Steve was asked by Peter Gabriel to do a record.
The third record?
The third solo album. I ended up doing that with Steve and that was a major string in the bow so to speak. Through that I met Phil Collins, who played the drums on two of the songs on the record and obviously through the Gabriel record we — I don't know if invented is the right word — but the big drum sound thing.
Yeah, I wasn't going to ask you that question because it's been covered so much.
Phil took note of that, so he then asked me independently of Steve if I was interested in working on his solo album, so that's how I met Phil. That's how I got involved doing him and then obviously through him, I met the other guys in Genesis. So that came on, and while all that was going on, I got to work with The Police.
Right. That was all intertwined in that time.
That was intertwined because XTC used to tour with The Police a lot. The Police were fed up with this guy who was producing their records.
Nigel Gray?
Nigel Gray, who basically turned them on to cocaine and various other pharmaceuticals — so they were looking for somebody else. I think Sting would have been chatting to Andy [Partridge] one day and Andy would've said,. "Why don't you use the bloke whose working with us? He's great." So that's how I got asked to do The Police. I always remember Miles Copeland, the manager, ringing me up and the only question they asked me was, "Do you take drugs?" It was like, "No, of course not!" "Okay, you got the gig." That's how it was in those days. I had met Sting once before because we did a session at The Townhouse — he was originally signed to Virgin Publishing. I did a session with him when he was producing a demo for another songwriter. Anyway, going back to The Police — we kind of met at the airport on our way out to record that. Nowadays you have protracted negotiations and meetings with the band and all this sort of thing.
Had you heard demos or anything? You just sort of jumped in?
Yeah. I mean, you would, wouldn't you? Having had three successful albums before them, they were one of the biggest bands around.
That was Ghost in the Machine, wasn't it?
Yeah, that was the one I did.
Yeah, which really — not to knock on Nigel, because the first records sound fine, they hold up good today as well — but that was a sonic leap forward for them too, with more textures and stuff.
It was a whole different trip, really, wasn't it?
Were they pushing in that direction, too? Did you feel that they'd been a little restricted before?
I didn't feel that they'd been restricted. I just seemed to sort of flow with the songs, I think.
You were co-producing with them. Things like the synth textures — were those from you or from the band?
We just turned up in Montserrat [AIR Studios] with a bunch of gear, you know. They had a deal with Oberheim and they had given us a bunch of synthesizers. I remember the Minimoog, and it had all of these sticky things on the keyboard with numbers and I said, "Well, what are those numbers for?" And they said, "Oh, those are the order of the notes for one of the songs." In other words nobody was, in their own admission, a keyboard player, really. Sting has obviously improved a lot over the years, but in those days it was one-finger stuff. Of course polyphonic stuff was just coming in, so we had the Oberheim and the Prophet so you could actually play chords. It is very easy to forget that in those days, it was like — I think Ghost in the Machine was done 24-track and Synchronicity, I think we did 48-track analog. Even I amaze myself thinking back on those days. How did we make records on twenty-four tracks?
It seems like for quite a while, you kept on the path of engineering. Steve Lillywhite was much more in the producer's chair and you were engineering. He was also qualified to engineer as well, to a degree.
Yes, but not as much as me. He started producing a bit earlier, whereas I had a longer, more formal education — well, if you use the word education. He knows roughly how it works. He would be the first who admits he's not as technical.
One of the things I hear with your sound, or the kind of sounding records you're working on, from '77, '78 on, was bringing the drums really far forward. Is that partially your own vision of how you like to hear records?
Yeah it was, really because I just thought records in the '70s sounded... if you stand next to a drum kit it kind of hurts. Really flat out. If you go to a good gig — a gig where the acoustics are really good, it's loud! Drums on records never sounded loud to me. I don't mean volume-wise, but sound loud. One of the first records I heard in the '70s that I thought did sound good was Little Feat with George Massenburg [Tape Op #54] engineering, where he actually did have a bit of room sound in there. Otherwise, it was the whole thing in the '70s with very, very dry and dead studios. I wanted to change that, and when we started the Townhouse, particularly with this whole British punk movement, it was loud, raucous bands, a lot of whom were terrible — but we wanted to sort of make it sound loud. We had the opportunity to make a couple of rooms in the Townhouse really live and that's where that whole room ambience thing came out of. I made a conscious effort to try and make the drums not only be loud, but appear to be loud as well. I just felt that room thing was where it was at. The other thing was, I just think that people, from an engineering point of view, didn't understand tape saturation well. I think people very often used to over-record — therefore, you would loose the transients. Quite often, I used to use Dolby A, and then Dolby SR when that came out.
To bring the record levels down a bit?
To bring the noise levels down. I used to hardly tickle the tape with the snare drums to try to retain maximum transients. I would be very careful how I mic'ed the snare drum up — the preamp that I used — not to overload it onto tape so that it would retain the transients. I would look at some records like the Police, and I'd think, "Oh my God, in the mix the snare drum is so loud," and it is! I'm sort of embarrassed about it now, but every time I say that to somebody they say, "Oh, no, we love that! That's what we love about it." It was three people — The Police with the three personalities, and the drums do need to kind of come forward and make that balance. We didn't have effects boxes in those days where you could plug in a room sound, so to speak, or use a plug in or whatever. You had to use what you had in those days and therefore, the acoustic area that you recorded in was vitally important.
The strangest thing to me is that some of your work actually led to you going in a different direction.
It had to really, because there's only so far that you can go — I remember for a few years after that "In the Air Tonight", every waking day of my life people were ringing up wanting me to record the drums. "Can we get that drum sound?" In the end I think I just kind of reacted against it.
It's funny because at the same time you were creating stuff like XTC's English Settlement, with a very nice room drum sound on most of that record, and then Peter Gabriel's "Intruder" sound.
Well, "Intruder" was the first one. That's when we kind of discovered that sound.
That led to a thing where people made a canned version of that sound with digital reverb and stuff.
Yeah, I was talking to someone about this the other day. Right in the early '80s was when AMS started making mad stuff, and that non-linear reverb was one of the first instances of trying to recreate that sort of thing. We had one of their boxes at the Townhouse and the famous setting that is called "nonlin2" that everybody loves — that is my invention. Everybody said, "Well, what was nonlin1?" Nonlin1 was like nonlin2 but only one side. It was like a stereo thing, but only one side had that "schhhh" thing and the other side some sort of strange or normal sounding reverb. I said to them, "Why don't we make it stereo, but both sides sound like that?" I listen back to "In the Air Tonight" now — I was always trying to be subtle about it, but I heard a Springsteen record the other day that Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84] must have mixed — who's a good friend and I love Bob, but this was like "Born in the USA" or something, early mid '80s and [makes a blasting sound] and it's like so fucking obviously digital reverb to the max! I don't know if it was Lexicon or AMS or whatever, but it was like, "Oh my god that is so unsubtle." We all thought it was great at the time. There isn't one record I've ever made that I listen to now and don't go, "Oh shit. I wish I could remix that."
Everybody has that feeling.
We did a remix many years ago now of "In the Air Tonight" — like a '91 remix or something, which Phil and I did for a laugh.
Did that come out?
It came out on a b-side or something.
How did you change it?
I can't remember. It was probably the fact that we mixed it to half inch as opposed to quarter inch. I remember we used to complain that the echo on his voice was out of time. [sings] "Do you remember — buh, buh, buh"
Oh, I like that!
In those days you mixed pretty damned quickly.
I always think that things like that are interesting, with a sort of tension. I remember buying The Doors — they did a remix of The
Doors classic songs. It was the original tapes, but remixed, and it sounded really weird to me because they had used up to date digital reverbs and things. It was the same music, but it didn't sound right to me. It made me feel weird, and I remember ever since then I thought, I don't really want to mess with old stuff, even if you do listen to it and think that you made a shit job of it.
I put on English Settlement yesterday and listened to it all the way through, and on "Jason and the Argonauts" there's this flange at the end of the song. It's beautiful and at the very end of the chorus it does this whole part where the flange is perfectly timed at the end. I thought, "How in the hell does he do that in analog?"
It was an analog device called a Bell flanger [made in UK]. It was the best flanger ever and I really should try to get ahold of one because I haven't got one, actually.
It sounds so thick there.
Yeah you could just manually sweep it. There were three settings on it. It was like an envelope setting, a manual setting and an auto setting. So, the manual setting — you could adjust the speed and the depth. It was a bloody good device, actually. It definitely was better than any plug-ins now.
That is one of my favorite records that you worked on — English Settlement.
Well, it was the last record XTC made with a sort of band line up, because after that they stopped touring. I mean they still made some great records, but that was the last one that was a real sort of band. Funny enough, I kind of lost touch with Andy from XTC. Just literally this year we've spoken to each other and we've met up a few times and had lunch. It's been really, really great to talk to him again because to me that album is one of my favorite albums that I ever worked on. He is one of my favorite musicians and a very, very talented and also very, very funny guy.
One of the things I found most interesting on Peter Gabriel's third album is that there are no cymbals. There's a little bit of tambourine and other things, but what things did you find that were being added in the mix to take care of those tones, and how were you recording the drums to try to bring more highs out of the toms?
The thing with recording big drum sounds that we were talking about before — the single thing that messes up the sound more than anything else is the cymbals. It was like manna from heaven, really. And that's why the drums sound so good on "Intruder" and all that, because there were no cymbals fucking it up — because that's what they do. On the other hand, you cannot ask the drummer to play a drum kit and not play the cymbals. Many people tried, but it doesn't work, so even now when I'm recording and you want a big drum sound, it very much is dependent on the drummer and how heavily he plays his cymbals. It's usually down to that and nothing else. If he hits his cymbals hard and toms don't ring well, it's whatever state the cymbals end up that tends to sort of help or hinder that live drum sound. I think there probably is an engineer out there who, when you're recording — whatever you are, a heavy rock band or something where you've got full on guitars — the likelihood of your pure recorded drum sound, the room being big enough, is I would say highly unlikely. You're having to enhance it in some way. Probably depending on what the musical content of the record is, you're having to help it in some way, always. The beauty of that Gabriel record was we didn't need to do that in any way at all because of the lack of the cymbals. I kind of remember slightly looking up things to replace the high end, but not on a really major basis. I would probably think about it more now. There were a few drum box sort of patterns, like "Games Without Frontiers."
Yeah, that's got the little — was that the old PAiA drum machine kit?
Well, that was Larry Fast. It's hard to remember back on all that stuff. It was very early days for that. It's so weird to look back on things that you just completely take as normal now. They were really new things then. Another thing I remember about that album was that it was very early days of - we did quite a lot of it at Studio Two at the time — that was the first sort of commercial SSL studio — and before that mix thing was on, if you did any sort of automated mixing at all it was using that Allison [Automated Mix] System, where you would bounce between two tracks. And we couldn't afford to loose two tracks, but in the end we kind of realized that we were going to have in some way, and therefore we had to find the tracks to put the SMPTE code on. Of course you were paranoid about anything being second generation — particularly I was then. So we ended up for some peculiar reason — the SMPTE code track tended to end up being track seventeen, which you would never do that — well most people would never use analog tape anyway nowadays. I still use analog a lot. We use analog, but we transfer it to Pro Tools and then use a mix on Tools, put on a track of analog or just run the analog in sync with the Tools, and we'll do guitars on analog and put them over on Tools, so everything ends up on Tools.
You're kind of using it to process as you work?
Yeah, I use it a lot like that. It's not usually that much more time consuming, either.
With that the album, another thing that Larry Fast has talked about was if you heard rough mixes, there were all sorts of things going on and the final mixes were all reductive, where tracks had been pulled out to kind of arrange as the mix was going. Obviously you were using automation and the SSL then to do that?
Yeah. The automation system is the same now as it was then, pretty much. You had phaser, automation and Moogs, really. So, I mean Peter was very involved in the mixing as he is with all of his records. I guess we did mess around a lot. There was probably a lot of stuff left out.
Do you remember those sessions well? Like, with you sketching out the arrangements during the mixes in some ways?
No, I can't remember much about it to be honest. Quite a lot of analog splicing of tape.
Like cutting the mix tape.
Yeah, even though we've had automated bits, there's still quite a lot of that sort of thing. Or going back — I remember going back and re-doing some intros to some songs and that sort of thing, so then that would be spliced.
Spliced it in the older mix?
Yeah.
That makes sense. I think that's one thing that people don't think about much anymore, because you can mix in Pro Tools and automate the heck out of everything, and you don't think about doing a series of mix passes and chopping them together.
Well, you kind of miss the excitement of the spontaneity of mixing with all hands. I remember in the old days, it was like everybody in the band had a fader to push.
Just don't give the drummer the drum fader.
Exactly, that was usually the one rule, that you couldn't have your own fader. I remember mixing The Police like that. Although the second album, Synchronicity, we mixed out of Morin Heights, which had an SSL, and a lot of the songs were very heavily edited in the mixing for that album. For instance, I can remember a couple of the songs being completely and utterly reformed by mixing. It was very exciting, actually, doing the mixing like that.
Having things change as you're mixing?
Yeah. I remember this one song on Synchronicity, called "King of Pain", which had basically everything going all the way through it. If you listen to it now, it's very stripped down, bits and pieces coming in here and there. Literally everything was recorded all the way through and I really remember that one well — sitting down with Sting coming in one day, when we were mixing and [Sting] going, "This is shit" and I went, "I think you're probably right." The thing at the back of my mind always is trying to keep things simple so you can then hear what's there, as opposed to the kitchen sink style, which is cool, sometimes. Some people do it incredibly well.
I think there's always a good sense of room for everything to live in the classic records that you've worked on. They sit in a good space.
Well, I spent a lot of time figuring it out, and not always, but often with Sting we had the ability to do that. Something like Fields of Gold for instance, which is intrinsically a very simple record, we spent a long time making that simple. We spent a long time on the guitar parts, arranging it by throwing stuff out and down to the chord positions or what strings he used — the voicings and all that. As you know it's a classic old adage, I don't really want to have to say it, but what's not there is as important as what is. It's hard to make simple records, much harder.
I know you had, especially with the final Police record, quite a battle of egos going on there, especially between Stewart [Copeland] and Sting not being able to agree. By the end of that session and that album were you like, "I don't want to even see these guys again!"?
Definitely, yeah. Even though it's a great record, and I think one of the reasons it was great was the tension — but I look back on it now and I'm absolutely serious or truthful with myself, it was a horrible mental torment, really. I probably lost my friendship with Stewart through that record because ultimately, with me as a co-producer, Sting wrote the best songs. He was the singer. It's not like you had to side with somebody, but I'll take for instance an example of where we were overdubbing on the record and we were in Morin Heights in Canada and it was the winter — they wouldn't be in the same room together. Sting would go skiing in the morning and Stewart would come in and he'd say, "Right, I want to overdub a hi-hat on that song." So, you'd overdub a hi-hat and then lunch would come and then Sting would come in the afternoon to sing or something and Stewart would go off skiing. "So, what did you do this morning?" and then start playing and then say, "What's that fucking hi-hat doing in there? I hate that fucking hi-hat! Get rid of that hi-hat!" "Yeah, but don't you think we should discuss it with Stewart?" "No! Get rid of that hi- hat!" And he'd stand by the machine and, "Right. Put it into record. I want to see you hit the record button now." Here goes the hi-hat. Then Stewart would come in the next day, "Where's my fucking hi-hat gone?" So I was caught in the middle of it, but in the end I kind of had to side on Sting's side more, really — it's an awful thing to say this because originally The Police were Stewart's band. He invited Sting to be in that band.
He had the drive to set it up.
But if you were working on "Every Breath You Take", which I remember listening to Sting's demo and Miles Copeland going, "Don't fuck it up!" because it was a hit the minute you heard the demo. It was a hit. Stewart was overdubbing hi-hats all over Sting's masterpiece hit. I had to take Sting's side, really in a way — if you were talking about taking sides. So of course, Stewart was pretty upset, really. It was pretty bad vibes going on.
Where was Andy [Summers] in all this?
Well, it would be unfair to say he was in the middle — I think he as strong a character as any of the three. The real hatred, you know the power of hatred, was Sting and Stewart. It didn't in any way mean that Andy was not a part of the band, but the big fighting was between those two.
Do you find yourself doing stuff for independent labels or smaller labels at this point?
That's the whole thing of getting this studio together now, is to try and work with acts who specifically aren't signed. There is so much good stuff that is not signed out there. One can hopefully make a great record with less pressure and then look at selling it on. Let's face it — these days most record companies, the A&R departments are not A&R departments anymore. They're just kind of bureaucratic offices. I don't think most A&R people are A&R people in the sense of the old world — when it was people who could spot talent and so on. Nowadays if somebody like James Blunt gets a hit, all the record companies, all they want to do is find their own James Blunt.
J: Yeah, but that never works.
It doesn't, but they don't look further than that. Even now, with the studio, I'm trying to make it work by doing a certain proportion of paid jobs, which then lets me do the unpaid jobs that will hopefully pay in the future.
J: How do you find the bands? Do you go out to see shows at clubs?
Well, between Jay [Reynolds] and I, we just sort of find them. I suppose one's reputation, and people know that you've got a studio — we've got three going on at the moment, all of whom are new, unsigned. All are doing gigs and everybody has MySpace pages. There's a lot of good stuff out there. One band that we're doing at the moment, the singer I found [when] I got invited to give a lecture at my old school and a guy came up to me and said, "I teach geography at the school here, but I'm in a band. Can I give you my CD?" I listened to it and it's great. It just happens that the drummer is Pete Townshend's nephew as well.
The record labels were the ones that were like the banks that took a risk and now an independent production company, which is really what you're sort of existing as, is the one that takes the risk.
I remember talking to a few of the labels in New York a couple of years ago and they were begging me and local producers to bring them records.
As far as the business model your back end is, if they're going to get an advance you get paid back from that?
It's something that changes act to act, but in a normal scenario the group is signed to a label and gets an advance and they would have to pay for the record. Obviously in this situation I'm not [initially] asking them to pay anything toward making the record at all. What I don't want to be doing so much now is making a record for label "x" for three or four points or whatever you get, because three or four points doesn't really mean very much anymore.
Right, so more billing for your time and the production fees and stuff when the record is done.
Well, I just think that all the major labels basically "creatively account" now and some managers are trying to charge more. In other words, what was three percent on retail ends up being four and a half on dealer price or something, if you can persuade the lawyers of the labels, but you have to be pretty successful to negotiate those deals now. Many people would say that we were overpaid in the '80s and '90s. I don't necessarily agree because we put a hell of a lot of hard work into making the records, and I just find it a bit of a kick in the teeth, really, that's cut wages basically in half. Yet the electricity goes up, the rent goes up, the mortgage goes up — everything else goes up and the producers' fees go down. The chances of getting a hit now are so much smaller. You could make a great record, but if you haven't got the publicity machine behind it then it won't be a hit. It's why I'm taking a punt on doing this half the year this year — working with these new bands that I think are great. I'm just too old to be bossed around by A&R guys who have never even heard of bands like The Kinks or something. You know?
Do you still feel like you're getting to have fun?
Yes I do. I'm not trying to be doom and gloom, but I don't think I'm the only person who says this and not just people from my generation either. Jay, who works for me, he's literally half my age. He knows what the score is. He's only twenty-seven now, but he started when he was really young — around ten years ago. I first met Jay when he was an assistant at Townhouse.
So you guys have been working at least seven years together.
Yeah, he's cool. He's my arms and legs. I couldn't exist without Jay.
He knows Pro Tools?
He's very good on that, but he's a great engineer as well. He's a big part of my team. I love old technology and I love new technology as well — I can do the basics of Pro Tools, but I'm quite keen not to. You're looking at the music as opposed to listening to it, so I've always made a conscious effort to stay away from it. Removed. But if he goes to the loo, I can still press play and start and record.
Seems like there was a period through the eighties where you were so busy.
I was always so busy then. It was mad! I mean, it was great. Such a good time, I wouldn't swap it.
Did you ever have to at some point just stop working for a bit and relax — take a long vacation?
It never really happened. You know, you became a bit of a social outcast.
Did your relationships and things suffer?
Definitely. I remember talking to — when I went to Muscle Shoals, I did some tracks. They'd moved the studio to the side of the river in a big complex in the early '80s, and I did some stuff with Melissa Etheridge there. I was talking to Roger Hawkins, the drummer from the Muscle Shoals band, and he said from the age of eighteen to twenty-seven or twenty- eight, literally three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, all day was spent in the studio. He said he was like a social leper. He had no idea how to have a relationship with a woman, let alone anybody. He said it was just mad. The work was just so full on.
He could talk charts.
I remember there was a period in the '80s there where I don't think I had a holiday for five years.
That sounds kind of brutal.
But you didn't mind because you fuckin' enjoyed it. You enjoyed every minute of it. It was like, why did I ever, ever want to do anything else? We just felt so lucky and privileged and honored. It was this great thing in the middle of a vibe that was a great vibe.
It's hard to say "No" when you see an interesting project on the horizon. "I'd like to work on Sting's record. I'd like to work with XTC again."
If you're asked by one of your heroes to make a record, you're not going to go, "Oh, I think I'm going on holiday that week." That never happens.
