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.
