Tell me about those early days in Ireland in the punk scene. Was it the late '70s roughly that you started engineering?
The late '70s and early '80s. The first studio I worked at was called Lombard Sound. It's still in existence, though it's changed its name to Westland Sound. It was a small 24-track analog studio. There were two principal owners. One of the owners ran an ad agency, so typically we got jingles from about eight in the morning 'til lunchtime. We always had an album project, be it traditional Irish music or some other album. Back then management was very keen to have the junior assistants, of whom I was one, bring in outside projects. The punk and new wave scene were really proliferating there. Everyone was in a band. Everyone wanted to make a demo tape with the hope of getting signed to a major label in the UK. The impetus for a lot of my training was [wanting to go] from that hectic jingle session to having a bit more time and leeway in a regular session. I did frenetic eight hour, do-as-much-as- you-can sessions because the studio would allow the client to come in for a couple-hundred dollars for the night. You got one of the junior engineers, which was either myself or maybe Gerry Leonard, who is David Bowie's MD [musical director] and is MD'ing with Rufus Wainwright now. One of the owner's sons was the other junior engineer. We also had a couple of people who would come in and freelance. Management encouraged us to go out and find projects and they would assign us to projects based on either recommendations or whether you happened to be in the studio that day. It was a really great training ground because I was allowed to make mistakes and from those I grew. The house engineers, Philip Begley and Fred Meijer, would critique our work — it was great because they could put up the multitrack and listen to how we recorded basic things and they'd ask questions and then make suggestions. It was really a hands-on experience.
That sounds like a great education
It was a great education — I learned a lot. Within five to six months of joining I was engineering my first full- time session on my own with no assistance. I had to set up the room, do the tape alignment on the machines, set up all the mics, get all the balances, do the headphones, make the tea [laughs] — which I was doing all at the same time. I completed the tape logs, the sessions data, made the copies afterwards, leadered the tapes.
Sounds like a lot of work.
It was a lot of work but there's no way I would have been able to propel my career as quickly as I did without that experience. It gave me such a good grounding.
In these late night sessions did you record, mix and finish that night; or were they coming back to mix? How fast was it?
Some of them were a wrap in one evening — typically two or three songs. And it could also be somewhat delusional, meaning that the bands were thinking, "We play this as a three minute song, so how long could it take to record?" They were thinking, "With eight hours, gosh, we could record a whole album!"
Fast records!
They were not taking into account the whole set up and getting everyone comfortable in that environment. Some of them literally ran the gamut of completion from beginning to finish, as many tunes as you could do. Some of them said, "We're going to try and get drums, bass and guitars. Then we're going to come back another evening and do vocals and additional overdubs. Then we'll set aside a separate time to mix." Initially a lot of bands started out in the first mind- frame and then started moving gradually towards slightly elongated projects. But typically they'd be done in two to four nights, so I'd have maybe thirty- two to forty hours maximum to get the whole project done. We sometime had to hurry because these bands were putting up their own cash to make these demos with the hopes of getting a deal.
Right.
Some of them actually got a deal with major UK labels and some of them managed to progress on to the next level. Many of the bands received interest from labels but never went beyond that. U2 had just released Boy and there was Cactus World News, The Boomtown Rats, Horslips, Thin Lizzy, Clannad, Planxty and The Chieftains. There were a lot of different kinds of success stories on different levels so people were thinking, "This is something that could really work." Use that demo tape to get more gigs, generate more interest — it's kind of a self- fulfilling prophecy. And there were many a day when you'd certainly have two or three A&R people from London checking out the Dublin scene.
Label people?
Yes — label people, management companies and publishers. One of the biggest deals occurred in 1981. Bill Whelan (a very accomplished musician and arranger) along with house engineer Philip Begley produced demos for two local brothers, John and Willie Hughes — they were called Minor Detail. The demos consisted mostly of a LinnDrum [drum machine] and a Prophet V synth. Labels were falling over themselves to sign the band. Eventually they got a huge deal from PolyGram. Bill went on to produce a song on U2's War album ["The Refugee"] and achieve enormous international success with "Riverdance."
It was an optimistic time?
