Jackson Analogue

Brothers Jim and Rob Homes have more than a smattering of DNA in common. First up, there's their band Jackson Analogue, the grunge, garage rock five-piece they've been cutting loose with since 2004. Secondly, there's Studio Luka, the eccentric studio they've built inside a haunted water tower on the Isle of Wight, situated in the grounds of Osborne House, a former royal residence of Queen Victoria. We chat to the rock 'n' roll siblings about the building of their studio, the recording of Jackson Analogue's sophomore album and how they've taught themselves how to record though a happy history of trial and error.

How did you guys first get into music and recording?

J: When we were about 12 we both started playing the guitar purely because we were obsessed with all the guitar bands of the time, like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden — grunge was massive then. We formed a couple of covers bands that we played in for a few years. I stopped doing music when I was about 18. I went off to waste a lot of time at university and Rob kept going with the band and recording.

R: We had our rehearsal room where we basically spent all our time, but our dad bought a little Fostex 4-track. We ignored it for about half a year, but we had to get something down. I think it was our bass player [Matt Winsor] who got this thing out. We very quickly moved off 4-track and went on to a Mackie 24-channel desk with an Akai 1/4" tape machine — pretty small stuff. After that we got a small studio on the island here and I started recording local bands. I went onto ADAT and stuff like that and then when Jim came back from university, we started to play again and we built the studio around the band.

Jackson Analogue got signed up by Universal. How did that happen so fast?

J: It all happened in a really funny way. We started playing for the sake of playing while we were waiting for other bands to come and record. Before we knew what we'd done, we'd accidentally demo'd an album and then almost by accident again, we signed a deal with Island/Universal! It was completely ridiculous! We gave away a couple of songs to a few people and within a week we had a meeting with the label. Then we did a gig in front of them and we literally signed a major label deal a couple of weeks after that. We were barely even a band — we didn't have all of the players yet or anything! It was absolutely crazy times. We did the major label thing, the touring, the singles and the videos and all of that, which was fine......

But......

J: But we disagreed a lot with the record company and their vision of us — we got lumped in with a lot of bands we were nothing like. We were a small fish in a very big pond is the best way to put it. So we left Universal and spent a lot of money fighting to get the first album back from them over the course of 18 months. We eventually got it back and licensed it to a load of other labels around the world.

The water tower sounds like an amazing place. When did you find it?

J: We've been in here for five years in loads of different guises. It was a rehearsal room at first and we had it as one big open room — it's over 1500 square feet. Then we built a drum booth and a control room, so we had those and a big live room. Originally we weren't meant to physically be in the building, because it was on Queen Victoria's land and we'd actually only hired it as storage. We used to get thrown out! Now we have a proper lease with them and we've had that for two years.

So what's the current studio layout?

J: The difficult thing for people to appreciate is how odd this building is. From the outside it doesn't actually look too crazy at all, but inside there are three floors. You've got the basement floor, which was an old joinery shop from when the place was a naval college. Then you've got our studio floor, which was a meat locker and the floor above us is a 32-ton steel tank for the water, which is begging to be an echo chamber if we can make it happen. But it means we've got this great big chunk of metal in the ceiling, which is boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. We've moved the control room out into the big room now, so we've got a really big control room — about 800 square feet — and that's because we like to have a lot of room around us. We've recently acquired the downstairs, so we now have a 1000 square foot live room downstairs.

What have you done as far as soundproofing and acoustic treatments?

J: As with everything in our place, it's a magical mix of applied science and whatever we could afford at the time. The basic trick to the soundproofing was making the walls ridiculously thick, doing the air gap, doing the wall over again and covering it in carpet tile or whatever we can get our hands on. The ceiling is made up of folded blankets and wood chip over the top — it's pretty makeshift in that way! The rest of the room was a big, boomy square, so I sloped the walls off a couple of years ago when Rob went to Glastonbury, and put these big baffles over the desk. That works fine for us. We've also always had this weird obsession with carpets, proper old '60s and '70s revolting carpets, so we have them slung all over the place. The room is quite lively, but at the same time it's controlled enough for us.

And you use the stairwell for recording too......

R: That's one of the joys of what we've got — being able to use the whole building when we're recording. We're forever using the reverb of the stairwell. It's wooden stairs with old Victorian brick and it goes right to the top of the building — it must be at least a good 60 or 70 feet. We record most amps at the top at the stairwell with a mic halfway down and the same with vocals and acoustic guitars. Our schooling with the space was when we did the first Jackson Analogue record. We were there on day one thinking, "Right. How the fuck do we make this record?" We'd put an amp on and we'd walk around it with a mic until it sounded good and that's how we've built up our knowledge of everything. We've tried, tested, played around and had a lot of fun.

You mentioned earlier a favourite secret weapon when it comes to reverb......

J: We're completely obsessed with the reverb in the [Roland] Space Echo RE-201. We absolutely love it, but it's completely broken and only the spring works in it. We've tried the Great British Spring and all types of lovely springs, but we always come back to that.

R: It's probably because we didn't have any other reverb, so early on we made our sound using the broken Space Echo. Now we can't find anything to recreate that reverb, so it's like, "Well, let's just keep using it!"

J: And that kind of ethos has stuck with us through everything. We have enough outboard gear, but we don't use it an incredible amount really. We run most things through one of three outboards and that's it really. We use the Empirical Labs Distressor a lot, Thermionic Culture Phoenix Stereo Valve Compressor and we DI nearly everything straight through the JoeMeek [Studio Channel VC1Qcs] and into the desk.

As well as your 48-channel Audient ASP8024, you've also got an old Audix (ex- BBC broadcast) desk. How did you get ahold of that and what do you use it for?

J: We had a phone call from one of the guys at the storage place and he said, "Some guy's put a load of stuff in storage and never came back for it! I think it's music stuff — do you want to come and have a look?" We turned up and there were about five reel-to-reels, there was this Audix desk, a crazy load of old mics and I think we paid 200 quid for it all! The Audix has got LDR [Light Dependent Resistor] compression on it — we started playing around with that on drums and it sounds absolutely incredible! So now when we come to mic'ing drums we use the Earthworks [Drum Kit System] setup — a lot of close mic'ing — but we also put a mono mic somewhere between the kick drum and the snare, pump it straight through the Audix compressed to shit and use it almost like an effect!

How did the producer Head end up working with you on the debut record?

J: Universal came down, we had a meeting, we said we wanted to record all of the music ourselves and they thought that was fine. But about five weeks in the label had a panic and someone up higher must've gone, "Sorry, what've you done? You've let them record this album on their own?" So we had a stressed A&R man down saying they wanted to put a producer on it, but by that stage it was done bar the vocals and one track. We were given the options of a few producers and we weren't really keen on any of them, but then they mentioned Head. We love PJ Harvey and a lot of the stuff he did when he was associated with her. It was an easy decision for us, "Yeah, bring him down!" And it helped that it just so happens he's one of the coolest humans on earth as well.

R: He's incredible, the way he produces...... J: He's magnificent! We've been to lots of places with Head now — he's done every big gig we've ever done, like when we played with The Who and when we went over to America to do some dates. He's now not just a producer to us — he's more like our Obi-Wan!

You've finished recording, mixing and mastering Jackson Analogue's second record. How much nicer was it working on your own without a major label breathing down your necks?

J: This record that we've finished was so easy. We were so happy and were genuinely enjoying ourselves and I think that's come through in the record. It allowed us to take a few more risks sonically as well, because there was not one single person telling us what to do. Me and Rob realised in the car on the way up to master at Abbey Road that we hadn't played the tracks to any other person in the world. We looked at each other and said, "Was that a horrible mistake? Well it's too late now. We'll find out once it's mastered!" We didn't send it to any other producers or friends that we knew — only one person from the band heard it before it was mastered. I'd love to make out we were really cool and did it on purpose, but actually we're a bit stupid and forgot to tell anyone!

So tell us about the recording process on the new record, Half Way Home.

J: We made the mistake of doing the first record with all five band members being there all day long and it's a classic mistake. You assume everyone should be there so there were five of us there the whole time. But now the band's all over the place — Leeds, Brighton, etc. — so we ended up tracking most of the stuff. I think I'm right in saying that at no point did we all stand in the studio together as a band, but it worked fine — you'd think there would be gelling issues, but there weren't!

How did you get that low-down filthy guitar tone on "Glue"?

J: That's a Roger Mayer Octavia, a Gibson 325 and a [Fender] Twin [Reverb]. But the sound on "Glue" is quite an interesting one. The really dry signal at the beginning is just a close mic, but we had a mic halfway down the stairs, which I think we'd left on by accident. It wasn't actually part of the recording. When the band kicks in you get the reverb coming in on your right. We can't explain why, but the guitar sounds brilliant. We've tried it a million times since, but we've never got it again. But that's one of the things isn't it — getting lucky with some stuff? I think with regards to mics and mic placement on guitars, we have always used a valve mic eight feet back in case we want a bit of room and for close mics, we either use the Earthworks or a [Shure SM]57. Also these cheap Telefunken TD-20s — we used them on guitar and they sounded incredible, but we've used them wrong ever since the beginning. They're an old desk mic I think, and they look a bit like the capsule's at the front of the mic, but it's actually not — it's at the top. So what we've been doing — not intentionally — is sending the signal right over the top instead of into it but, for some reason, it sounds brilliant. It's lovely on a [Fender] Telecaster and a Twin. That's the only kind of "secret weapon" mic that we use really.

R: We did try using them the right way round but it sounded really shit, so we went back to using them wrong!

And what about the vocal sound you guys got?

J: We're terrible on vocals because we like the sound of semi-distorted vocals. If we had it our way everything would sound kind of distorted. We've got a producer friend who lives on the island who's got a beautiful private studio. He bought an old valve Telefunken and we borrowed it to do the vocals. We put it in place, set it up, tested it — but we kind of forgot what we were doing and went back to demo mode. We put it through the Audix and distorted it!

R: All the vocals were done through the Audix and some Distressor on top of that. It goes back to the early '90s grunge thing. We're really big fans of that close, compressed vocal sound.

J: But Rob did take a lot of the tracks out of the [iZ Technology] RADAR and did the vocals at home on his own little home studio with Pro Tools and an Mbox.

R: Yeah, I recorded through an Mbox with absolutely no compression, halfway inside my girlfriend's clothes cupboard. Then I'd bring it in and run it through the Audix to get that sound. There were a few we did at the studio because I live in a top floor flat so I can't really shout up there — we did the more uptempo, more aggressive sounding tracks in the studio.

Is the water tower really haunted?

J: Some really weird things do happen there after dark! Our drummer won't go there at all after dark, even if we're all there! He's a completely rational human being, but he won't go there — it's the noises. Me and Rob — because we've spent the most time there — have both had bad things happen.

Such as?

R: I found Jim on the road refusing to go back in the studio.

J: I was in the studio and I was doing some piano. Because there's the wooden staircase in the stairwell, you hear the click click click when someone's walking up the stairs. I heard the click click click and I went to open the door. There was no one there and I thought, "What the fuck?" I looked out the window and there was no one outside either and I freaked out and ran onto the road until Rob came back with our fish and chips. It's that kind of thing that happens, along with gremlins in the equipment. We have clickable compression on the desk so it doesn't move unless you click it one way, but you'll go across the room, come back and it's clicked the other way! It's kind of weird and creepy there, but the way we have it decorated probably doesn't help... there are stuffed owls and ouija boards and things like that on the walls too!