"I'm fundamentally a musician, although I've fallen into being sort of... I hate to refer to myself as a producer because I think there's a lot of pretension around that name. But I've learned how to engineer."
When I was in high school my friend picked up a copy of Wire's 1979 album 154 based on a review in Rolling Stone. Little did I ever imagine how the sonics of that album, and so many other records by Wire (and solo albums by singer/guitarist Colin Newman), would influence my own taste and record making over the following years. Texture, darkness, tension, odd precision and oblique lyrics have always filled Colin's work, much to my delight. Noticing that he also became more studio savvy as the years passed, producing, tracking and mixing many of his projects, I realized it was time to pay a visit to his home-based Swim Studio in London. Wire keeps making records and their last studio album, Red Barked Tree, is seriously among their best work. Along with other projects, Colin also has the enjoyable Githead — a band with his wife Malka Spigel, her former Minimal Compact band member Max Franken, and Robin Rimbaud of Scanner.
When I first heard Wire, it felt like such an anti-learning-how-to-play- band. Rudimentary ability was trumped by concepts and ideas.
I've always famously said that I'm no better a guitarist than I was when I was 16. I'm probably slightly better now, but not much. I'm not obsessed.
Most Wire fans were introduced to the band via the first two albums, Pink Flag and Chairs Missing. But I obsessed over your third album, 154, for years before hearing its predecessors. When you first went in to record that album with Mike Thorne producing, I assume there was an engineer there as well.
Paul Hardiman, who produced Chris de Burgh's "The Lady in Red" later.
I've heard the Behind The Curtain (Early Versions 1977 & 78) demos. How much of a change did you see between the demos and album?
There's always a great squabble over authorship and who did what and who had all the great ideas, but there's also the Rockpalast video that we released [Wire on the box: 1979] which is us playing live. It's the same band playing the same material that's unproduced. A lot of what is assumed to be production was, in fact, just the band playing the arrangements that we worked out between us. The opening track on 154 ["I Should Have Known Better"] was originally a Graham [Lewis] song based around this bass line, and it wasn't my favorite song. We got into the studio and it was the first thing we worked on. I started playing this sort of "duh duh duh duh duh," then Bruce [Gilbert, guitar] immediately picked up on it and we were playing single notes. Robert [Gotobed/Grey] came in with the drums. Within five minutes we had that arrangement and we recorded it. That's an eclectic piece of work, and that's how the band meets the material and works with it. Of course Paul and Mike knew stuff that we didn't know [about working in the studio]. This was back when it took three days to get a bass drum sound. You'd come into the control room and they'd still be listening to one bass drum.
On these records?
Oh, yeah. It was a really top of the line studio — very expensive — and we had three or four weeks to record an album. It was considered a very decent amount of time to make a record, so certainly time was taken to get the drum sound. I think that's what happened when Wire came back in the '80s. I had already done some solo records with Mike in the early '80s and we had a fundamental disagreement about how we wanted things to go on. I became the default producer and I didn't really know what I wanted, but I was talking with Steve [Parker] at the time — he was with a studio called Scorpio Sound. It was a learning process for me about how to make a record and it was enormous fun. I'm sort of a minimalist.
Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish is one of my favorite solo records of yours.
That was my first production.
The record really sounds like, "Let's play this part and then let's put this part on, and this part on." It's so much layering.
Usually we started with the drums.
Was that a concept of how to build it up?
Well, the original thing was that I had done some demos where I'd play something and then I'd play it back twice as fast — like chipmunk style. I thought it was really good. Playing with speed was sort of how the early things were born, basically. It was based on things I used to do at home, tape-to-tape. Just building tracks by layering. It was just Steve Parker and me in the studio. There were no musicians coming in. We'd say, "What are we going to do now? Alright, let's start with this." It's got my appalling drumming on it.
And then you were asked to produce other folks.
My first production job was for the Virgin Prunes [in 1982, ...If I Die, I Die]. Steve was with me because it seemed a really wrong thing not to [ask him]. At that point I didn't have my hands on the mixing board — my idea of production was the grand overview: make the band happy and get the best performance. You know, work on the arrangements. Then [in 1985] I went on to work with Minimal Compact (which is how I met Malka). They wouldn't employ Steve Parker, so I used the house engineer at the studio, Gilles Martin, who is now a well-known producer in France. Raging Souls was a weird record because it's really poorly produced, from a technical standpoint. Gilles Martin assumed I knew what I was doing sonically. I was just taking care of the band, the arrangements and all that stuff, and I was falling in love with Malka while she was doing the bass guitar parts.
When did you put together a home studio?
When Malka and I started living together, we bought an 8-track [tape deck] and a mixing board; then, by default, I suddenly started recording. And Malka, who has zero patience, just expected me to do it. That is how I learned to record and mix. That was also about the time when [Steinberg's sequencer software] Pro-24 came out for the Atari. That was the late '80s and we were still living in Brussels in an apartment. Then we moved to a house in Brussels, set up the studio in the basement and started making something — it wasn't really even a record, at that point. We were just recording. Then we moved to London in '92 and decided we wanted a house that could have a studio in it. Our realtor called us one morning and said, "You have to see this house in Wimbledon. It's got a garage and it could be perfect for your studio." It just so happens that it has this thick wall between here and next door, so you can't disturb [the neighbors], and we built a wall between the studio and the garage door, so it doesn't really let much sound outside.
I think one of the changes we've seen is that people can have setups like this that are affordable.
This is not a commercial studio, so you can't make a record in here unless you have some reason to be working with us. You know, it's not for hire. It's just in our house. There's no way that it could be [commercial]. Unless someone asks me to do a remix or something, I'm not really working on anything else apart from our projects. For me it's always about affordable studios. I've always believed I didn't want to create something in a studio that's too expensive to work in. Over the years I've spent a lot — I just upgraded my Waves plug-ins recently and it's really nice. But the reason I like Pro Tools, and I don't use any other [product], is that it's actually recording and mixing software — it's not creative in itself. You have to be creative.
Some of the early MIDI programming was very rigid.
It was very rigid and [Steinberg's] Cubase was revolutionary compared to Pro-24 because Pro-24 was a pattern-based drum program, whereas Cubase had a multitrack thing going. But Pro Tools is just straight ahead. I don't have to double click on anything, because it's there.
We saw the real progression, from sequencing software to recording software.
Absolutely. In the end it is about recording. I think there was a period last decade where I was interested in creating a band in a box. I've become more interested now in just recording while a band is playing. Because they make the arrangement for you — they just do it.
You hear that on Wire's Send [2003]. The band seems tight and controlled, as far as their parts.
Absolutely. And it was all done here except for some drums we caught in rehearsal, which is the most stupid place to record drums. It had zero ambience. That was the innovation for Wire's Object 47 [2008], although that had originally happened on the Githead tracking. Because with [Githead's] Art Pop [2007] we had recorded in London and added live drums and other stuff in Rotterdam; I could see how it just let all the light in. And also doing things like recording drums and vocals in the same room, or feeding guitars out to amps that have been recorded in the same room as the drums.
That kind of glue...
It's kind of "old school," but it works! That's why they did it in the first place. It's hard when you get to a certain age, because if everything you do is "old school" then you are just living in the past. But, on the other hand, you shouldn't be afraid of "old school". As you can see, I'm not any kind of analog purist.
It seems like a lot of your focus has centered around creative tools that you have on hand, as well as working within budgetary constraints.
Well, the budget is zero.
So, there you go.
For both our swim ~ and Pink Flag record labels, I actually make money after. I can't charge back studio time. If I charged back studio time to all of the projects then nobody would make any money, apart from me. That's not a way of doing any kind of business.
Right.
We did Red Barked Tree's basic recording in February 2010 at Resident Studios [in London]. We did a tour of France, which ended up at Primavera [Barcelona's music festival]. Then the rest was pretty much all done here until the album was finished. We did one extra session at Andy Ramsay's Press Play Studios where we did some Graham vocals and a few extra bits, like organs and bouzoukis. Apart from that, up until it was delivered in September 2010, I worked every day on that record.
Would Graham come over and work on bass or vocal parts?
That was all done. The original parts were done there. If we needed to, we had that second session to replace anything that needed doing. Then we would add some extra instrumentation and Graham's vocals, but that was it.
So you were in here overdubbing guitars and...
Actually no. My process of making records...
What is your process?
My Process. Okay.
[laughing] Because I think the Githead record, Landing, and Red Barked Tree — of the records you have self- produced, those are the best sounding of the lot.
Yeah, they are both really strong records. It sounds good to me. I know I am seriously getting somewhere. Basically I get a multitrack recording of the band playing and then I start chopping it up. I find the best tempo that it's being played at, cut the drums, and I use a combination of Beat Detective and some time stretching to get the drums all in line, but I don't work with loops. I might cut three minutes of drums; beat for beat, apart from the bass drum. The bass drum plays the same thing all of the time. Once I start altering the audio I want the bass drum and the bass to go in the same time. I know there's a clever science of the bass playing just ahead of the bass drum — I don't know anything about that stuff. The only thing I might move in time is the far ambience of the kit. I might move it a bit closer if it feels like it's dragging, but apart from that I want everything in the same time. Then, once I start to have this very solid feel, especially in getting the kit working with the bass, I put the guitars in. I start to have a sense of what the landscape of the piece is. Then I work with the basic arrangement and do vocals. Vocals take me for-fucking-ever. [laughter] I do the vocals here. I record myself, and I don't want to put anyone else through that torture. With Red Barked Tree my rule was eight perfect takes of each vocal. "Perfect" meaning I hear that I am singing in-tune in the headphones, and then I start working it.
Like comping a vocal?
Well, actually very often I am comping them, but I am also using Waves Tune to tune everything note by note — no auto-tuning of any kind. It sounds great when it's super in tune. Then, once I've got eight all in tune with each other, I use [Synchro Arts'] VocALign to line them all up. You get this exquisite chorusing that you can't get out of a box. That's one of my main vocal tricks. It works on my voice and it works on Malka's voice. And you want eight, because you want to have enough to bring in extra ones. You might start with a basic three [vocals], and then on a chorus you might bring in more so that you've got more out to the sides. I don't use stereo a lot, but I might use stereo guitars or stereo voice with the main body of it going up the middle. Then there are extra little bits coming in. It's all of the basic things, you know? What does music have to be if not in tune and in time?
That's true.
...And that's what it's all about.
It's interesting that you mention that kind of precision with editing the drums, because if you look back at the very first Wire record [Pink Flag] it's all about the precision of how it fits together and how it's played.
Of course. It sounds like a drum machine, and Robert...
Robert likes to play that way.
The idea is to preserve as much information as possible when doing it, so it's as rhythmically as tight as a drum machine, but it doesn't sound rigid. We've got all that variation because he has so much subtlety in the way he plays. The bass drum doesn't really change. The snare drum has a few different levels in it. Then there is all this expression in the hi-hat.
In the '80s you started to replace him with drum machines.
That was simply a failure in technology. Eighties technology was great to get into, because there was no way you could have gone from what I could have done at home (which was tape-to-tape, with two cassette machines) in the '70s and early '80s, to a multitrack recording studio where recording an album would cost you as much as a house. The gap was just too big, so MIDI technology filled in that gap. You could get there. You could make something that didn't sound totally home recorded. That was kind of the deal. It doesn't mean to say that everything that is being produced on modern DAWs is fantastic. There's the 90 percent rule: 90 percent of everything is crap. It's about, "Did you have any good ideas?" How inspired were you when you were doing it? It has to inspire. That is very much my thing of ordering the audio before I sing. By that point I have a deep understanding of the structure. I know where everything is coming, and the voice has to sound great when I sing it. It has to "do it" for me. I have to feel like I am making that track better by singing on it. Not like it's some additional thing. It's not instrumental plus vocal. With Wire and Githead there is this thing of wanting to do songs. Wanting to make songs that work within the arrangement. Both bands work very differently, but deep within it, it's a song.
When Wire reformed in the '80s songs like "Ahead" [from The Ideal Copy] seemed very programmed.
Very sequence-y, yeah of course. That was happening at the same time as I first got my studio in Brussels, and I came to the studio knowing how to use Pro-24. It's all fucking technology. It's the same way making records with computers — it's just a slightly different way of putting it.
How do the interpersonal relationships work in Wire now that you've got more control over the process versus the '70s and early '80s?
I think there was a lot of suspicion at one point and that has gotten less so. I think I'm now trusted in what I am doing. Especially the way I made Red Barked Tree. I am working on the level of facilitating. Something like 70 or 80 percent of the material was written on acoustic guitars in here. It was recorded on my iPhone and then quickly recorded into Pro Tools, but not with a click track or anything that you could build a song on. I just recorded it because I wanted to have a better recording then on my iPhone. Then we learned the songs as a band in the studio, and then performed them straight away.
So you rehearse, work them up and then...
Record it, straight away. We did pretty much everything over three days. That meant they could immediately implement how they thought the piece ought to go. It's not a discussion.
You end up doing a large portion of an album's work these days at your home studio. How is the monitoring in this space?
I am monitoring on [Yamaha] NS10s. One of the things about this space, and the way I tend to work here, is I will mix with the door open. That means I am mixing very quiet.
You don't want to rock the house?
No, it's actually not a properly made room. The room does impart something to it, so the less the room impinges on it the better. You do get a good idea about stuff, like how loud the bass is. I asked an engineer I used to work with in the '80s how he mixed records. I asked, "What are your tips about how to mix a record?" He said, "Don't put the bass too loud." I said, "Is that it?" He said, "The rest is all personal taste." [laughter]
Well, yeah, sure.
There is some truth in it.
I'm always carving things away so it doesn't get all muddy and weird.
Absolutely. And if you monitor too loud then it's very, very hard to work out. I'm familiar with these [NS10s]. I'm not saying these are the best monitors in the world but I am familiar with them, so I know how to mix on them. When I produce something as a mix I know that when I hand it to Denis he is going to be able to take it where it needs to go, without needing to completely change it.
Is that Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering?
Yeah. He's mastered everything I've worked on in this studio since the second swim ~ album, as well as some stuff from the '80s. We've just stayed in contact. He's now in Skye, which is why I never see him unless he comes down to London. He's given me the confidence to feel like I "can do." It's a weird thing to be in a band and to be mixing your records when you didn't used to do that. A lot of it is still about having fun while making records. I'm really ambitious. I want my records that get produced in this studio to be as good as anyone's records. As if it was recorded in any studio, anywhere. Denis has told me, "Your productions come in the top 10 percent of what I get and you're the only person I am getting that from that doesn't work in a top of the line studio."
That's nice.
It's a nice compliment to get. I'm sure there's an extra one or two percent that you can get from having absolutely, pristine, fantastic, high-end gear.
It's always small percentages.
Believe me, if I had to mix Madonna's next single and I was getting paid 20 or 30 grand to do it, I'd be shitting myself about, "Everything has to be amazing," you know?
Yeah.
...But I'm not. So I don't have to care about that.
Thanks to Will Houk & Benjamin Nokes for transcription!
www.colinewman.com, www.pinkflag.com, www.swimhq.com
