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Marcus Lindsay – Sound Engineer and Supertech

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

Marcus... 'don't stare at music, listen!'

Marcus is the person you call if your band is going on tour and you need someone to help iron out all the problems associated with running live sequences, backing tracks and midi instruments. His attention to detail and methodical perfectionism will ensure that you don’t get any of those embarrassing technological cock-ups that can ruin a live show, which is why he’s in demand by some of the top acts in the country when they put their tours together. He’s surprisingly modest and cares more about the quality of work he’s doing than having a high-profile career, an attitude which is born out by him turning down working for Madonna on her recent tour. Sissy catches up with Marcus while he’s between tours, to find out a bit about his unusual job.

SISSY: How would you describe what you do?

MARCUS: I describe myself as a sound engineer, but people think that because I work in the live business, I do live sound but I don’t. I’m a studio sound engineer, and live I use some of the skills I have to do another side of the business, which is looking after electronic instruments and recording technology onstage. I suppose on tour, people would refer to me as the keyboard tech or something, but these days that involves a lot more technology than just a few keyboards.

SISSY: So you look after click tracks and sequencing; things like that?

MARCUS: Yes, if there’s additional playback stuff, I might be asked to deal with that, if the keyboard set up isn’t too elaborate and one person can look after both. Things like operating hard disc recorders with a few backing tracks and a click track; maybe a bit of programming on the computer.

SISSY: I’ve seen you do everything to help a band’s live set-up run smoothly, including soldering leads and fixing stuff.

MARCUS: That comes from what I was doing as a studio engineer, which involved learning a bit of maintenance, but also from helping musicians I knew with their own private studios. A lot of people can’t do that aspect of it, the nuts and bolts stuff, so I started attacking the soldering iron through being determined not to be scared of that side of it.

SISSY: What bands and artists have you worked for on tour?

MARCUS: I haven’t worked with that many bands as I only started doing the live shows in about 1998. I only get to work with maybe 2 or 3 artists a year, because each one takes up so much time. I’ve done work for Massive Attack, Kylie, Asian Dub Foundation, Craig David and Emiliana Torrini, which was nice because it was so different from the other stuff; it makes you appreciate working with artists who aren’t on such a huge scale… and I also worked for Madness. I was keyboard tech for them, it was a very small crew for a club tour they did. It was good fun except for the fact that it involved travelling around in the back of a van some of the time, instead of a more comfortable tour bus!

SISSY: Massive Attack are such a legend; can you tell us a bit about working for them?

MARCUS: I haven’t been involved in any studio stuff with Massive Attack, although that would have been really nice. They’ve developed a kind of co-production relationship with someone else and they have their own studio set-up, local to them. I’ve spent a lot of time working with them on tour. I’m happy helping them to make things run smoothly on the technical side; their music just won’t work if it doesn’t have the technology behind it. I did the Mezzanine tour in 1998, a festival tour after that, then in 2004 we did a tour with bits of everything including 100^th Window stuff. Last year and this year, we did some charity concerts playing greatest hits.

SISSY: Did that involve revisiting all the different set-ups you’d done before?

MARCUS: Musically, yes, but we approached it a bit differently so it didn’t involve lots of playback. For the Mezzanine tour, I was originally approached by the drummer, Pete Lewinson. He was rehearsing with the band and learning arrangements and he didn’t want to worry about dealing with the technical side of the electronic drum triggering and programming, so he got me in to help with all that. I also started helping the keyboard player Michael Timothy as well… he was the MD (musical director) and was very good at doing his stuff but needed help with programming and sequencing on an MPC sequencer, so I dealt with the sequencing, drum loops and electronic trigger sounds, which obviously there are lot of in Massive Attack. I had to listen to the recordings and put everything in the right order and get it to sound pretty much like the record. They had their own source material to choose from, which was great. Instead of trying to find sounds again, we could sample the album tracks from the original masters although obviously we had to re-produce some of the sounds. I also had to look after the DJ set-up, which is quite a simple thing. I didn’t end up doing the tour to begin with because they hired someone else… they hadn’t known that the drummer was bringing me in. fortunately the other person left and I got called in to do the rest of the tour which was about 3 months travelling all over the world.

SISSY: Massive Attack seem to give the impression that there are some difficult inter-band relationships going on. How did you find them to work with?

MARCUS: There were no problems when I started working with them. We had a common link through my old flatmate who was from Bristol; I met him through the person I studied sound engineering with. I’d worked with other Bristol artists in London, so when I met Massive Attack, we had lots of friends in common. The politics always seemed ok, but they were definitely the sort of people who had lots of strong opinions about things. I think the reputation they have of being difficult with each other comes from them all being passionate about their music, and also because everyone has a life outside the band, which can clash with commitments and obligations or business things that other band members want to do.

SISSY: One of the great things about Massive Attack is that they are hugely well known and respected and yet they aren’t the sort of celebrities you’d recognise in the street.

MARCUS: That’s true, they’re kind of anti-celebrity. They aren’t bothered about being out and getting their faces on the scene. I think that gives them longevity; there are many great artists we all have in our record collections that we don’t have a clue what they look like.

SISSY: The band are also known for having strong political views.

MARCUS: During the last tours there’s been a lot happening in the world and they’ve got things to say about that, which get put into the music. Sometimes I might notice something in the music and ask questions about it, but most of the time it’s fairly obvious and plain to see what their message is. They certainly don’t ram their opinions down your throat if you’re working with them though. I know 3D is always up to something, getting involved in political stuff and those ideas will get used, sometimes in the visuals for a tour; hence all the screen stuff that we do… images that you might not see on tv which are there to inform and educate. Their music has a lot of content that people can relate to and it’s not all about love stories! Some of the messages are quite angry but people will listen because it’s in the context of a beat or a groove that you can identify with.

SISSY: Did Liz Fraser (from the Cocteau Twins, who has performed vocals on various Massive Attack recordings) do any of the live gigs?

MARCUS: She did a few of the gigs in 1998, and she did all the shows we did in 2006. She did some of her famous ‘singing without words’ that she did in the Cocteau Twins, and she did some where she reproduced what she’d done on the recordings. Last year, Liz seemed happier with the live set-up, being able to hear herself properly and being a part of the team; in the early days I don’t think it went as well for her. She was singing a lot of songs on the last tour, along with another female vocalist, Deborah Miller. Deborah isn’t on the albums but she performs the parts of different guest female singers like Shara Nelson (on the Blue Lines material) with the exception of the Tracey Thorn songs. Liz has her own thing going on with the audience who are now getting to see her perform for the first time so she has her own mini-fan club going on at the front of the stage!

SISSY: Can you tell us a bit about working for Kylie Minogue?

MARCUS: Again, it was strange because I’d just finished doing a Craig David tour and I got a call from Andrew Small who’d taken over on drums in Massive Attack from Pete Lewinson. He was asked to become Kylie’s MD and he phoned me because he needed help with all the electronics, keyboards and all the usual stuff. I was quite surprised! Kylie was starting a whole big production tour, it was around 2001 promoting the ‘On a Night Like This’ album. It was a semi-theatrical kind of show involving lots of contemporary dancers and costume changes with a lot of the favourite songs from her career. The music was played by a band but had to tie in with the dance tunes so it had backing tracks running live.

SISSY: What do you think of Kylie’s recent nomination (along with Jackie Onassis) to be the number one female icon of our times?

MARCUS: I think she’d actually find that quite amusing but in terms of what she’s brought to other people in terms of entertainment, she might appreciate it. I don’t think she’d ever try to step outside of the musical arena and go into politics or claim that she’d empowered loads of women, but she’s definitely in control of what she’s doing.

SISSY: The common perception is that Kylie is a really nice person; men and women both seem to love her, and she’s not the sort of girl other women bitch about.

MARCUS: I’m sure there are people who bitch about her, but it’s usually because they’re working for someone else who’s in competition with her. Occasionally the people working for Kylie may do stuff that makes her appear demanding or something, but really it’s to do with her staff being rivals with the staff of other artists. That’s quite common; it happens throughout the business and it’s usually not true. I’ve always found her to be really nice and easy-going and a hard worker. I think she hates bad atmospheres around her so she wouldn’t try to impose things on people, whereas you might work with other artists who can create a vibe that isn’t very comfortable, which rubs off on everyone else around them. If you look at the kind of music that Kylie makes and the shows that she does, you couldn’t have a bad atmosphere and pull it off… it’s all about fun. She’s very professional and its very hard work for her, with all the dancing. I’ve done all the Kylie tours since 2001 as well as the tv appearances that involved a live band.

SISSY: What happened when she had to cancel shows due to her health?

MARCUS: In 2005 we had a tour that was cancelled halfway through when we were in Australia. After Kylie was diagnosed with breast cancer, she called a halt to everything for a while, then word came out that she wanted everyone from the old band and crew to come back for the new tour, so we finished the dates that had been cancelled in Australia and did a few additional shows. It was essentially the same show, with a few minor alterations. We had one show near the end of the run, in Manchester where she had flu, which if you’re trying to sing and dance can be difficult and she couldn’t give it 100% so we stopped a show halfway through. There was an interval, so she played till that, then didn’t come back on. It was the first time we’d had to actually stop a show. She bounced back a few days later and we carried on.

SISSY: What was Craig David like to work with?

MARCUS: I worked on the first tour he did with a sizeable production. He seemed really down to earth and in tune with thinking that if it didn’t all work out successfully, it could all end tomorrow, and appreciative of what was happening for him. When you explode that big at that young age, if you have got your head screwed on right you won’t take it all for granted. If you’re not humble and someone is turning you into something and creating you out of nothing, you’ll be gutted if it doesn’t work out. If you’re doing your own stuff and you feel in control of what you’re doing then it’s up to you to make it a success, as long as you keep an eye on the business side as well. I think Craig’s previous experience with doing lots of club gigs and DJing helped him; he was used to working with different musicians so when it got scaled up and became more about just him, he could cope. Also he knew that the artists he aspired to be like had worked really hard for their success so that helped him to see what you had to do and what could happen. When you’re that young, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, your ideas are going to change as you mature and you’ll have different points of view on life. Your priorities might change from music to having a family or something. Craig is still playing and because he has a strong fanbase all over the world, he’s able to play in lots of different countries. I think the way the industry works, it’s hard to sustain the huge level he entered on. You might not be intending to be the next big thing, they might make you into that, then stop pushing you which leads to the perception that something has gone wrong when it hasn’t. I’ve seen how marketing can make things appear differently from what they really are sometimes, although marketing budgets aren’t what they used to be. Craig did actually seem like a really nice person. The thing to bear in mind is I’m on tour with these people in a purely technical capacity; no-one’s asking me to make any radical artistic decisions so it’s not up to me how things turn out!

SISSY: How did you get involved with Asian Dub Foundation?

MARCUS: Through David Lawrence, the tour manager from Massive Attack who took over working for them in 1999. He asked me to help out with their technology. Asian Dub Foundation all interact a lot with each other on stage; they’ve got rappers and someone playing tablas as well as live instruments. The last thing I did with them, they had a live drummer as well as a guy doing loops and programming. They also have their own DJ set-up. I’m basically there with another tech who looks after guitars and drums, but everyone in the band kind of gets stuck in, helping out with everything. I’m there as an extra pair of hands to make sure it runs smoothly. We’ve done some smaller shows and some big festivals as well, where I was dealing with the extra playback, sequencing and all the electronic equipment.

SISSY: They seem to have a huge following.

MARCUS: They do; I don’t recall any shows where people didn’t get into it. They really make a performance of it; it’s not just a DJ playing beats. It’s good to watch that kind of thing where it’s a real rabble-rousing infectious performance and like Massive Attack, it’s not about celebrity. One of the moments that I particularly recall was after going from some smaller gigs to a festival in Japan. They were playing late afternoon on an enormous stage at a venue the size of a football pitch, and the set-up on stage looked quite small; they weren’t taking up the entire stage like some bands do, but they really got the crowd going and bouncing up and down, this huge sea of Japanese faces getting into it. I didn’t see that happen with any other band that day although quite big bands like Travis were playing, but the reaction was nothing like the one that Asian Dub Foundation got.

SISSY: I didn’t realise that their music was big in other countries.

MARCUS: I think their markets are varied in different territories; maybe in some countries they go down well in a club type set-up with more of the DJing and use of the rappers, whereas in other territories they can tour with a whole band. They’re able to change their set-up to suit different things, which helps them to keep their profile bubbling along by adapting to suit different demands.

SISSY: It seems as though you must get to travel extensively all over the world with the bands you work for; is there anywhere you haven’t been that you’d like to go to?

MARCUS: I still haven’t done much work in South East Asia; either because I didn’t take a particular job, or because something got cancelled in a band’s schedule. I seem to keep missing out on Hong Kong and that part of the world in general although I have worked on stuff in Australia many times. So the Far East is somewhere I’d like to go to more. Also, I haven’t really worked in Russia, although I’ve done a few things further south like the Balkan States. Again, I always seem to miss out on those places like Russia and Estonia. I seem to have covered most of the other countries! Not many bands get to play in the Middle East as there’s not so much demand, but I’ve been fortunate enough to do gigs in Beirut with Massive Attack, also in Lebanon and Israel. I’ve done South Africa twice, but I’ve never done anything in other parts of Africa.

SISSY: Do Massive Attack consciously make a point of trying to play in countries like that so they can get their message across?

MARCUS: It’s hard to work out the question of which comes first; are there agents and promoters asking for them to play, or are they fishing for gigs in those territories? Some of these places are exceptional in terms of playing them and they are unusual so not many artists are going there. When you start breaking things down to the logistics and cost of putting on a gig, in some countries it just isn’t viable to play much, so that can create a bit of a barrier as to where it is feasible to tour.

SISSY: Can you tell us a bit about how you got into this as regards education and training etc?

MARCUS: I was born in the UK but my dad was in the military, so after going through both English and American education systems I ended up finishing school in the UK. When I realised I could actually leave school at 16, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I was a good student up to a point but I think moving around with my family hampered my ability to stay in sync with the different syllabus in the UK, or American schools on various airbases. I went to American schools in the States in Illinois, California and Washington, then in Italy and the UK. Then from halfway through secondary school, I went to a British school… it was pretty patchy. I lost interest a bit through all the moving around.

Basically, I decided I would like to try doing something involving video or audio editing and technology. I was at college doing business studies and computing. I did some work experience through college so I could go to a studio and spend time seeing how that worked. Then I decided I wanted to get specific training in sound engineering. At the time, in the late 80’s, people were still trying to get jobs in studios by writing to loads and working their way up from tea boy/tape op, but I preferred the option of getting more training first which was quite difficult as there weren’t as many courses as there are now. I found a private course in Manchester; I wanted to go to an established course in New York but my father was a bit apprehensive about me going away. So I worked and saved up to go on the course in Manchester. Compared to what you can do now, it was a bit of a shambles and not very well run, so I didn’t complete the course although I’m sure I would have passed! I spent most of my time in that studio learning to do things hands-on as well as learning lots of theory.

SISSY: Were you really into music at the time or was it a case of finding something you had an aptitude for?

MARCUS: I had always loved music because of my dad. He had a really mixed music collection, which was unusual for a black guy, where you might expect just to see loads of soul and jazz; he had everything from the Beatles to Gene Pitney and the Beach Boys as well as stuff like Parliament and Funkadelic. He loved all genres of music so I had a vast record collection to listen to. I was a massive Stevie Wonder fan, and I loved Prince. My dad wasn’t so keen on him, maybe because he was a bit too quirky and odd for someone of his age. For me, Prince combined many styles of music, like James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Little Richard, all into one thing but with his own style. It appealed to my rebellious side. My brothers were into rock music so there was lots of heavy metal in the house as well! I kind of started looking after my dad’s hi-fi and his record collection, making little mix tapes and stuff.

SISSY: Did you ever try and play an instrument or make music yourself?

MARCUS: I like to sit down and mess around on the guitar, and I like playing the drums and teaching myself bits. You pick things up from other people you’re working with; when you’re around great musicians you learn things and sometimes they encourage me to have a go, which is really nice. But I don’t try and become a musician.

SISSY: Do you think your perfectionist tendencies have something to do with why you haven’t tried to be an artist yourself?… as in your own standards are too high for you to meet them!

MARCUS: I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m quite happy with what I do because it’s still creative but in a different way. You’re collaborating with people without realising it.

After I left the course in Manchester, I came back home and did part-time jobs while writing to studios all over the place. Eventually I got an interview at Orinoco Studios on the Old Kent Road and at least I knew I was going in there a bit prepared, rather than completely green. They didn’t have a position for me but through their relationships with other studios and managers, they sent me to Protocol Studios behind North London University on the Holloway Road and I got the job. The owners had recently taken over; they were young guys and they started me as an assistant engineer.

I worked on a mixture of projects including people from PWL, jazz projects, remixes for Chaka Khan and lots of commercial dance mixes, as that was a big thing at the time. I worked on some hip hop stuff like Smith & Mighty from the Bristol scene, who weren’t really known at the time, and then there was some film and tv music as well as some of the Britpop bands like Suede and Pulp. We were known as a mid-budget studio so record companies would send in bands that they didn’t want to spend too much money on. I trained up some of the new tape-ops who didn’t have any technical knowledge and I worked on all different kinds of music whereas some of the other engineers would only do specific styles. I found some of the grungy shoe-gaze bands a bit dull musically; they were nice people but the music all seemed the same. Although my background was recording live bands, I was a bit more interested in the people who were trying new things. All the new technology was developing and it was an interesting learning curve for me. Sometimes acts would bring in their own producer and engineer so I would just assist them.

SISSY: You’re obviously a really competent engineer, so why haven’t you done the obvious thing and made the transition to becoming a producer?

MARCUS: Well, things became a bit stagnant for me at the studio in terms of some of the work I was having to do. Then unfortunately the business started struggling so my pay versus workload ratio wasn’t too good. I started looking for other job options, and almost went to be an engineer at the Roundhouse studios in Camden but it didn’t work out. I think I made the odd wrong turn and didn’t do what some other engineers had done which was to stick to one area and start excelling in that. I was quite content as an engineer because there were so many different aspects to it. I think some people want to call themselves a producer because they want to feel they put their own stamp or have a big effect on a record, which is not really where I was coming from. I’d rather do my part really well, without feeling the need to control things. And I wasn’t thinking about the money side of it; royalties and that kind of thing.

Eventually, I started doing freelance stuff, which was better for my sanity. I did a film score for Mike Leigh through knowing an actress/musician called Marianne Jean Baptiste who was in Secrets and Lies and an Oscar nominee. She wasn’t in this film, she was singing some of the music so I was working with her and a musician called Tony Remy. I think in terms of building up a career as an engineer, I didn’t spend long enough as an in-house engineer, whereas lots of engineers spent years doing that and developing relationships with producers.

I’m not a complete geek but I think I’ve been able to help inspire confidence in the people I work with through knowing about the nuts and bolts of the developing technology. We’ve constantly been battling with new technology for years now and it’s kind of reached a peak, but during the 90’s there was a sense of there being all this new stuff to choose from but none of it was really perfected in terms of how to use it the best way, and what was going to be reliable, so I kept up on all that. But you can still put a microphone in my hand and I’ll know what to do with it!

Although I’m not a musician, I learned a lot about music through listening to arrangements and parts over and over again; you have to be musical to drop in a drummer or guitarist in a complicated bit. If you don’t develop that you can’t do the job, so it’s important to ask questions and learn if you’re not a musician.

SISSY: Do you have any favourite bits of equipment?

MARCUS: Apart from the hassle involved lining everything up, I don’t think you can beat a good analogue 24-track 2inch tape machine. All desks have their merits so it’s hard to choose one but Neve desks had a lot of care and attentions put into the building of them sonically, and I like some of the old American stuff like API consoles because they have a certain sound. As a real functional desk, I like the old SSL’s because of their functionality, and SSL still make good analogue gear. When SSL brought their automated desks out, it played a big part in pop music during the 80’s and 90’s. I rate quite a few microphones like Sony, Neuman and AKG… all of those are good for different things.

SISSY: Would you agree with Flood that 2inch tape sounds best and CD quality is horrible?

MARCUS: He has a point in that we’re making high quality music, even on digital systems and then translating it down to much lower resolution systems like CD and MP3. You could say the same about cassettes but not so much about vinyl. It’s about what you deliver to the audience; there’s a whole generation of people who think that MP3’s are the way everything sounds. We have to try and make the delivery format not let down the quality that’s been recorded on the expensive studio equipment.

SISSY: How do you think things have changed through new computer technology and recording software?

MARCUS: I can’t argue with the fact that recording technology has improved, but I don’t think the music has improved as a result of it. If that was the case then all the old music that was made on old technology would be redundant, but it isn’t. I think it’s created fast-food style music production and it stems not just from how it’s made, but from the delivery, the way it’s presented and the artists in general. We’ve been using technology to fix a lot of things when you should just get people to do it right in the first place, or not bother to try and fix it because it had a good vibe even though it wasn’t perfect. Often mistakes will be fixed by cutting and pasting parts, purely because you’re watching the clock due to the finances, when you used to make the musician stay until they’d played it right. Things sound better when the whole song has been played from start to finish, rather than chopped around… you can tell the difference.

Some people are striving not to make things sound so clinical but they’re battling because they’re still relying on the computer so it will have a major influence. There are a lot of albums that sound kind of plain, not because the sounds are synthetic but because something’s been going on in the editing and tweaking and perfecting with the computer.

I think we’re coming full circle now though because people are buying all the old vintage equipment to make things sound more natural. It’s difficult to beat some of that old equipment because it was expensive for a reason… it’s really good! We should use computers as tools and not abuse them; we think technology is making us more efficient but it isn’t. We listen differently because we’ve got a screen in front of us; you can mix a record without seeing the waveforms and yet we’re using our eyes to analyse it instead of our ears, when music is meant to be listened to, not looked at… Don’t stare at music!

Contact Marcus at yinandyang69@mac.com

Tags: Asian Dub Foundation, Craig David, Kylie Minogue, Marcus Lindsay, Massive Attack, Sound Engineer, Tech
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Neil Martin, Sony/BMG Marketing Manager

Friday, March 9th, 2007

Neil Martin... musician friendly marketing man

When you talk to musicians who have had disastrous relationships with record companies, or who have had releases that have failed to sell, you will often hear from them that ‘it was down to bad marketing’. Conversely, marketing departments are often blamed for pushing rubbish acts, and launching them in such a way that they are forced into public consciousness thus achieving a degree of success that more credible musicians feel these acts don’t deserve. With all this in mind, Sissy meets up with Neil Martin, marketing manager at Sony/BMG to get his side of the story and hopefully find out the truth of the matter; can marketing make or break a band, regardless of talent? Is it true that anyone could become famous and successful if enough money and imagination is spent on them?

You might imagine that your typical marketing man would be hard-nosed, cynical and manipulative but Neil is none of these things. He’s humble, modest, unassuming and a genuine music fan who has managed to retain a degree of innocence despite working at the rockface where music merges uncomfortably with business.

SISSY: What’s your official job title?

NEIL: I’m currently Marketing Manager for Catalogue, which is essentially material over 18 months old. But for 12 years I was doing frontline Marketing Management, looking after UK bands and international acts, marketing them in the UK and breaking them, or not breaking them! I did a lot of work for Epic which is a Sony/BMG label, from 1990-2002. I worked a really broad roster of artists including Motorhead, The Stranglers, The Godfathers, New Model Army, Headswim and we signed The Lightening Seeds, who we probably had most success with in marketing terms. Then International Acts I’ve worked with include Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath who I’ve worked with for years, Pearl Jam, Korn and Screaming Trees.

SISSY: Can you describe what your job entails? Legend has it that being a marketing man involves lots of cocaine and a huge expense account!

NEIL: Those were the glory days! That sort of thing doesn’t really happen any more in these frugal times. Basically, the best way of summing up what the marketing manager does is… they are the product manager for their roster of artists within the company. So that means that if they are the marketing person for an act, they are totally responsible for managing them through the company. In the first instance they work with the A&R man who brought the act to the company; hopefully getting to know the band early on, if they’re a live act, going to see them play and generally getting a vision for how they can be marketed. It’s also good to form a relationship with the act’s manager if they have one, help find a booking agent and get a good team around them. So initially marketing involves being the point of contact between the artist and record company.

Then you would commission a photo shoot, and start to look into getting some artwork ready. One of the great things about this job is that all the acts are so different; you’re not dealing with marketing baked beans and putting tins on a shelf, you’re dealing with creative human beings who have all got their own opinions. Some of them are passionately interested in art, some are artists themselves as well as musicians so they contribute a lot. Others may not have a clue or don’t care and need a lot of direction so the marketing manager gets to be more creative. Then it’s about finding the right creative people that the artist will hit it off with. The next stage involves scheduling a release date for the first single, then the album or whatever releases have been decided upon. Then you’d be looking at commissioning and making a video. Next the cds and covers have to be physically made. For radio, you need to get a radio promo package together, which is part of what the marketing department does in conjunction with the promotions and PR people who may be within the company or outside agencies employed by the act. The marketing man is like a conduit; once an act has been assigned to you, you’re expected to produce all the things the artist needs for radio and tv. After all that comes the actual marketing of the product itself, a lot of which is now online or digital. Then there’s the traditional media like press, radio and tv advertising, which if a project takes off involves making commercials.

SISSY: How does the budget get allocated for an artist?

NEIL: You would sit down and agree one with the MD of the label itself. If you’re breaking a new British band, for example, you would have a figure in mind but that can change very quickly depending on how momentum picks up for the act. The actual amount will vary depending on how much it cost to sign the band, record them. What you’ll find is if you sign a band for around £100,000 you’ll initially have a really decent marketing budget and then if it starts to take off, the budget will increase correspondingly. The budget may have to include tour support of £50,000 depending on the contract, plus around the same again for a video.

SISSY: Is all of that recoupable from the artists’ royalties?

NEIL: Again, it depends on the contract, but as a rule, what we would provide as a major record company would be sales and marketing, press and promotions. But there are other costs above and beyond those that would generally be recoupable.

SISSY: Some bands prefer to employ press and plugging agents outside their record label. Does that cause offence to the in-house departments and result in them not working so hard for the artist?

NEIL: Not usually; it depends who it is. If it’s a good artist having success, everyone obviously wants to be associated with that. People at record companies are no different to the artists in that respect. You do have bands that come with outside press agents, but the more people there are involved within the company, the more exciting it is, which generates good feeling about the band.

SISSY: Have you been a part of any particularly notorious marketing stunts or ploys?

NEIL: The one that springs to mind is when we floated a giant statue of Michael Jackson down the Thames. It was to promote the Dangerous album, which had a huge statue of him on the front cover. So we hired a barge and floated it down the river, which got on the national news and in all the papers. What you’re trying to do with something like that, and it’s getting harder and harder, is to create something that generates news, that gets you on to things that money can’t buy like the News at Ten, the front page of the newspaper or radio coverage like mentions on a phone-in show; anything that gets people talking about the band.

SISSY: So what does marketing catalogue entail?

NEIL: It’s kid in a sweetshop time! You get to revisit old albums and remaster, repackage and re-release them. We have a synch department who are looking to place tracks on adverts and soundtracks, and one act that’s enjoyed success recently in that way is The Only Ones, whose track ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ was on the Vodaphone ad. It’s actually my all-time favourite song and I wasn’t sure about it being appropriated for that advert, but the upshot has been that the band has reformed despite saying that hell would freeze over before they would get back together! They are doing some gigs and have loads of festival dates lined up. So we are looking at the 3 albums they recorded for our label as well as all the B sides of the singles and extended remixes. We’ll get lots of photos from the era and maybe get a journalist or someone who understands the band to write an essay on what each album meant and we’ll re-release them around the band reforming.

SISSY: I actually think that part of your job will increase in the future while investment in new bands will decrease because it’s so risky in today’s environment.

NEIL: I think there will always be people who want to buy cds. We’re kind of in a bit of a scared, uncertain stage at the moment where people think it’s all going online or digital, but people like myself who are working with catalogue don’t see that yet. It’s a bit like when vinyl was considered dead by 1992, and now it’s back with a vengence and getting more and more popular. Certainly major record companies have been a bit slow to react to the internet; 7 years ago they were burying their heads in the sand which caused a lot of problems we’re still scrambling to deal with, but I think there’s room for both cd’s and downloads. There’s an enormous population of people in this country who are over 35 and still buy cds. In marketing terms we call him ‘£50 man’… who goes into a record shop and thinks nothing of spending £50 a time on cds. Those people will be buying music for at least another 20 or 30 years. Then there’s a huge ‘grey market’ of pensioners; there’s never been so many pensioners in this country who grew up being into music. The thing to bear in mind is, the music industry is still a very young industry; Elvis was only 50 years ago. The industry has kind of fumbled its way along on gut feeling and it’s never really been based on a great business model. So the interesting thing is, the people who started the industry 50 years ago are all retiring by now and there’s a new breed coming through. If you compare it to the motor car industry or book publishing, the music industry is still changing and no other industry has been through so many changes in such a short space of time, in terms of both styles and formats. I can definitely recommend the book ‘Black Vinyl, White Powder’ by Simon Napier Bell to anyone who wants to discover the heritage of the British music scene and all the changes it’s been through.

SISSY: Lots of artists blame poor sales on inadequate marketing… what’s your opinion on that?

NEIL: The Rolling Stones were the first to do that in about 1964! Their Manager, Andrew Loog Oldham told the band to say in interviews that they hated their record company because it made them look like rebels, more risqué than the Beatles. Bands like Oasis are still doing that today; I think it’s great… it’s how things should be. Otherwise you can get too comfy and complacent. Sure, record companies can make mistakes; the big ones are enormous organisations who have worked out their priorities and may not be able to allocate the type of budget each individual band would ideally want.

SISSY: I have a pet theory, that punk inadvertently created what it set out to destroy; before punk, to be a successful musician you had to learn to play for years so you were really good and possibly be an art college graduate or something as well. Then punk came along and was anti all that. The lesson the industry seemed to learn was that you could take any couple of kids off the street and as long as they had the right hairstyle and cool shoes you could market them and they’d make it. So instead of having to sign drug-addled reprobate punk bands, you could turn a couple of malleable, clean-cut and obedient kids into pop stars. What do you think?

NEIL: It’s funny you say that because I read a brilliant article recently that said the advent of the X Factor could be seen as a terrible side-effect of punk! The essence of punk was that anybody could do it and the legacy of that idea is shows like the X Factor and Pop Idol. The music industry is many things; it is a broad church so you do have things like X Factor or Westlife at the teeny end of it where arguably you can just get a bunch of herberts off the street, stick them together and write some songs for them then promote them in the right way. They are manufactured but that has happened ever since pop was born, and will probably continue to.

SISSY: Do you have any favourite bands at the moment, either musically or in terms of being good fun to promote?

NEIL: I hate this question because I always go completely blank!

SISSY: Personally I really rate the new Arctic Monkeys single… they had that first album hype and massive success and could have easily become a one-hit wonder, but they seem to have learned a lot while they’ve been touring; that if they want to make it on the international rock arena they have to subscribe to the great rock tradition and reference their Sabbath, ACDC and Zep. They seem to have done that with their new single, which is basically intelligent heavy rock without fuzz! So now they can make it in America and Germany… everywhere.

NEIL: That’s true, they’ve been a bit parochial up until now but it looks like they’ve gone broader in their music. But there’s no current bands really grabbing me by the throat. Maybe it’s a wider thing really; I think life in general is quite dull at the moment in terms of all areas of the arts. I don’t think music is any different from the other arts in the respect that it’s kind of waiting for a revolution; that’s where Britain seems to be at the moment. One person I have really liked over the last year or so is Paolo Nutini who I think is fantastic. It’s not the sort of thing I normally gravitate towards but I just think he’s a real talent, a fantastic songwriter and he’s got humour as well.

SISSY: And his voice is quite distinctive. An A&R man once said to me that it’s not important to be a technically good singer, as long as your voice is instantly recognisable as you. For example Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream isn’t a technically good singer but he doesn’t sound like anyone else.

NEIL: It’s the same thing with Ozzy, the Arctic Monkeys, Oasis or Bob Dylan; it’s star quality. I saw Bob Dylan last night and he just kind of drones on but there’s something about him that’s unbelievable and he’s incredibly cool. There’s not enough star quality around in my opinion.

SISSY: Or maybe there is but it isn’t being given an arena in which to develop at the moment?

NEIL: I disagree; I think real stars will always emerge because cream rises to the top.

SISSY: That’s an old political argument; capitalism assumes that cream rises to the top and socialism assumes that scum rises to the top so the weaker elements of society need protecting from the scum. Applied to the music industry, I would say the more left-field artists, less obvious acts, or ‘growers’ need time to develop, something which doesn’t always happen in an instant success or market-driven environment.

NEIL: Being really successful always comes back to the same thing, it’s still all about the song. If you’ve got a good strong song you’ll get there. In a way, I think things were worse in the past when you just had Radio 1 and 2 with strict playlists, and nowhere else to go. Although I think XFM is a prime example of a radio station that’s got it all at its fingertips but only has 500,000 listeners because it still adheres to a playlist and won’t actually go out on a limb and see what people are doing, instead of playing the same few records every hour. They should be broadening their remit and saying ‘here’s a load of new music, it’s really exciting!’ and becoming something that could be really influential, creating an audience that’s willing to be stimulated. XFM doesn’t do that; it goes so far and then it’s just Capital radio all over again.

SISSY: That’s kind of what I’m saying; everything seems to be playing it safe, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Things have to be instantly popular whereas great bands can sometimes be less immediate and more difficult to understand. For example, Led Zeppelin were dismissed in the UK when they first started and had to go to America to become successful. In today’s climate, they wouldn’t have got a record deal.

NEIL: That’s true. REM would never have made it past their second album, even U2 probably would have been dropped! Bands like the Godfathers and Headswim might never have got signed in the first place.

SISSY: You were saying you think the live scene is quite vibrant at the moment, despite the general decrease of revenue in the music industry?

NEIL: I think the live scene has been really vibrant for the last year to 18 months, and even if that is because recorded music sales have decreased, it can only be a good thing. If you’re a musician, that’s what it’s all about; it’s not about sitting in your bedroom recording, it’s about being able to do it live as well.

SISSY: Do you think it’s thriving as in unsigned bands are playing, or do you think that it’s mostly bands who are already in the industry, as in they have management or a deal already?

NEIL: My impression was that at venues like the Barfly, Dublin Castle or the Metro, a lot of it is American bands or more established British bands who can pull a bit of a crowd, which gives unknown bands a chance to support them. Obviously they need to have got to a certain level already or they wouldn’t be given those gigs.

SISSY: Is it true that you have to have a manager these days in order to get taken seriously by a record company?

NEIL: No, that’s not necessarily true; we have signed bands without a manager. In some ways it can be an advantage not to have a manager as there are an awful lot of managers who don’t know what they’re doing and are a pain in the proverbial! There are bands who have a mate representing them at the beginning, and they can be a bit green behind the ears. They might be good at booking local gigs or getting a rehearsal space for the band, but when it gets beyond that, you need someone who knows what they’re doing in order to get to the next level.

SISSY: As a marketing manager, do you have company directives to find a certain amount of bands each year?

NEIL: Certainly, the A&R department are looking for bands all the time. Sony/BMG has just started a new initiative, which is basically a blog page. We’re telling bands and A&R not to send in demos; save the money because it’s all on line now. We’ve got this blogging intiative set up so that if you want to send in your music, you can post it up on the site and we’ll give it a listen. I think about 800 bands have posted stuff so far in the 4 weeks since it started. The addresses are columbiademos.co.uk and rcademos.co.uk…. Columbia and RCA are the 2 frontline labels within Sony/BMG. It’s worth checking out; there’s a social networking aspect to the site as well and blogs by people at the record companies saying what they are up to at the moment, but the main objective is to attract artists who want to get signed. It got some good press when it first launched.

SISSY: How did you get started in this career?

NEIL: There was an awful lot of luck involved; it’s not something you can train for. I studied something completely different…Maritime Studies which was completely random! I was interested in shipping and air travel but my passion was always music. When I left university I got a job with HMV and partly enjoyed it because it widened my musical knowledge and I got discount cd’s, but I didn’t really like the retail environment. I wanted to work with bands or for a record company. I was clearly never going to be talented enough to go on stage so I decided I would have to live my live vicariously through other people who could. So I joined CBS in their telesales department with a view to getting into marketing. I wanted to work for them because I loved the Stranglers and they were on CBS. Luckily enough I had a really good manager who saw my enthusiasm and gave me a chance. So I worked my way up, plus I was lucky.

SISSY: Who are your favourite bands of all time?

NEIL: As I said before, I love the Stranglers, but my musical appreciation is so much wider now; when I started I was a bit blinkered. I think the way people consume music now is so different to 20 years ago. When I was a kid it was more tribal; you were a punk or a skinhead or a mod. If you didn’t have the right shirt on you’d get beaten up! It’s not like that any more because everybody likes a bit of rap and a bit of rock or indie. There just aren’t those divisions now.

SISSY: Can you give any advice to people wanting to work in the music industry?

NEIL: The only bit of advice I’ve ever given to anybody in the 20 years I’ve been doing this is; whatever you’re doing, do it well. If you get your head down and do things well, someone will notice. And if you show enthusiasm and an aptitude, people pick up on that. in the music industry, people thrive on enthusiasm because it’s all about vibe and gut instinct. We can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds marketing things, but it’s more about the visceral feeling than logic. So if you want to get into the industry on any level, if you get an opportunity, just seize it and give it your all and it will be recognised!

Tags: BMG, Marketing, Neil Martin, Sony
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Tony Harris – Recording Engineer with Attitude

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

Tony… waving the flag for good songs

Tony Harris or ‘Nod’ to his friends is a rare phenomenon; a studio engineer with over 25 years experience who is happy to be just that without hankering to make the move to become a producer. In a way, he’s a typical ‘old school’ engineer in his no bullshit approach, but he’s kept abreast of new developments in technology and is equally comfortable recording on a laptop as he is in a 48-track studio.

SISSY: What would you describe yourself as?

TONY: Primarily I’m a recording engineer but at the moment I’m working at the British Library national sound archive, digitising. I’m transferring tapes of sociological interviews to digital format, backing everything up into a massive hard drive to be preserved for the masses. I have to do 1200 of those during a six-month contract so it’s like a six-month freelance gig

SISSY: Can you tell us a bit about what else you’ve done as a recording engineer?

TONY: I’ve been an engineer since 1979; I’ve worked on recordings by the Sisters of Mercy, 10,000 Maniacs, Sinead O’Connor, Bad Company, Rolf Harris, the Coronation Street Album… loads of things. The Coronation Street Album was a celebration of 35 years of the show with lots of the actors doing a track each. It was amazingly good fun because we worked at Abbey Road studios for three months; it was one of the best gigs I’ve done because now everyone wants to do an album really quickly and cheaply instead of taking their time.

SISSY: Tell us about how you got started; were you originally a musician?

TONY: No, I got into music comparatively late when I was about 12 or 13. But at the same time, I was a bit of a swot at school and I liked biology, chemistry, maths and physics. I was buying more and more records and getting more into science. Then I saw this magazine, which had an article on how a recording studio works. I picked it up and it had pictures of mixing desks and things, and I thought it was interesting because it seemed to be halfway between science and music… it was to do with music but also it was to do with being logical, organised and scientific.

SISSY: I heard that as a teenager you had pictures of mixing desks on your bedroom wall instead of the usual scantily clad females. Is this true?

TONY: Absolutely! When I was 15, all I wanted to do was to work in a studio.

SISSY: How did you get your first job?

TONY: I wrote to every studio in the world a hundred times! When I left school I was temping at Debenhams for about a year because I couldn’t get work at a studio. When I was 18 or 19 I got my first job at a studio down in Worthing. I couldn’t get a job in London because I lived in Guildford, so when I had an interview with a London studio, the people who lived closer would get the job, It was that catch 22 situation of I couldn’t get a place to live in London unless I had a job and vice-versa. I worked at the studio in Worthing for about a year, then left because the guy who ran it was a bit of a nightmare. I was doing the jobs of engineer, tape-op, tea boy and cleaner for hardly any money and no one else was working there for me to learn things from. Then I moved to London and did temp work cleaning pots and pans and packing shirts while looking for another job in a studio. I had a flat in Victoria and each day after work, I would cycle in a different direction, knocking on studio doors.

I eventually got some freelance work for Odyssey studios in Marble Arch… I think Jazz FM are in that building now. They asked me if I was available for a session… they told me the producer was called Connie Plank, the band was Ultravox, then they gave me the keys. So I had the keys to a studio I had never worked at before and I was supposed to be in charge for the weekend while Ultravox were in… it’s amazing because I could have been anyone and stolen everything! The session was to remix a single called ‘the Voice’. It was funny because I didn’t know where anything was in the studio and I had to search for the kitchen and the air conditioning etc. Anyway, I survived the experience and did a few bits of work for Odyssey over the next months. It was a really cool place to be because while I was there, they had Thin Lizzy in one studio, Black Sabbath in another and the Who came in at one point. A few months later I got a job at Livingstone Studios in Wood Green, which is still going today and has lots of big bands in.

I was originally taken on as a tape-op/bottle washer/tea maker and I helped build studio two. Myself and the other tape-op helped the owner, Nick Kinsey to build it although we had no building experience! I ended up working at Livingstone for the next ten years, from 1981-91.

SISSY: Tell us about how the 1980’s were compared to now.

TONY: It was the beginning of the end in some ways for music, because it was the start of technology taking over from ‘real’ music. I didn’t mind using SSL for automated mixing but it was when sequencers and samplers and Fairlights came in and everyone was spending £15000 on an Emulator One or a Synclavier that things went downhill. Everyone was obsessed with making records that were the most in tune and in time possible, but not succeeding. There’s a lot of records from the 80’s that are unlistenable because everything has a stupid big sample of a snare drum and it’s all a bit out of tune with loads of chorus and things on it. I hated it; it was pseudo science with people trying to look like they were clever and that they knew what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology if it’s doing something useful but it’s annoying when you’ve been in the studio for 2 days and you can’t get the code on the tape in order to organise a click track so the band have all committed suicide or split up and left because they’re bored out of their minds!I think things did recover quite soon though, because good sense prevailed in the end. There are lots of records from around 1983-85 that sound totally appalling. 1960’s and 70’s records sound great and then once things like Nirvana and grunge came along at the end of the 80’s, everything sounded fine again and has ever since, but there was this horrendous chunk in between! A few people got it right, like Trevor Horn who was really good, but everyone else was trying to copy him and failed. Also, it was a time of complete stupidity where you had every man jack from America who’s ever made tea for Prince or Madonna, coming to this country to be an American producer and getting £500,000 budgets when they’d never actually done anything. They were imported by A&R dimwits who had no idea, who were impressed by a credit as a tea boy on a Prince record or something. Budgets for albums were ridiculous by today’s standards; obviously you can’t really compare because technology has moved on in terms of you can afford to have a studio at home. But then, the studio would be costing the artist around £1200 per day, my fee was £250 per day and although I tried to avoid the really long sessions, I did a Runrig album for 10 weeks, so you can see how that cost a lot. Some people would spend a year making an album at Livingstone, hiring every session musician you can imagine, and hiring loads of extra stuff in. that was also the fashion in the 80’s; to hire in racks of valve EQ’s and effects. There was always ‘this week’s thing’ that you had to have and all that was costing as much as the studio itself.That sort of scenario can still happen today though; I did some recording 18 months ago with this 18 year old Irish guy called George Murphy who’s got a fantastic voice… he sounds like Shane McGowan’s dad! He had a number one single in Ireland so you’d think they’d try and bang an album out quickly to capitalise on that success, but 18 months later it’s still not finished. It’s probably costing 100’s of thousands of pounds. The first album was all covers and was done really quickly but now he’s writing his own stuff; I know you can argue that it’s the artist’s right to express themselves creatively but… do it in stages and start with a couple of original tracks rather than spending all that time in an expensive studio learning to write!

SISSY: Do you think that developments in technology have benefited music or harmed it?

TONY: I think it’s entirely neutral in effect. It’s a tool; intelligent rational people using it make good records and morons or coke addled fools don’t! There’s lots of records now that use a lot of tech and sound great and have been done in a way that you couldn’t make records before, for example the Eels and the Flaming Lips who are farting around with technology in a kind of 60’s approach to making music whilst still being high-tech.

SISSY: Do you think the effect on the industry in general is neutral as well?

TONY: Yes… I mean what’s better? Having 10,000 records out there, which cost £1000 each to make, or one record that cost a million. People can only listen to a finite number of records in their life so you could say it’s good to have choice, but then there are a lot of not very good records out there. It is better if people have learnt their craft; the brain behind doing stuff is more important than the stuff.

The internet has made it easier for people to put stuff out there, but it hasn’t increased the quality of what’s on offer. Look at myspace; it has something like 40,000,000 people on it and everyone’s got a track on myspace. It’s inevitable, and the same applies to TV, radio, art writing; computers have made it possible for everyone to make their stuff accessible. Sometimes I think it would be great if everything got erased and we had to start again! But you can’t now; you can’t imagine a world where you can’t hear Sergeant Pepper or see the Mona Lisa because there’s millions of copies of these all over the world and more and more are being generated all the time… you’ll never get rid of them, we’re stuck with them for all time. We’re drowning in it really, and to make an impact gets more and more difficult.

SISSY: What are your main influences?

TONY: I’d wave the flag for a good song that sounds crap rather than a crap song that sounds great! I was totally influenced by punk, being 17 in 1977. Punk was all about getting out there and doing whatever you wanted to do; that Eddie and the Hot Rods record was actually pivotal. Favourite albums would be Never Mind the Bollocks, London Calling, Ziggy Stardust, and Physical Graffiti but not necessarily for sonic reasons. Sonically, I really do like the Flaming Lips, the new Arcade Fire album, and anything the White Stripes do; I think Jack White is an absolute genius and everything I’ve heard by him is madly good. He takes some wild risks but it works. My favourite yardstick record of all time is that Jellyfish album, Bellybutton, which is an extraordinary record.

As an engineer, I was influenced by Roy Thomas Baker and all those early Queen records; I loved him. You got the impression he really had to work hard to get all those things on a track and that he had to make final decisions as he went. They had to get things right so they could bounce them down free up tracks for more layers. Not like now where you can get hundreds of tracks on Pro-tools and they’re all full of rubbish that won’t get used in the mix.

SISSY: Can you give any tips on recording?

TONY: This is where I sound really Victorian… write some good songs, learn how to play your instruments, put some new strings on your guitars and heads on your drums and make sure you can play your songs and make a sound you like yourselves. Put a microphone in a rehearsal room and if it sounds good, you’re halfway there.

When it comes to recording drums, I’m glad that the world seems to have gone back to reality with drum sounds. My favourite sounds have always been the Led Zeppelin albums and I’m a massive Glynn Johns fan; all the records he did sound great. The drums sound like you are there in the room and the sound doesn’t date. He recorded the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the first Eagles album, all the greats. Glynn johns would be one of my absolute heroes in lots of ways.

With guitar and bass sounds, you can make more difference to the sound by moving where you hit the strings with the pick by a centimetre, then by moving the mic to a different part of a speaker cone. New strings will always make a better sound. With mics, I’m a Senheiser 421 man all the way… I love them. I use them for lots of things including guitars. Vocal sounds are very hit and miss; I generally try and use an expensive top quality mic, as long as it sounds good.

SISSY: With all the people you’ve worked with, can you say what quality makes someone good?

TONY: I don’t really believe in star quality, I think as long as the song is good, that’s what counts. But having said that, I once worked with Joe Strummer and he really did have it. He knew what he was doing and what he was going for. I’d like to get a t-shirt made that says ‘a bad decision is better than no decision’ because no-one makes decisions… they do a hundred takes of something for no reason because they can’t decide what they really want.

SISSY: Do you have any favourite guitars etc when it comes to recording?

TONY: Not really, people can turn up with the most unlikely looking instruments and then when they play, it sounds fantastic. Someone else will turn up with brand new top-of-the-range gear and sound awful. I’ve never noticed a correlation. Simple is usually better though; I prefer passive basses to active ones. One of the most important things, I think, is to use API mic pre-amps. The mic is the most important thing, and the mic amps come a close second. I record everything through them because when I push the fader up, the sound is the same as it was in the room with the instrument. I also have a theory that any equipment from America with an ‘X’ in it is always good!… MXR, Ampex, Lexicon, Teletronix, Electroharmonix, DBX… they’re all good.

SISSY: What are you currently doing and what will you be doing in the future?

TONY: Because of what I previously ranted about; that everyone has a home studio now, I decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. So I’ve got a pile of gear together which hasn’t cost much. I’ve got Pro-tools, a hard disk recorder, a little desk, mic pre-amps and loads of good mics that I’ve accumulated over the years and I’m taking bookings as a mobile studio. Going back to what I was saying about how old records were made, I’ve always loved the idea of using a mobile studio. Rooms that aren’t in studios can sound better sometimes. Radiohead have been doing that lately and Led Zeppelin recorded in big old houses. It makes sense and I like the idea of it being an unrepeatable event; you can get a good vibe going, have fun, take loads of photos and enjoy the process.

I charge between £200 and £250 per day depending on the location. If someone has a nice room there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make a great record that way. Then I can do mixing at home on Pro-tools. I recently did an album with the Bikini Beach Band in Stoke Newington in a Hawaiian furniture maker’s shop. They are an instrumental surf band and we recorded it in 2 days, then mixed for 4 days. They contacted me through a guy called Mike Gibson from the Godfathers; we also did his solo album at my house. I can do projects involving one or two people at home; there just isn’t room there to do a whole band. You can contact me at tony@nodharris.com and my website is www.nodharris.com my mobile is called New River Studios, or go to myspace.com/newriverrecordings

Tags: Recording Engineer, Recording Studio, Tony Harris
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Sandy Dillon – Underground Mistress of the Blues

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

Sandy… getting in the mood for Christmas!

Sissy first heard the music of Sandy Dillon a few years ago, and couldn’t believe that this woman remains an underground artist despite her highly original talent. She plays piano and keyboards and sings her own hauntingly twisted swampy bluesesque songs; her voice somehow combines the vibes of Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart, but channelled through the vocal chords of a diminutive girl. The musical backdrop to her voice is often minimal and evocative but also conveys that there is a kind of warped humorous undercurrent to some of the songs. Sandy has released four albums to date; Skating (1996), Electric Chair (1999), East Overshoe (2001), and Pull the Strings (2006). She continues to tour sporadically, mostly in Europe where there seems to be a greater understanding of her uncompromising material. One of Sandy’s long standing band members is Ray Majors (on dobro, banjo and guitar) who used to play in 70’s legend Mott the Hoople and recent incarnations of the Yardbirds. Previous live line-ups have included Ed Harcourt (on bass), members of labelmates Alabama 3 and Katie Tunstall’s drummer Luke Bullen. Another sorely missed long standing collaborator was Fripp-esque guitarist Steve Bywater, Sandy’s husband who tragically died in 2000.

SISSY: Where are you from and how did you get started playing music?

SANDY: Boston, USA. I played classical music as a child… I was quite a good pianist, although there are hundreds of very gifted 13 year old pianists in the States and lots of competition. I was one of those kids who got straight A’s at school, not because I was so smart but because I understood what I had to do… I came across as a responsible student but really I was just trying to get all the work out of the way. I was like that in the day, and then in the night time I was seriously delinquent and would be out clubbing. I looked older than I was and had a fake ID so I could get into gigs and things. Aerosmith were a local band I’d go and see… they’re a great blues band. I was also listening to Hendrix and things like that and I suddenly thought to myself, if I was sitting at a table with Mozart and Beethoven, they’d be going ‘Hey, what’s your latest thing?’ and they’d all be talking about their latest compositions and I’d have to say ‘Well, all I’m doing is copying you’. I didn’t know how to write music, I was just good at reading, but if you took the sheet music away I was stuck!

SISSY: Did you study music at college?

SANDY: Yes, I went to Berkeley University in Boston to study music. I was playing jazz piano and I did orchestral scoring; that’s what I really wanted to do, I wasn’t into rock or anything. The big heroes at the time were jazz players like Pat Metheny, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, John McGlaughlin; fusion stuff where you had to play 20 zillion notes a second. At the same time, punk was starting so in my split personality I was into jazz by day and started going to punk gigs by night! So I didn’t fit well into the school… punk music was absolutely laughed at because it was made by people who supposedly couldn’t play. They didn’t understand the whole ethos of punk music… the DIY ethic and so on. So I used to write little songs when I was at Berkley but I didn’t play them to anybody because they had a snobbish attitude and I could only write songs to a certain level.

SISSY: What did you do when you left college?

SANDY: When I moved to New York after I graduated from Berkley, the only jobs I could get were playing in piano bars. That was really tough because you had to play six 45 minute sets with no repeats! In the States, because there are so many people doing it you can’t afford to specialize… you might have to go and play jazz gigs so you have to know your standards. Then some of the bars I played in wanted singing as well as piano and if I’d hired a proper singer I would have had to split the money. So I decided to fake it! I’d choose songs that had very small vocal parts because I don’t have a big range. Then I started sneaking in my own lyrics over a basic 12 bar blues form, mainly because I couldn’t remember all the words to a song! It was like writing on the spot to fill my 45 minutes. People started asking for those songs again but I couldn’t always remember them because I never wrote them down, so I tried to remember each song by one word! It took me all that time since college to learn to write properly.

I also used to play in Japanese Enka bars; before there was Karaoke there were these bars where people could go up to the piano player and give them 50 bucks to play ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’ or something and they would sing… it’s that whole Japanese thing of humiliating yourself in front of your business colleagues to put things on an even level. I was earning lots of money because these guys got to know ‘the funny little girl piano player’. I wasn’t really suitable for the normal hotel bars because I didn’t sound like Leann Rimes or someone and I had weird short hair so I also used to play in a famous gay bar on 53rd and 2nd which was know as Boy’s Town where all the rich upper-east men went cruising for young waiters. One night I looked up and saw Tennessee Williams; he lived around the corner and he was always out cruising for rent boys. At the time I was living in the Chelsea hotel… I had a flat there. I know it sounds like a bit of a cliché! But really it was because they had a phone there I could use and I didn’t need a deposit because I moved in as a hotel guest then changed it to a lease. When you’re 20 years old and out representing yourself in New York on your own it’s scary but the Chelsea had security guards so if I came back late at night it was safe and they’d be checking out your visitors to make sure no weirdos came in. I needed that because I was a bit wild and got myself into the most ridiculous situations!

SISSY: How did your first record deal happen?

SANDY: It came about as a result of Tony Defries of MainMan (David Bowie’s old manager) seeing me play the role of Janis Joplin on Broadway at the St. James Theatre in..um…1982. The show was called ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll – the First 5000 Years’. It was great, in Act 2 I got to pretend to be Wendy O’Williams from the Plasmatics with a chainsaw and plastic tits with gaffer tape on the nipples! Funnily enough, that was the biggest money I have ever earned, per hourly rate! Anyhow, Tony liked my performance, I played him some of my songs on a piano, signed up with MainMan and got a deal with Electra in New York. I was thrilled!

SISSY: What made you move to the UK?

SANDY: After Electra declined to release either of the 2 records I made for them, MainMan moved me over to London with my then producer, Mick Ronson to try out some studios etc. We only had one release, on EMI Priority Records in 1985, a single with a double A side called ‘Flowers and Heavy Boys’. ‘Flowers’ was produced by Dieter Meyer (the guy from Yello), and ‘Heavy Boys’ was produced by Ronno. (Mick Ronson) I adored both those men. They both seemed to get what I was about, although in very different ways.

SISSY: You eventually signed to One Little Indian Records; how did that come about?

SANDY: I’d done some recordings and a guy called Tom Astor who ran Orinoco Studios (who has been my manager ever since) heard the stuff and played it to Derek Birkett who runs One Little Indian. He really loved it and said he’d like to put it out and wanted to meet me. He promised not to mess with it and to put it out just as it stood which was fantastic… I’d never had that because all my life until then, record companies would sign me because I was unique, then they’d try to push all the uniqueness out of me. Because it was the early 80’s when I was first doing stuff, women in the music industry were viewed very differently to how they are now. Basically if you wanted to play ball, you had to listen to what you were being told to do, to a certain extent, otherwise you’d have the door shut in your face. So I would compromise and try to make my sound more commercial, and then the record company would turn around and say that the very thing they had liked about me had gone. I always compare it to being a 13 year old girl when your boyfriend wants to have sex with you; you hold out and hold out, then you shag him and he never calls you again!

SISSY: So would you say it’s harder to be taken seriously in the music industry if you’re female.

SANDY: Definitely; but you have to just get on with it, although it does depend what kind of artist you are. The famous story is that Madonna never compromised, but then the sort of act she was meant that she didn’t have to because she wanted to be commercial. But if you’re trying to present something different it’s hard. For example, when I was first signed to Electra they wanted me to be more like Cindy Lauper and they put me in with a hip hop producer so there was my bluesy singing over hip hop beats… some of it sounded good but I wanted to sound like Robert Johnson or something.

SISSY: Who would you say were your main influences as a writer and also what stuff do you love?

SANDY: My main influence is the 5 senses; anything I hear forms the visual, and anything I see or visualize suggests a score to me, then with taste, touch, and even smell the music arrives, usually nearly complete. Improvisation and simultaneous composition/performance is to me the ultimate goal of an artist, so that as you experience anything, you communicate it to others. Everyone is your audience, meaning all communication is performance, and all performance is real. Nothing is really pretend. Even actors who say they are pretending are only pretending to themselves they are. This includes every emotion, and every connection we make with each other, our surroundings and our consciences. The fake is real, and vice versa, it’s all just different versions of a score that keeps changing. From music to film to literature… crap magazines and the Bible, we constantly process this stuff into creative outpourings of what is called artistic. I believe everyone is an artist and that some of us do it publicly by painting or storytelling or songwriting, perhaps individually more desperate to connect to others through the ritual of performance. I also now like to listen to nothing at all but the air of whatever place you find yourself in… if you stop and listen to it, it’s full of surprises. You have to shut up and just chill.

SISSY: Now that you’re in your 40’s do you think it’s a good thing that the type of music you make doesn’t have an age limit?

SANDY: Definitely…in fact it was harder to do when I was younger because people don’t think you have credibility; that you haven’t suffered enough to play the blues. Now I’m going to start saying I’m 56 so people think I look good for my age!

SISSY: Which countries do you have a fanbase in?

SANDY: I have a strange career because I have large cult following in Germany, Austria, especially Belgium, a bit in the Netherlands and funnily enough, Poland, which I’ve never been to but I keep getting emails from. But it’s all people who’ve discovered me themselves; it’s certainly not because of any promotion that’s been done. What’s strange is that the lack of help that I’ve received in one way has been quite cool in that I’m never under pressure to do anything. That’s one of the advantages of being 46. The hardest part is when you’re in that mid-range, in your 30’s, you’re not a young cute thing and you’re not old, but when you get older it’s like you get young boys respecting you. I’m really looking forward to being 60!

SISSY: What effect (if any) do you think the internet has had on music?

SANDY: Huge!! The internet means that artists like myself no longer have to worry about mundane things that aren’t a part of what we are trying to do. Meetings that used to HAVE to happen can now be totally avoided. I owe a lot to the internet for getting my music around the world in a way that no record label would have done for me… the control of radio/tv. Popularity is all meaningless now, because people can find the sound that’s relevant to them via internet. Also, I have now been making records with various people via the internet, some I have met, some I have never met… except through music down the wire… its a good way to represent yourself as there’s no need for any social crap so you can get straight through to raw self expression. It’s interesting, as initially I thought… ‘Oh, I ain’t one of those computer types!!’ I ‘m still fairly acoustic in my approach to everything from getting out of bed to recording live, albeit most of it with judicious amounts of DISTORTION! I recommend distortion as usually the answer to everything; your song, your life… exaggerate anything to the point of destruct-deconstruction and clarity will be revealed. I like working with other artists who aren’t afraid to push the buttons. Sometimes, forward thinking business people can be like that too, and they help realize a lot of creativity.

SISSY: Do you like to use any particular music software?

SANDY: I can only list my hardware: drills, saws, the metal and formica bits from kitchen units, oil drums, and some gaffer tape. I remain slightly old fashioned.

SISSY: Do you have a website or myspace page you’d like to plug, also when was the most recent album released?

SANDY: I do have a myspace but only just remembered the password so I can update it now. I also now have a website: www.sandydillon.com and if you go there and see the Links page, there are some great ‘unofficial’ sites that are actually official. I never did get that… one done by a Belgian guy called Jerome Smeets and another guy called Irwin in Holland. My ‘official’ site is new, and I haven’t had much time to devote to it yet. I plan to release film and other works not available on One Little Indian, my UK record label; stuff that is too weird for them. Although I have to say they were the first and only label to fund and release my work commercially without asking me to ‘clean up my room’, so to speak. Soon I am hoping to work with a guy called Chris the Sparkleboy and his friend Eric…I met them while on tour with Robert Love, aka Larry Love from Alabama 3. He also sang/wrote with me on my latest release called Pull the Strings, produced by David Coulter and Ken Thomas. It was released at the end of April 2006, and I did the Ghost Flight tour (named after Rob’s new solo album) with Rob and another labelmate Jeff Klein prior to that. This fall I’ll be promoting Pull the Strings in Europe, which is mainly where I gig these days.

SISSY: You’ve done duets with people in the past… who would you like to duet with in the future?

SANDY: I love duets. On Pull the Strings there is a song I sing with Rob called ‘Why?’ its one of my favourites on the album; it’s just voices and harmonium. The artist I would like to duet with in the future is definitely Ed Harcourt… his album The Beautiful Lie (Heavenly) and his other work with The Wild Boars is fab!! I love Ed. I think a co-write/duet with him would be a musical dream come true

SISSY: Would you like to mention any other future plans?

SANDY: I have a vague sound plan for my next recording of a group of songs concerning women who are or have been shipwrecked………..distorted rigging will feature!!! give me enough rope to…..

Check out www.sandydillon.com or myspace.com/sandydillon for more information.

Tags: Blues, Piano, Ray Majors, Sandy Dillon, singer, songwriter
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Ian Johnston – Freelance Writer on Nick Cave, the Cramps and Screamin’ jay

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Ian... following his obsessions

The UK music press has changed almost beyond recognition over the last 20 years. There used to be 2 other inkies to rival the NME, weekly music papers called Sounds and Melody Maker, both with their own distinctive editorial flavours. Time Out’s London listings magazine had a competitor too in the slightly more street-cred form of City Limits. The 80’s and 90’s saw the launch of many new glossy music-related magazines, several of which have since floundered and perished along the way.

Ian Johnston is a freelance writer/journalist, who over the last 20 years or so has written for Sounds, City Limits, a magazine called 20/20 which was a monthly spin-off of Time Out, GQ, Esquire, the Scotsman, the Saturday Telegraph and numerous others. He’s also been the author of two books; The Wild, Wild World of the Cramps published by Omnibus Press and the critically acclaimed Nick Cave biography Bad Seed, published by Little Brown. He currently contributes to Total Film magazine and independent music magazine Loose Lips Sink Ships.

SISSY: How did you first start writing professionally?

IAN: Sounds was the very first thing I ever got work for. It was a cool paper because it had its own remit and there were some good people there.
I was living in a squat in Hackney at the time, wondering what the hell I was doing and I’d recently been to Las Vegas. There were a series of these compilation albums coming out called Las Vegas Grime, which featured weirdo late 50’s and early 60’s novelty rock and roll records. Just on spec I wrote a review of one on headed notepaper and an envelope from the Sahara hotel in Vegas and sent it in to Sounds, thinking I’d never hear anything more about it. I actually got a reply!

SISSY: They must have liked your style.

IAN: Possibly. This was in the dark ages of the late 80’s when the internet wasn’t in common usage. So this review in an unusual envelope and headed paper must have caught their attention. They liked it and they printed it… next thing you’re at the news stand going ‘oh look, there’s my review… I think I’ll do another one.’ So you think of something else and do some more reviews. After a few, you think of an idea for an interview and suggest it. If they go for it, that’s how the ball starts rolling.
Suddenly you’re in print… the minute you have your name attached to some piece you can say that you’re a freelance writer.

SISSY: Who did you interview early on?

IAN: Basically, one of the reasons I got work was that I had virtually no interest in contemporary music whatsoever, so all the ideas I came up with for the people at Sounds were completely eccentric and totally off the wall. For instance I suggested doing something on Johnny Cash long before his renaissance and before he’d become hip again. I did a review of him at the Royal Albert Hall. I also interviewed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins for Sounds because the film Mystery Train in which he appeared as a night clerk, was coming out.

SISSY: What was he like to interview?

IAN: He was one of the maddest, craziest, most demented people I’ve ever met in my life; I’ll never ever forget that interview! I’d been a huge fan of his music and then to actually meet this guy…
I went into his hotel room and he says ‘I will show you my bones.’ I was like ‘excuse me…?’ And he pulls out this bag full of all these novelty toy items, including bits of actual bones like chicken bones and all sorts. Then he said ‘these are my bones. I rolled these to make the rain stop on Jim Jarmusch’s film set.’ Apparently Jim Jarmusch had rung to thank him; Hawkins was grateful to Jim because he’d used the song ‘I put a spell on you’ on his film Strangers in Paradise’ ensuring the continuation of Screamin’ Jay’s legendary status.
I also reviewed some gigs he did around that time for Sounds.

Although it can become stifling at times, it’s generally good to find a niche for yourself and specialise in something, then people know who to come to if they want something in your field. A good example of that is a music writer called Max de Charney who used to be the drummer in Gallon Drunk, then formed his own band, The Flaming Stars. He’s always been a writer as well as a multi-instrumentalist and he’s now carved a niche for himself at Mojo magazine. He’s a huge early rock and roll/rockabilly fan, and if you look in the latest edition of Mojo you’ll see there are different writers who have their own little section and his section covers all the retro rock and roll stuff.
Mojo is published by Emap, and one of the longest assignments I had was for a movie magazine called Neon, which Emap produced to give their publishing empire a bit of a boost. They thought that one of their publications was becoming complacent, so rather than have any other rival magazine come along and steal their thunder, they took the unusual step of producing this more left-field movie magazine to light a firecracker under their other publications. I also wrote for the music section in this magazine; it was quite enlightened in that it didn’t just specialize in film.
So long term, it’s a good thing to have specialised knowledge although it can sometimes work against you because if it’s not commercial, you can get pushed to the sidelines.
From what I’ve seen, a lot of writers who are really into music don’t do well in the major music publications because they don’t want to follow the party line that dictates the current flavour of the month. You won’t get the chance to write a critical piece on someone if the editorial directive is to push that band… they’ll pull the piece. The music press deny that this happens but I know plenty of music journalists whose experience has been exactly that.

SISSY: Can you tell us how you came to write your books on the Cramps and Nick Cave?

IAN: The first one was purely by chance: in the early 90’s I’d been doing a few articles and one day I was at a friend’s house. He used to work for Ace records and had a big filing cabinet full of all the stuff he’d taken when he left the label. I opened one of these drawers and there was a huge wedge of cuttings and articles on the Cramps. I’d always loved their early stuff and they’d turned me on to a lot of other music that I would never have discovered prior to hearing them, like early rock and roll music by people like Link Wray. Punk had made everyone forget about these things since ‘year zero’, which was insane… the attitude with punk was that you had to forget about anything that happened before punk; it was almost like a non-music movement.
The Cramps appealed to me because they sounded like this amazing music from some sort of future past, coming through a broken radio. They had excited me when I was a teenager.
So there I was, looking through this old press file and I thought, ‘Wow, I could write a book about them.’ Then it just so happened that they had an album coming out and I was working for a magazine called ‘What’s On and Where To Go in London’ at the time so I got to interview the Cramps for them. The interview went very well; it over-ran by at least an hour so I must have been talking to them for about two and a half hours. I came out of the interview thinking I had to do a book about them.
To my shame, I didn’t contact the band in any way and try to make it an official biography because through various contacts I’d discovered that they were very insular people and that if I’d attempted to do an authorised book, I’d probably still be waiting for permission. So I thought I’d use the interview I’d just done and the knowledge I’d gleaned about what sort of music they were into, plus all the stuff I’d found in that filing cabinet.
I wrote a proposal, took it without any agent or representation to a publisher and negotiated my own deal, which of course, was highly foolish! But when you’re young and stupid you don’t know about the pitfalls; you just want to do something. The advance I got up-front was actually pretty good for the time but I could have done better with the terms. The title, ‘The Wild, Wild World of the Cramps’, I got from a Jayne Mansfield film… she’s one of my other obsessions!

SISSY: Is it still in print?

IAN: No. They asked me to update it a few years ago but I was in the middle of writing my second book at the time and I just didn’t have the time or inclination to do it. So it’s in limbo at the moment. Creation books inquired who had the rights to it; Omnibus Press owns everything. I would probably rather re-write it than up-date it, and seek out the Cramps for an interview and permission for the book. I suspect that they’ll do their own book though, because I saw that they recently released a compilation album and in the booklet that comes with it, there’s loads of notes written by singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy correcting information that’s been written about them previously.
On the positive side, it all happened very quickly; within a year the book was written and published. Roger Armstrong from Ace records read my book and liked it and in fact, the Cramps themselves must have liked it; they were on a roll at the time and released another album on the heels of the last one, called ‘Look Mom, No Head’ and I had to interview them for a City Limits cover story. I was very nervous because I’d used their last interview for the book without their permission, but although Lux raised his eyebrows a bit when I arrived, they were very friendly and gave me a very good interview so I suspect they sort of liked the book.

SISSY: It sounds like they might be up for you doing another book then… get onto it and take your own advice… follow those obsessions!

IAN: Although sometimes your obsessions can lead you to penury and the nut house, which is something to be avoided if possible!

SISSY: Do you think a writer starting out should try and get an agent before attempting to get a publishing deal?

IAN: It depends. For instance, the Cramps book enabled me to get an agent. Sometimes you have to take a risk in order to get noticed enough to get an agent. The more stuff you actually have behind you… a book is a tangible thing you can present to people to demonstrate your abilities and get more work.

SISSY: Tell us about your second book.

IAN: It’s called the Bad Seed and it’s about Nick Cave and his band. Again, it was an unauthorised book. I got the idea for the book because on the estate in Hackney where I lived, I met this engineer who’s now a great producer; his name is Victor Van Vugt. I was round at his flat on the estate one day and who should walk in but Mick Harvey who used to play in the Birthday Party with Nick Cave and has been in his bands for years, so I started talking to him and we got on pretty well.
I’d been a huge fan of Nick Cave’s music so this book was a real labour of love for me. It was amazing to have seen him develop over the years in the way that he has; he’s developed more than just about anyone else I can think of. For instance, Shane McGowan is fantastic, but he seems to go through ups and downs and he’d admit himself that it’s been a rocky road whereas with Cave, unbelievably, it’s got more and more focussed which is astonishing. There’s not many people like that, and it’s amazing to have seen that happen right from day one when the Birthday Party came here 25 years ago.

SISSY: And it’s pretty amazing that Nick Cave has walked so close to the edge and not fallen off into drug addiction or obscurity!

IAN: Or I’d even say he’s lived just over the edge for a long time, and then come out of it.

SISSY: Is this book still in print?

IAN: Yes, I think it’s in its 9th edition or something and it’s still selling, although not very lucrative for me! Writing can make you a good living though; I think Tony Parsons did pretty well out of his George Michael biography although I don’t think he mentioned anything controversial in it about George’s sexual proclivities, so it probably seems a bit dated now.

SISSY: Do you have any plans for new books in the future?

IAN: Yes, I’ve been trying to get some interest on a book about film but they don’t sell as well as music-related books, so publishers prefer those.
Having done the Nick Cave book, I know how difficult it can be and how much work is involved in doing it properly and that terrifies me, which is why I started to concentrate on journalism. In order for the book to reach fruition I had to interview a hell of a lot of people. And you have to understand that you can’t just walk into people’s lives and expect them to trust you and tell you everything, just like that. You’re basically trespassing; first you have to gain their confidence and prove yourself in some way, that you’re capable and have some sense of responsibility or dignity. You can see how a rock biography or film about a rock star can go really badly; for example the Pete Doherty saga. So you can understand why people are nervous about engaging with someone who wants to write about them… it’s their life after all.
But with Nick Cave, I felt that I had a good take on it. I didn’t really have a set agenda, I just wanted to know and understand what happened from their perspective rather than impose my own opinion.

SISSY: Do you know how Nick Cave reacted to the book?

IAN: I’m not sure… but how would you feel if someone wrote a book about you?
I imagine his reaction was ambivalent. My brother James (who was a founder member of Gallon Drunk) plays in Nick Cave’s band now after getting to know Nick socially; I did worry that my book might have made Nick suspicious of James but he must like his attitude and style because it didn’t put him off having James in the band.
You have to understand, if you’re doing a book about someone that you really like and admire, it doesn’t mean to say that they’re going to like you or what you write.
It is very much an invasion of someone’s privacy at the end of the day. I’ve heard stories of writers who tried to do various unauthorised biographies being chased out of gigs. It’s definitely a rocky road, unless you’re doing a simple cut-and-paste job, you have to tread very carefully. It’s also a question of balance; you can’t bend to every whim you’re presented with but you have to be aware of the risk the interviewees are taking in talking to you. You have to be sensitive and diplomatic or you could spoil friendships and create a real mess in someone’s life.

SISSY: What are the main differences between journalism and writing a book?

IAN: With journalism, the guidelines are established but with biography, they’re not. As a journalist, the publicist rings you up, you walk into a room, you have maybe 35 minutes to do an interview where there will be some stipulations about questions you can’t ask etc… you ignore that and ask them at the end anyway! But the parameters are established as in they have something to sell and you get something from them in exchange for publicising their product.
When you write a book, it’s a whole different ball game. You have to use your common sense. And however long you think it will take to write, it will always take much longer! Always try and get as much money as you can up front for your book, so you have something to live on, because when you look at the amount of work involved, it doesn’t pan out as much in terms of a weekly wage.

SISSY: What training did you do, if any, to qualify you as a writer?

IAN: The only thing I did that has any bearing on my writing was I did a 3-year degree course at Reading University in film and drama studies. I got in quite a bit of trouble for making a short film, which featured a dead cat. The practical component of the course wasn’t that great but the thing that was of use was the theory. And I watched every great movie you can think of for 3 years and digested as much film theory, criticism and writing as I could absorb. Also, it taught me how to present an argument.

SISSY: Has your love of cult/art films and film noir influenced your taste in music?

IAN: Probably. This is a bit of a generalisation, but I think material of any description that’s very successful in a mass market has an element of being designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, so as a piece of art, it won’t be that interesting. It’s like fast-food; it fulfils a need but is lacking in substance. That’s fine for other people, but it’s not for me. Maybe I’m just a twisted individual, but I do enjoy stuff that has a modicum of intelligence or passion.

SISSY: Is there a band or artist that you would feel inspired to write a book about in the future?

IAN: I can give you an exclusive on that! If I were to do another music book, it would be about Goldfrapp. Or there’s this guy who’s recently broken through called Richard Hawley. Both are co-incidentally on Mute records. If we’re talking about people carving a niche by following their obsessions, Daniel Miller (the head of Mute) started a label to release a record by his band the Normal… a song called Warm Leatherette, which Grace Jones later covered. 26 years later, Mute is still going strong and has some brilliant acts. Daniel stuck to his guns, he had a vision of what he wanted to do and he achieved it. I think Mute remained completely independent until a few years ago; now they’re part of EMI.

SISSY: What’s your take on the effect of the internet?

IAN: Well obviously it’s having a huge effect. I think it’s momentous; all sorts of things could happen and spiral out of control. But I think that people of a certain generation, oldies like myself, are always going to want to have a tangible product to hold in their hands as an acquisition, because we were raised to consume things. So it could have drawbacks in the sense that perhaps the album will disappear as a format… although people have been saying these things for ages and yet it’s survived so far.
It seems like younger people with their i-pods aren’t so into building a physical collection… perhaps that’s a good thing; after all, it’s healthier than raising a nation of anal-retentives!

Tags: Ian Johnstone, Nick Cave, The Cramps, Writer
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Fayney – Writer, Producer and Live Sound Renaissance Man

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

Fayney... mutate and survive!

Fayney’s best known for instigating 80’s R&B/Rock legend Roachford and working with the Clash but he’s a versatile professional who’s equally happy producing, engineering, writing or doing live sound. His many years in the business are testament to his willingness to adapt and embrace new technologies, attitudes and methods.

SISSY: How would you describe what you do?

FAYNEY: What I do now has expanded from what I thought I’d be doing. Because the necessity in the music business now, is to do more of everything yourself. Like a lot of other people, I’ve been sort of corralled into being hands-on in a lot more areas than just the music, like the business side of things. In the past you might just work on the music and that would be the last you’d see of it until it was on TV; someone else had done the video etc. But now there’s more of a tie in between the different mediums; the audio and video elements have sort of merged along with the business aspect so now I can be called on to do all of it. I think maybe you should ask whether the music side of things is suffering because people have to do so much. The onus has definitely changed now.

I came from a background of people in rooms playing music together and if you wanted to record a track, you had to go into a studio. So it forced more social interaction. Computer technology has given convenience and ease of use but what it’s also done is to actually kill a lot of social interaction.
It’s that image of young kids sat in a room playing video games by themselves, no friends around and totally immersed in it in solitude. Humans are supposed to interact and learn from each other but unfortunately, that same scenario is happening with music.

SISSY: So making music has become much more technical, rather than being based on the vibe… the sounds have to be perfect instead of it being about keeping the take with the best vibe, which might be technically flawed.

FAYNEY: Exactly.

SISSY: How did you get involved in music?

FAYNEY: I always knew from the age of 8 or 9 that I was going to do something with music. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone; I think sometimes people realise later in life, but from the age of 10, I was already fixing radios and had a working knowledge of electronics. I lived out in the country where there was no access to music, but my family moved to London when I was about 11, which was fortunate, otherwise I might have gone mad from the lack of stimulus.

SISSY: Did you play any instruments?

FAYNEY: Not at the time. My Dad played piano and my Mum played a bit… there was always music in the family. My dad was religious in one sense; he would drag me into the living room; we were a typical West Indian family in that no-one ever went in there except for weddings and funerals, everything was covered in plastic! My dad would take me in there and bombard me with Ray Charles and stuff. I hated it because as a really young kid, I didn’t really understand where that music was coming from. So it wasn’t until later, around 15 or 16 I kind of woke up one day and thought, ‘ah, now I get it’.

SISSY: When did you start working with music?

FAYNEY: I went to university to study electronics and when I was there I met up with a group of guys and formed a college band. I started playing bass at a couple of gigs, but then my interest started to drift. I wasn’t so interested in standing up on a stage in front of people. I actually thought my ego would love it but when I actually got up there and performed, I realised it wasn’t really my thing; it didn’t do it for me.
I wanted to get into the engineering side of things, so I started to look around for jobs in that area.

To start with, I got a job in a hi-fi shop because I couldn’t get a job in a studio; it was the nearest thing I could find. But it just goes to show you that in life, fortune has a big part to play because my sister got talking to a woman who lived on our estate who’s husband was Eddie Grant’s recording engineer. She had mentioned to this woman that I was dying to get into the music business and I couldn’t get a job; I’d sent off loads of applications and hadn’t got any replies.

One day, this woman’s husband knocked on the door. His name was Frank, and he said he could provide me with some training, although he couldn’t offer me any money. I was blown away! So I went to the Coach House studios and I basically sat behind him on studio sessions and just watched what he was doing. Then gradually, they let me take the reins on a few things, like recording the drums or something, and I learnt very gradually. My earliest recollection of recording anything is when Eddy Grant’s old band, the Equals, had come in to record some stuff and I got involved in recording some of that.

SISSY: Was it an easy road from then on?

FAYNEY: No, I ended up being out of work for about a year. When you’re out of work there’s 2 choices; you can either sit around or you can be pro-active, and I’ve always been the latter… god loves a trier! So I just kept knocking on doors and one day this guy who funnily enough was Eddy Grant’s cousin, found me. I’d been asking around for work and told me about a job going at a studio where they needed a young engineer to work for a famous band. He asked if I’d like to come down for an interview at 9am in the morning… well I wasn’t stupid, I was there bright and early!

It was very odd; I walked into this place, which was a well-equipped studio. It was only 8-track but everything was brand new and pristine like nobody had ever used it. There was this short guy in there who was obviously the governor. He introduced himself as Bernie Rhodes, shook my hand and ushered me into the studio, where there was a guy playing guitar, who got up and walked out; I remember thinking later that I should have recognised him. Bernie immediately turned to me… he was a very acidic character but I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, I just think he was always trying to test your mettle because he knew that if you want to survive in this business, you’re going to have to be a bit tough. So he said ‘who are you then, who is this Fayney character?’ I explained that I’d been looking for work in a studio and that I’d had a bit of experience. He asked me how many hits I’d worked on and I had to say there hadn’t been any so far. Then he gave me a tape by a band called the Black Arabs and told me to put it on and do a mix of it for him. By this time, I was shaking, but I put the tape on and managed to get it all working while Bernie went out for a coffee. I did a mix and gave him a cassette of it, then went home, not expecting to hear anything.
Anyway, the next morning the phone rang at 8.30am and when I answered it was Bernie. He said ‘Look, I don’t know how you do things, but where we come from, we start work at 9 o’clock, so you better get your ass down here!’ So I scrambled to get myself together, and went to the studio not really knowing what was going on… I was definitely intrigued to say the least. When I arrived Bernie introduced me to these 4 guys who were there; they were called the Clash and he was their manager.

I was already into the Clash because an old school buddy of mine whose uncle was King Tubby, the legendary Jamaican producer, had he’d told me the Clash had some wicked tunes and that I should check them out. We played London Calling to death at one point. At the time I was mostly listening to reggae and rare groove or soul but when I heard the Clash, it really stood out! I remember 2 months later, I was walking down the road and at the local town hall, there was a punk band playing. I’d never seen a punk before and there were loads of them hanging around. I remember I didn’t feel threatened or anything, but the whole thing was so strange, it was like humanity had changed overnight and no one had warned me!

SISSY: Did you record the Clash?

FAYNEY: I basically ran their studios for them, and the main part I played was when they split up, we had to find replacements for their last album. I did lots of live sound for them as well, which was f****n brilliant; I was only 18 at the time.

SISSY: Would you say the Clash were responsible for expanding your musical taste to include rockier stuff?

FAYNEY: That’s not really true, but what they did get me into was politics. I wouldn’t describe the Clash as being the greatest musicians on earth but their vibe, spirit and political stance were what got to me; I’d never experienced that before. So they opened up a whole new world for me, literally overnight.

SISSY: What happened next?

FAYNEY: The Clash did a lot of stuff overseas and I didn’t go with them to the States, so while I was working at their studio I started doing other things with people involved in the scene. I did the pre-production for Malcom McLaren’s Madame Butterfly album and I worked with Bow Wow Wow, Adam Ant and the Specials.
I mostly did engineering work and contributed ideas here and there.

Things were different in those days; we’d be drinking in a bar somewhere and meet a guitarist or something, then rope them into coming to the studio to record the next day. That’s what I call punk; I don’t think of it as just the music, it’s an attitude and a way of doing things, a lifestyle.

Around that time, I also started doing some of my own music. I wasn’t really a player except for a bit of bass which isn’t much good for writing by yourself. So I persuaded Bernie to get me some equipment; drum machines and synths and stuff. I started working on some ideas and I was looking around for musicians to work with. A friend of mine recommended a guy called Andrew Roachford, so I got him in to play a keyboard part on a track I had. To be honest, he was terrible and I couldn’t wait to see the back of him! About a year later, I got invited to a concert at my friend’s college. I ended up back stage, chatting to people and not really paying attention to the bands when suddenly I heard this guy singing and it grabbed my attention; it was like a bell ringing in my head or something. I went to look and it was that same guy, Andrew Roachford! It turned out that when he’d come to my studio, he’d never played a synthesiser before, only the electric piano, which was why he’d sounded so bad. So I got him to come to the studio again, and we wrote a whole track in one day from start to finish. We didn’t really know what we were doing, it was a vibe thing… we seemed to be able to communicate without even talking and we knew we were onto something. We then started working towards the Roachford that eventually got known.

SISSY: What was your role in Roachford?

FAYNEY: Predominantly, I did arrangement and co-production, as well as suggesting ideas for videos and things.

SISSY: It always seemed that Roachford were very respected by other musicians as well as fans…

FAYNEY: Yes, I remember one time when we did a little gig somewhere and this guy came who ran Michael Jackson’s publishing empire. It turned out Michael wanted to buy our publishing because he was a big fan. Another time, Greg Phillinganes, the musical director of Michael Jackson’s Bad tour came down to some of our rehearsals, and he told us that Michael had come onto their tour bus once on the tour just to give everyone a copy of the Roachford album, and told us all to study it!

SISSY: Why do you think Roachford didn’t maintain their successful position?

FAYNEY: It was a set of circumstances that could have happened to anybody; I think the thing to remember when you’re in the music game is it’s a game of Russian Roulette. And just as you may be prepared to get all the adulation, people throwing their knickers at you and the stuff you get off on, you’ve also got to be prepared for the downfall. It’s no good if you have a fragile ego; if you have an ego you’ve got to leave it on the stage.

With Roachford, we’d been quite successful in the UK and we went to America and had a hit single and album there. But there was a timing issue because while we were messing around doing radio promos in America, we should have been back in the UK recording the next album and keeping the profile up. I remember we did a gig in Germany supporting Steve Miller and he offered us a bit of good advice… whenever you hand over an album to your record company, make sure you have the next one already prepared. It’s hard to do but it’s a must; if the first one takes off you need to back it up quickly.

SISSY: That’s like something I’ve been told before; when you record your first album, you’ve had your whole life to write and perfect it, but you have to make your second one in a few months. That’s why lots of bands flop on their second album.

FAYNEY: Exactly.

SISSY: There was also a bit of an R&B/rock crossover movement going on then… I remember bands like the Brand New Heavies and Living Colour being popular at that time.

FAYNEY: We met Corey Glover, the singer of Living Colour at a backstage party somewhere. His girlfriend said she was a big Roachford fan and he seemed to have a bit of an alpha-male knee jerk reaction; he started slagging us off and saying we shouldn’t do schmaltzy love songs although ironically, their biggest hit was a ballad type watered-down version of their other stuff!

SISSY: What happened after Roachford?

FAYNEY: We kind of drifted apart and started doing our own things. For a while, I started doing some work for Elton John’s manager; live gigs for Elton and Courtney Pine. Elton John was a big fan of Andrew Roachford. I did some big gigs with him in Paris and it was crazy… every night I would be taken from the hotel in a stretch limo to the backstage door, then had to wait until the production girls had spread rose petals on the floor. I had my own room with 5 bottles of the finest chilled champagne and a Michelin chef doing the catering; no menu, he just cooked whatever you ordered!

I got a publishing deal with Trinifold, the company that manage the Who and the remaining members of Led Zeppelin. I also became a DJ at Madame Jo-Jo’s in Soho for a while, playing rare groove. Then I met my production partner, Jamie Maher and we set up our own studio, called Big Fucking Digital, originally with a guy called Martin Eden as well.

SISSY: You seem to do different jobs for people; can you tell us a bit about that?

FAYNEY: We’ve done bits of film music, including lots of post production for ‘I’ll Be There’ starring Charlotte Church. The good thing about being established is that people know what you’re about so they know they can trust you to do a job when they need something doing. The funny thing is, because the music business has taken such a strange turn, a lot of high-end producers who were doing really good business a couple of years ago, are having to sell of bits of equipment now. It’s got that bad for a lot of people. The reason Jamie and I are hanging in there is because we’re more versatile, and a small, flexible company. Lately we’ve done a few tracks for New Order’s last album and we did a wicked remix with Arthur Baker for Ash, called Submission.

Jamie and I like all kinds of music and we try and put that feel into everything we do, so it’s easy for us to switch hats and do a dance track or rock or anything. We actually ended up working on the Ukranian eurovision entry in 2004, which won! Our management company were approached by these people looking for a production and co-writing team to work on a couple of tracks. So we agreed a fee and they came into the studio to play us the ideas, and told us they wanted to put the track in the eurovision song contest. They weren’t concerned about winning, they just wanted to get some exposure for this girl Roslana’s album. We re-wrote it with them because the original was some gibberish about the local goat’s cheese and their favourite meat! Then it accidently won, which was slightly embarrassing but funny at the same time!

SISSY: What software are you into using?

FAYNEY: Jamie and I use Pro-Tools, but we’ve been waiting for Apple to bring out their own hardware in conjunction with a company called Apergy, which is set to rival Pro-Tools and will be a lot cheaper. It works through the system in Apple called Core Audio; it will make it even easier to get good results on a home system. The interface will give you much more power and creative potential. But at the end of the day, I’m an analogue engineer. The last analogue album I did was in New York; we recorded onto tape in this lovely wood room. When I got back to England, I did transfer it to digital but I used a system called Radar because it’s the only digital system that sounds like tape… it doesn’t steal your soul!

SISSY: That’s what people used to say about the first digital mixing system called SSL, which everyone used in the 80’s… it’s almost as though that was the sound of the 80’s.

FAYNEY: Totally; the first Roachford album mixes were done on SSL and I was horrified. It sounded so harsh and aggressive, like that clinical Art of Noise/Frankie Goes to Hollywood sound. I think software like Logic and Pro-Tools do the same thing to a lesser extent, but I couldn’t tell the difference between Radar and tape. I think you can have the best of both worlds, like using an old console that’s driven digitally. But you have to pay attention to what you’re using; if you want a really warm sound, you won’t get it without using valves… a plug-in just won’t do the job that a valve amp would. But there are pros and cons to the way things are going; it’s good you can get a laptop and do things through the internet, but go out to gigs as well and converse with people. Try and find musicians you can get a vibe with and then try and capture that on your recordings. You have to try and give more with the vibe now, because the machines give you less.

SISSY: What are your plans for the future?

FAYNEY: I’ve got a prediction for you for the future… because of the way that reality TV is going, picture this; one day you’ll turn on your TV and on the screen you’ll see yourself, sitting there watching the TV. And then they’ll find a way to make you pay for it! But seriously, now we’re trying to set up an internet label; people are starting to realise that there are viable ways of making money from music through the internet instead of the typical label approach. We’re working with a couple of bands at the moment called the London Beach and The Dirty Feel, with a view to releasing their stuff on the internet. Bands can put a tune on lots of different internet sites instead of being tied to one label like they were in the past. And those record deals were on really shit terms. So I would say to any young musician now, forget the major labels. If you have an album recorded and ready to go, do it yourself through the internet.

SISSY: So instead of trying to get an A&R man into you, you’re better off trying to find your own computer geek to be like an extra band member!

FAYNEY: Yes, you need to find people who can help build you a website. Try finding someone who’s at Art College or something, who wants some real world experience. What we’re trying to do is different from the traditional record company approach; we want to create a level playing field and facilitate the need for growth; encourage enterprise. If there’s too much financial pressure on a band when they record, they’ll blow it and not get another chance, which is what happens on major labels. We want to put out music on a song-by-song basis where the band isn’t signing their life away. If you don’t put some mud down, the plants won’t grow; the record companies aren’t allowing things to develop any more, they just want singles. The whole record company thing is dead… they just don’t know it yet! For the first time, people can now control their digital identity. In the same way that you don’t need to go to the bank, you also no longer need a record company because you can do it all online. The record companies could save themselves but they’re not willing to give up their greed! Ultimately, music will probably be free but that will generate income from other parts of your identity; merchandising, tickets for gigs, access to tour diaries on line etc.

SISSY: You have your own album under the name ‘the Rainmaker’. Can you tell us about that?

FAYNEY: I’ve basically spent 5 years making this album, not because it’s immaculately played or recorded; in fact I’ve tried to make it as lo-fi as possible… I recorded everything at 16-bit. I took a long time making it because it’s a heartfelt album; it’s not instantaneous, it’s a grower! I’m about to release the album online; it’ll be available on 35 different music websites, details of which will be at myspace.com/therainmakeruk.

……………

Since doing this interview with Fayney, he and his partner Jamie Maher have been producing an album with young Icelandic singer Vedis Hervor Amadottir. They’re flying out to Iceland in a couple of weeks to finish recording.

Tags: Fayney, Live Sound Engineer, Producer, Rainmaker, Recording Engineer, Roachford, songwriter, The Clash
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Jamie Butterworth – Live Sound Engineer and Tour Manager

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Jamie Butterworth - Sound Maestro and Tour Manager/Supernanny

Jamie Butterworth is a Tour Manager and Sound Engineer who’s worked with numerous acts including Mylo, Martin Grech, world music bands the Afro Celt Sound System and the Doll Foundation, The Real Tuesday Weld, Grand National, Amy Studt, classical violinist Sophie Solomon and Magoo.

SISSY: How did you get to do sound and tour manage?

JAMIE: I started working for a local crew company, we would build stages, hang lights and set up backline, you had to be a jack of all trades. To cut a long story short I was offered a job upstairs at the Garage in London as one of the house sound engineers. Through contacts I made there, I was asked to sound engineer for touring bands. I ended up tour managing because people like to save money; they’d rather have you do two jobs than one!

SISSY: Did you get any training to be a sound engineer?

JAMIE: I did a degree in popular music at Leeds University and I also went to Kingsway College in London (famous for educating Johnny Rotten, Jah Wobble and … Jamie Oliver) before that. I was a guitarist at the time, and I played in a band called Omni for a while after that.

SISSY: Did you have any success as a musician?

JAMIE: Close… but no cigar! I got bored with chasing the dream; record deals and stuff, trying to write hit songs and having record companies saying ‘it’s good but can you change this or that’… what’s the point?

SISSY: What style of music did you play?

JAMIE: Kind of rocky but weird with lots of strings; our main influences were probably Bjork (we had a female singer) and Faith No More. Our drummer Scott now plays for Imperial Leisure and Ruth the singer still writes stuff.

SISSY: What does being a tour manager entail?

JAMIE: A lot of preparation! You get given a list of gig dates from the band’s booking agent or manager and the tour manager’s job is to turn those dates into a tour; book flights (if necessary) and tour buses or splitter vans plus if you’re playing somewhere like Brixton Academy or big shows like that then you have to arrange the PA, lights and crew. You’re also in charge of the budget, doing the accounts, booking hotels and generally looking after the artist on tour. It depends a lot on what level you’re doing it; on the very basic level, i.e. small venues, you have to deal with the in-house promoters of the venues to arrange riders and food whereas with a bigger tour all that is arranged through an agent like SJM so you just liaise with their rep. In an ideal situation, a tour will have a tour manager to look after the artist, hotels and finances; a production manager to look after the PA, lights etc; two sound engineers, one to do front of house sound and one to do onstage monitors for the band and a couple of Techs for backline and drums. Sometimes though, at a lower level, one person ends up doing the whole lot.

SISSY: Do you prefer the bigger budget productions?

JAMIE: It can be good, working with someone like Mylo where the budget is big enough to basically build your own show from start to finish. But it’s also nice to go back down again and slog it out with a band in a splitter bus.

SISSY: Can you describe a typical day on tour?

JAMIE: Usually you have to get up early, before everyone else, make sure the crew (if any) are together to go to the venue and set up. Then the crew will do line checks to make sure everything is working. Meanwhile there’s accounts to be done every day, itineraries to be worked out, guest lists to be compiled, interviews the artists needs to attend, problems to be solved and tea to be drunk. Then you have to go back to the hotel/tour bus and make sure the band are up and ready in time for soundcheck, make sure they have enough money so they can eat, basically it’s like being a babysitter or a nanny… it doesn’t matter how civilised and capable a human being is, as soon as they step on the tour bus they become completely incapable of functioning like a responsible human being!A tour manager also has to be like an oracle because you have to be able to answer every question. You may spend hours writing tour itineraries and making them into little books for everyone so they have all the relevant information at there finger tips, yet they’ll glance at it and say ‘that’s pretty’ then discard it. Then they’ll proceed to fire questions at you so you have to know it all off by heart!

SISSY: Is being a tour manager a well-paid job?

JAMIE: It can be, although the work isn’t always constant so you have to take that into account. It can range from the bottom end where you do everything for £100 a day, up to big productions where you can get £500+ a day or more just for tour managing.

SISSY: Can you tell us a bit more about how you learned to do live sound?

JAMIE: I studied from the age of 17 or 18 but most of my experience comes from working.

SISSY: What tips can you give?

JAMIE: If you want to be a sound engineer, learn to EQ!!! If you’re doing the EQ, it’s good to have a piece of music that’s well produced and that you know really well so you can hear when you’ve set the rig up to sound right.
The most important thing about being a sound engineer is understanding frequencies; knowing what each frequency sounds like and making a venue that could be horrible because of its natural acoustics, sound great. You also have to understand and be sympathetic to the music that you’re mixing. Sometimes it’s not necessary to mic everything up individually; it’s about getting a good overall sound and sometimes less is more. You have to be sensitive to the situation you find yourself in each day and be adaptable.My advice to anyone who wants to be a sound engineer is the first thing you should do is go and work for free; get some work experience at a venue. Go in to a venue and ask if you can help out and learn all the various aspects of the job like how to mic up and how to patch everything, how to EQ a rig. Watch the soundman do a few gigs, then maybe they’ll let you do sound for the first band on one night and you could end up working there. Also, try and get friendly with a new band and do their sound, maybe for free at the start so when their career takes off, they’ll take you with them.

SISSY: Have you worked as a monitor engineer as well as front-of-house?

JAMIE: Yes, it’s a different brief to the out front sound. You can be doing as many as ten (sometimes more) different mixes for the members of the band. Each person will want different things in their monitors, and you might have to change things for different songs within the set. You have to be really on the ball and react to changes onstage. Doing monitors can be more challenging and you’re closer to the band; I like having that relationship where you’re communicating with the band throughout the show, whereas doing the front-of-house sound can be more of a solitary thing.

SISSY: Do you think it’s true that the soundman’s performance can be almost more important than the band’s performance because if he does a bad job, the whole show will suffer?

JAMIE: As a soundman, you are in a very important position because there can be up to 50,000 people depending on you to help the band get their songs across. In a sense you are there to reinforce what the band are doing, so if the band is crap then you don’t stand a chance of making it sound good! There’s also a creative element to it as well especially if you are working with an artist from the beginning. One of the things that I really enjoy is to sit down with the artist to discuss how they want their live show to sound. I spend time in rehearsals tweaking guitar amps, bass amps, discussing vocal effects, learning the songs and basically aid the artist to sonically evolve their live show. You can end having a satisfying creative input to a certain extent.

SISSY: As a former musician, do you get the same buzz from doing the sound as you do from performing on stage?

JAMIE: Definitely! And you can get a buzz from tour managing as well; To have stood out front-of-house after a show at Brixton Academy and have someone tap me on the shoulder saying ‘you instigated all this, you made it happen!”… it’s an amazing feeling! Obviously you could never do it alone, you need a good team to make it happen. It’s great to think that a few weeks before, the gig was just a date in a diary and then suddenly it’s all happening and 5000 people are going mental.

SISSY: There must be a lot of politics and stress involved in your job… how do you cope and de-stress?

JAMIE: Its very hard not to get involved in band politics! You have to always remember that it’s just a job and that you can walk away from it… it’s not life and death. When it gets stressful, find somewhere where you can take a deep breath… and drink a bottle of whiskey!

SISSY: You must have seen a few up-and-coming bands play at the Garage when you were working there?

JAMIE: Yes a few. I remember doing monitors for the Darkness before they were known.

SISSY: What’s your verdict on the great ‘did the Darkness take themselves seriously until they realised hamming it up would get them somewhere’ debate?

JAMIE: Without a shadow of a doubt, they were taking themselves very seriously! I still think they do to a certain extent but the record company has marketed them as an ‘ironic’ rock band. In America they can be serious because there’s very little irony in rock over there!

SISSY: Did you do sound for anyone else who’s famous now?

JAMIE: Keane played at the Garage loads of times before they were big. I remember when they first got their record deal and proudly came in with brand new equipment. They used to have a guitarist and sound a lot heavier back then. Snow Patrol played a few times as well around that time.

SISSY: Have you got anything lined up for the near future?

JAMIE: I’ve got more work with Sophie Solomon and Mylo coming up.

SISSY: You seem to do sound for a lot of acts who aren’t typical guitar music. Do you prefer that?

JAMIE: I accidentally started doing some of the world music bands and it’s a great opportunity because if you become a straightforward rock engineer there’s things you’ll never experience and you’ll be restricted as to what you can do. I think you get more respect if you have a more diverse CV, it’s a competitive industry so the more experience you have the more work you get. World music tends to get overlooked in the UK but worldwide, it’s a big thing so you get to travel. When I was doing the Afro Celts, we played all over Europe, Singapore, the USA and for me, that’s what it was all about. It’s great to have that travelling lifestyle without the pressures of being a band member.

SISSY: I know you’ve done the UK ‘toilet’ tour with lots of bands and must be an authority on the venues by now!

JAMIE: Bands should have a legal right to know what they’re letting themselves in for when they get a gig at these places! The quality of the venue and the treatment you get can vary enormously. Of all the small venues in the country, I love the Dublin Castle in Camden; as a sound engineer I’ve never had bad sound in there. Sometimes the sound can be the best in the most bizarre venues; on tour with Martin Grech we played the White Horse in High Wycombe. When we arrived for soundcheck, there were strippers dancing on a greasy pole! It’s a small grotty pub but the sound that night was the best on the whole tour!

SISSY: What about the legendary Hull Adelphi?

JAMIE: It’s got a certain character about it that is special… don’t eat the curry though! The guy who runs it feeds you curry and it’s a bit dodgy! But seriously, he does an incredible job; he’s devoted his whole life to that venue. In London, we’re spoilt because any band can get a gig and there’s loads of places to see up-and-coming bands. But in Hull, there’s only the Hull Adelphi.

SISSY: What are your favourite big venues?

JAMIE: Brixton Academy because it symbolises success to London bands and it has a magical vibe, and, just to sound pretentious, the Olympia in Paris! That’s one of my favourite gigs because as well as sounding great, the backstage area is brilliant; lots of rooms where you can hide away. When you’re on a long tour it’s really good to have somewhere you can chill out and do all the paperwork.

SISSY: Has the impact of the internet on the music industry had any effect on your area of the business?

JAMIE: The only thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be bands that have loads of money pumped into them but they only ever do one tour then you never see them again! I think that nothing has really changed except that the internet has made A&R men lazy; they’ll wait until a band has done a lot of work themselves before signing them now. I think the internet has made everything easier; I don’t know how people tour managed before the internet! If someone wants to know what the PA is like in a venue, I can find out on line. And being able to email when I’m on tour is indispensable.

SISSY: You must have witnessed a few good rock & roll escapades involving sex drugs and rock and roll! Can you tell us any?

JAMIE: Well, a cautionary tale involving drugs was one artist (who shall remain nameless!) got so out of his head in Spain that he started walking out into the sea… and kept walking. He had to be rescued otherwise he’d have disappeared! Another time I was with a band when one of them racked up some lines of cocaine at the back of the bus and decided to carry them to the rest of the band at the front of the bus. Unfortunately, they forgot that the skylight in the roof was open, so because we were travelling at 80mph down the motorway the cocaine was blasted all over the bus!

SISSY: In your experience, are drugs still a problem in the music business?

JAMIE: Well there’s no point being in the music business if you’re a prude but personally I don’t do drugs. I have a few drinks sometimes, but there’s a time and a place for it. A bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll won’t hurt anybody; its only when it starts to be abused that the problems start. Pete Doherty is the classic example of when it goes wrong… it’s like he can’t control himself for long enough to remember why he started playing music in the first place. It wasn’t about heroin; it was about being in a band, writing songs and getting an opinion or a story across to people. I don’t recommend that people get out of it before going on stage because it can all go horribly wrong; party after the show when you’ve earned it. In a way, I think there’s probably as much if not more drugs consumed in the city by business people than there is in the music business these days! A&R people are only likely to take drugs because they need to stay awake and go to gigs every night, and musicians tend to use it to keep themselves vibed up because touring can be incredibly boring at times. You’re spending hours, days and weeks with the same 5 people on a tour bus and once you’ve learnt all about each other what do you do? You have to try and create your own fun.

SISSY: What are the relative pluses and minuses to touring in various countries?

JAMIE: In America, the union system can make things a bit difficult. Obviously, they don’t want British crew to come over and take jobs that could be done by Americans so it can be hard to get a work visa because it costs a lot and smaller bands can’t afford it. Belgium and Germany are probably the best organised and the most efficient countries to play in whereas Italy is the worst place to play from the technical point of view… they have great food and wine though! You do the soundcheck then go to dinner for 6 hours and they ply you with grappa so you practically forget you’re there to do a gig! You get an eight-course meal but the equipment doesn’t work and no one knows what they’re doing.

SISSY: So finally, are there any do’s and don’ts for touring?

JAMIE: Don’t shit in the tour bus… in the toilet or anywhere else! Try and change your clothes regularly and have a shower at the venue… most of them have one. Because you’re all living in such close proximity it’s only polite to try and not smell! And eat healthily! It doesn’t matter how much you drink etc., if you eat well you’ll have the stamina for the tour. All MOTO service stations have a Marks and Spencers now… use them! Eat a salad instead of a Ginster’s pasty; avoid those at all costs because they’re dangerous… more evil than any drug! And when you’re touring in France a good tip is… make sure the beer you buy from the service stations actually has alcohol in it: I was driving through France on the Mylo tour and the band needed beer because they were all really hung over. So we bought some, and then some more, and some more. They wondered why we weren’t feeling drunk until they realised it was non-alcoholic beer. Another good tip is when crossing European borders, make sure there are no drugs in the bus because you may well get searched and if they find a trace of something using the sniffer dogs, then you’ll all end up being strip-searched in intimate places! Hide it in the drum cases because they’re more likely to look up your bum first!

……………………

We finish the interview at that point and have a few beers with Jamie and some of his friends. He really is a wicked soundman, we’ve been to a few shows where he was in charge and it sounded amazing. If you want to contact Jamie you can do so at soundhooligan@hotmail.com

Tags: Jamie Butterworth, Live Sound Engineer, Tour Manager
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Dimitri Tikovoi – French Producer, Programmer and Recording Artist

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Dimitri with members of Trash Palace... he's so french!

Producer/programmer Dimitri Tikovoi grew up in Paris where his parents are both luminaries in the French theatre scene. Since moving to the UK he’s produced and/or done programming for Placebo, The Raveonettes, Goldfrapp, Future Sound of London, Marc Almond, Gary Numan and John Cale to name but a few. Dimitri also recorded his own album under the name Trash Palace and toured to promote the material with a live band. The album featured guest vocals from Brian Molko (Placebo), Alison Shaw (Cranes), John Cale (the Velvet Underground), Asia Argenta (the Italian actress and director), Cozette, and Lian Warmington. Sissy was fortunate enough to get an invite to visit Dimitri in the studio where he was producing the new Placebo album… We got to hear a snippet of a couple of new songs from the album ‘MEDS’ before it was released, and approved of the fact that the flavour was distinctly vintage gothic Placebo!

SISSY: Why did you choose a career in music rather than following your parents into the theatre?

DIMITRI: I hated theatre, being born around theatre people meant I had too much of it and I suppose music was my way of rebelling. I started playing drums when I was 7, I went to drum school and studied percussion at the Conservatory of Classical Music, and I studied Jazz at CIM, the Institute of Contemporary Music in Paris

SISSY: How did you get into production?

DIMITRI: By playing with bands and recording them in my little studio at home on a four-track recorder, writing songs and someone would hear it and say ‘can you do something with me?’ then little by little things fell into place… I bought an 8-track and slowly learnt more.

SISSY: Can you give any advice on recording at a basic level?

DIMITRI: Just read sound magazines, and if you go into a proper studio, watch everything that’s done, ask lots of questions.

SISSY: When did you get into computer recording rather than tape machines?

DIMITRI: The first thing I bought as soon as I earned some money was an Atari computer with Cubase so I started working with that, but at the time it was very basic, all midi stuff with synthesisers. At the same time I had a musician’s background, mainly rock and jazz. It started to become possible to combine the two in terms of recording, not just midi around ‘95, ‘96. The first direct to disk recorder was an Akai 8-track and that’s the first time I recorded things like vocals on a computer because it was much more convenient especially for vocal comps and editing. After that pro-tools had just come out and I started using Session 8 which was the early version.

SISSY: What made you move to the UK?

DIMITRI: The music; France is not much of a country for live music, here there are lots of pubs and clubs where you can play and learn to be good but in France there’s nothing in between someone playing accordion in the town hall and big venues for bands that are already established. There aren’t enough venues for live music so there aren’t many touring rock bands… if you’re a young band in France it’s really hard. Also French bands often try to copy what’s coming from England or America so it’s not very original, just a bad version of the same thing.

SISSY: Can you offer any advice to French bands on how to get round this?

DIMITRI: French music has developed since I left…

SISSY: Is that because you left?!

DIMITRI: Yeah, once they got rid of me everything was fine! No its just that they’ve developed in terms of the fact that electronic music is now really strong in France for exactly the reason I mentioned; that there aren’t any places to play so there’s a whole generation of young people that want to do music and they’ve found an alternative way to do it.
When you can’t learn to be a good band by playing live, you’re going to find another way to do it and home studios and electronic equipment are available to everyone.

SISSY: Do you identify yourself with the ‘French sound’ typified by Daft Punk and Mirwais?

DIMITRI: No, but I like some of it. It’s very retro or maybe a combination of retro with a kind of ‘cheese factor’. The French electronic scene is really influenced by disco and the dance scene whereas I came from a rock and jazz background. I always programmed, but I like much more aggressive stuff like Nine Inch Nails and there’s a huge difference between them and something like Daft Punk.

SISSY: You’re producing the Placebo album and Flood is mixing… Isn’t that a reversal of your usual roles?

DIMITRI: Kind of… I do a lot of work with Flood. I started off doing some programming and playing on stuff for him, like Gary Numan and various things then we started co-producing. With the Placebo album I was telling him that I was going to produce it. He said that if I needed someone to mix, he’d be very happy to do it which was great as I didn’t think he’d want to; because I know that the band asked him before and he’d never been available so I wasn’t sure if he liked their music.

SISSY: How would you describe the sound of the new Placebo album?

DIMITRI: Very dark and raw; they’ve done a lot of evolving in the past so because it’s the fifth album, I thought it would be good to take it back to something a bit more raw and basic, the essence of what Placebo was originally about. I wanted to push them to go back to playing guitars instead of having loads of programming. Which is funny because at the start they got me in to do some programming!

SISSY: Did that come as a surprise to the band?

DIMITRI: Well it’s a relationship that develops… it doesn’t happen instantly in one moment. I’m not addicted to power so I’m quite a discreet dictator in the studio! But to be serious, we have a good working relationship so I did have it in my mind to go back to something more raw and it’s just about getting them to try it and if they like it we go with it and if they don’t, we change it. But the more I encouraged them to go back to basic guitars, the more they enjoyed it and thought it was great and realised that’s where they came from. Everything fell into place.

SISSY: How did you get to know Placebo?

DIMITRI: It was through Rob Ellis who plays for PJ Harvey, because we had the same manager at the time and Rob was asked to do a string arrangement on one track. He was struggling a bit so I offered to let him come to my home studio and demo the strings and they really liked it so instead of getting some string players, they asked me to come to the studio with some samples and used what I had done.

SISSY: Is it a good thing to work with friends or can it cause problems?

DIMITRI: It could go both ways, but if you’re going to spend 6 months in the studio with someone, you will either become friends or you will hate each other! I don’t think it’s changed much with Placebo because we respect each other.

SISSY: What prompted you to start Trash Palace (Dimitri’s own project which released an album and gigged as a live band)?

DIMITRI: When I moved to London I didn’t have much work to start with so when you don’t have any work you start doing things by yourself. I find it very hard to do things completely by myself because you don’t have any mirror or feedback from anywhere; one minute you can love something and the next minute you can absolutely hate it because there’s no-one to help you be objective. It took me a long time but it was a good learning experience. I’d like to try and do another album but we’ll see…

SISSY: Did you have a cohesive vision for the project from the start or did it evolve?

DIMITRI: I just wanted to push myself, my own knowledge of computer-based music so there was a lot of experimentation and trying to do things a bit differently. But I also had a theme which was sex, because firstly, everyone uses sex to sell things but they exploit it in a way that’s not very sensual or erotic. I thought that if I could combine some kind of eroticism into something that is as cold as electronic music, then it would be really interesting. Also I wanted things to be a bit deranged or slightly out of place…kind of the opposite of Britney Spears! Electronic music is so cold because it’s made with machines so if you try to put sensuality into it, it kind of gives it some soul.

SISSY: Your stage shows were quite theatrical. Was that influenced by your theatre background?

DIMITRI: It was difficult because I think I think electronic music on stage can be really boring. I haven’t seen many people, including Trash Palace that have succeeded in doing it. The problem with Trash Palace was that the album had lots of guest singers so there was no actual lead singer. It’s hard to have a band unity because lots of the music is coming from machines so the band are just recreating or doubling what the machines are doing. It’s very tricky to get it right on stage.

SISSY: Sometimes electronic music is best played by a DJ through an appropriate sound system…

DIMITRI: Well it’s basically studio music; I never planned to do it live when I was recording the album. But at some point you have to. I though it would be good fun and I had grand ideas about ways of doing it; sometimes you can pull it off and it’s fun but sometimes you can’t do it right because you don’t have the budget or if you’re playing smaller rock venues it doesn’t work because it’s not a real rock band so you try and compensate with theatrics or lighting and video displays.

SISSY: How was Trash Palace received?

DIMITRI: It was great; the first show we did was the Routes de Rock in France to 15,000 people. A lot of the guest singers did that gig as well, which made a big difference. Some people absolutely hated it and some people really loved it so it generated some kind of war in the French media, which makes great publicity. At least if someone hates it then you’ve provoked a strong reaction; some people saw the humour in it and some didn’t. I enjoyed it though!

SISSY: Do you think you’ll ever make another album of your own?

DIMITRI: I don’t know; I’d like to try again but this time I’d need a bit more of a focus and maybe do it with someone who’s going to front it and be the lead singer. It’s also about finding the right space in your mind… I really like producing because I like working with other people so much so I’d have to be in the right mood to do things on my own. Although the idea of doing another album is exciting, the reality of being by myself trying to make music is less exciting!

SISSY: Do you like the attention of being in the spotlight as a performer or do you prefer to be behind the scenes?

DIMITRI: Both of them are great; it’s good fun to be the centre of attention! But I like being behind the scenes too although it’s very different.

SISSY: After you finished promoting the Trash Palace album I got the impression you’d had enough of touring and thought that all musicians were bastards!

DIMITRI: They are! No really it’s just that I don’t know if I can cope with endless touring. I like being on stage and playing but the studio is a more creative environment. Being on stage and touring is not. You just play stuff and it’s good fun but it’s a different energy. And I start to miss the creative energy very quickly. I used to tour as a drummer when I was very young and after a month of touring I was ready to go home. So touring to promote an album for two years is for me, a nightmare.

SISSY: Do you think the creative buzz is more enduring whereas the live buzz is like a drug, a quick hit like amyl nitrate or something?!

DIMITRI: Yes, it’s a brilliant hit; it boosts you up and there’s nothing like it but it ends up being too repetitive when you do it day after day and you’re not going anywhere creatively. I like exploring and experimenting, finding new things and learning so I prefer the studio environment for those things.

WAREZ: What’s your opinion on the impact of the internet and filesharing on the music industry?

DIMITRI: I think it’s great. I don’t condemn people who download music illegally because it’s not being done by people that have money and can afford to buy CD’s. You’re not going to spend 45 minutes downloading something that might sound shit and have half the song missing if you can go and buy the CD. So the people that do it are usually kids that can’t afford to buy things and the good thing is they’re discovering music and bands that they wouldn’t hear otherwise. Therefore they listen to new music and by doing that, maybe they’ll get to really like a band and go buy the CD because they want to have the artwork. And they’re more likely to go and see the band live because you can’t download that experience! I think that the internet has done live music a great favour because more people are getting to know about more and more bands so they’re going to more gigs. So I think it’s a good thing and in terms of Madonna being downloaded and only selling 25 million instead of 26, then ok, the majors might lose a small percentage of their sales but I think the impact for artists is not a bad one at all.

SISSY: Do you remember the first big gig you went to and what your early influences were?

DIMITRI: The first proper gig I saw was David Bowie. The Velvet Underground would be another big influence because everything they did should have been completely wrong and it shouldn’t have worked but for some weird reason it did!
It held together by the skin of its teeth. If it was one track you could say it happened by accident but because it was a whole album, you realise it was pure genius. They couldn’t play, they couldn’t sing, they couldn’t write songs in a conventional technical way but somehow they actually could in a very different way. So it wasn’t about the technical ability, it was about the emotion that’s in the music. Prince was also an absolute genius, probably the biggest genius of the 1980’s and an influence on me because he produced his own material and other artists as well.

SISSY: Can you recommend any equipment for recording?

DIMITRI: At the moment I really like the Shure Beta 58 microphone. We’ve used it for all Brian’s vocals on the Placebo album and for some of the drums and guitars. I love this mic… it’s one of the cheapest good ones you can get (about £50 more than an SM 58) and it always sounds great. For guitars, if you want a really modern sound, plug-ins like Guitar Rig are really good. But you can’t beat Marshall, Fender Twin and Vox for real amp sounds. A good thing to do is to split the guitar signal and record two different amps at the same time. There’s lots of good software; Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Reason, Live or even GarageBand, it’s about learning how to use it and getting it to do something it’s not supposed to do. If you use all the presets in GarageBand you’ll end up with all the same sounds as someone else but if you experiment you can get something good with it. It’s not necessarily about the equipment you use; it’s more about how you use it!

…………………….

Just then, Brian Molko appears in the studio to listen to mixes, tired after a day’s photo shoot. Sissy asks Brian why Placebo are such workaholics… they never seem to stop writing, recording and touring in an endless cycle! Brian feigns an air of worldweary cynicism and replies ‘It’s because our lives are so unsatisfactory that we have to throw ourselves into work and booze in order to stay alive!’ We think we can detect an ironic twinkle in his eye when he says it; we certainly hope so!

Tags: Dimitri Tikovoi, French, Producer, Trash Palace
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Bill Lloyd – Behind the Scenes with Placebo

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Bill... Placebo mystery man!

On our trip earlier this year to the studio where Placebo were recording their fifth album, ‘MEDS’ which has now been released, Sissy managed to corner William Patrick Lloyd, (better known as Bill) who has perhaps one of the best and most unusual jobs in the music industry, and got him to answer a few questions. Bill acts as a kind of interface between Placebo and their crew; sort of half a fourth member, half tech. He does a bit of everything from playing and programming to looking after the equipment side of things. You can usually see him at Placebo gigs lurking at the back of the stage, playing extra guitar and keyboard parts and trying not to be noticed. He wouldn’t even let us take his photo for this interview on account of his modesty and shyness!

SISSY: How did you end up such a unique situation?

BILL: I started off as a tech for Placebo around the time of the second album, and they asked me to play some stuff at gigs so I developed this dual role. Then eventually I got to contribute a few little ideas and bits of playing in the studio on the odd occasion; a bit of bass or keyboards.

SISSY: How did you get involved in music?

BILL: I was in a band from the Croydon area called Faith Over Reason and we got a publishing deal while I was still at school. Then we carried on after we left school for a few years. I mainly played keyboards and then bass.
The music was kind of folky indie rock… a bit dodgy really, and not very cool!
Then I worked for a small record company for a while where I sometimes had to drive bands around and help them set up. It was a really cool label called Big Cat; they had bands like Pavement who I really liked.
I was always interested in technical things so I learnt a bit about it… you have to be interested in technical stuff to be any good at it otherwise you’d get bored!

SISSY: It always seems to me that Placebo have quite a heavy workload. Is that by choice?

BILL: It’s more out of the necessity of keeping the profile up. It’s not too bad though, we have had a bit of time off here and there.

SISSY: What did you get up to in 2005?

BILL: We were touring, then we did some writing sessions where I had to set up the gear and get the sounds so we could record it for the demos. Then we started doing the album.

SISSY: Do you enjoy the extensive touring that working with Placebo involves?

BILL: I mostly like it but it can get a bit much after a year or so!

SISSY: What’s your favourite place to play?

BILL: We went to South America for the first time earlier in 2005 and that was fantastic, I had a great time.
France is a good place for us to play; we always get treated really well and the venues we play are designed for bands whereas in countries like the UK you’re sometimes playing in classical music venues, which sound terrible. And I always look forward to going back to Australia.

SISSY: What do you think gives Placebo its international appeal?

BILL: It’s kind of unique and doesn’t follow any particular styles; it just does its own thing.

SISSY: Do you think Placebo will carry on forever like the Rolling Stones?

BILL: If you’d have asked me that a few years ago I’d have said no way but the longer it goes on the more I think I can’t really see a finish!

SISSY: What’s your favourite type of Placebo song?

BILL: Probably the darker, mellower stuff interests me more than the up-beat songs. I really like the album we’re making now because it has that darker flavour.

SISSY: What’s it like being behind the scenes all the time? Do you mind not being in the press shots and having none of the glory?!

BILL: I really like it; I wouldn’t like to be at the front of the stage and I don’t like the limelight. A couple of times the band have pushed me to the front if it’s my birthday or something and I hated it! It was kind of sweet of them but I didn’t feel comfortable. I prefer being out of the spotlight and just working on the music.

SISSY: What was the first proper gig you ever saw?

BILL: I think it was the Thompson Twins… I was in my early teens and I was really into synthesisers. I learned to play my grandmother’s electric organ and wanted to get a proper synth. I seemed to have a fairly immediate understanding of that type of technology, it was definitely my thing. I had a triple keyboard stand and a home-made A-frame which I thought was really cool but it was the 80’s so that’s ok!

SISSY: Would you consider doing the same kind of job for another band?

BILL: Probably not! I don’t think I could start all over again with anyone else; getting to know them and exactly how they do things.

SISSY: What equipment can you recommend?

BILL: If you’re starting out, Fender probably do the best guitars for the least money. You can get something playable for £200 or so that will sound all right, you can gig with it. All the amplifiers I like aren’t starter amps; my favourite bass amp is the 200T Ampeg. For guitars, Marshalls are always good but if you can afford it, you can’t beat the Fender Twin ’65 reissue… it’s the best reissue I’ve heard.
With keyboards, the old classics tend to be my favourites, my first keyboard is my favourite still, it’s a Korg 700S monophonic synth. The latest thing I like which is quite cheap is the Korg Legacy reissues of their old synths. You can get all the vintage sounds like the Poly 6, Wavestation and MS20 and they’re all really good.

SISSY: What do you use for programming?

BILL: We don’t use sequencing live, but I’ve started using a sample programme called Contact. Live I use a keyboard and pedals to trigger clicks and sounds and stuff.

SISSY: Have you ever missed a trigger and not brought a song in?

BILL: I’ve done it a couple of times! It’s a nightmare.

SISSY: That sounds like a huge responsibility! I guess that means you can’t get drunk before you play?

BILL: I probably used to but I can’t play drunk now! None of us get wrecked before we play; maybe just a couple of drinks!

SISSY: What music do you like to listen to?

BILL: The Sigur Ros album was my favourite from 2005. I like a lot of film soundtracks by people like Ennio Morricone and John Barry. I like such a wide range of music; all the greats and some obscure stuff too, it’s hard to specify anything in particular…

………………..

That’s where we leave Bill, sitting at the grand piano in the live room. The mix of the new Placebo album is due to finish soon but Bill will still be there at the weekend, sorting out the equipment and tying up loose ends. His wide musical tastes, refusal to be in the limelight and amenable attitude (rare qualities in the music industry!) seem to make him the perfect, and possibly the only candidate for the job he does so efficiently! For info about Placebo, go to www.placeboworld.co.uk

Tags: Bill Lloyd, Placebo, Tech
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Dave Randall – Guitarist for Faithless and Creator of Slovo

Monday, August 21st, 2006

Dave… articulate and connected

Dave Randall is perhaps best known for playing guitar in Faithless, but he’s also got his own band Slovo and has played for many other artists including Emiliana Torrini, Pauline Taylor, Dido and 1 Giant Leap. He has a distinctive style, bringing lush atmospheres and ambient soundscapes to anything he plays on, as well as being a soulful and articulate acoustic guitar player, and he’s also able to rock and funk with the best on electric guitar when required. Sissy has managed to persuade Dave to take a couple of hours off from working on his new album to meet up for a cup of peppermint tea and a chat:

SISSY: How long have you been playing guitar?

DAVE: I started playing the guitar when I was about 10 years old. And by the time I was 13, which is when I got my first electric guitar for £25 out of the local paper, I knew I wanted to do it professionally. But it wasn’t until 10 years later, when I was 23 that I was able to give up my day job and start working as a guitar player.

SISSY: Did you have your own bands in the interim?

DAVE: Yes… my philosophy as a young musician, which I would endorse and encourage others to adopt, was to say no to nothing… musically speaking; to play with as many people and in as many different genres as possible. Also, I tried to keep an open mind and absorb as much information as I could. So I had a lot of bands during that 10 years, and to this day I work with as many people as I have time for.

SISSY: What were your main influences and inspirations?

DAVE: My earliest significant influence was my best friend’s older brother. I was very lucky because he was a good guy; he took the time to show me a few chords and to play me some of his albums. Looking at him playing his guitar, I thought it was the coolest thing that anyone could do. Then I started to listen to a lot of the bands that were around at the time… this would have been the early 80’s. I listened to the Police a lot; Andy Summers was a big influence on me. Then a little bit later on I heard Hendrix for the first time, then I got into rockier stuff like Living Colour so their guitarist Vernon Reed became an influence.

Another crucial thing was that I was encouraged by a lot of my musician friends from my hometown of Southend-on-Sea, who were around 15 years older than me, to listen to a lot of blues music. To this day, I have a love of acoustic and early electric blues.

SISSY: It seems that all good guitarists have at some point immersed themselves in the blues when learning their craft.

DAVE: It’s pretty important… there are some people who try to break away from that tradition like Richard Thompson, who I also love; he’s gone for a much more English rooted folk tradition. But for me, blues and everything associated with it like soul; just great black American music, right through to hip-hop… things like A Tribe Called Quest and Slow in Theory who were all part of the same trajectory; really emotional, exciting, soulful music which moved me and which I tried to learn from and emulate in some sort of way.

SISSY: You mentioned buying your first guitar; what was it?

DAVE: It didn’t have a name, it was very basic. I remember my mum being quite irritated at having to spend the £25. It was a birthday present and I remember her saying ‘you’ll probably give up in 6 weeks!’ So it’s quite nice to be able to prove her wrong all these years later.

SISSY: Did you have any formal music education at music college or anything?

DAVE: No. I don’t have grades on any instruments but I did take studying very seriously… when I could afford it I would have a few guitar lessons from a guy that lived locally; then I did a couple of part-time courses in London and played with as many other guitarists as possible. So I did take learning very seriously but never did it in a formal way.

SISSY: Do you think some college courses can be too set and structured and give an unrealistic idea of what it’s really all about?

DAVE: I think that’s true because although playing guitar is a craft and therefore you need a set of tools available to you and to be fluent and have a vocabulary, at the same time it’s an art so you have to bring your own personality, feel and perspective to the instrument. Colleges which hot-house players on a 2-year intensive course sometimes focus exclusively on the craft side of things and you emerge at the other end able to copy any number of great players but the real question is, can you create something original which is your own?

SISSY: You mentioned having a day-job before you became a professional musician; what did you do?

DAVE: I had a part-time job in a record shop for a while; I did all sorts of jobs before that including working in a pork-pie factory!

SISSY: Aren’t you a vegetarian?

DAVE: I was and still am, but you have to pay the rent! I’d say to any young musician, there’s no shame in paying the rent by whatever means you can. It’s better to have the basics of life together than to try and do the romantic struggling musician thing and not even be able to afford new strings.

SISSY: What led to you becoming professional?

DAVE: At 23 I got a lucky break; an old drummer friend who I’d been playing with since I was 16 introduced me to the people who formed the first incarnation of Faithless. I was already earning some money from music by working with singer/songwriters like Pauline Taylor (who sung on the first Faithless album) and a guy called Jay Fisher. I also had my own 3-piece rap-rock band called Bombastic. We didn’t get signed but it taught me a lot about performance and writing. It wasn’t until I joined Faithless that I was able to leave the day job and register myself as a self-employed musician, which was a lovely feeling.

SISSY: How long did you play in Faithless for?

DAVE: I toured with them between 1996 and 2000 at which point I left because I wanted to make the first Slovo record, which was my own project. That was released in 2002 and we toured to promote it for 2 years. Then, in 2005, Faithless called me up and asked me if I’d consider coming back. They’d been using a guitarist called Nemo Jones who’s a lovely guy and a very good player but they’d gone their separate ways.

SISSY: It seems that you have an affinity with Faithless in terms of ideology.

DAVE: I think that’s true; we were quite a diverse bunch of people with very different perspectives in lots of ways but we do coalesce around certain important ideas. Max and I performed together at the last-but-one Stop The War Coalition Demonstration in Trafalgar Square. So we do have some ideas in common, but I think what’s more significant than that is that we’re all old friends. We’ve got 10 years of shared memories between us and it’s been great fun working with them again. I’ve been working with them this time since the beginning of last year; this year we’ll be playing some dates in Ireland and then the V festivals.

SISSY: How do you find sessioning and playing other people’s material compared to doing your own projects?

DAVE: The term ‘sessioning’ can have negative connotations for a lot of people so let’s call it ‘playing guitar for someone else’ because with Faithless, I do feel like I’m part of the family and I get to write a little bit occasionally… I contributed ideas to two songs in the past. But I love both things; I love playing for someone else because I can really focus on being a guitar player and performer and enjoy the whole experience. Whereas when you’re doing your own thing, although ultimately the long-term picture is potentially far more satisfying, because you get to document your musical ideas, work with the people you choose to work with and flex your creative energy in a completely holistic way, even though that’s all great, it’s also really challenging. It means that in my case, I spend long solitary hours chiselling away at ideas in my little studio in Brixton. I think of songwriting as being similar to sculpture, in the sense that you have a vision of the finished statue but to get there, you have to chip away at a hard piece of rock for days on end. Therefore it can be a bit gruelling; that saying about it being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, is in my experience entirely true!

SISSY: You seem to be quite adaptable and able to easily interpret other people’s ideas, whereas some musicians get frustrated when they aren’t doing their own music. Do you think you would get frustrated if you didn’t do your own projects as well?

DAVE: I might have felt that way; I know a couple of musicians who have resented doing gigs for other people when they should have been enjoying the opportunity. They’ve been so pre-occupied with the fact that they’re not getting on with their own stuff that they’ve been hard to work with when what they’ve been offered is actually a gig that other musicians would consider a dream come true. I think you’ve got to keep some perspective and humility.

SISSY: On your website, I noticed that as well as your band Slovo, there’s another project called Randall. What’s the thinking behind differentiating between the two projects?

DAVE: After I made the first Slovo album, I made a mostly acoustic, instrumental record and just released it on the internet under the name Randall. It’s a strange little album that I’m actually very proud of; it’s quite stark and haunting, and hopefully quite beautiful. I didn’t incorporate the material into Slovo because I felt that it had its own integrity and its own remit, in a way. Slovo is about having a narrative running through the albums, which is in part social commentary, and partly reflects the fact that I see the world through a political lens, and I like to work on the album with people who can help to develop that narrative.

SISSY: Did you write music first and then find the political theme or was it your politics that inspired the music?

DAVE: I don’t think I can separate the two because to be an artist, you have to communicate something honest from within and I honestly ask questions about the world, not only in my music but with friends down the pub and so on. I am actually interested in the questions that I then write about on the Slovo records, from feeling lonely in a big city and alienation to what’s going on in the Middle East. That’s not to say that I always want to be overtly political; I don’t… the Randall album didn’t have a single lyric on it, political or otherwise but with Slovo I have continued to explore political questions. On the second album, I’ve worked with a very interesting and politicised East London-based quite grime-sounding MC called Bobby Whiskers and I’ve also got a guest called MC Boikutt on one of the tracks from the west bank town of Ramallah in Palestine rapping in Arabic about life under occupation.

SISSY: Is it true that you travelled to Palestine to research and record bits for the first album?

DAVE: The first album began with the voice of a 70 year old Palestinian woman saying how hard life was and it kind of set up the whole album, putting what I saw as the voice of the usually voiceless multitudes at the start of the album to set the scene. On this album I wanted to return to Palestine, at least metaphorically, but present it not from the perspective of a sad and desperate victim of oppression but a more positive side; a young, articulate MC who wanted to represent everything that is positive and fighting back against the illegal occupation, everything that is anti-racist about Palestine to a young audience.

SISSY: Do you think the situation in Palestine has improved in recent years?

DAVE: No, it’s as bad as it ever was.

SISSY: Are you attracted to supporting causes that fight injustice in some way? What draws you to deal with those issues?

DAVE: Firstly, I think that all things are connected; the fact that people feel that resources might be scarce because a school is threatened with closure or a hospital is being privatized or a playing field sold off, I think there is a connection through economics between that and war in the Middle East, the desire for oil and imperialism. And in turn, between imperialism and what is going on in Palestine and Israel. Economics has a big part to play in the west’s agendas; for example the British and American governments shook hands and did deals with Saddam Hussein long after he’d gassed the Kurds. The hypocrisy of the leaders of Britain and America is mind-boggling. So in my view, things are pretty grim. However, I don’t think that the state of the world we see today is inevitable… we are all agents for change. We can’t sit around and wait for divine intervention, nor can we defer our power to elected politicians. People have to talk about ways that they themselves can take the power back and create a different world. So those are the sorts of ideas that underlie the political dimension of the Slovo records.

SISSY: It seems quite rare for a musician to put their neck on the line and take a political stance nowadays; mainstream music almost seems to be politically castrated compared to the 60’s and 70’s when people felt that music could change the world.

DAVE: I’m not sure I agree… I think the war in Iraq has opened a lot of people’s eyes to just how cynical and rotten the American administration in particular is. Therefore there are a few more mainstream American acts that are finally making political statements; some of them always have, even huge people like Bruce Springsteen down to smaller acts like Arni Defranco and unexpected acts like the Dixie Chicks. It’s a good thing that there are growing levels of politicization in music. Music tends to reflect the mood of society in that while some people are confused or apathetic, there are others who have no faith in mainstream politics but who are nonetheless politically minded; organising benefit gigs, going on anti-war demonstrations etc.

SISSY: I heard a good quote from Tony Benn the other day; he said ‘We are no longer being represented by our politicians, we are being managed.’

DAVE: But we can represent ourselves. New attitudes are already affecting party politics. The important thing is to reject this idea that privatization is inevitable; new labour tells you that you have to accept the introduction of the private sector into schools, hospitals and the tube and the implicit message on international issues is that you can’t really challenge American power. I think that at every level, we have to say ‘No, we don’t accept that.’ We shouldn’t accept that our council homes are being sold off to the highest bidder, we should invest in council housing. Are we going to pretend that these things aren’t to blame for tension in local communities, when they have been run down by corrupt local councils? You have to take on each of their lies one by one and organise with others to present an alternative, and I think that people are starting to do that. It’s already beginning to have an effect; recently the Financial Times said that there are 2 superpowers in the world; one is the US ruling class and the other is world public opinion. There are more of us than there are of them, and most ordinary people agree on many things. We’ve already made it difficult in this country for the government to get away with backing America on further imperialistic adventures like a war in Iran.

SISSY: Do you think you have sacrificed greater commercial success by using your music as a platform for your beliefs?

DAVE: That might be true, but I’m not conscious of making any sacrifices, or of making a propagandistic record. It is one aspect of what I do, but it’s something which comes naturally. Both Slovo albums also have love songs on them, and moments of contemplation about completely different things. It’s certainly not about party politics; all the parties agree with each other about the very things I disagree with… the three major parties in this country are a bit of a waste of time, so my only interest in them is to encourage people to reject them.

The new Slovo album is called Todo Cambia which is Spanish for ‘everything changes’. I heard the phrase when I was in Venezuela at the beginning of the year; I went there for the world social forum. It was particulary significant that it was in Venezuela because they’ve got the world’s most left-wing elected government. They face a lot of challenges; the leader Hugo Chavez has already been the victim of an American-backed attempted coup. He’s trying to take some of the profits from the vast oil reserves of Venezuela and spend the money on helping the poor. He’s had some success but the richer Venezuelans and foreign investors don’t like it, and the Bush administration hates what he’s trying to do.

Todo Cambia works for me as an album title on two levels; firstly that on a political level, things will inevitably change for the better or for the worse but it also works on a more personal level; creativity is a response to changes in our lives, whether it’s the beginning of a relationship or the end of one, or responding to the world around you and articulating that in as honest a way as possible.

SISSY: In what way has Slovo developed over the course of the 2 albums?

DAVE: It was certainly my intention that the 2 albums have a sense of cohesion. The first album was more acoustic in flavour. It was called Nommo which is a west African word meaning ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’… it’s a tradition where things experienced as an individual are then discussed in a communal context, and that’s what I was doing on the first album; talking about the things that troubled me. Nommo had some west African influences musically as well. The second album is more urban in a London sense; it’s got a slightly tougher sound, partly because some of the vocals are by an east London MC. The production has a more urban feel, although there are still some acoustic moments.

SISSY: You’ve also started singing some of the vocals yourself; are you enjoying the experience?

DAVE: It’s probably been the same for me as it is for any songwriters who don’t consider themselves singers! I sing on about 3 tracks on the album. Initially I wrote a song called Spun Out and sang a guide vocal as I often do. Then I got the real singers in; Andrea Britton, who is in the band, sang it and I got another guy who’s on the album to try singing it, but then everyone agreed that my old guide vocal version had something which the other versions didn’t have; a certain emotive quality. So I thought I’d be brave and go with the thing that had the right feel and seemed to move people the most, even though I wasn’t confident about singing.

SISSY: Do you find it easy to sing and play guitar at the same time?

DAVE: It’s not something I’ve done much of. I’ll be sure to arrange the songs in such a way that it works, but it’s all new to me… Damien Rice I’m not! When we perform the songs it will be the first time I’ve sung live. But potential listeners will be pleased to hear that I will be joined on stage by some wonderful vocalists.

SISSY: What are your plans for Slovo this year?

DAVE: I’m finishing off Todo Cambia at the moment so it should be finished within the next few months, although we may not have an official release until the beginning of next year. I am guaranteeing to those people who have been in contact through my website that we will make a limited run of pre-release copies available through the website and we’re going to start doing some gigs in July.

SISSY: It seems that you are already using the internet to distribute your music and contact fans. How do you see this trend affecting the music industry?

DAVE: There was a piece in Music Week recently, talking about the significance of various download sites; there’s been a lot of conjecture about this. I think the truth is that no-one knows for sure but I think the 2 obvious points are firstly that there is a huge opportunity for people like me who have a small network of people already interested in a record; I can reach them directly and build up a relationship with the people who listen to my records, which has never been possible before. That’s the positive stuff. The more underwhelming aspect of all this is that if you don’t have a fanbase and you want it to grow, then most of the time you still have to rely on conventional means like airplay, racking in the record shops or the online equivalent of banners encouraging people to listen to you and all that relies on big money. So the grip of major label financial backing isn’t completely broken, and I don’t suppose it will be for a long time. I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing; you have to embrace that which is good but like most technology, it depends who is using it and why, and to what end.

SISSY: I wonder whether things will become similar to how they were in the 1920’s when everyone had a piano and played music at home but the number of people making music their profession was a tiny fraction of what is has become since. Now everyone can have a band and share their music but the over-saturation could erode the mystique of the recording artist and stop us having those shared cultural memories like the record everyone had their first kiss to etc.

DAVE: I think you’ve got to have a balance because although it’s good to have a shared culture across the Britain and the world beyond, on the other hand, the homogeneity of national radio in this country is mind-numbing to say the least. It’s very hard for interesting, innovative artists to get played except by one or two maverick DJ’s after midnight. So the internet could help to redress the balance and help to give a platform to previously marginalised music. I must admit, it is quite weird that when I go to my studio now, to do the admin stuff, I used to just have to check my emails. Now I have to do that as well as check the forum on the Slovo site to see if there’s any pertinent questions that need responding to. Then I have to check myspace and other sites to see whether any messages have been left there, so if you’re not careful, you can get sucked into spending more time than is healthy on the internet. I think it just came out recently that young people are now spending more time on the internet than in front of the TV so maybe that’s ok, if it’s just TV that’s losing out. Last night my housemate was looking at an internet dating site and I thought about all these people who aren’t bothering to go to the pub because they’re dating on the internet… how ridiculous! I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories but I do think this is part of a trend which does encourage us to spend more time in isolation. It’s a mad thought that all across London, on any given evening there’s people playing backgammon online, or chatting online or trading music or pornography online with people all over the world, and these same people don’t even know their neighbour’s name or pop round for a spliff and a chat!

SISSY: What software do you use for recording?

DAVE: I mainly recorded the album on Logic. I’m not an expert when it comes to computer software. I use it to achieve an end but I’m not really into it. Still, Logic has allowed me to a lot of the things I wanted to do. I run it on a battered old G4 laptop, which is very basic by today’s standards but it serves my purpose.

SISSY: What guitars and pedals do you use to get your distinctive soundscapes?

DAVE: The only general thing I can convey to others is to take time to open your ears; in other words don’t just dial up a preset on a Pod or something, and expect it to sound like your favourite guitarist. Find your own sound and pay a lot of attention to the tone. I use a handful of old Boss stomp boxes; 2 delays in line, a wah pedal, a Digitech Whammy-wah and I run those through a nice Mesa Boogie amplifier. I use mainly a Fender Stratocaster and occasionally a Telecaster and I use slides and E-bows or whatever I need to achieve a certain texture. So think about the texture you want to achieve and what emotions you want to evoke primarily in yourself and therefore in the listener.

SISSY: if you hadn’t become a musician, what do think you would have done instead? Do you think you’d have been a politician?

DAVE: No I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d still be asking questions about the same things and getting angry about the same things. I suppose I’m a people person… it would be nice to give some romantic answer about something outdoorsy but I think I’d most likely be working in a café, chit-chatting about nonsense!

………………..

Having exhausted ourselves discussing the state of the world and music, we leave Dave to go back to his bunker in Brixton and continue sculpting the new Slovo album. You can check out new tracks from the album, read about Dave’s music, buy the first album and contact Dave at www.slovo.co.uk

Tags: Dave Randall, Faithless, Session Guitarist, Slovo
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