We went to Battery in Willesden, to record two songs, ‘She’s So High’ and ‘I Know’, with a production duo from Liverpool called Steven Lovell and Steve Power. It is hard to say what a producer does. He’s sort of in charge, like an architect on a building site, but he’s your architect and you have to make sure he’s building your castle and not his.
In a recording studio, there is also someone called an engineer. He is always asking the producer about microphones and levels. Then there is an assistant who sits quietly in the corner trying not to look bored, and who asks you if you would like anything every half an hour.
Battery was huge. There was loads of complicated gear in racks in the control room and a colossal mixing desk. There must have been hundreds of buttons and thousands of knobs in that room, a sea of switches and little lights. A long, tall, wide window in the wall behind the mix console looked over a church-like live room, a vast space with pine floors and carpet going up the walls; a grand piano as long as a barge sat in the middle. There were anterooms with tape machines; soundproof booths for guitar amps; echo chambers; cupboards full of looms and wires and huge fridges containing power supplies. All the rooms had double doors. The restaurant and leisure facilities were down a long corridor.
It was intimidating to start with, but all studios are pretty much the same. Once you’re at home in one, you’re at home in them all.
We didn’t have much gear. Jason, the kid from the rehearsal studio, brought it all down in the van. I was playing a Fender Jazz copy through an amplifier that cost sixty quid. It was good, that amp. I showed it to the producers and they looked at each other and I could tell they didn’t like it. Graham kept breaking his guitars, and he was down to his last one, an Aria, but there was an affiliated hire company next door to the studio.
It was a painstaking process, making a record. We’d written the songs we were going to record and we could play them fine. It took all day to set up the drums with microphones, so that they sounded good. They just sounded like drums to me. By the evening we were playing through the first song, ‘She’s So High’. We played it so many times it was impossible to tell whether it was good any more. That does happen in studios. You get lost inside things. You often can’t tell if anything is good until you’ve had a cup of tea and listened back to it later. Sometimes getting it right is a joy; sometimes it’s a chore. It depends on the producer, too. Some producers like to do everything a hundred times, some like to use the first take.
We were all wearing headphones, which had a clicking metronome coming through them that was louder than anything else. It was very offputting. Lovell said we had to get the tempo exactly right. I knew what a tempo was, but I’d never heard anyone say it before. We persevered, trying it slightly faster, then a bit slower, then in between. Then he said, ‘That’s brilliant, guys, we’ll record the drums in the morning’, and I was driven back to my hovel in a limousine.
We spent the whole of the next morning recording the drums and the whole of the afternoon listening to them, just the drums on their own. Again and again, considering the sound of the hihat, the steadiness of the rhythm itself, whether any bits needed patching up, was the tempo definitely exactly right? It’s the usual procedure these days, to start by recording the drums. When the drums are spot on, all the other instruments are overdubbed one at a time. Sometimes a song sounds better if everything is recorded at once, but it’s usually easier to concentrate on one thing at a time.
After dinner we checked the drums one last time and started on the bass. ‘I Know’ was a song based on a metronomic groove and the producers thought it would be more mesmerising if we looped the bass. I hadn’t done that before. Looping is used a lot in dance music, rap and hip-hop.
The fundamental unit of groove is the riff. If the riff is good, the groove is good. A groove is usually the same riff played again and again with subtle variations. With a looped groove, you’re actually hearing
exactly
the same thing over and over. The bass player jams along with the drums and a small section of the performance, usually eight beats long, is cut and pasted together to make the bassline for the whole track. Computers make this easier to do, but bands had been using tape loops before computers arrived. The Bee Gees used a tape loop for the rock-solid drums on ‘Stayin’ Alive’. I’m pretty sure they used that exact same drum loop for some of their other big hits, too.
There is something very earcatching about the same thing repeating, a hypnotic perfection. Eight beats is quite a small amount of time, but it is actually long enough to change the course of popular history, if you get it exactly right. Making good loops is no easier than playing well through the whole song. In fact, it puts even more emphasis on the ‘feel’. ‘Feel’ is the subtle quality that separates the great players from the ordinary ones. It’s largely innate, like a person’s way of walking or talking. A hundred different guitarists will all play the same riff in exactly one hundred slightly different ways. The subtle pushing and pulling at the rhythm, the exact length of the notes and how hard the strings are hit and bent, mean that no riff is ever quite the same in different hands. Things played with clinical accuracy often sound quite lifeless and mechanical. If it feels good, it is good.
Knowing what is really good and what isn’t quite so hot is the key to making a good record. I played the riff over and over and listened to it again and again until we found ‘the one’. It had a slightly lazy lilt and, boy, it made the drums sound good. It was a crap guitar but it was a great bassline.
The record, a double A-side featuring both tracks, sounded amazing. It sounded like a record. It was all shiny and shimmering and it floated. We got the tempo spot on. We got the feel spot on. We listened to it a hundred times and played it to all our friends, and also, and especially, to people we didn’t like. We were In Business. We were best friends. It was very exciting, but we began to separate from the lives we’d lived before. All our friends were either unable to relate to what we were so excited about, or slightly envious. We went up to Manchester Square to meet everyone at EMI. There were a lot of people to meet: a product manager, a press lady, a TV promotions man, a radio plugger, lots of people behind desks and fax machines, the marketing department, the head of the label, the head of international sales, the chairman. It was a five-storey office building full of people who worked for us.
We still had to make a video. Balfe wanted to do something weird. He said, ‘Lets build a really mental flashing doughnut and wobble it around in the dark. It’ll be brilliant.’
When we got to Pinewood Film Studios, the light wasn’t quite as mental as we’d been led to believe it would be. It was a bunch of neon hoops. There were problems with wobbling it, too. It flashed quite nicely, though. There were dozens of people running around, speaking into walkie-talkies, smoking and sipping coffee out of plastic cups. It was very cold on the hangar-sized set, but glamorous women strutted around saying ‘OK, darling?’ and kissing everybody, even the scary looking light wobblers and grumpy focus pullers. There was make-up, there was hair, there was wardrobe, there was catering, cameras, playback, riggers, grips, lampies, sparkies, producers, commissioners, runners and drivers. No wonder film stars have trouble with the real world. This seemed like a much nicer place. All that fuss over the song we’d written before we went home for the Christmas holidays a year ago, the chords I’d sat up in bed playing when I should have been reading eighteenth-century French literature.
Daytime radio would have trouble with the word ‘high’, they said at the label. Really it was just too slow and too indie and not quite brilliant enough for daytime radio. It got played a bit in the evenings, on Mark Goodier’s show, and the BBC offered us a session at Maida Vale.
Graham wasn’t phased about going to the BBC. He’d been on
Blue Peter
, twice, playing his clarinet. Dave’s dad had worked at Maida Vale and Damon took everything in his stride. The BBC reminded me a bit of college. They do things properly at the BBC and Maida Vale was even more impressive than Battery, a titanic complex of sound studios, from huge rooms for recording orchestras to little voiceover cubicles. It’s steeped in history, and you couldn’t move for sitting somewhere Jimi Hendrix had sat, or standing where a Beatle had farted. It’s quite serious at the Beeb. I suppose it has to be. Everyone there knew exactly what they were doing. The staff are all cherry-picked from the best of the best, and it was all so illustrious it made me want to scream. It’s hard to rebel against. You can’t really have a career in music unless you can interface successfully with the BBC, and you sort of have to do it on the BBC’s terms, which are reasonable enough. You’ve just got to do what you do; if enough people like it, pretty soon they’re knocking on your door.
Food really liked ‘There’s No Other Way’, one of the new songs we recorded on that session. We all thought it was a B-side but were pleased they were nice about something. Most radio is broadcast live. It’s more exciting to do things live, but it does take a while to get the hang of talking on the radio. There are only really two rules in broadcasting: no swearing and no silence. Silence does not broadcast well. People who haven’t been on the radio very much tend to think that the few words they are about to say are what they’re going to be remembered for, and they tie themselves up in knots trying to say too much. In my experience no one can remember much about what I’ve said on the radio, just odd lines here and there. It’s like trying to recall what someone on the bus was talking about. It is quite scary, though, to start with. It’s a knack, like swimming. When you relax, there’s nothing to it. You can do it all day.
Images
Being in a band embraces a lot of things. There are your thoughts, which you are constantly expressing in your music, and being probed about by journalists and presenters. There are your clothes, which have to say who you are, too. Hair is cheap but hard to get right. You have to be able to think of things to say that are worth repeating, or at least repeat things that are worth repeating. You’ve got to be able to play an instrument, or sing, if you want to get any satisfaction out of it. You need to enjoy travelling, because there’s a lot of it. Stage design, record sleeve design, videos, photo shoots . . . There is always an expert to hand, but you need to know what you want or it all just looks like everyone else’s.
It takes a while to get the hang of everything. None of the early photo shoots were that spectacular. We didn’t look like a band. We still weren’t really, yet. We had written some songs and hung around together, but we hadn’t played more than a couple of dozen shows. Some touring was planned around the first single.
We went to meet with a design company in a mews in Paddington. It was the sort of place at which everyone who did art at school would have dreamed about working. They’d designed the covers of all the greatest records ever made, by the looks of things, and there were gold discs all over the walls in reception. The offices were bright and sunny, and hip-looking people were ‘just working on ideas’ at big draughtsman’s boards. The idea they’d had for ‘She’s So High’ was a naked bubblegum queen astride a hippopotamus. It was a painting by a San Franciscan artist called Mel Ramos. We all agreed it was brilliant, even Balfe, who said it was important to break minor taboos. It was just a good picture, I thought.
Andy Ross thought it would be a good idea for Damon and me to go and be nice to everyone at the EMI annual sales conference, which was taking place in a hotel near Gatwick airport.
It was the start of the nineties. It was a glittering affair and things got interesting after dinner. It was the tail end of the good old days in the record business. Record companies were still expanding and setting up film divisions. They’d made a fortune from rereleasing everything on CD. Record sales were higher than ever. British artists outsold American stars and it was a good time to be in the music business. It must have been quite an expensive event. There were hundreds of people there, including some proper pop stars. The boss of the company, Rupert Perry, made a speech on a little stage and said he wanted to introduce some special guests. Iron Maiden drove on to the stage in a bubble car and started swearing at everybody. Damon had a funny turn and ran outside. I was having an excellent time. There was a party in every room in the hotel. Nigel Kennedy, a strange kind of violin-playing arch-yobbo and the biggest-selling artist in the world at the time, was trying to throw a television out of the window of the first room I went into. A lot of men in suits were laughing. He fell in a heap on top of the telly before he got to the window. It was good in that room. I sat on the bed sharing a bottle of Scotch with a guy with a silvery beard who seemed quite interested in everything I had to say. We shot the breeze for ages. He knew all kinds of things. I liked that guy. We drank all the whisky. Eventually I said I’d better go and find Damon, who had last been spotted in a field trying to talk to some horses. Andy Ross said, ‘What the hell were you talking to Andrew Prior about for an hour?’ I said, ‘Who the hell is Andrew Prior? I’ve been drinking whisky with my mate over there!’ He said, ‘That’s Andrew Prior, you berk. He’s the head of the label. I’m lucky if I get thirty seconds!’
I suddenly had a feeling that I might be able to do all right in the music industry.
I enlisted my next new friend, who was spectacularly pissed, to help me find Damon. We got into his car and put on Marianne Faithfull, really loud. It had never sounded so good, her voice. My new friend just wanted to drive his car over the golf course; it was good fun, but I was a bit worried about Damon. I found him in Balfe’s room having an argument with the singer from Jesus Jones. Singers never agree with each other about anything. I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They’re devil-worshipping ponces. I said, ‘The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.’ He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.