Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bath West That's Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is artist remixer All Around That Pool
Speaker 1: musician Stephen Wilson. Stephen, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello. Okay, you
Speaker 1: just put out a new album, Future Baites. What motivate
Speaker 1: you to make new music today? Well, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm sort of one of those people that years and
Speaker 1: years and years and years and years ago when I
Speaker 1: was when I was a kid, when I was a teenager,
Speaker 1: fell in love with the idea that I could make records,
Speaker 1: and for me it was a magical thing and a
Speaker 1: gift to be able to do that professionally. So I've
Speaker 1: made it my business to make rather a lot of them. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'm slowing down a bit. There was three years between
Speaker 1: this album and the preceding one, which is almost unheard
Speaker 1: for me. But as an excuse, I did get married
Speaker 1: Eden and acquire a family in the meantime, so that
Speaker 1: kind of slowed me down a little bit. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, I've I've just you know, I've just been
Speaker 1: in love with the idea of making records ever since
Speaker 1: I can remember, even before I knew what things like
Speaker 1: producer lyrics, you know, even what those words I was
Speaker 1: reading on record sleeves, even before I knew what they meant,
Speaker 1: I kind of subconsciously and intuitively knew that's what I
Speaker 1: was going to end up doing, and that's what I've
Speaker 1: dedicated my life to doing. Okay, you have this new album,
Speaker 1: the Future Baits. What was the inspiration for that? So
Speaker 1: I wrote a couple of years ago, and and really
Speaker 1: the idea of the future bias. There's a couple of
Speaker 1: themes go on on the record. One I guess that
Speaker 1: the dominant theme is about how sense of self and
Speaker 1: identity have changed in the Internet era. So the idea
Speaker 1: that we now, well, let's just say that before the Internet,
Speaker 1: we used to look out as a species. We used
Speaker 1: to look out at the stars. We used to look
Speaker 1: out the world with incredible curiosity. Now we spend most
Speaker 1: of our time gazing at a little screen to see
Speaker 1: how many likes, how many comments, how many views, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So the idea that now we see ourselves pretty much
Speaker 1: reflected back in the mirror of social media, and how
Speaker 1: that has affected us as a species, how that has
Speaker 1: affected the course of human evolution, because I really believe
Speaker 1: it hasn't quite severely. So the album deals with a
Speaker 1: lot of the kind of issues spinning off from that
Speaker 1: new era, I guess of what I call the new
Speaker 1: era of narcissism. Okay, you said you wrote it a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. Yeah, So what was the interim about. Well,
Speaker 1: right here in the UK about two eighteen, we were
Speaker 1: going through this hideous thing called Brexit. In fact, we're
Speaker 1: still going through it. It was a very very depressing time. Um.
Speaker 1: I was kind of, you know, seeing on social media
Speaker 1: the increasing polarization of people, you know, the belligerents, what
Speaker 1: I call the politics of hate really coming to the
Speaker 1: fore that that whole thing brought out some of the
Speaker 1: worst aspects of humanity, seemed to me. And we were
Speaker 1: also in the middle of the Trump administration, so ditto
Speaker 1: to that really, So I you know, I I think
Speaker 1: I felt for the first time in my life, I
Speaker 1: wasn't really looked looking forward to the future particularly, and
Speaker 1: of course, low and behold, just as I finished the album,
Speaker 1: along comes the pandemic and it's become even more sadly
Speaker 1: and ironically, it's become even more relevant and even more topical. Okay,
Speaker 1: just to be clear, you wrote it was there an
Speaker 1: interim between writing it and recording it, or you just
Speaker 1: held the album back because of the pandemic. Yes, so
Speaker 1: the album is finished last January, so it's just before
Speaker 1: the pandemic came along. It was being scheduled for release,
Speaker 1: and then of course as soon as it kicked in,
Speaker 1: we pulled it and and now it's just come out. Okay.
Speaker 1: But in your particular case, because most people will hold
Speaker 1: albums back, it's primarily because they want to associate the
Speaker 1: release with the tour. You have a very dedicated fian base.
Speaker 1: Do you find that the were maximize's consumption or use
Speaker 1: some more tickets if there's everything happening at the same time,
Speaker 1: what's the thinking there, Yeah, for sure. Ideally right now
Speaker 1: I would be on tour, I would be doing record
Speaker 1: store signings, I'll be doing TV appearances, whatever I can
Speaker 1: do to to kind of bolster up the you know,
Speaker 1: the record, But I can't do any of that, So ironically,
Speaker 1: I'm left with the only thing I can do to
Speaker 1: promote this record is social media and making videos and
Speaker 1: posting that sort of stuff online so I can reach
Speaker 1: my fan base that way. Um, I think the idea
Speaker 1: of originally of postponing the album wasn't necessarily to do
Speaker 1: with touring. It was more to do with I wasn't
Speaker 1: sure when the pandemic first kicked in, and when Lockdown
Speaker 1: first kicked in, I wasn't sure if it was the
Speaker 1: right time to release a record that was essentially about
Speaker 1: the dystopian world that we lived in. And I'm still
Speaker 1: not sure that the truth is, I'm still not sure,
Speaker 1: but I didn't want to hang onto it any longer.
Speaker 1: I felt like a year was already more than enough,
Speaker 1: you know, to hold it back. Well, the historically there
Speaker 1: have been great dysturpian records. Are do you feel that
Speaker 1: you're a pioneer of the twenty century or is anybody
Speaker 1: else carrying the flag with you? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think there's lots of people. Certainly there's going to be
Speaker 1: lots of people writing songs about, you know, what the
Speaker 1: human race is going through right now. I've no I've
Speaker 1: no doubt there already are many records that have been
Speaker 1: released in the last few months that deal with that.
Speaker 1: The difference for me, I suppose, is I have a
Speaker 1: commitment and a dedication to the idea of the album
Speaker 1: as a continuum, as a journey as a kind of
Speaker 1: analogist with a film or a short story. I love that.
Speaker 1: I love people. I love the idea of people sitting
Speaker 1: down and listening to a record in the way in
Speaker 1: the same way they would engage with a movie from
Speaker 1: beginning to end. You wouldn't just watch a scene of
Speaker 1: a movie in the middle, would you. You'd watch it
Speaker 1: from beginning to end. So that kind of art of listening,
Speaker 1: which I think is definitely being what has been and
Speaker 1: is continuing to be compromised and eroded by what they
Speaker 1: called playlist culture, um is you know, I I do
Speaker 1: find myself kind of unusual in that respect. I'm sure
Speaker 1: I'm not the only one, but I don't think there
Speaker 1: are many of us left committed to that idea of
Speaker 1: the album as a continuum. And that comes from from way,
Speaker 1: way way back when I used to listen to my dad,
Speaker 1: you know, playing Dark Side of the Moon and my
Speaker 1: mom playing the classic Dona Summer Georgia Moroda records. Just
Speaker 1: I'm sure, if you know, many of those have, like
Speaker 1: this sidelong, what I would call disco symphonies. So I
Speaker 1: was just completely in love with the idea that you
Speaker 1: that music didn't have to be about the three minute
Speaker 1: pop form. It could be something much more sophisticated, much
Speaker 1: more in the long form in that sense. So I'm
Speaker 1: still committed to that idea. I find it hard to
Speaker 1: let go of that, even though I know it's kind
Speaker 1: of an old fashioned idea in the age of Spotify,
Speaker 1: streaming and playlist culture. But I have it. As you said,
Speaker 1: I have a very dedicated fan base, so I know
Speaker 1: there is still people out there that feel that way too. Okay,
Speaker 1: de fire, what you mean by playless culture? Well, so
Speaker 1: these days people aren't interested in albums, They're interested in songs. Okay,
Speaker 1: So rather than somebody actually listening to a song they
Speaker 1: really like, hearing a song they really like on the
Speaker 1: radio or you know, on YouTube or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: and saying, wow, I love that song, I want to
Speaker 1: find out what else that artist has done and listened
Speaker 1: to that too. People don't tend to do And obviously
Speaker 1: I'm generalizing here, but I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: now they don't have that mentality. Uh, it's the song,
Speaker 1: that's all they're interested in. They don't care what the
Speaker 1: what the rest of the albums like. They're not interested
Speaker 1: in in what else that artist might have done. And
Speaker 1: that's completely anathema to me, because I grew up being
Speaker 1: fascinated by the cult of personality. So I would get
Speaker 1: into an artist and immediately I fell in love with
Speaker 1: the song. I wanted to hear the record. Not only
Speaker 1: didn't want to hear the record, I wanted to hear
Speaker 1: all the other records in that artist catalog. I wanted
Speaker 1: to understand the trajectory of that artist's career, the bad stuff,
Speaker 1: the good stuff, the amazing stuff, they're not so good
Speaker 1: stuff that fails. I was fascinating with all of that.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that's true a lot of perhaps
Speaker 1: the younger generation of listeners now, they just like a song.
Speaker 1: They're not interested in finding out much more about the artists.
Speaker 1: They're not interested in hearing the album. They're not interesting,
Speaker 1: certainly not interested in here, you know, in being you know,
Speaker 1: familiarizing themselves with the whole catalog of a particular artist.
Speaker 1: That's what I mean by playlist culture. Okay, what do
Speaker 1: you view the general landscape of music today? Being the
Speaker 1: way I always say, you know, I grew up in
Speaker 1: the air sixties and seventies, where music drove the culture.
Speaker 1: There was faltering with corporate rock and disco. At the
Speaker 1: end of seventy nine, there was another injection as a
Speaker 1: result of MTV. Music is still very influential. But I
Speaker 1: don't want to answer the question for you. But today's
Speaker 1: things have changed. How do you view the landscape of
Speaker 1: music today? Are you optimistic pessimistic? Two things need to change?
Speaker 1: Will there be an evolution? Yeah? All of the above. Really,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I think it's true to say
Speaker 1: there's more music coming into the world than any other
Speaker 1: time in history right now. It's crazy. I mean the
Speaker 1: amount of songs. I think Spotify get some like ten
Speaker 1: thoud new songs added every day or something crazy or week,
Speaker 1: I forget what it is. Anyway, it's a lot. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of new music being made. And a
Speaker 1: part of that, of course, is the democratited eight. Democratization
Speaker 1: of making music by the fact now that it's very
Speaker 1: easy for anyone to buy a cheap piece of software,
Speaker 1: put it on their laptop, and they can make music
Speaker 1: in a reasonably high quality. You know, um plug ins,
Speaker 1: virtual instruments. Pre preset culture enables people to sound like
Speaker 1: their favorite artists almost instantly, just by pressing the right
Speaker 1: button or choosing the right option on their on their
Speaker 1: on their computer, laptop, on their laptop. So I think
Speaker 1: that's good that people are able to make music. Unfortunately, um,
Speaker 1: the downside of that is that most of that music
Speaker 1: that's being made is extraordinarily generic. And that also is
Speaker 1: a problem and a symptom of the preset culture. When
Speaker 1: it's very easy to sound like everyone else, that's what happens.
Speaker 1: Everyone does sound like everyone else. So you don't have
Speaker 1: those kind of um, you don't have that kind of
Speaker 1: situation you have perhaps in the sixties and seventies, the eighties,
Speaker 1: even the nineties, where people had to find their own tone,
Speaker 1: their own sound, their own personality because it wasn't easy
Speaker 1: to sound like anybody else. Um. So I think that's
Speaker 1: that's the downside of of the ease of accessibility of
Speaker 1: now making music is that everyone pretty much sounds the
Speaker 1: same as everyone else. I'm you know. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, I'm I'm kind of talking mainly about rock
Speaker 1: music here and I and I acknowledge the fact that
Speaker 1: I come from the tradition of rock and classic rock music.
Speaker 1: That's what I grew up with. But there is a
Speaker 1: new generation of music which does sound much more fresh
Speaker 1: and is much more contemporary, is much more innovative, which
Speaker 1: has come out of electronic and urban music in the
Speaker 1: twenty one century, and I've been immersing myself up a
Speaker 1: little bit more in that world. I don't like it all,
Speaker 1: but I'm fascinated by it because a lot of the
Speaker 1: people that make it are kind of doing things that
Speaker 1: rock musicians don't do. That it's kind of like they
Speaker 1: don't know what they don't know, they don't know the rules.
Speaker 1: They're not kind of burdened with that kind of legacy
Speaker 1: of the Beatles and led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd the
Speaker 1: way I am and a lot of my musicians in
Speaker 1: my generation are. They're not burdened by that, and they're
Speaker 1: doing some extraordinary things. So I do feel, you know, um,
Speaker 1: that there is some really interesting music going on. I
Speaker 1: just don't feel it's coming from the you know, the
Speaker 1: kind of area that I came from, the classic rock background.
Speaker 1: It's there's nothing coming from that background that that kind
Speaker 1: of interests me these days. What are the rules that
Speaker 1: these young people are breaking because they don't have the
Speaker 1: history that is burdening them. Well, one of them, for example,
Speaker 1: is just in terms of structure. They have no interest.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, you know, people like Kanye West, Billie Eilish,
Speaker 1: Kendrick Lamar, those kind of guys. They're they're the big
Speaker 1: names that you know, you you might pick out pick
Speaker 1: out of the current scene, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other people doing it too. If you listen to the
Speaker 1: music those guys make, there's no adherence to anything what
Speaker 1: you might call a conventional song structure, and that fascinates
Speaker 1: me because of course I've grown up with all of
Speaker 1: those legacy artists understanding that the whole notion of introverse chorus,
Speaker 1: first chorus, middle eight chorus, you know, the classic kind
Speaker 1: of tim panale structure that are that are apparently a
Speaker 1: great pop song has, although of course there's been exceptions
Speaker 1: to that, but these guys don't. They don't kind of
Speaker 1: seem to care about that at all. And I like
Speaker 1: that because it makes the music unfolding more unpredictable ways,
Speaker 1: and in a way that reminds me that's like going
Speaker 1: back to what, you know, what I was talking about
Speaker 1: the beginning, this idea the albums could take you on
Speaker 1: a journey, and part of the the appeal of that
Speaker 1: was you didn't know what was coming next. You didn't
Speaker 1: know what was coming next on a concept album, you
Speaker 1: didn't know what was coming next if a if a
Speaker 1: song was ten minutes long. Um, So that adherence to
Speaker 1: classic pop song structures seems to be disappearing and I
Speaker 1: kind of I kind of like that. I kind of
Speaker 1: applaud that that that interests me certainly. Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of documentation that you have to
Speaker 1: put the hook up close so that people don't skip
Speaker 1: the song. Is that something you think about when you're
Speaker 1: making new music. No, I don't. You know, the only
Speaker 1: thing I think about when I'm making new music is
Speaker 1: just getting myself excited about it. That's all I think about.
Speaker 1: And I've I've had this question come up in you know,
Speaker 1: various different forms. Do you think about your fans when
Speaker 1: you're making music? And I really don't. And it's an
Speaker 1: incredibly selfish way to go about your career, But I
Speaker 1: believe that's what an artist is, that someone who's essentially
Speaker 1: very selfish. You know, people talk about the music industry
Speaker 1: as if it's one thing, and of course it's never
Speaker 1: really been one thing. It's always been at least two things.
Speaker 1: It's been the entertainment industry and the music in industry,
Speaker 1: and there's been a crossover. Of course, there has in
Speaker 1: certain in the case of certain artists, but generally speaking,
Speaker 1: I believe art is something that is made by people
Speaker 1: who have this kind of vocation to do something which
Speaker 1: comes from their very being, and they have to be
Speaker 1: true to themselves. And that's where we get to these
Speaker 1: words like integrity, you know. And then there's the other
Speaker 1: side of the business, which is, you know, the reality
Speaker 1: TV side of the business and the very kind of
Speaker 1: contrived modern pop side of the business making songs that
Speaker 1: will fit a particular demographic fit on daytime radio that
Speaker 1: basically look at what their audience want and try to
Speaker 1: give it to them, or worse, look at what radio
Speaker 1: produces want and streaming services want and try to give
Speaker 1: that to them. I'm actually incapable of doing that, and
Speaker 1: I think anything, I think anyone that has integrity and
Speaker 1: considers themselves to be an artist would also be largely
Speaker 1: incapable of doing that too, because there's something about creation
Speaker 1: and being an artist and being a musician. I think
Speaker 1: that you means you have to kind of do what
Speaker 1: you do in a vacuum. So you're absolutely right. I
Speaker 1: mean that that whole thing about, you know, modern pop
Speaker 1: music being almost a hundred percent about the lead vocal now,
Speaker 1: no intro, no solos, no characters of the backing track
Speaker 1: at all, just all about the lead vocal. And that
Speaker 1: does sadden me a bit because you know, obviously I
Speaker 1: grew up in listening to music where the music was
Speaker 1: often as important, if not more important, than the top
Speaker 1: line vocal melody. And what do you think about the
Speaker 1: overuse of the elite drum sound and the lack of
Speaker 1: melody in so much of today's current music. It's interesting,
Speaker 1: isn't it. How how rhythm has become so fundamentally important
Speaker 1: but more important than melody in modern pop. That's something
Speaker 1: obviously I don't particularly I mean, my album is still
Speaker 1: incredibly melodic, and I worked very hard to make it um,
Speaker 1: you know, very strong melodically, as well as being hopefully
Speaker 1: sophistication and having all the other stuff going on too.
Speaker 1: But you're right, you listen to modern pop and it
Speaker 1: seems that often the hooks are kind of the things
Speaker 1: that my kids were chanting the playground. That's about the
Speaker 1: level of banality that a lot of the hooks have
Speaker 1: almost like you know, playground chance, but it seems to
Speaker 1: work for them. And then the music is, as you say,
Speaker 1: is this kind of it's all about the rhythm and
Speaker 1: it's all about the base. There's not a lot of
Speaker 1: what you might call harmonic movement in in modern pop
Speaker 1: music with you know. Again, with some exceptions, Taylor Swift
Speaker 1: writes great melodies, for example, great great harmonic shifts in
Speaker 1: her music, but a lot a lot of the modern
Speaker 1: urban R and B artists now are just basically creating
Speaker 1: a rhythm track and then playground chance over the top.
Speaker 1: It seems to me, Okay, you're blowing my mind. I
Speaker 1: have seen Porcupine Tree, granted that you know, seventeen or
Speaker 1: eighteen years ago, and I certainly have followed your career
Speaker 1: and I see your picture associated with different certain works
Speaker 1: that you've done. You always seems so serious. I'm talking
Speaker 1: to you now. Not only can you talk fluidly, you're
Speaker 1: so are you date? Where the hell did all this
Speaker 1: come from? Um? Well, I'm very you know, I'm very
Speaker 1: I'm a student of music. I've always been a nerd
Speaker 1: um and I've always been very passionate about music. And
Speaker 1: the history of music. And I've talked a lot about
Speaker 1: it by b over the ears, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I even have my own podcasts and you have my
Speaker 1: own podcast where I just basically argue with my friend
Speaker 1: about about albums. It's called the Album Years, and we
Speaker 1: pick a year and we basically just argue about what
Speaker 1: our favorite records are. So I've had a bit of
Speaker 1: practice at this. Um. You know, it's not only being
Speaker 1: able to talk fluidly. You know, there's an ability to
Speaker 1: analyze in the society where analysis is tertiary. If it's
Speaker 1: there and all, let's go back to the beginning. So
Speaker 1: where did you grow up? I grew up just outside,
Speaker 1: just outside of London, a place called Hamma Hampstead. Okay,
Speaker 1: And what did your parents do for a living? So
Speaker 1: my parents was an electronic engineer and my mother worked
Speaker 1: in the local bank. So there was no there were
Speaker 1: before you asked the question, there was no sort of
Speaker 1: history of music in my family. How many kids in
Speaker 1: the family. So I have one brother who's a couple
Speaker 1: of years younger than me, who again has nothing to do,
Speaker 1: nothing to do with music. He has a proper job.
Speaker 1: But I I think my parents, Um, As I kind
Speaker 1: of alluded to earlier, my parents were certainly responsible for
Speaker 1: me falling in love with music because they kind of
Speaker 1: brainwashed me, you know, when I was too young to
Speaker 1: even understand in a good way. I mean, when I
Speaker 1: was too young to even understand what I was hearing.
Speaker 1: They were playing great records and I would hear them
Speaker 1: on repeat. You know, the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever,
Speaker 1: Abbot's Greatest Hits, Dark Side of the Moon, Tubla Bells,
Speaker 1: you know, Frank Sinatra, these great records, and I was brainwashed.
Speaker 1: And still I feel like those records I heard as
Speaker 1: a kid when my parents played them are still very
Speaker 1: much the foundation of my of my musical DNA. But
Speaker 1: ever since then, i've i think partly also because of
Speaker 1: my parents and the kind of eclecticism of what they
Speaker 1: listened to. I've never really recognized this idea of genre.
Speaker 1: And I know people associate with me with with a
Speaker 1: genre particular one. It's never one I described myself as
Speaker 1: being a part of. I don't describe myself as being
Speaker 1: generic in any way. I have no interest in being generic,
Speaker 1: and I've always been very much a fan of that
Speaker 1: idea of listening, you know, across genres, being curious about
Speaker 1: everything that's out there. And I think again that was
Speaker 1: because of the music my parents listened to. And how
Speaker 1: much formal education have you had? I left school at eighteen.
Speaker 1: I did. I did my what in England was my
Speaker 1: O levels and then my A levels. I didn't go
Speaker 1: to university because I already knew what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: Um much to my parents dismay, I I kind of
Speaker 1: was set already on actually what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: I would say, probably from the age of about thirteen
Speaker 1: or fourteen. And did you go to regular public school?
Speaker 1: You know that these words in different meaning in the UK,
Speaker 1: but you did not go to a private, elite school. No.
Speaker 1: I went to a very regular grammar school. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was a sports It was called a sports college,
Speaker 1: which is just a fancy way of saying that they
Speaker 1: the emphasis in the syllabus was more on sport than
Speaker 1: it was on the arts. So I had everything stacked
Speaker 1: against me in that respect. I didn't really have any
Speaker 1: proper music education even at school, so everything was kind
Speaker 1: of self taught. But it was all from listening, just
Speaker 1: being curious and listening. It's as much music as I
Speaker 1: could get my hands on. Okay, so you were listening.
Speaker 1: At what point did you start playing? I think almost
Speaker 1: as soon as as soon as I realized that I
Speaker 1: was in love with this notion of making records. I
Speaker 1: mean just that, just the whole thing of being able
Speaker 1: to hold something in my hand and say that I
Speaker 1: did it. That was my ambition, you know, just to
Speaker 1: hold a record in my hand, and we're talking about
Speaker 1: good old fashioned vinyl records here. To be able to
Speaker 1: hold one of those things in my hand and say
Speaker 1: this is my record. That was my That was my
Speaker 1: dream and ambition from twelve thirteen. So I my parents
Speaker 1: did send me to guitar and piano lessons, and I
Speaker 1: hated it because I wasn't interested in being um. I
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in learning repertoire. I still to this day,
Speaker 1: I can't play anybody else's music. If you give me
Speaker 1: a guitar and say play me something, I know, I
Speaker 1: couldn't play anything. I could only play my music. And
Speaker 1: so my my guitar teacher would would be furious with
Speaker 1: me because he'd sent me away with a bunch of
Speaker 1: homework to do, to learn I don't know, Segovia piece
Speaker 1: or something, and I come back the next week and
Speaker 1: he'd say, if you learned the piece, and I say no,
Speaker 1: but I've written my own and and that was that.
Speaker 1: That that that was basically what I was interested right
Speaker 1: from the beginning, just being able to create and beat.
Speaker 1: My dad, being an electronic engineer. He built me stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, that that I had no right to have
Speaker 1: access to when I was a kid, you know, like
Speaker 1: a little multi track cassette record, which meant I could
Speaker 1: start experimenting with overdubbing and ound on sound from a
Speaker 1: very very early age. And but you know, and I
Speaker 1: have to say, I was never interested in being a
Speaker 1: singer a guitar player. What I was interested in was
Speaker 1: making records. I didn't realize it at the time, but
Speaker 1: what I'd kind of fallen in love with was the
Speaker 1: idea of being the producer stroke or to you know,
Speaker 1: I remember having el O Records early on and looking
Speaker 1: jeff Lyn, this guy does everything. That's what I want
Speaker 1: to do. He writes the songs, he produces, he plays guitar,
Speaker 1: he sings. I'm going to be that guy. So those
Speaker 1: those were the kind of inspirations to me. Those kind
Speaker 1: of people like Jeff Lynn now were you alone ranger,
Speaker 1: or did you have friends who talked about this stuff
Speaker 1: with that helped you in your formative era. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had a couple of buddies at school that we formed.
Speaker 1: We formed our first bands together with m and also
Speaker 1: had an interest in music. I had a very very
Speaker 1: good friend of mine who had an older brother there
Speaker 1: was about five years older than him, and actually that's
Speaker 1: how I really became immersed in world of early seventies
Speaker 1: conceptual rock music, because all the music that was happening
Speaker 1: when I was at school, when I was at secondary
Speaker 1: school or high school as you call it in the States,
Speaker 1: was you know, post punk, uh, sort of the early
Speaker 1: sort of new romantic stuff, electronic early electronic stuff like
Speaker 1: Gary Human and New Order. That was what with the
Speaker 1: kids were listening to a school. But my best friend
Speaker 1: Mark had this older brother, Stewart, and he had this
Speaker 1: record collection, so he kind of he wasn't interested in anymore,
Speaker 1: so we just kind of borrowed records from his collection,
Speaker 1: and that's how I discovered things like Hawk, Winn, Camel,
Speaker 1: you know, all that early seventies conceptual rock stuff. So
Speaker 1: that was another big kind of watershed moment. I think
Speaker 1: him in my childhood, because that's where I found I
Speaker 1: had access to to this this form of music that
Speaker 1: had only really happened, you know, ten years before, but
Speaker 1: it was like it might have well has been a
Speaker 1: hundred years before. Because we're talking about the eighties here.
Speaker 1: No one talked about music from the early seven and teas,
Speaker 1: at least in my in my particular area, it was
Speaker 1: an althema, right, but not only prog rock everything, you know,
Speaker 1: all of the musical genres that come out of the seventies,
Speaker 1: whether it's fusion music, you know, or the whole singer
Speaker 1: songwriter tradition or progressive or whatever it was, if it
Speaker 1: came from the seventies, no one listened to it, no
Speaker 1: one talked about it, no one name checked it. So
Speaker 1: I was very lucky. I had this this friend of
Speaker 1: mine with his big brother who had this amazing record collection,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff by Aphrodite's Child, you know, which is
Speaker 1: quite obscure you know at the time. I still is,
Speaker 1: I guess, you know. Anyway, So that that was a
Speaker 1: really important factor I think as well in my in
Speaker 1: my youth. Yeah, Okay, the obvious question, as an American
Speaker 1: you're eight team, you leave school, what do you do
Speaker 1: for money, So I ended up being very poor for
Speaker 1: a while. I did go and work for a computer
Speaker 1: company for a couple of years, but I got out
Speaker 1: of as soon as I could. And for about the
Speaker 1: first ten years of my career, when when I had
Speaker 1: Porkepontry and No Man Commentary was still a solo project.
Speaker 1: No Man was a duo I had with another singer guy,
Speaker 1: and I did music for TV commercials. I basically got
Speaker 1: by by doing music for TV commercials. But but that
Speaker 1: was that was good, and I didn't mind that, you
Speaker 1: know why, because it meant I didn't have to even
Speaker 1: entertain the idea of compromising the other stuff. I was
Speaker 1: making money and I could do the other stuff without
Speaker 1: having to think about I've got to make this work
Speaker 1: for me financially. And it didn't. It was a disaster,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Poukeuponary lost money for years. No Man likewise,
Speaker 1: and it didn't matter because I had this kind of
Speaker 1: safety net of being able to do music for for
Speaker 1: these TV things. I was okay, how did you get
Speaker 1: those gigs? Again? I was very lucky. I had a
Speaker 1: friend of mine who happened to be um in an
Speaker 1: advertising agency who came to me one day and said
Speaker 1: it was really funny. It would have been about and
Speaker 1: he came to me and said, we want we're doing
Speaker 1: this commercial for Lego and basically the production team want
Speaker 1: hastiche of Metallica, Master of Puppets. And I said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'll have a go. I can do that. And I
Speaker 1: did a really terrible, terrible version of Metallica Thrash Metal.
Speaker 1: But luckily the production team were no wiser. They didn't
Speaker 1: really know what they were talking about it, so they
Speaker 1: kind of it was really lame, but it kind of
Speaker 1: convinced them, and I got my foot in the door,
Speaker 1: and um and and so I started to get more
Speaker 1: and more work from agencies and and some of the
Speaker 1: stuff I did later on was was genuinely quite good.
Speaker 1: So I got a pretty good name for myself. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: musicians who are not household names are incredible networkers. So
Speaker 1: if you look at yourself, everybody's humble. Do you work
Speaker 1: the connections certainly back then, work on relationships, or really
Speaker 1: somehow you blundered through when things came your way. I
Speaker 1: think the latter. Yeah, I'm not. I'm certainly not very
Speaker 1: good at schmoozing and networking. Um, I think, you know, largely,
Speaker 1: I felt most of my here, I felt very much
Speaker 1: out on a limb. I've never really been part of
Speaker 1: a scene. I'm not sure if I would have wanted
Speaker 1: to have been part of a scene. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: kind of be careful what you wish for in a way. Um.
Speaker 1: But it's also been frustrating not being part of a scene,
Speaker 1: because being part of a scene gives you a big
Speaker 1: leg up, you know. I feel like most of my
Speaker 1: career has been a little bit of a war of attrition,
Speaker 1: you know, particularly with the genre I was associated with,
Speaker 1: being you know, persona non grat for most of the
Speaker 1: nineties and most of the first ten years of this
Speaker 1: of this millennium too less so now I think it's
Speaker 1: you know, the kind of world of progressive rock, conceptual
Speaker 1: rock is a little bit more accepted now, partly because
Speaker 1: I think the younger generation don't care about genre as
Speaker 1: much as my generation did, which is another good thing
Speaker 1: about about the way people engage with music these days.
Speaker 1: But for years, it was a struggle to get pressed,
Speaker 1: it was a struggle to get radio play, um, and
Speaker 1: I felt like I would have been better off perhaps
Speaker 1: being someone who was better or at networking and associating
Speaker 1: with me, part with myself with part of the scene.
Speaker 1: But I think part of the reason I never did
Speaker 1: is because I loved I love the music too much.
Speaker 1: I loved the whole romantic notion of making music too much,
Speaker 1: too to to kind of get into that mindset and
Speaker 1: more cynical mindset I guess you maybe need to get into.
Speaker 1: I've been very lucky the whole remixing things just fallen
Speaker 1: into my lap two and I'm sure we're going to
Speaker 1: come on, Yeah, let's see that. Because I got so
Speaker 1: you do this podcast? What years do you tend to cover?
Speaker 1: Were random? So so basically the idea was a very
Speaker 1: good friend of mine, Tim Bones, so I've known for
Speaker 1: more than thirty years, and basically whenever we get together,
Speaker 1: we'd just nerd off and argue about music. And at
Speaker 1: the beginning of Lockdown, I was looking for some things
Speaker 1: to do, you know, creatively, to fill the time that
Speaker 1: I suddenly had in my hand. And one of these
Speaker 1: ideas was let's do a podcast. And I said to him,
Speaker 1: why don't we just take what we do, you know,
Speaker 1: naturally on onto a podcast and see if people love it?
Speaker 1: And the idea is basically, we pick a year at random,
Speaker 1: and we then go and see what albums were released
Speaker 1: that year. And the first thing we do is we
Speaker 1: throw out all the ones that we consider to be canon.
Speaker 1: So we don't talk about Sergeant. If we do seven,
Speaker 1: we don't talk about Sergeant Pepper, if we do three,
Speaker 1: we don't talk about Dark Side of the Moon. There
Speaker 1: is nothing left to say about these albums. Nothing, So
Speaker 1: we deliberately pick ones that we think maybe people haven't
Speaker 1: heard about. So give you an example. We did and
Speaker 1: we talked about Van Morrison's Common One as our favorite
Speaker 1: album of that year, which isn't even an album that
Speaker 1: Van Morrison fans talk about very often, but for us
Speaker 1: it's like one of the all time classics and a
Speaker 1: beloved album. So that gives you a kind of example
Speaker 1: of how we go about it. We're trying to introduce
Speaker 1: people that listen to it, which a lot of them
Speaker 1: are my fans and Tim's fans, trying to introduce them
Speaker 1: perhaps two albums that are not part of the cannon,
Speaker 1: but we think are just as good as those albums.
Speaker 1: Would we ever picked a year from the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: we haven't yet. We haven't yet, but we are going to.
Speaker 1: We've only done about twelve episodes so far. We've we've
Speaker 1: I think we've been back as far as sixty seven
Speaker 1: and as far forward as night So we've been relatively focused,
Speaker 1: you know, in the last thirty years or thirty thirty
Speaker 1: five years of the twentieth century. At the moment, let's
Speaker 1: jump into today's era. We have Van Morrison along ironically
Speaker 1: with Eric Clapton making a anti lockdown songs. Is COVID
Speaker 1: Mutate and in you know, basically indeed the UK. How
Speaker 1: do you feel about that, and how do you feel
Speaker 1: about Brexit? Well, I mean, I think I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned to you earlier on the Brexit for me was
Speaker 1: something extremely depressing because it brought out it brought out
Speaker 1: those extremes in in viewpoint, It made people ten times
Speaker 1: more belligerent, ten times more polarized. It didn't seem like
Speaker 1: there was any room for discussion or a gray area anymore.
Speaker 1: And that was really what the future bias became about,
Speaker 1: you know, and a lot of that I do lay
Speaker 1: the blame a lot a lot of that social media,
Speaker 1: but it's unfair to do that because of course the
Speaker 1: technology itself is not to blame. It's about the way that,
Speaker 1: you know, the human beings engaged with the technology that's
Speaker 1: the problem. How do I feel about Eric Clatton and
Speaker 1: Van Morrison writing anti what is it they're doing? They're
Speaker 1: kind of writing and and they're not saying that the
Speaker 1: COVID is a conspiracy? Are they? They're not one of
Speaker 1: those people that they're basically saying, Well, Van Morrison is
Speaker 1: verging into that territory. But he's basically saying you the
Speaker 1: lockdown as BS, you should open everything up. We should
Speaker 1: be able to tour, or we should be able to
Speaker 1: go to restaurants, etcetera. Yeah, it's kind of pretty responsibility.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the thing about Van Morrison is
Speaker 1: if you really really take a long look at him
Speaker 1: as a person, you probably wouldn't want to listen to
Speaker 1: his music. And I think, you know, sometimes you just
Speaker 1: have to divorce the art from the artists, don't you,
Speaker 1: And possibly that's the case with him. Yeah, Okay, let's
Speaker 1: go back to the remixing things. So how did it
Speaker 1: fall into your lap? So? I in about two thousand
Speaker 1: and two, I and my band Pokepine Tree, signed to
Speaker 1: an American record label. We signed to Jason Flom's label,
Speaker 1: Lava through Atlantic, and it was a big thing for
Speaker 1: us because it was the first time we'd signed directly
Speaker 1: to an American label, and we thought, you know, we thought,
Speaker 1: oh great, we're gonna We're gonna crack America. Um and
Speaker 1: we didn't obviously crack America, but we had a couple
Speaker 1: of let's let's stop there because I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: trains I liked on the first Lava record. Why do
Speaker 1: you think you did not crack America? Because what we listen,
Speaker 1: I don't want to blow my own trumpet, and I hate,
Speaker 1: I hate to do it, but I'm going to do
Speaker 1: it anyway. I think what we were doing was just
Speaker 1: a little bit too head of the curve. Basically, what
Speaker 1: we were doing in two thousand two, which has been
Speaker 1: much imitated since, very flatteringly, but no one had done
Speaker 1: it at the time, was combining extremely heavy riffs with
Speaker 1: classic singer songwriter with textual ambient music and a lot
Speaker 1: of sound design elements that you might associate with conceptual
Speaker 1: rock music. And I don't think anyone had really done
Speaker 1: that before. There was a lot of you know, really
Speaker 1: crushingly great heavy rock records around at that time, but
Speaker 1: they didn't have the kind of layering and the sophistication
Speaker 1: in the production that we were that we were doing,
Speaker 1: and for whatever reason, it just it was the classic
Speaker 1: case of the record company couldn't figure out how to market.
Speaker 1: And I don't blame them. I'm not one of those
Speaker 1: people that lays the blame always at the you know,
Speaker 1: the feet of the record company. Andy Carper was the
Speaker 1: guys signed has worked so hard to try and get
Speaker 1: it off the ground. But the point is that people
Speaker 1: just didn't really know what to do with us, didn't
Speaker 1: quite get it. It was like, well, they're kind of
Speaker 1: like a heavy pink Floyd, aren't they. What do we
Speaker 1: do with that? You know? Um? And I think subsequently
Speaker 1: that sound became almost, you know, a genre in its
Speaker 1: own right, and there's been lots of bands now have
Speaker 1: kind of imitated those early Porcupine Tree records and what
Speaker 1: a couple of those would be. Well, there's they're not
Speaker 1: massively successful bands, but there are there are a lot
Speaker 1: of bands. There's a label over here called case Scope
Speaker 1: Music who basically that's the sound of that label, and
Speaker 1: they have some bands that do quite good business, not
Speaker 1: probably not in America, but that you know that it
Speaker 1: became a kind of like a sound and a recipe
Speaker 1: in a combination that other other bands adopted and and
Speaker 1: it's one of those interesting things that in absentially the
Speaker 1: album you talked about they had trains on. It sold
Speaker 1: nothing when it came out, but it now sells year
Speaker 1: in year out, It sells ten thou copies. Every year
Speaker 1: it sells tenos. Okay, this begs a question. Those two
Speaker 1: Lava albums, were you happy with them? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm really proud of Okay, so how did you fall
Speaker 1: into the remixing? You made a deal with Lava, right, so,
Speaker 1: so yeah, we we've we've gone slightly off topic and
Speaker 1: we so basically we did those albums and one of
Speaker 1: the things that the record company came to us and
Speaker 1: said they wanted to do as part of the trying
Speaker 1: way to break because they thought, Okay, this band that
Speaker 1: they've got this kind of conceptual, layered production thing going on,
Speaker 1: Let's hook them up with DTS and we'll do a
Speaker 1: five point one mix, and we'll hire Elliott Shina, this
Speaker 1: legendary a legendary engineer to do the five point one mix.
Speaker 1: So cut along, story short, that's what happened. I'd never
Speaker 1: heard music in five point one. I was completely ignorance
Speaker 1: of it. I've never heard it, but I said, I'm
Speaker 1: going to book a studio in London. Send me over
Speaker 1: the mix I want to hear. I'm a control freak,
Speaker 1: you know. I'm not going to let somebody just mix
Speaker 1: the record put it out without me listening to it.
Speaker 1: So I hired the studio in in in London, and
Speaker 1: Elliott sent the mix over and I went and listened
Speaker 1: to it, and I hated it. I hated it not
Speaker 1: because he's done a bad job. It sounded beautiful, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It wasn't why. It wasn't the way I
Speaker 1: would have done it, and it wasn't. It didn't sound
Speaker 1: right to me. It didn't sound like ust to me. Okay,
Speaker 1: very very specifically, what was wrong? Do you know what?
Speaker 1: Bob is? So long ago I can't remember. I think
Speaker 1: I hated the way the drums sounded. There's too much
Speaker 1: reverb on the drums or the guitars were to recess,
Speaker 1: so literally it literally had to do with the sound
Speaker 1: of the instrument as opposed to how they were put in.
Speaker 1: The varying for speakers also also this also this year.
Speaker 1: The balance and the distribution of this. You know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't like I said, Elie, it was a you know,
Speaker 1: master he'd done, he had done what he was doing
Speaker 1: with it with his other acts. But for me, for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, it didn't feel right for us. So I
Speaker 1: said to the record label, I don't like this. I
Speaker 1: want to go over there and sit with him and
Speaker 1: just basically go through it, go through it with him
Speaker 1: and you know, sort of do it as a as
Speaker 1: a sort of co co mixing job. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1: I went over there. I flew over there, and I
Speaker 1: spent a week sitting there with him while he rather
Speaker 1: begrudgingly remixed the whole album, and we got something that
Speaker 1: we both were really happy with at the end of it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's cut a long story short. While I was sitting
Speaker 1: there listening to I was thinking, I can do this.
Speaker 1: This is fantastic. I love this. I'm going to do
Speaker 1: all my records in it. So I got back and
Speaker 1: I put myself a little put a little five point
Speaker 1: one system together in my in my own studio, and
Speaker 1: from that point on I started to remix all the
Speaker 1: records I was working on in five point one and
Speaker 1: Lo and Behold. Three or four years later, Fear of
Speaker 1: a Blank Planet, which is a couple of Porkeypine Try
Speaker 1: albums down the line later gets a Grammy nomination for
Speaker 1: Best five point one Mix. Where where were How did
Speaker 1: you get that gig? What do you mean? What do
Speaker 1: you mean? How do you have a black pianot planet?
Speaker 1: You did not work on? No, no, no, not the
Speaker 1: Public Enemy album. No, this is Fear of a Blank Planet.
Speaker 1: This is a Poke Pine Try album. This is a
Speaker 1: Poke Pone Trey album that was kind of riffing off
Speaker 1: the Public Enemy title. Okay, I guess I was unaware
Speaker 1: of it. Okay, yeah, yeah, it was the altist. So
Speaker 1: two albums after an absentially the Pork Pantry album is
Speaker 1: called Fear of a Blank Planet, So it was kind
Speaker 1: of a riff on the Fear of a Black Planet
Speaker 1: was a riff on the public everything. Anyway, that album
Speaker 1: got a Grammy nomination for the Best five point one Mix,
Speaker 1: just out of the blue, I mean, and and somebody
Speaker 1: rung me up one day and said, do you know
Speaker 1: you've been nominated for a Grammy for your for your
Speaker 1: mixed of a Blame Planet? Anyway, So to cut another
Speaker 1: long story short. My manager at that point started to
Speaker 1: put out some feelers and say, I've got a guy.
Speaker 1: He's just been nominated for five point one mix. Do
Speaker 1: you are you interested in having it? And one of
Speaker 1: the people that responded in a positive way was Robert
Speaker 1: Fripp and King Crimson, who I was a lifelong fan of. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he wasn't completely sure, but he was interested, So I
Speaker 1: did a couple of tracks on spect for him. He
Speaker 1: came up, we played the two tracks to him and
Speaker 1: by the end of the first track he was jumping
Speaker 1: up and down his chair and saying, We're going to
Speaker 1: do the whole King Crimson catalog in five point one.
Speaker 1: So I started with the King Crimson Catalog. It was
Speaker 1: very well received. One door led to another a little
Speaker 1: bit slower, a little bit slower. So what year was
Speaker 1: the King Crimson remixes? Was two thousand nine. This was
Speaker 1: the story of in the Court of the Crimson King. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: a couple of things. Most people would say five point
Speaker 1: one is a field format, not so much as S
Speaker 1: a c D. But it's really for a very small
Speaker 1: percentage of people who have high level home theaters. So
Speaker 1: I didn't the market appears to be small and dwindling.
Speaker 1: From being inside the beast, what do you see are
Speaker 1: you talking about at that time? Are you talking about
Speaker 1: right now? Because right now it's growing. Right now, it's growing.
Speaker 1: But you're absolutely right. In two thousand and nine, it
Speaker 1: was dwindling, and part of the reason it was dwindling
Speaker 1: was because the record companies had given up putting out
Speaker 1: stuff from five point one. Now, what actually happened was
Speaker 1: that they put enormous in two thousand. In the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's, they put an enormous amount of money into
Speaker 1: getting stuff remixed into five point one. They were paying
Speaker 1: like a hundred thousand dollars to get pet sounds mixed
Speaker 1: into five point one, you know, and a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars to get room as mixed into five
Speaker 1: And then when and then with surprised when they only
Speaker 1: sold ten thousand units and they didn't make their money back. Now,
Speaker 1: fast forward to two thousand seven and eight. There's not
Speaker 1: a lot of people putting our catalog in five point one.
Speaker 1: But the people that are doing it are making no
Speaker 1: money from it. They're doing it as a labor of love.
Speaker 1: And there is a small dedicated audience four five point
Speaker 1: one that have been starved of catalog since the record
Speaker 1: companies had spent so much money doing the early records
Speaker 1: that they basically completely pulled out. But I was a
Speaker 1: champion for it, and I started remixing King Crimson, and
Speaker 1: there weren't many other records coming out at five point one,
Speaker 1: but the ones that we were ravenously received by the
Speaker 1: people that listened to it. And there was still a
Speaker 1: category in the Grammys for multi channels surround sound mixing,
Speaker 1: so it was actually relatively easy for me to get
Speaker 1: the nod the nomination because there wasn't a lot of competition.
Speaker 1: But people notice things. People notice things like Grammy nominations.
Speaker 1: So I started with Crimson and then I got invited
Speaker 1: to do Jethrow Tells Aqual Lung War. You're working with Fripp.
Speaker 1: You know. The first album's results of having Gregg League
Speaker 1: did pretty well commercially, then it became more of a
Speaker 1: cult item. The obvious question is was that a labor
Speaker 1: of love? Did you make any money? How many copies
Speaker 1: of these how many copies of one of these albums
Speaker 1: would sell? Um, Well, that's a difficult thing to quantify
Speaker 1: because the fourti anniversary editions were CD DVD A combos,
Speaker 1: so so that that's the trick. And that's another thing
Speaker 1: that's changed from those early years when record comans were
Speaker 1: doing surround mixes. They're very rarely now released to stand alone.
Speaker 1: They are considered to be extra value content. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure we'll come onto this, but nowadays surround mixes are
Speaker 1: almost always added as a kind of extra to a
Speaker 1: box set or a deluxe edition. Um. But in those days,
Speaker 1: two tend the Crimson fourtieth anniversary editions were put out
Speaker 1: as CD, DVD A combos and they did extremely well,
Speaker 1: extremely well, partly because I think it was coincided with
Speaker 1: the time when bands like King Crimson were being completely
Speaker 1: rediscovered and reevaluated, particularly by mainstream media. And Robert will
Speaker 1: tell you that because he put out thirtieth anniversary editions
Speaker 1: of those albums around too about and they got no press,
Speaker 1: and the little press they did get was quite derogatory.
Speaker 1: When the forty anniversary editions came out, five star reviews
Speaker 1: right across the board, it was extraordinary. It was absolutely
Speaker 1: even for albums that had never been part of the
Speaker 1: you know, the core favorites of that band we're getting
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary reviews, and that band started to really
Speaker 1: start to sell again, and of course that led to
Speaker 1: him reforming King Crimson around that time too. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: just talk at that particular time. You said, at first
Speaker 1: you did the five point one mixes at your home,
Speaker 1: and then when you were working with Fripp, did you
Speaker 1: also do them, and what kind of equipment were you using,
Speaker 1: and what was the studio experience as you went further
Speaker 1: into the project. So it was all done in the
Speaker 1: digital domain. Basically, what would happen is the multi track tapes.
Speaker 1: I mean this is true. Pretty much every project have done,
Speaker 1: the multi track tapes gets sent to a professional tape
Speaker 1: transfer facility where they baked the tapes and then they
Speaker 1: transfer them to high resolution digital files. I get sent
Speaker 1: those files, so I get raw multi track tapes, but
Speaker 1: as digitized files. So then part of it for me
Speaker 1: is just kind of detective work seeing what's on the tapes,
Speaker 1: making sure everything's there, and then essentially recreating the stereo
Speaker 1: as closely as possible before breaking out to five point one.
Speaker 1: And I do all that in Logic, the software called
Speaker 1: Logic Audio, and it's a very simple set up logic
Speaker 1: audio basically going out to six self powered speakers, the
Speaker 1: two at the front, the two at the back, the
Speaker 1: one in the middle, and the sub the low frequency speaker.
Speaker 1: And that was based atally set up in my little
Speaker 1: home studio. I have a proper studio now, but for
Speaker 1: years because there's no money in it. No, they weren't
Speaker 1: paying a lot of money to do any of this.
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding when I say it was a labor
Speaker 1: love um and I was just having fun doing it,
Speaker 1: and you know, and learning a lot, learning a lot
Speaker 1: by how those guys made those records. It was an education.
Speaker 1: So making the album of the old days, yes, there
Speaker 1: might even be multiple twenty four track machines. Then you
Speaker 1: have twenty four track, then you mix it down to
Speaker 1: two track, So we're in the process. Were your teeps
Speaker 1: coming from all of the also send you the two track?
Speaker 1: They send you the last version of the track, would
Speaker 1: you actually get So I'm not interested in I'm not
Speaker 1: interested in the two track bounced down master. I'm interested
Speaker 1: in the raw multi track tapes. So the tapes where
Speaker 1: the guitar is isolated, the bass drum is isolated, the
Speaker 1: vocals are isolated, the back in, etcetera, etcetera, and there's
Speaker 1: no there's no usually no processing at it, so things
Speaker 1: like reverbs, compression EQ or any phaser of anything like
Speaker 1: that has to be reapplied to the mix um. So
Speaker 1: I'm pretty much I'm very much working from from the
Speaker 1: very raw source recordings upwards. Yeah, okay, Well this is
Speaker 1: fascinating to me because prior to your work, I was
Speaker 1: a hundred percent against remixing the most egregious examples. Although
Speaker 1: he's a nice guy and a friend of mine, Jiles Martin,
Speaker 1: what they've done with the Beatles I just find horrific. Okay,
Speaker 1: it has changed the music, and I'm very fearful that
Speaker 1: those will become the default products going forward. But when
Speaker 1: I first listened to your tall mixes, it sounded just
Speaker 1: like the original, just like with a lot of steel
Speaker 1: wool scrubbed off, and you were closer. How could you
Speaker 1: do that without did you just know the material? Without
Speaker 1: having the two tracks? How did you get so close
Speaker 1: to the finished product that had previously been released? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I do, obviously I do have the two tracks.
Speaker 1: I have the CD, I have the vinyl. So what
Speaker 1: I'm what I'm doing? So my work process is basically
Speaker 1: to load up the multi track tapes, and then alongside
Speaker 1: the multi track tapes is to load up the original
Speaker 1: stereo mix. And then I'm literally on a pair of
Speaker 1: headphones listening in little five second chunks to the stereo mix,
Speaker 1: to the original stereo mix, and then my new mix,
Speaker 1: and then I'm hearing are okay, they've pushed the lead
Speaker 1: guitar up a couple of dB there, so I'll do
Speaker 1: that now. My whole philosophy with this is the people
Speaker 1: that these mixes are aimed at, the people that these
Speaker 1: reissues are aimed at, whether it's part of a box
Speaker 1: set or it's part of a CD combo, as a
Speaker 1: stand alone blue ray, whatever it is. The people that
Speaker 1: are going to listen to these products and buy these
Speaker 1: products are people that probably have bought these albums at
Speaker 1: least three times before. They bought the original vinyl when
Speaker 1: it came out, they bought the first CD edition, and
Speaker 1: they probably bought the deluxe CD with the extra disc
Speaker 1: or the bonus tracks. Now you're a expecting them to
Speaker 1: buy the deluxe hundred dollar plus box set with a
Speaker 1: blue ray in it or a DVD in it with
Speaker 1: a five point one mix. So the point is that
Speaker 1: these people know the music probably better than the artist.
Speaker 1: And I say that advisedly because most of these artists
Speaker 1: haven't listened to their records for years, and I'm the same,
Speaker 1: I don't listen to my music. So Ian and Robert,
Speaker 1: for example, the two people we've talked about so far,
Speaker 1: King Crimson and told they haven't listened to their records
Speaker 1: for years, and I find quite often I'm fighting them
Speaker 1: to not change the music. So Robert will come in
Speaker 1: and say I never liked that bit, let's you raise it,
Speaker 1: and I'm saying, you can't do that, Robert, you can't
Speaker 1: do that because the people that listen have been listening
Speaker 1: to this record for sometimes for fifty years or forty
Speaker 1: years or fifty years. It's like a bible to them.
Speaker 1: It's like a sacred text. So we can't change. And
Speaker 1: I've had these kind of fights with with some of them.
Speaker 1: I mean not fights, but it's a heated discussions with
Speaker 1: some of these guys. The worst was Greg Lake when
Speaker 1: I did an e LP album, Greg Lake come mean
Speaker 1: and saying bless him, you know, rest in peace and
Speaker 1: all that, but coming in and saying we always played
Speaker 1: that too, fast. Can you slow it down? I said,
Speaker 1: well I can, but I'm not going to because I
Speaker 1: think you're missing the point. You know, this this was Tarkas.
Speaker 1: You know. I think you're missing the point Greg that
Speaker 1: this is not for you to to, you know, fix
Speaker 1: things that you didn't like the way you played it
Speaker 1: forty years ago. This is about creating a more immersive,
Speaker 1: three dimensional version that's essentially doesn't sound in a way,
Speaker 1: doesn't sound different. But I can't remember what analogy you use.
Speaker 1: You use, Bob, the steel wool one, but I mean,
Speaker 1: I always use the analogy. It's like cleaning the Sistine Chapel.
Speaker 1: It's like just taking off a layer of grime off
Speaker 1: off of the Michael Angelo beneath, but you're not changing
Speaker 1: anything about the art itself. So I'm very committed to
Speaker 1: this idea of recreating that stereum, all of those mixed
Speaker 1: decisions that they made in nine or whenever it was
Speaker 1: figuring out all of those mixed decisions and recreating them
Speaker 1: because fans don't want to hear any other way. Um,
Speaker 1: there's kind of a there's kind of a contradiction to
Speaker 1: work here, which obviously the fact you're remixing in the
Speaker 1: first place. It's going to sound a bit different. But
Speaker 1: I think there's a way to do it that it
Speaker 1: doesn't jar. It doesn't sound like someone has tried to
Speaker 1: reimagine the music, and I'm very, very against that. Okay,
Speaker 1: Is it just technology? How do you achieve a clearer
Speaker 1: version than the original? A lot of it is technology.
Speaker 1: I would love to take the credit. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: doing some incredible act of necromancy to make it sound better.
Speaker 1: Not really, um, it is the technology working with digital files,
Speaker 1: not having to work with multiple generations of analog tape.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. In the Court of the
Speaker 1: Crimson King was actually recording on eight track, but it
Speaker 1: was done in the old fashioned way of they would
Speaker 1: record the band on eight tracks. They would bounce those
Speaker 1: eight tracks down to two tracks on a second eight track.
Speaker 1: Then they would fill up the other six tracks on
Speaker 1: that tape with malotron. They would then bounce that down
Speaker 1: to two tracks on a third tape and fill up
Speaker 1: the rest of the six tracks with a vocal. They
Speaker 1: don't have to be Einstein to work out that. That
Speaker 1: means that by that time the drums, guitar, and bass
Speaker 1: that were on the original reel our third generation analog
Speaker 1: tape copies with all the attendant hiss and degradation of
Speaker 1: sound that that entails. So when I get those tapes,
Speaker 1: I go back to the original source reels and I
Speaker 1: resynchronize all of what they call those slave reels. So
Speaker 1: I'm dealing for the very first time, the very first
Speaker 1: time anyone has been able to mix that album from
Speaker 1: first generation copies of the drums, bass and guitar, and that,
Speaker 1: by definition, gives you more clarity. Less tape is less
Speaker 1: harmonic distortion. Now, I say that with the caveat that
Speaker 1: some people like all that ship and one of the
Speaker 1: complaint it's I have had, and I completely acknowledge it,
Speaker 1: is that some people don't like the fact that the
Speaker 1: music sounds clearer. The part of the sort of sludge
Speaker 1: and cross talk and tapeist is all part of the
Speaker 1: experience for them. And all I would say is that
Speaker 1: what I do probably isn't for those people. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think there are a minority anywhere, but those purists.
Speaker 1: It's not for those people. But does that sort explain
Speaker 1: to you, you know how some of that clarity is
Speaker 1: kind of coming back in in that respect, and you know,
Speaker 1: being able to clean. Yes, and what about in terms
Speaker 1: of effects, you say, you start with raw and then
Speaker 1: you add reverb delay whatever is. The modern technology also
Speaker 1: helped there. The modern technology is amazing. One of the
Speaker 1: things I hear a lot is that digital can't replicate analog.
Speaker 1: I think that was true for years. I think it's
Speaker 1: becoming less and less and less true, and it's becoming
Speaker 1: more and more redundant as an argument against digital technology
Speaker 1: is so good now the plugins what we call the
Speaker 1: plugins that we use, which are the kind of pro
Speaker 1: you know, equivalence of what used to be like old outboards,
Speaker 1: effects units, compressors, delays, a reverbs. The plugins now are
Speaker 1: so good, and the emulations of the vintage plug in
Speaker 1: specifically are phenomenal, to the point that some of the
Speaker 1: guys that used to use them in the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies can't tell the difference between the emulations now. But
Speaker 1: that's really been happening, particularly the last five six years.
Speaker 1: They've just becoming There's a company called Universal Audio that
Speaker 1: make plug ins that are such a high quality, and
Speaker 1: they are emulations. So I'm using, you know, when I'm
Speaker 1: going and remixing aqualung for example, I'm using an emulation
Speaker 1: of the old e MT one forty rever plug chamber,
Speaker 1: which is exactly the same reverb that they used on aqualung.
Speaker 1: It just happens to be a digital emulation of it,
Speaker 1: which is phenomenal. So that's been also kind of one
Speaker 1: of the things that's really helped me is these kind
Speaker 1: of emulations, modern digital emulations of all of the original
Speaker 1: analog outboard gear. Okay, we'red you stand on raw source
Speaker 1: forget remixing, are you someone? You know? There are people
Speaker 1: who cut on the ANALYG transfer the digital. There are
Speaker 1: people who talk about digital. They talk about sampling rate
Speaker 1: c D versus violent, analyged versus digital. If we're starting
Speaker 1: from ground zero, where do you stand? Let's just say
Speaker 1: that all these days, everything I do, and I think
Speaker 1: everything almost everyone I do in the digital domain is
Speaker 1: done at a very high resolution. So the days when
Speaker 1: we were working on digital at c D resolution, you know,
Speaker 1: sixteen bitty four point one, I mean I'm now doing
Speaker 1: stuff at K twenty four bits, sometimes even K twenty
Speaker 1: four bit. The resolution is just off the scale. Um,
Speaker 1: So I don't think there's any compromise in terms of
Speaker 1: the quality of digital. But there is something missing from digital,
Speaker 1: and what it is missing is that it doesn't have
Speaker 1: a kind of signature sound the way analog does. Analog
Speaker 1: does have um It imprints its personality and its signature
Speaker 1: on the music, and some people like that. I like that,
Speaker 1: you know, I like I like old records that recording
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies. Part of what I like about them
Speaker 1: is that kind of golden glow, that kind of gradual
Speaker 1: top end roll off that you get with analog. It's
Speaker 1: a very sweet kind of roll off at the top end.
Speaker 1: And I don't understand these things. The truth, I'm kind
Speaker 1: of bluffing here a little bit. I don't understand this
Speaker 1: stuff that there are people that really do. But all
Speaker 1: I'll say is that I grew up in the age
Speaker 1: of digital recording. I started in the industry when digital
Speaker 1: recording was very young and it didn't sound very good.
Speaker 1: These days, it sounds fantastic. And you can cut analog
Speaker 1: from a digital, a digital recording uh K twenty four bit,
Speaker 1: it should sound amazing. It should sound amazing. Okay, I
Speaker 1: completely understand releasing vinyl records of things that we originally
Speaker 1: quite ano be al never made any sense to me
Speaker 1: to have something that we recorded digitally trim through the vinyl.
Speaker 1: What is your take on that? Well, I think I
Speaker 1: understand completely where you're coming from. But I think the
Speaker 1: one thing you're discounting there is the whole romance and
Speaker 1: the kind of tactile experience of vinyl, aren't you You
Speaker 1: know so, I think a lot of the time it's
Speaker 1: not about the source audio. It's it's you know, a
Speaker 1: c D made from the same master as a vinyl.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, what's the point? What's the point where
Speaker 1: you can get a CD for five bucks and you
Speaker 1: have to pay thirty bucks with the vinyl and you've
Speaker 1: got all that surface noise and potential crackle involved too,
Speaker 1: you know, to contend with I feel that way sometimes,
Speaker 1: but I also like vinyl and I like to have
Speaker 1: certain things on vinyl because I love the ritual of
Speaker 1: final I love the kind of tactile, tangible experience of
Speaker 1: taking a record off the shelf, taking out of the sleeve,
Speaker 1: putting it on the turntable. Honestly, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of it is that for people. And I also think
Speaker 1: a lot of people hear things that they want to hear,
Speaker 1: so when they listen to vinyl. Oh, it sounds so
Speaker 1: much better than the digital files. I think what they're
Speaker 1: hearing is the kind of compromises they're inherent in vinyl,
Speaker 1: the fact you can't cut very high top end to vinyl.
Speaker 1: There is a natural roll off. So people hear that
Speaker 1: and they say, oh, it sounds so much warmer than
Speaker 1: the CD or the digital file. Yeah, it sounds warmer
Speaker 1: because they couldn't cut the trouble to the vinyl. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot. I think there's a lot of that
Speaker 1: mythology that goes into vinyl. But I have to say
Speaker 1: I love Final because I love the ritual of it
Speaker 1: and I have a nostalgic attachment to it as obviously
Speaker 1: growing up with vinyl. Okay, forget the rituals purely talking
Speaker 1: about the sound. Is there any reason to take something
Speaker 1: that was cut digitally creator the vinyl such that you
Speaker 1: either have a comparable but different sound or a better sound,
Speaker 1: or inherently or you're going to get a word sound
Speaker 1: because of the compromises of vinyl itself. Okay, with the
Speaker 1: caveat that, it does depend on what the sources. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, if you've got if you've got a source file,
Speaker 1: that is a very high resolution, then it would make
Speaker 1: sense to cut its vinyl. If it's a digital file
Speaker 1: that's CD resolution already in the sense that the artist
Speaker 1: recorded it as CD resolution is probably pointless. But even
Speaker 1: then there is the caveat that you may have a
Speaker 1: fantastic vinyl cutting engineer who will get something out of
Speaker 1: the audio that the guy cutting the CD didn't get.
Speaker 1: But these are caveats. Basically your question, The answer is no.
Speaker 1: The answer is no. Just so I understand you're saying
Speaker 1: it would be you get a higher chance of getting
Speaker 1: good quality if you had a higher resolution digital recording. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've got digital recording that's done at four bit,
Speaker 1: putting that on a CD, you're naturally having to dial
Speaker 1: it that down to forty four point one sixteen. You're
Speaker 1: losing a lot of the information. A lot of the
Speaker 1: digital information is being thrown away because c D has
Speaker 1: to be a lower resolution, lower bit rate going to vinyl.
Speaker 1: That's not true. You have a pure analog wave, which
Speaker 1: is a continuous thing. There's no information being thrown away.
Speaker 1: But if your digital file is already CED resolution, there
Speaker 1: is nothing to be gained by cutting it to vinyl.
Speaker 1: Does does that make sense, okay, So tell us how
Speaker 1: you got the Toll gig. So it came from the
Speaker 1: King Crimson, you know, the King. It was like I
Speaker 1: was saying to you earlier, one door led to another.
Speaker 1: The King Crimson series was very successful, very well received,
Speaker 1: very well reviewed. Next thing I know, I get a
Speaker 1: call from Tim, Tim Shacksfield at e M. I as
Speaker 1: was then this would have been two thousand eleven. We're
Speaker 1: doing Aqualung fourth anniversary. We'd like to get a five
Speaker 1: point one mixed done? Would you like to do it?
Speaker 1: So that started me off on the whole Toll catalog again.
Speaker 1: That Aqualu and came out. It was extremely successful because
Speaker 1: it basically sounded the same as the original all but
Speaker 1: so much better. And I'm paraphrasing what a lot of
Speaker 1: people said about it. You know, I'm not That's not
Speaker 1: what I think. That's what most people said about it.
Speaker 1: And again I don't take credit for that. That album
Speaker 1: was originally mixed onto a faulty quarter inch tape machine.
Speaker 1: There was out of alignment. So every single version of
Speaker 1: the album that came out before we remixed it had
Speaker 1: been from a master that was was mixed onto a
Speaker 1: faulty machine. So it used to make me laugh when
Speaker 1: he used to see some of these people on forum saying,
Speaker 1: how dare Stephen Wilson remixed this album? The original mix
Speaker 1: will never be bettered. When Ian himself said, we mixed
Speaker 1: that onto a machine that wasn't working properly. I've been
Speaker 1: waiting forty years to fix it. So we fixed it.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't hard to fix it because the original
Speaker 1: session tapes sounded beautiful. It was the quarter inch master
Speaker 1: that was where the problems had come in. So we
Speaker 1: did a mix of that. It came out beautiful. It
Speaker 1: sounded much more alive and vibrant and three dimensional insert
Speaker 1: your own cliche. And it was very well succeeds, very
Speaker 1: well received, and I've gone on now and done I
Speaker 1: think something like ten toll records now we've we've basically also,
Speaker 1: you know, at what point did you shift from doing
Speaker 1: in addition to five point one two tracks and how
Speaker 1: did that come down? That's a very good question. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: we haven't touched on that have weak So what happened
Speaker 1: was essentially I was hired to do the five point ones,
Speaker 1: but my first the first part of my process always
Speaker 1: was to recreate the Sarah stereo mix to the point
Speaker 1: that I could hardly tell the difference when I beat them.
Speaker 1: When I would go from the original mix to my
Speaker 1: new mix. The only thing I wanted to hear that
Speaker 1: was different was perhaps a little bit more clarity. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to hear any difference in the levels. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to hear any any difference in the reverb treatments,
Speaker 1: the EQ, the compression, stereo placement I matched exactly to
Speaker 1: any moves and he rides in the volume, and he
Speaker 1: moves in the stereo field, something panning from left to right,
Speaker 1: or I recreated everything meticulously because I wanted the five
Speaker 1: point one mixed to reflect as closely as possible what
Speaker 1: the stereo mix that people have been as as you know,
Speaker 1: as much as it's possible within thein the surround field,
Speaker 1: to reflect what was happening in the stereo mix. And basically,
Speaker 1: to cut a long story short again, while we were
Speaker 1: doing this, people like Robert and Ian and myself, we're
Speaker 1: listening to the stereo mix and saying, this sounds better
Speaker 1: than the original mix. We should include this in the package,
Speaker 1: you know, as a bonus for people. You know, we won't.
Speaker 1: We won't take the original mix out include the original
Speaker 1: mix two, which is almost always what happens. The original
Speaker 1: mixes included too. But let's throw in this new stereo
Speaker 1: mix too, because even though it was a byproduct of
Speaker 1: doing the five point one, it is it does sound different.
Speaker 1: It sounds arguably better, clearer. Maybe a little bit of
Speaker 1: that analog magic has been compromised, but you know what,
Speaker 1: it's a different perspective. So that was the kind of
Speaker 1: mindset originally, let's throw it in. Let's throw it in
Speaker 1: as a bonus um and a lot of people started
Speaker 1: responding very very well to the stereo remix, to to
Speaker 1: the point that some of my jobs have been like
Speaker 1: for example, the Chicago Chicago second album I just got
Speaker 1: hired to do a stereo mix of that wasn't even
Speaker 1: a five And the Sabbath albums I've just done stereo
Speaker 1: only not that the record company didn't even ask me
Speaker 1: to do surround mixes. So that was kind of how
Speaker 1: that came about. Yeah, okay, just in terms of process,
Speaker 1: what do you do after you make the stereo mix
Speaker 1: to make at five point one? You know, in technical terms,
Speaker 1: on the workstation, I flip, I just flip on each fader.
Speaker 1: I go from stereo out to surround out. And when
Speaker 1: you do that, your stereo pan pot becomes a surround
Speaker 1: pan pot. So instead of just something where you go
Speaker 1: from left to right, it becomes a little sort of
Speaker 1: diagram which is like essentially like a little picture of
Speaker 1: your room, and it has a dot in each corner
Speaker 1: where each speaker is, and you just start to break
Speaker 1: things out into the room. So I might say to myself,
Speaker 1: you know, and I really approached it like an idiot,
Speaker 1: because apart from those mixes i'd seen Elliott do, I
Speaker 1: hadn't listened to anyone else's mixes, and I just kind
Speaker 1: of did it like a bit of a you know,
Speaker 1: kind of intuitive way, like an idiot. So, well, this
Speaker 1: might sound good, and let's try to put in the
Speaker 1: backing vocals in the back and and if it sounded
Speaker 1: good to me, that's what I went with. And when
Speaker 1: the mixes came out, I started to realize I was
Speaker 1: doing it in a way that not many people have
Speaker 1: done it before. I was doing it quite aggressively. A
Speaker 1: lot of surround mixes had tended to be quite conservative
Speaker 1: in that they kept pretty much the whole stereo image
Speaker 1: in the front and they would just occasionally put a
Speaker 1: bit of reverb or sound effect in the back speakers.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know this because I had seen Elliott
Speaker 1: doing and Elliott was quite aggresive with his surround mixing.
Speaker 1: But apparently he's one of the one of the exceptions too.
Speaker 1: And I was putting all sorts of things in the back,
Speaker 1: you know, and in the center speaker and moving things
Speaker 1: around the room, and it just sounded good to me.
Speaker 1: This is fun, you know. So they answer your question is,
Speaker 1: technically speaking, you just get presented with a little sort
Speaker 1: of pan, a surround pan pot which has a little
Speaker 1: dot where each of your speakers is, and you just
Speaker 1: move using the mouse. You just move things where you
Speaker 1: want them to be in the surround field. It's easy. Okay,
Speaker 1: Obviously there's been a learning curve and you're much better now.
Speaker 1: How long did it take you to do in the past?
Speaker 1: But more importantly, someone called you today. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to track and forget the preparatory, you know, baking it.
Speaker 1: You know that's not done in your studio. Once you
Speaker 1: get the files. How long from start to finish? Well,
Speaker 1: that really depends, like for example, I'm doing a project
Speaker 1: now which unfortunately has to remain nameless, but it's it's
Speaker 1: a big American record from from the nineties that sold
Speaker 1: a lot of copies, and the tapes came to me
Speaker 1: and they recorded. Some of the tracks were recorded on
Speaker 1: four twenty four track tapes running in SYNCHRONI station. So
Speaker 1: I'm loading up these sessions and it's just insane. There's
Speaker 1: like a hundred channels of information. And the thing is
Speaker 1: the track sheets that come along, which the track sheets
Speaker 1: being the original documentation that's like on the tape boxes.
Speaker 1: They're usually not very helpful because these guys that recorded
Speaker 1: these albums never really anticipated there's someone like me twenty
Speaker 1: years later I was going to have to figure out
Speaker 1: what's on these tapes ever again. So I'm literally then
Speaker 1: going through all of these tracks, listening to say, okay,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a backing vocal label as such, that
Speaker 1: sounds like it could be a you know, as our
Speaker 1: sitar whenever it is. I'm listening through and I'm kind
Speaker 1: of labeling labeling each of those tracks. And this is
Speaker 1: before I've done any mixing at all. I'm literally just
Speaker 1: identifying what is on each track of the multi track,
Speaker 1: and then I can start to have an idea about
Speaker 1: what sort of what sort of time is involved this
Speaker 1: project I'm doing right now, I've been working on since
Speaker 1: the beginning of the year, off and on, you know,
Speaker 1: because I have got my other, my other consideration of
Speaker 1: my record coming out, but I've been promoting that. But
Speaker 1: I've been working on it on and off since the
Speaker 1: beginning of the year. It's probably gonna be the best
Speaker 1: part of four to six weeks by the time I
Speaker 1: finished the surround mix of this particular album. But then
Speaker 1: I've had other records where it's just record on eight track,
Speaker 1: like when I did I think it was Benefit or
Speaker 1: stand up for Jethrow Toll. No, this was the first
Speaker 1: albums record on four track, so I had there was
Speaker 1: very little, you know, to sort of figure out and
Speaker 1: do with that. Um so that I mean, obviously that
Speaker 1: was a much quicker process. Someone comes in with twenty
Speaker 1: four tracks, how long do you think it'll do. I'll
Speaker 1: take me about a week. Take me about a week
Speaker 1: to recreate stereo mix from a well recorded twenty four track,
Speaker 1: forty minute album. You'll tell me about a week. And
Speaker 1: how do you establish a fee? I don't I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't really care about the money. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: in a very privileged position to be able to say that.
Speaker 1: I always say to the people that asked me, um,
Speaker 1: what have you got, it's fine. And the other the
Speaker 1: other sort of consideration for me is I must genuinely
Speaker 1: like the album uh and have some um pre knowledge
Speaker 1: of the album. I must know that. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to take on a record that I've never
Speaker 1: heard before, I don't know, I have no affinity with.
Speaker 1: And part of that is simply because I you know,
Speaker 1: I do acknowledge to myself that the people I'm doing
Speaker 1: this for are the people that have bought the album
Speaker 1: over and over again and their fans, and I think
Speaker 1: I'd have to be able to do a good job.
Speaker 1: I have to be a fan too, so I have
Speaker 1: to genuinely be a fan of the record. And at
Speaker 1: that point I just say to the label or the
Speaker 1: management or the artist, whoever it is, it's asked me,
Speaker 1: what have you got? What's comfortable for you budget wise?
Speaker 1: And usually it's fine. I've never turned down a job
Speaker 1: that I wanted to do because of the money. And
Speaker 1: you get an override or royalty sales, no I would
Speaker 1: never accept that. Never, it's not my work. It's not
Speaker 1: my work, it's not my career activity. Even my mix,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of copying the original guy that mixed it,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm kind of recreating his mix in a way.
Speaker 1: So the only part of the process that I'm really
Speaker 1: being creative is in breaking out into the room. You
Speaker 1: know that the surround field. No, I would never on principle,
Speaker 1: I would never take an override a royalty. Okay, the
Speaker 1: five month stepard is very important and can change record mastering.
Speaker 1: So how are these projects mastered? Wow? Wow, you've You've
Speaker 1: hit on one of my favorite subjects there. Early on,
Speaker 1: these five point one mixes were being and and the
Speaker 1: stereo mixes were being sent off to be mastered in
Speaker 1: various They will remain nameless for some very reputible master
Speaker 1: ing rooms. And I had sent the mixes off being
Speaker 1: really happy with the way they sounded, and they kept
Speaker 1: coming back and they sounded worse to me. And I
Speaker 1: remember having conversations some of the guys that commissioned them
Speaker 1: from me, and I would say to them, you thought
Speaker 1: that makes it sounding great, didn't you to start with?
Speaker 1: And they'd say, yeah, they sound it amazing. Why are
Speaker 1: you having the master because they're coming back basically compressed
Speaker 1: with big smiley eques, which is what you would do
Speaker 1: with a new You might arguably do that with a
Speaker 1: new record that you wanted to get on radio or
Speaker 1: you wanted to part when it's on Spotify and the playlist.
Speaker 1: But the point is that these records were doing are
Speaker 1: selling to the fans who are listening to them at home,
Speaker 1: generally on pretty good high fives. Why are we crushing
Speaker 1: the dynamics out of them? And this is one of
Speaker 1: my big bug best crushing dynamics. Um So, I actually
Speaker 1: managed to persuade almost in every almost every case since
Speaker 1: say the early days, the first two or three years,
Speaker 1: these mixes get released by passing the mastering stage completely.
Speaker 1: So the mixes come out of my studio, they go
Speaker 1: on the disc exactly as they are, and the labels
Speaker 1: love that because they say five dollars not to have
Speaker 1: it masters. You know. Okay, let's be talking about the
Speaker 1: very specific equipment, because do an equipment has difference? First hardware,
Speaker 1: what are you using for a computer? So I'm I'm
Speaker 1: a I'm a Mac user. I've been a MacUser ever
Speaker 1: since the beginning. Um so I just bought myself. I
Speaker 1: love one of the brand new towers, you know, very expensive,
Speaker 1: but for Dolby atmost particularly which is what I've now
Speaker 1: transition to, which is the next step out from five
Speaker 1: per one, which maybe you want to talk about that too,
Speaker 1: But anyway, Dolby Atmosses is obviously, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: quite process or intensive. So I've got a very very
Speaker 1: powerful Uh those machines you can buy for five thousand
Speaker 1: or ninety thousand dollars. How much rem did you put it?
Speaker 1: What do you do for chips? I spent about ten
Speaker 1: thousand pounds, So what's that about thirteen thousand that I
Speaker 1: forget exactly? I threw quite a lot of ram at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because surround mixing is quite particularly this project i'm doing now,
Speaker 1: where as I've got a hundred channels of audio and
Speaker 1: I'm breaking out into Dolby at mooss it's quite it's
Speaker 1: quite CPU intensive, it's quite memory intensive. And what do
Speaker 1: you use? How many screens and what screens? I just
Speaker 1: have one screen, but it's a big screen. It's a
Speaker 1: big screen. I can't I can't be doing with the
Speaker 1: two screens thing. So I have a big screen, one
Speaker 1: of those ones that kind of curves around you. It's
Speaker 1: like a wraparound thing, so I can see the whole
Speaker 1: mix all the time. Basically, Okay, what headphones do you use? Um?
Speaker 1: I am using? Hold on, I'll tell you audio audio technical?
Speaker 1: Headphones audio technical? And did you make a specific choice
Speaker 1: on those? And how expensive are those? Do you know what?
Speaker 1: They're not that expensive? They're not. I think they're good.
Speaker 1: They're good. Um, I did make a choice. They're you know,
Speaker 1: they're like a three quid pair of headphones. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can spend three thousand. But the question would become
Speaker 1: this was like the old days of mixing Tora tones
Speaker 1: or exactly Yamaha and as ten. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to get too far from the average listener. So
Speaker 1: a lot of people use these Sony as a standard.
Speaker 1: How did you discover these audio technicals? I can't remember.
Speaker 1: I probably just went to my local music equipment supply
Speaker 1: and said, you know, I think I bought these headphones
Speaker 1: not for mixing on. I bought them for probably tracking
Speaker 1: with you know, I wanted a good pair of headphones
Speaker 1: to work with when I was tracking vocals and stuff
Speaker 1: for my own stuff, and I just started mixing on them.
Speaker 1: I know how they sound, I understand what I'm hearing
Speaker 1: through them, and of course that's the most important, which
Speaker 1: is kind of what you're alluding to. You know. The
Speaker 1: point is if you know what you're hearing, if you
Speaker 1: understand what you're speakers or your headphones are giving you,
Speaker 1: that is a hundred times more important than having the
Speaker 1: fancy you know, amazing expensive speakers are amazing expensive headphones.
Speaker 1: And then what speakers do you use? So for mixing
Speaker 1: in stereo, I use Vocals, a company to I think
Speaker 1: the Italian company called Focal French. Actually I know, because
Speaker 1: I haven't in my car. I beg your pardon, French
Speaker 1: company called Focal, Yeah, yeah, so I have to. I
Speaker 1: think they called Triads, the Triads Stery Monitors. And for
Speaker 1: the mixing instaurround, I use General Lex Jenny Lex speakers,
Speaker 1: self powered speakers. And why did you choose those specific
Speaker 1: brands because Elliott used them. So I used basically my
Speaker 1: original five point one setup was based on his because
Speaker 1: he's the only one i'd seen and he was using
Speaker 1: General X. So I just went out and bought myself
Speaker 1: five or six General X speakers and now I have
Speaker 1: Dolby atmos, so i have another seven or eight in
Speaker 1: the room, but I've just stuck with them. Again. I
Speaker 1: understand what I'm hearing when I hear general X, I've
Speaker 1: I've grown up, you know, hearing them. Okay, for people
Speaker 1: who at this point still don't understand, explain Dolby atmos.
Speaker 1: So Dolby, you know, I don't completely understand all of
Speaker 1: it myself, because it's it's a much more complex thing
Speaker 1: that five point five one is very straightforward. You've got
Speaker 1: five speakers, you can put sound in any of the
Speaker 1: five speakers, and you've got the sub which is the
Speaker 1: dot one, which is for the low end frequencies. Dolby
Speaker 1: ATMOS is more complicated because it's it's it's to do
Speaker 1: with it's more to do with object orientation, which means
Speaker 1: you can basically place the sound anywhere in the room.
Speaker 1: It will sound like it's coming of a particular spot
Speaker 1: in the room, in the air. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they do it, but they do. But the bottom line
Speaker 1: is that the most standard configuration of Dolby atmost, which
Speaker 1: is the one I've got, is seven point one point four,
Speaker 1: which means that you still have the five speakers you
Speaker 1: have in five point one, the two in front, two behind,
Speaker 1: the one in the center, and the sub but you
Speaker 1: have two additional speakers in the horizontal plane which are
Speaker 1: at the sides, so they fill in between the front
Speaker 1: and the back pair, so you can discreetly put something
Speaker 1: that feels like it's coming specifically right from beside you
Speaker 1: rather than from behind you or in front of you.
Speaker 1: And the point four are two sets of speakers above you,
Speaker 1: two at the front, two behind you, which means you
Speaker 1: can now move sound not just in the horizontal plane
Speaker 1: but also in the vertical plane. And it's incredible, and
Speaker 1: it does mean you can give the impression of literally
Speaker 1: you can put point something in the air and say
Speaker 1: that sound is coming from there and point at it.
Speaker 1: And that's the incredible thing about Almoss. It's I mean
Speaker 1: to say it's immersive is an understatement. It's the next
Speaker 1: level up from from immersive. Okay, you know, Dolby, always
Speaker 1: start theatrically. How many people you're mixing these records, you're
Speaker 1: mixing them for home use, How many people have these systems?
Speaker 1: I've no idea. Um that's never really been a motivating
Speaker 1: fact for me, and I've always been of the philosophy
Speaker 1: that if there's there's catalog out there is more likely
Speaker 1: people will go out and buy systems. Now, when the
Speaker 1: Beatles are doing Dolby Atmos, that's a big help. That's
Speaker 1: a big help. I know you're not a fan of
Speaker 1: Giles Is mixes necessarily, but the fact that he's done
Speaker 1: Delby Atmos mixes, the Beatles have done Delby Atmos mixes
Speaker 1: probably has sent a lot of people out to look
Speaker 1: at the possibility of putting Dolby Atmos in their rooms.
Speaker 1: And I think that was always the problem. When I started.
Speaker 1: There wasn't catalog like that out there. Um, And when
Speaker 1: you get people putting out albums like the Beatles catalog
Speaker 1: in in at moss, then that's such a great kick
Speaker 1: start to the whole industry. The other thing I think
Speaker 1: Altmos has got in his favor is that there there
Speaker 1: are now Again, I don't understand the technology, but there
Speaker 1: are there are soundbars, and there are headphones that are
Speaker 1: able to They are able to decode Dolby Atmos mixes
Speaker 1: and give you a kind of pseudo I think. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've heard it. It It was amazing. I heard I listened
Speaker 1: to one of my mixes on a pair of headphones
Speaker 1: and it wasn't completely discreet, but you know what it
Speaker 1: was se of it was there. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they do it, but that's that's again I think a
Speaker 1: big advantage is going to have over the previous attempts
Speaker 1: at creating multi channel sound in the domestic market. Tell
Speaker 1: me two albums that you've remixed that you're like the
Speaker 1: most or you're proud of stuff. M Well, there's different criteria.
Speaker 1: Then there were some that I'm proud of because I
Speaker 1: feel we made the most improvement in the sound, and
Speaker 1: Aqua Lung would be pretty near the top of the list,
Speaker 1: if not the top of the list, because that was
Speaker 1: not as as I mentioned before, to that had a
Speaker 1: problematic original mixdown phase. So being able to really clean
Speaker 1: that up and make it shine and sound like it
Speaker 1: never sounded before, I had a mensum out of proud
Speaker 1: pride of doing that in terms of actual creatively, the
Speaker 1: most challenging but probably the most rewarding, Seeds of Love
Speaker 1: by Tears for Fears was a nightmare to do, uh,
Speaker 1: but it's one of my favorite records of all time,
Speaker 1: and the final result was incredibly rewarding just a beautifully
Speaker 1: recorded album with great playing, great songs, great performances, but
Speaker 1: an early generation of digital recording. And another album that
Speaker 1: took three years to make was recorded multiple times in
Speaker 1: different studios with different lineups, different arrangements, and then the
Speaker 1: final versions of the songs would be one version of
Speaker 1: the song recorded in this year with this band stitched
Speaker 1: onto another version of the song done two years later
Speaker 1: in a different studio with a different engineer and a
Speaker 1: different band. I mean, it was just a nightmare to
Speaker 1: piece it together, but I'm very proud that I did
Speaker 1: and persevered and we got through to the other end,
Speaker 1: and it sounds terrific. Okay, that was an album that
Speaker 1: was recorded digitally from source, yes, yeah, And what machine
Speaker 1: did they use? Do they do use the Mitsubishi or
Speaker 1: do you know? I think I think it was the Mitsubishi. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it was recorded forty eight forty eight K, which
Speaker 1: was you know, that was all the digital machines were
Speaker 1: capable of then. But you know what, when digital is
Speaker 1: recorded well, it can still sound amazing. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: another example, Skylarking by EXTC another out my remix, which
Speaker 1: is a beautiful you know, recorded by Todd of course
Speaker 1: up in Woodstock, and that was recorded. I think, no,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm thinking the wrong album. No, it's not that
Speaker 1: album's Oranges and Lemons, the follow up to Skylarking, not
Speaker 1: the Todd one. Oranges and Lemons was recorded at forty
Speaker 1: eight A sixteen bit, which is like CD resolution. But
Speaker 1: you know what, it sounds amazing. It sounds amazing, And
Speaker 1: I think sometimes people forget that a great producer and
Speaker 1: a great engineer is a lot more important than the
Speaker 1: resolution of the recording. Um, those things are, obviously, they
Speaker 1: are important. I'm not saying they're not. But the fact
Speaker 1: that the album sounds as good as it done when
Speaker 1: it was a relatively low you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: digital terms, quite primitive forty eight K sixteen bit sounds phenomenal.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that Tard albums. I discussed this with
Speaker 1: Tard himself. I find there's a signature kind of high
Speaker 1: end compressed sound that his records have in the final mix.
Speaker 1: Did you find his mixes like that different from other mixes?
Speaker 1: Did you have a take on that? Yeah, his mixes
Speaker 1: are quite eccentric, in a in a in a in
Speaker 1: a good way. Um, And of course wasn't particularly a
Speaker 1: fan of the original mix. Andy Partrish wasn't a fan
Speaker 1: of the original mix. Um Todd's mixes are quite um.
Speaker 1: They're quite sort of murky in a nice way. Um
Speaker 1: quite homogenized. There's not a lot of clarity, and there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of detail. There is that kind of
Speaker 1: slightly muddy top end, which I think is what you're
Speaker 1: kind of alluding to. This very much a signature to
Speaker 1: the way the top end on his record sound, which
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't allow the instruments to really have clarity or separation,
Speaker 1: and I wonder if that's something he likes. He likes
Speaker 1: the fact that mused the all instruments in a sense
Speaker 1: combine into this kind of cohesive sound rather than sounding
Speaker 1: like different instruments in a in a mix. If you,
Speaker 1: if you, if you see what I'm getting at. So
Speaker 1: what we were doing with the remix was trying to
Speaker 1: get into the mix and put some air around the
Speaker 1: different instruments, which was definitely what Andy wanted. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what he wanted at the time, and he didn't
Speaker 1: get it. So we were kind of trying to reetro
Speaker 1: retroactively put some of that separation and clarity back into
Speaker 1: the album. You know, again, one of my favorite albums
Speaker 1: of all times. So that that was that was one
Speaker 1: of my favorite projects I've done year for sure. One
Speaker 1: would say at the end you ended up with a
Speaker 1: product that was somewhat different from the one the fans
Speaker 1: were used to. In that case, we did. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: have no idea how he made it sound like he did.
Speaker 1: There is there are occasions where I simply, you know,
Speaker 1: for all, for all my ambitions to try and replicate
Speaker 1: the stereo as closely as possible, there are times when
Speaker 1: I just cannot get close to I cannot figure out
Speaker 1: why it sounds the way it does. So in that sense,
Speaker 1: I just have to get as close. And it could
Speaker 1: be as simple as they were using some piece of
Speaker 1: outboard gear that was specially made for them. It was
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, a a piece of equipment that
Speaker 1: had been made by some boffin that Todd knew that
Speaker 1: he was putting through all his mixes through and it
Speaker 1: did something weird to the mix, and nobody quite knew
Speaker 1: what it was. I mean, they're all those stories about
Speaker 1: those things that come out of Abbey Road, you know,
Speaker 1: the special Perry combobulator that they put all the tracks
Speaker 1: through that made it sound like an Abbey Road mix,
Speaker 1: you know, and all those things are very coveted by
Speaker 1: collectors of analog outboard equipment. I don't know, so sometimes
Speaker 1: I cannot get close and I do feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: I just have to do the best I can. Had
Speaker 1: you end up working with Chicago, that's the one act
Speaker 1: that sticks out your catalog. So that was Steve. Would
Speaker 1: you know Steve Willard over over Rhino in l a step.
Speaker 1: I know the guys we started Rynod with Steve. I
Speaker 1: do not now, Okay, so Steve, Steve the Ready way.
Speaker 1: He's not the red hair guy, is he? Do you know?
Speaker 1: I've only met him in person I think once, and
Speaker 1: it was a few years ago because over in l
Speaker 1: a hem, not really important. I'm thinking now I think
Speaker 1: I do not, but keep going. I think he's a
Speaker 1: lovely guy. Anyway, he asked me, He asked me, and
Speaker 1: that was that was a That was a slightly interesting
Speaker 1: project because the band didn't really know who I was,
Speaker 1: and they weren't right. It kind of involved in the project,
Speaker 1: which is unusual for me because usually one of my
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it's one of my stipulations, but it's
Speaker 1: certainly one of my requests, strong requests, is that I
Speaker 1: would like the band to be on board and approving everything,
Speaker 1: um and with Chicago. For whatever reason, Steve was like, no, no,
Speaker 1: the band are interested, but they're happy for me, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, do it. And when it came out, the
Speaker 1: fans really liked it. And then there was a couple
Speaker 1: of comments from the band that were a bit snotty
Speaker 1: about it. This kind of English geeks done this mix,
Speaker 1: we don't know, and then um, you know. And then
Speaker 1: the next one they got there they got the Chicago
Speaker 1: Transit Authority in the the first time, they got it done
Speaker 1: by their own guy, and I don't know what happened there,
Speaker 1: but obviously they decided after that they didn't want me
Speaker 1: to do anymore. But no, So that one was, you know,
Speaker 1: these projects can come from management, they can come from
Speaker 1: record label, and they can come from artists. In that case,
Speaker 1: it definitely came from from Steve at the record label. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he wanted me to do it, and I was very
Speaker 1: happy to do it. Okay, Traditionally the actors not the engineer.
Speaker 1: Do you ever talk to the mixer or the engineer
Speaker 1: on some of these projects to find out where they
Speaker 1: were coming from, what they did very occasionally. Most of them,
Speaker 1: to be fair, are either dead or retired, so you know,
Speaker 1: I can't talk to Eddie offered about doing the Yes
Speaker 1: mixes because he's retired. He's not interested. But I did
Speaker 1: speak to Hugh Pagem, I spoke about one of the
Speaker 1: XTC mixes I did. I spoke to Dave Bascombe, who
Speaker 1: recorded Seeds of Love for Tears for Fears, for example.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I've occasionally sort sought their kind of input,
Speaker 1: no doubt, to dream projects you haven't yet done. Oh wow.
Speaker 1: Kate Bush has always been top of my list. Um.
Speaker 1: I just think her albums would be so perfect for
Speaker 1: surround um that it's frustrating to me, not even that
Speaker 1: I would do it, but just that no one is
Speaker 1: doing it. But apparently she's she's not she's not interested.
Speaker 1: She's not if she's just not heard surround, or she
Speaker 1: has and she just didn't particularly care for it as
Speaker 1: an idea. So yeah, Kate, Kate would be And and
Speaker 1: the Prince Catalog. The Prince Catalog. Prince was my when
Speaker 1: I was growing up in the eighties. Prince was was
Speaker 1: my hero. He was the guy that had posters on
Speaker 1: my wall, and to be able to get my hands
Speaker 1: on on Parade or Purple Rain or any of those
Speaker 1: seminar eighties records would would be a dream. I mean,
Speaker 1: just to be able to go into his world. I mean,
Speaker 1: for me, the single most gifted musician the world of
Speaker 1: pop has ever produced, to be able to go into
Speaker 1: his world and deconstruct and reconstruct the music would just
Speaker 1: be mind blowing for me to be able to do that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this lead deep. Are you a musician or a remixer?
Speaker 1: And how do you split up the time into what degree?
Speaker 1: Are you frustrated by one or the other? Oh? I
Speaker 1: mean my job is to make my own records, and
Speaker 1: and that would allay. That is always my priority to
Speaker 1: make my own records. That's what That's what I feel
Speaker 1: I was put on this earth to do, not to
Speaker 1: not to tart up other people's records, you know, the
Speaker 1: tarting up of the old other people? Sorry, is that
Speaker 1: an amerrit Do you have that express in America times? No?
Speaker 1: We don't. Just watching a Last Night and you know
Speaker 1: they had someone using an expression they don't use and
Speaker 1: ran and everybody got freed out. So it's kind of funny.
Speaker 1: It sounds bad, but I don't know what you're talking
Speaker 1: about it, but they don't. There's certain things that don't
Speaker 1: mean such a negative things in the UK. It's not rude.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, it's not rude. It just means to basically,
Speaker 1: you know, give give something a sort of clean you know,
Speaker 1: clean up a bit, or make it look better than
Speaker 1: it deserves to, or or make it look as good
Speaker 1: as it deserves too in the case of these albums.
Speaker 1: So you know, that's not my job. My job is
Speaker 1: not to but it's become a sideline and you know what,
Speaker 1: it's one I love to do. And you know, I
Speaker 1: keep saying to myself, I'm going to try and try
Speaker 1: and you know, back off doing as much as I've
Speaker 1: been doing. But then people keep approaching me with these
Speaker 1: amazing albums. You know, I'm not going to say no
Speaker 1: when you know, if principal cap Bush ever did come on,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say no. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say no when I get asked to do XTC Skylarking
Speaker 1: or songs from the Big Chair. Of course I'm not so.
Speaker 1: And as I say, I think there's also an element
Speaker 1: that it is feeding back into what I do as
Speaker 1: an artist. Anyway, I've learned so much from from from
Speaker 1: being able to go inside this music. I mean, what
Speaker 1: better education could there be for someone who likes who
Speaker 1: believes in sonic excellent excellence and it's fascinated with production
Speaker 1: um and the techniques of the past and present. What
Speaker 1: better education could there be than to be able to
Speaker 1: go inside these classic records and actually have to figure
Speaker 1: out for yourself because nobody's apart from those engineers that
Speaker 1: gave me a little help, they don't remember, they don't
Speaker 1: remember how they did, They don't remember a lot of
Speaker 1: the time how they got those sounds. So I have
Speaker 1: to figure out for myself, and in doing so, those
Speaker 1: things become part of my own tool kit. So the
Speaker 1: answer your question, Bob, it's definitely. You know, my day
Speaker 1: job is doing what I do as as a musician
Speaker 1: as a songwriter. But I'm very very happy to do
Speaker 1: this too. I know every year is different, but what
Speaker 1: percentage of your time has spent on your music as
Speaker 1: opposed to working on someone else's. I think it's eight twenty.
Speaker 1: I mean, as I say, if I get a well
Speaker 1: recorded album record on twenty four tracks, I can turn
Speaker 1: it around probably in a week without feeling like I'm
Speaker 1: rushing it turn around in a week, and I'm doing
Speaker 1: maybe seven eight albums a year, So you can figure
Speaker 1: out from that that may be spending a couple of
Speaker 1: months a year working on the back catalog remixing projects.
Speaker 1: The next question would be where are you making your money?
Speaker 1: Are you making your money primarily from those projects? From
Speaker 1: going on the road? Music itself doesn't generate as much
Speaker 1: revenue as used to unless you're drink. I think I've
Speaker 1: been quite fortunate. I have a I have a substantial
Speaker 1: back catalog. Some would say there's too many records I've made,
Speaker 1: and I would be one of those people. I've made
Speaker 1: too many records over the years. But because I've made
Speaker 1: a lot of records, and I have a very very
Speaker 1: loyal fan base which continues to grow incrementally continues to grow,
Speaker 1: my back catalog generate is pretty good income for me.
Speaker 1: I'm never going to be, you know, multimillion or anything
Speaker 1: like that, but I don't want to be. I don't
Speaker 1: need to be. I'm very comfortable. I've managed to make
Speaker 1: a career by basically doing what the hell I want
Speaker 1: and not many people can say that, And I continue
Speaker 1: to make it, continue to make a career by doing
Speaker 1: what the hell I want musically speaking, uh and creatively speaking,
Speaker 1: I'm completely fulfilled. So my I'm make enough money from
Speaker 1: my back castalk and I get paid a little bit
Speaker 1: to do these remix projects too. It's it's um, it's um.
Speaker 1: It's not why I do them, and it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: to me, but it's always appreciated when there is a
Speaker 1: budget from the label or the artist or whatever. You said.
Speaker 1: You recently got married. Is this your first marriage? It is?
Speaker 1: And what was the motivation of this lead deep to
Speaker 1: get married? I fell in love. I fell in love, Bob,
Speaker 1: I fell in love. You know. I always thought that
Speaker 1: I wasn't the sort of person who would ever get
Speaker 1: married and have kids. But then I met my wife, Hydrometer. Well,
Speaker 1: I actually met her. I met her twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: although we only we really got together properly about four
Speaker 1: years ago. I originally met her twenty years ago. She's Israeli.
Speaker 1: She's from Israel. I met her twenty years ago when
Speaker 1: she's a very young young lady. She was only eighteen
Speaker 1: years old at the time I met her backstage at
Speaker 1: a gig in Israel where she was working for the promoter.
Speaker 1: She wasn't a fan, she didn't know who I was.
Speaker 1: But we we kept in touch for many, many years,
Speaker 1: and about four years ago, um, and she did in
Speaker 1: the meantime had two kids and I hadn't, so we
Speaker 1: we got together about four years ago and the rest
Speaker 1: is history, as they say. So I'm now a stepfather
Speaker 1: as well as as well as her husband. Now four
Speaker 1: years ago when she still living in Israel, or she
Speaker 1: moved to the UK. Now she moved to the UK
Speaker 1: a long, long time, many years ago. In fact, her
Speaker 1: first marriage had also been in England. So we've kind
Speaker 1: of been in touch all this time. Yeah, Well, it's
Speaker 1: always tough when you're an artist and you're living in
Speaker 1: your own head so much to balance home life in
Speaker 1: work life. And sometimes they're significant others who accept less
Speaker 1: time and other people don't. So what's it like now
Speaker 1: that you're married. It's really been four years you said
Speaker 1: it's been two years. No, it's been eighteen months since
Speaker 1: we got married and kind of bought a house together,
Speaker 1: and most of that time I haven't been on the road,
Speaker 1: if at all of that time I have been on
Speaker 1: the road for you know, and during the last year
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons. But the last time I actually played
Speaker 1: a show was towards the beginning of two thousand nineteen.
Speaker 1: So you know, I've been enjoying I've I've since we
Speaker 1: moved into the new house. I've built my new studio.
Speaker 1: It's actually the first time I've really had a proper studio.
Speaker 1: I mean every time, every every studio I've had before
Speaker 1: that has really been whichever room I put my computer
Speaker 1: into my guitars, and that's been quote unquote the studio.
Speaker 1: And I actually this time, we bought a new house together,
Speaker 1: we built a proper studio, a proper room on the
Speaker 1: side of the house, proper acoustically treated, and it's the
Speaker 1: first time I've had a really special room. And of
Speaker 1: course it's all been made dogby atmost compatible, which is
Speaker 1: great to be able to do that. So I've been
Speaker 1: enjoying eighteen months being home, being married, being with the kids,
Speaker 1: um doing a lot of work in the studio, and
Speaker 1: not having to worry about motivating myself to go out
Speaker 1: on the road, although I'm beginning to miss that obviously,
Speaker 1: I am, and that's a big part of what I
Speaker 1: love to do well. Are you the type of person
Speaker 1: who works strict hours or you're getting to run and
Speaker 1: you might work till two in the morning, or you
Speaker 1: start for dinner at a specific time. I have a
Speaker 1: pretty good work ethic, you know. So the answer is
Speaker 1: the answer to your question is the latter. I do
Speaker 1: have a kind of time. I kind of go to
Speaker 1: the studio around midday and I will work to about
Speaker 1: seven or eight in the evening, and then I'll stop
Speaker 1: to have dinner with my family, and then after that
Speaker 1: I'll spend the evening with my wife, watching TV, watching
Speaker 1: a movie, listening to records. So the days of me
Speaker 1: I used to I think I used to do that
Speaker 1: thing of going through till two in the morning. But
Speaker 1: those days, you know a lot of people say that,
Speaker 1: don't they As they get older, I think they stopped
Speaker 1: doing that burning the midnight all thing and getting some
Speaker 1: more of a a routine. And I'm in that stage. Now.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the new album. You have an
Speaker 1: incredible marketing plan with people. Can see the air quote
Speaker 1: your merchandise tell us about the generation of a thought
Speaker 1: behind that. So the idea with the album was I've
Speaker 1: always been fascinated by by this idea part, you know,
Speaker 1: part of the what we've been talking about during this conversation.
Speaker 1: This idea of trying to reconcile the idea of being
Speaker 1: a professional musician by also being completely true to yourself
Speaker 1: and having integrity, all that stuff. Blah blah blah. It's
Speaker 1: a very hard, you know, tight rope to walk, and
Speaker 1: it's always fascinating me. This idea of music is commerce.
Speaker 1: How do you sell music? What is involved in selling music?
Speaker 1: How do you how do you if you're a creative person,
Speaker 1: how do you also get your brain to be involved
Speaker 1: in the commercial side of things, selling yourself, schmoozing and
Speaker 1: all that stuff we talked about. And I've been fascinated
Speaker 1: by that. And one of the things I've been really
Speaker 1: interested about is how what would it be like to
Speaker 1: sell a piece of music in the same way that
Speaker 1: apples are one of their products for example, um, and
Speaker 1: what would it be like to almost remind the listener
Speaker 1: relentlessly or the purchaser that they are involved in a
Speaker 1: financial transaction when theyre buy a record. So kind of
Speaker 1: riffing on that, I got together with the design and
Speaker 1: we came up with this idea, why don't we parody
Speaker 1: the world of high concept high design. This These companies
Speaker 1: that buy a fifty cent T shirt put their logo
Speaker 1: on it and then charge five dollars for it, like
Speaker 1: a company like Supreme, for example, and people love that.
Speaker 1: They love that, And what interests me about that is
Speaker 1: how it means that the purchasing of a lot of
Speaker 1: these items is no longer about the utility. It's about
Speaker 1: the ownership. It's about the status of owning the item
Speaker 1: rather than its utility. And I believe that applies very
Speaker 1: much to my world. You thought we talk about these
Speaker 1: deluxe edition box sets that are coming out of left,
Speaker 1: right and center these days, and this seems like barely
Speaker 1: a week goes past now and there's not ten more
Speaker 1: deluxe edition box sets being announced. These are absolute utely,
Speaker 1: I think, for most people about ownership rather than utility.
Speaker 1: Most of the contents of these box sets you will
Speaker 1: never listen to more than once. But it's nice to
Speaker 1: have them. It's fun to have them. It's fun to
Speaker 1: have the coffee table book. It's fun to have the
Speaker 1: CD of Demos, it's fun to have the CD of
Speaker 1: the Cleaned up board tape. It's fun to have the
Speaker 1: CD of the alternate mix, where the only difference is
Speaker 1: the backing vocals a bit further over to the left
Speaker 1: hand side of the stereo spectrum. Jimmy Page, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at you here with your led Zeppelin deluxe editions. It's
Speaker 1: kind of fun to have those things, but actually what
Speaker 1: you really need is the original album. That's all you
Speaker 1: really need. Maybe a five point one makes if you're
Speaker 1: into that thing too. So it's fascinating to me this
Speaker 1: world where things have moved towards ownership rather than use,
Speaker 1: and so we're kind of riffing off that with the
Speaker 1: with these kind of what I call high concept, high
Speaker 1: designer products. A can of air for two hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: by the way, doesn't really exist. It's it's not what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say. You know, when you casual lookwards
Speaker 1: say it's sold out, but in it should when you
Speaker 1: click on there, there's like a laptop bag. Everything is
Speaker 1: exorbitantly praised, and that's when you realize it's a joke.
Speaker 1: It's a conceptual joke here, it's a conceptual gang. But
Speaker 1: you know, but the point is that a lot of
Speaker 1: these things are not completely ridiculous because there are I mean,
Speaker 1: they are ridiculous, But what I mean is they're not
Speaker 1: ridiculous in the sense there are companies out there that
Speaker 1: really are marketing things that are not a million miles
Speaker 1: away from these things. You know, paying a thousand bucks
Speaker 1: for a pair of sneakers just because it's got a
Speaker 1: particular logo on it. This is the kind of world
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. And also the other thing that kind
Speaker 1: of span off from this was this idea of the
Speaker 1: sort of elitism of limited editions. So we did one
Speaker 1: edition of the album, which is a limited edition of
Speaker 1: one copy, and we put it on so and by
Speaker 1: the way, this is real. This is not something we
Speaker 1: was a gag. This was real. We created myself and
Speaker 1: my designer created one a one edition, one sorry, one
Speaker 1: copy edition of one version of the album. That version
Speaker 1: of the album came in a big box which had
Speaker 1: a seven inch single with the song of which only
Speaker 1: one copy was pressed. It had it had my Grammy
Speaker 1: certificate and Grammy Medal nomination, It had handwritten lyrics, basically
Speaker 1: had a load of really exclusive stuff of which there
Speaker 1: was only one thing, you know, one version of that,
Speaker 1: and we put it on self a ten thousand pounds
Speaker 1: with all the money going to the Music Venue Trust,
Speaker 1: and it's sold out within five minutes, sold up within
Speaker 1: five minutes. And I love that because it played it
Speaker 1: kind of. Also, it's also playing on the idea of
Speaker 1: music selling music in the same way that art sells
Speaker 1: what it produces. So this idea that a painting or
Speaker 1: sculpture is produced in an addition of one and that
Speaker 1: one sells at a premium price. That's that's what basis
Speaker 1: that the whole world of art is predicated on. You know,
Speaker 1: you create one original piece, you sell it for an
Speaker 1: exorbitant price, and then the person that buys it has
Speaker 1: the choice to either share it by putting in an
Speaker 1: art gallery, or they can hang it over their front
Speaker 1: room and Frank hang it over their fireplace in the
Speaker 1: front room, and no one ever else gets to see it.
Speaker 1: That's their prerogative. And I was fascinated by what would
Speaker 1: be And I know I'm not the only person to
Speaker 1: do this. Woutan Clang did an album of one I
Speaker 1: think one copy a few years ago, which I think
Speaker 1: they sold from a million dollars. Uh, So I know
Speaker 1: this is not a completely original notion, but but it
Speaker 1: all kind of was riffing on this idea of elitism
Speaker 1: and snobbery and the idea of ownership rather than utility. Okay,
Speaker 1: a lot of people might be listening to this primarily
Speaker 1: for your remixes. Obviously we've talked about the new album,
Speaker 1: and you also said you have a lot of work.
Speaker 1: If you wanted them to further explore your work, where
Speaker 1: else should they look? I mean in terms of your catalog,
Speaker 1: It's very hard to question to us, I've done so
Speaker 1: many different kinds of records, So I mean, without knowing
Speaker 1: what the sort of agenda, what the agenda of the
Speaker 1: person you know that you'd be asking on behalf of
Speaker 1: is in terms of what their tastes are, I couldn't say.
Speaker 1: I think The Future Bites is probably my face record
Speaker 1: of all the records have ever made. Now. I know
Speaker 1: I say that every time I make a record, because
Speaker 1: I do say that every time I make a record.
Speaker 1: But there's something special about this record to me because
Speaker 1: it sounds completely like me, but it's completely a record
Speaker 1: of the now. It sounds like a record that could
Speaker 1: only have been made now. It's very contemporary sounding record.
Speaker 1: And I say that because I think a lot of
Speaker 1: my previous records have got more of a nostalgic element
Speaker 1: to them. If people are really into progressive rock, they
Speaker 1: probably like my album Hand Cannot Erase, for example. If
Speaker 1: people are really into metal, they probably like those early
Speaker 1: Porcupine Tree Lava Atlantic records like Fear of a Blank Planet.
Speaker 1: And in absentia, if people like more eighties pop stylings,
Speaker 1: they might like my record to the Bone. So it's
Speaker 1: a hard question to answer without knowing the taste of
Speaker 1: the post involved, but I would say definitely. The current record,
Speaker 1: The Future Bites, is a real landmark record for me,
Speaker 1: and it's a very accessible but no less sophisticated because
Speaker 1: of it record for him, A lot record, Okay, And
Speaker 1: since we live in this playlist world, one track where
Speaker 1: someone should start on the new album, Um, I really
Speaker 1: like this song called Man of the People, which I
Speaker 1: think is a beauty. It was in my head it
Speaker 1: was going to be Marvin Gay collaborating with Pink Floyd.
Speaker 1: And I know that sounds rather lofty aspirations to have
Speaker 1: for someone like me who can't really sing anywhere near
Speaker 1: like Marvin Gay, but that was it was kind of
Speaker 1: in my head. I had this idea. I wanted to
Speaker 1: do it almost like this kind of soul ballad, but
Speaker 1: with the kind of production aesthetic of classic Floyd And
Speaker 1: when you listen to it, that's kind of what it
Speaker 1: sounds like, I think. And I'm really proud of that song.
Speaker 1: Man of the People is beautiful song. I would go
Speaker 1: with Personal Shopper, but that's okay. You're the person who
Speaker 1: made the record, you know. I love the whole record.
Speaker 1: I'm so proud of everything. It's like trying to choose
Speaker 1: one of your you know, your favorite child. I love
Speaker 1: them all. I love Personal shop is great to Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I've loved talking to you. Know. It's funny until
Speaker 1: you actually connect someone, you have no idea what they're like.
Speaker 1: I had no idea. As I say, you were so
Speaker 1: erudite and articulate. There are many people who are musicians
Speaker 1: who really can make it but not really talk about it.
Speaker 1: And I can see why you have this podcast, and
Speaker 1: I would love to argue with you about some of
Speaker 1: these records, but I think we've come to the end
Speaker 1: of the feeling we've known for today, so Steve and
Speaker 1: I want to thank you so much for doing this pleasure.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of fun Bob is great to
Speaker 1: talk about a lot of stuff that I don't normally
Speaker 1: get to talk about because I've been I'm on the
Speaker 1: intervilled interview treadmill right now for the future. BIS and
Speaker 1: questions are always the same, so it's been great to
Speaker 1: have some different things to talk about. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1: It was great. I'll leave it at that until next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob left sets