I've seen Gareth Jones' name on records since the '80s and have always wanted to meet him. My imagination created a stuffy, meticulous character; an engineer/producer driven by a need for electronic perfection and a slave to the technology of recording. This is the man who engineered albums by Depeche Mode, Erasure, John Foxx, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nitzer Ebb, and Wire, and made them propulsive, fresh, and new sounding. Little did I expect to meet up with an incredibly passionate, thoughtful, and friendly bike riding gentleman with whom I felt an immediate connection. Gareth has kept busy over the years, working with groups like Interpol and Grizzly Bear, and current work that even includes a New Order remix. We met at his studio, Strongroom, in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, not far from where his career initially took off at The Garden Studio with John Foxx, where we had a wonderful chat and a lovely lunch at the Strongroom Bar.
I've seen Gareth Jones' name on records since the '80s and have always wanted to meet him. My imagination created a stuffy, meticulous character; an engineer/producer driven by a need for electronic perfection and a slave to the technology of recording. This is the man who engineered albums by Depeche Mode, Erasure, John Foxx, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nitzer Ebb, and Wire, and made them propulsive, fresh, and new sounding. Little did I expect to meet up with an incredibly passionate, thoughtful, and friendly bike riding gentleman with whom I felt an immediate connection. Gareth has kept busy over the years, working with groups like Interpol and Grizzly Bear, and current work that even includes a New Order remix. We met at his studio, Strongroom, in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, not far from where his career initially took off at The Garden Studio with John Foxx, where we had a wonderful chat and a lovely lunch at the Strongroom Bar.
You've had a pretty fun career.
I've had an amazingly fun career.
I didn't know about your Pathway Studios connection early on. That place was churning out some interesting underground records in that era.
It was amazing. Mike Finesilver was the one who gave me a break, which was fantastic. He was really one of my first mentors. I'm like a gifted amateur, in the sense that I never had the privilege or pleasure of studying as an assistant under a great master. Most of my mentors have been musicians. I've learned a hell of a lot from bands, as well as all the incredibly creative colleagues I've worked with. Mike gave me a bit of a break. He said something great to me, as well. He told me, "Don't worry about this." [He said that] because I was thrown into the 8-track world, by myself, with no assistant. He said, "Okay, go." I'd done a bit of recording on my own at home, and had had basic training at the BBC, so I knew a little bit about signal flow. It seems ridiculous, looking back — I didn't know shit. But I felt I knew a little bit, like lining tape machines up. He really underlined the importance of getting on with the bands. He said, "The great engineers are geniuses at their audio work. Plus, they get on with the band." Obviously 90 percent of it is facilitating a situation for the band where they can flow. I was always obsessed with trying to do the best headphone mixes I could, making a creative and comfortable atmosphere for people, while I was really winging it. I'm forever thankful to Mike for giving me that break. Pathway was pretty cool, because we did loads of demo work. It was like a cheap-ish 8-track analog studio. Also, there was a lot of records that came out of there from the punk times. It was a great starting point for me, because there was a real mixture between demo work — where I had to learn as much as I could, as fast as possible, and still do a good job for people — and the challenge of actually working with people who'd perhaps made two or three albums already and were in there to make a real record. One of the great things about Pathway was that it was homebuilt. Barry Farmer was one of the previous engineers who had built the console and an echo plate. We had an echo plate, which was an unfeasibly expensive thing. I'd probably love it if I had it now. I still like spring reverbs. I've got tons of springs hooked up for my modular synths. Guitar amp springs, Fender springs, Ampeg springs. They're still readily available, and cheap. Back then, there were no other spatial effects in there, apart from three 1/4-inch tape recorders: one to master onto and two as delays.
You had to be creative.
Certainly you must have started with 8-track, or 4-track, or something?
2-track, 4-track.
So you know all about building sounds and committing the whole sounds to track.
Mix the drums to a track.
Exactly. That's a different world. I've been working in Woodstock with a super nice guy, Christopher Bono, who's become a friend. We were working on his project, called Ghost Against Ghost. It was huge, like lots of these projects are. He was stemming it himself, and I went over to help him finish the stems. One of the things we did was stem the drums down to stereo. It was wonderful. It reminded me of the start of my career. Not quite to one track, but to two tracks. I finished up using the stereo drum stems on both mixes, so it's nice.
That type of system helps move the project forward.
I love it. I really do.
How many years were you at Pathway?
I was there a couple of years. It's where my electronic career started, with John Foxx's Metamatic. He was an example of someone more experienced. He had already made three albums with Ultravox, and he'd also worked with Brian Eno. John was clever. He wanted a solo career, and he took a publishing advance to make the record. From having worked at Conny Plank's, he thought, "I want to do a minimal electronic record, and let's use minimal gear." He had one [Roland] CR-78 drum machine, an ARP Odyssey [synthesizer], an Elka [Rhapsody 490] String Machine, and, of course, his MXR Flanger. That was it.
I just bought a copy of that record.
That was , one that I recorded and mixed for the whole duration.
Did that throw you for a loop at the beginning, having to build it bit by bit with overdubs?
I loved it. I was always a bit of a geek. I loved [Wendy Carlos'] in the '60s when I was a teenager. I was open to that. Kraftwerk I was discovering a little bit. I loved Joe Meek's work. It blew me away as a kid, before I ever thought that I might work in a studio.
That was around 1980, right?
Yeah. John and I started working on Metamatic in 1979. It was brilliant. It was a great break for me, because it was just the artist, with me engineering. I think, a bit later, I got a couple of my friends in to play keyboards and bass. But a lot of it was just me and John. It was really intense. He had a real vision. He's a trained graphic artist as well, and he had a proper artistic vision. Looking back, I realize how much I got from it all. We made that record; and then he sold the record and took an advance from a record company, then bought a studio. That was The Garden Studio, now shut down. It was later owned by Matt [Johnson of The The], who bought it off John, and then Matt rented it to Craig Silvey. This is a very fashionable/touristy area now, with bars and restaurants. When John moved here in the '80s, it was completely derelict. There was nothing here at all. It was empty warehouse after empty warehouse. This studio wasn't here. There was one Italian cafe, like a breakfast cafe, a workingman's café, and a couple of old pubs. I think a bunch of artists bought the warehouse. John bought the basement, a sculptor bought the top two floors and lived there, a photographer had a floor with a studio, and they were able to pool resources. It was affordable then. They were ambitious, but not hugely wealthy. No one wanted this area.
That's a pretty typical cycle. Everyone goes, "Oh, the artists are all over here!"
It is. Now it's unaffordable and everyone's moved east, like five miles away. John invited me to help. We became friends, and he stayed my employer. He had the vision and the money, and I helped liaise with the guys who were selling the gear, even though I didn't know much about it. I obviously thought I was very knowledgeable and really into it, so I did everything, from having meetings with console manufacturers and tape machine distributors, to soldering up the tie lines.
You have a history of jumping in.
I think that's what I got from punk. I was like a bit of a hippie. I wasn't a punk, for sure, but I did get the atmosphere of "we can do this." That's just been my path through life. How wonderful it would have been if I'd managed to get a place at Trident, AIR, or Abbey Road, and studied with the masters. But, as it was, the masters I studied with were the bands I had the pleasure of working with. Some of us kind of grew together. They were learning, I was learning, and we were all doing it together.
Working with John was a good start to that.
It was indeed. As I said, Metamatic was his fourth album. He had an overview about how to make records that I simply didn't have.
You worked with him on his second solo album, The Garden.
I did, yeah. We did it partly at Andy Fernbach's [Jacobs Studios] down in Surrey. It was where I worked with Tuxedomoon and made Desire as well. It was pretty cool. John took me to my first 16-track studio. I think we worked where The Buggles had a studio, in Camden Mews. We rented that for one song on Metamatic. John felt it [the song] would benefit from having a few more tracks for him to try ideas out. Then he took me into Sarm East Studios where I met Julian Mendelsohn. We did some cheap, all-night session where I was starting to grapple with the idea of more tracks. John's studio, The Garden, was a 24-track studio. We had a funny thing about that, technology-wise. At that stage, not really having the experience or the training, there was this idea that transformers were not that good for the sound, because they affected transients in a way. There was a fashionable era where the modern electronics were transformer-free. As John's engineer, we selected an Amek console and an MCI tape machine, none of which had transformers. Now, of course, our lovely audio can't go through too many precious transformers.
That's funny. I forgot about that era.
It's like when we got seduced into thinking early digital sounded great, because our attention and ears were drawn to one or two things only, like brightness or lack of noise. Then, gradually, everyone's like, "Oh, hang on a minute. I'm not getting where I need to be. Why's it so brittle? Why is it two-dimensional? Why is there an offset between the two channels?" The Garden Studio was cool. John had a minimal visual aesthetic. It was a modern studio. There wasn't lovely stonework, carpets, and everything that we now embrace from the '70s. This was a move away from the '70s. We were doing modern, electronic music. It was about synthesizers and drum machines. It was a clean, streamlined, urban, modern aesthetic.
There were a lot of people on a similar path after punk.
Exactly. A lot of the early electronic musicians I worked with couldn't play, but they could program, and they had a musical idea and vision. They couldn't, in a sense, play in the way that the great prog bands could who had amazing chops. None of these dudes could play. But they had an artistic vision. Like Wire, who came out of art school. That's a classic art punk rock band, isn't it? They're like actually, "This is what we do. We make sonic art."
That's true. I just saw them a few weeks ago in Portland.
We've been friends for years. They're great guys.
With what John Foxx was creating with Metamatic or The Garden, you'd need to have 25 synthesizers to play it all live!
Yeah. This is really the thing about the studio being an instrument, which is very much how I felt about it at the time in the '80s. I played a lot, badly, as a kid. All kinds of different instruments. I loved music, but I never felt like I was in a band, or that I was a performer. After a while, people would ask what I played, and I said, "I play the studio." Now of course everyone plays the studio. Most modern musicians have a massive studio. When I was coming through in the '80s, they didn't. The musicians had their area, and the studio was my thing. It was what I did. The fact that I embraced that meant we were a good fit.
You've worked a lot with re-amping synthesizers and trying to capture more depth within electronic music.
I was really keen because I had a huge love of orchestral and classic music when I was a kid. I was very late to jazz and rock. I didn't really get into that until I became a college student. Also, with my training at the BBC... I have a huge admiration for public service broadcasting, especially at that time in the '70s. They were a big research organization too. There was this idea of not using many mics to record a symphony orchestra. My training involved being allowed to attend one session, say nothing, and sit at the back. I never recorded a symphony orchestra, but there was this huge idea of depth. If you listen to concerts from the '70s in the Albert Hall, the main sound is coming off a pair. There's this huge depth going on. I loved that. I was trying to get away from a lot of the early DI synthesizer work, which now I can embrace. I was thinking about mixing it. I was into re-amping. In the circles I was moving in at the time I was lucky, as it wasn't being done much. It was one of the things I was able to bring to the party. If you used to just play your Mini Moog DI-ed into the speakers, to then hear it paralleled out, sent to a room, amped with three mics down the room is amazing.
I feel like the first time I ever messed with a synth, I felt like, "Oh, it needs spatial effects." It needs something to keep it from being right at the front of the speaker.
All of the modern synths are now loaded with special effects.
Aren't they now? I'm always telling people to turn them off.
Exactly.
"Let me put my own reverb on this."
Then there's the extra harmonic element we get from re-amping as well. It's still wonderful to play sounds into real spaces. We all love it. That can be from a really clean monitor in a space, to being really crunched up. There was a huge, extra palette arriving on the console. I loved it. It was really fun hooking up the chains and getting everything going. It's something I played with for years.
You also set up a system where you might get something back that you're not expecting. Happy accidents.
Isn't that the fun of playing with pedals, or wires, or cables? I might be wrong, but in my experience, it's much easier to have a happy accident with analog gear than it is with digital gear. Obviously we can have lots of horrible accidents with digital, where it completely melts down.
You don't get randomness.
When we've got a mess of cables, amps, pedals, rooms, and mics, it seems like all kinds of stuff happens that maybe we weren't planning. John Foxx gave me a great lesson about that once as well. It happened to me on the 8-track. When I was young, it was all about trying to control the technology. It was a huge achievement to get sound from the microphone to the speaker. Something happened — some incredible sound came out of the speaker, different from what I was intending. I immediately went over to break it down. John was like, "No, stop! Listen!" I was like, "Oh, I see. I didn't mean it, but it's great. Let's track it." After that I was like, "I get it. Keep listening and stop judging." It's letting go of the ego, isn't it?
Were you still working at Pathway when you were working at John Foxx's studio?
No. I moved down to John's for a bit. John's studio first went to Surrey, because the building wasn't finished. The warehouse wasn't converted, but he'd bought the equipment. He did a deal with Andy Fernbach at [Jacob's Studios]. The equipment went in there for about six months. That's where Tuxedomoon approached John about making a record, and John kindly passed them on to me. . I was working with John's equipment in Surrey a little bit, making a couple of albums. Then the building was finished, and we bought a Lexicon Model 224 [digital reverb]. John has a thing for reverbs and spaces. He really wanted one of these newfangled, high-quality, digital reverberators. I proposed to John that I go to San Francisco, buy one, and bring it back. He was kind enough to go for that. I had a great vacation, my first trip ever to America. I also bought a Sony Walkman, the first one that had just come out. I couldn't really afford it, but I looked at it and had to have it. It meant I could hike out into the cliffs or mountains somewhere and listen to music.
They were really expensive when they first came out.
It was kind of life changing. For me, it wasn't as much about going around with headphones on in the world. It was about going somewhere and being able to listen to Wagner on the clifftops, or Pink Floyd in the mountains. My first one was a playback-only one.
