How did the album with Gina Birch get going? I assume you knew each other from a number of years back.
Oh, yeah; on and off. I saw her do a show at the Idler Festival in 2018. She was going on; she did a double header with Vivian Goldman. I'd already started working with Viv on her album [Next is Now]. I saw Gina do her show and was totally knocked away. That's still one of my top ten gigs I've ever seen. It was so visceral and disarmingly honest. Right in your face, no filter. Pure expression and dealing with difficult subject matter. Immediately after that show I said, "I'd love to work with you." She took me up on it and started sending me some demos a couple of years later.
We did one in lockdown, "Feminist [Song]," which I did remotely. She sent me the stems and I and added bits to it while I was in Spain. I mixed it and sent it back. It was good fun. After lockdown we got together in London, and I started going through all of her home recordings and demos. We based most of the album on those, and we did a few new ones at the same time. It all was very much a home recording situation. I've got a nice home studio here. I've got my 22-year-old son, Jake [Glover], living with me who assists. He's a music maker. It was still a bit of lockdown, but I didn't have an engineer. So, I had my son assisting, and then I did the rest of the engineering and recording. At the end of that, I got Michael Rendall, my main go-to engineer and mixer in, and we added a few other little bits. Then I mixed it. It was really straightforward. I enjoyed it, because it took me back to the '80s. I'm 62, so born in 1960. In the mid-'80s, I was just the right age. I'd gone through punk as a teenager. I'd gone through Killing Joke. I'd had a fair amount of recording experience and production, and I'd been programming Fairlights [CMI (Computer Musical Instrument)] for another producer. I'd just set up my first home studio around '84 or '85 in my spare bedroom with a Greengate [DS-3] sampler and Iconix software on an Atari [computer], a couple of keyboards, a couple of basses, and a little 4-track. I started writing songs there. The serial number on my Iconix software was 0015. I was only the 15th person who bought it. I was quick off the blocks with that technology.
Was that early MIDI?
MIDI was a bit earlier. I remember recording Killing Joke's first couple of singles, and it was pre-MIDI. We had to do the sequences with a slap delay. But then there was MIDI, so I could start using MIDI and I got an [Akai] S900 sampler a few years later. With that, I was writing so much and making beats. And I immediately started a record label, WAU [What About Us]! Mr. Modo Recordings, and producing projects in my bedroom. That was the beginning of The Orb [with Alex Patterson]. Some of that equipment I shared with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF. We'd been working together in my previous band, Brilliant. We quickly started having hit records with those home recordings. I found a great management company, Big Life, and they immediately started getting me to work with Coldcut, Yazz's first album [Wanted]. The first single we did with her, "The Only Way Is Up," was number one for 13 weeks. The phone didn't stop ringing. The remixes I was putting out on WAU! Mr. Modo was kind of proto-Goa trance, acid house, or proto acid house. DJs like Andrew Weatherall, and some certain Goa DJs, were picking up on them, but they weren't that commercially successful. They were so good that people were asking me to work with them and do other work. In hindsight, I think a lot of that was because I was one of the first kids doing that and I was quite young. That led to me doing a lot of remixes, mixes, and productions. Then, around '91 or '92, my manager, Gordon "Jazz" Summers, said, "Oh, you've done enough of this electronic dance music. We want you to work with this band, Crowded House." I was like, "Why? We're doing so well with the dance music." He said, "Yeah, but dance music's not that well respected. "
You start off playing in bands, then you become this proto remixer, and then you're producing bands!
Yeah, it's a strange journey. Also, I didn't stop doing dance music. I expanded my spectrum of what I could do. My manager was a visionary. Most producers are narrow gauge. They do one kind of music, and they just hammer that. I didn't do that. I was doing folk, classical, and all kinds [of other genres]. Initially I got a bit of a problem with that. People thought I was a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none. When I started having success in so many different genres, I got repped for being a successful producer. I got offered loads more range in what I was offered to work on. It was great. I understand that if you're going to be an international producer of respect that you can't just do electronic music or one tiny niche. You need to go into a bigger league. Certainly, working with Crowded House and [Paul] McCartney and people like that elevated what I was doing. That peaked at the end of the '90s with the Verve's Urban Hymns, especially the hit "Bitter Sweet [Symphony]", and many others in between. It's been fantastic. I've always tried hard to retain a naivete about what I do. I read a thing about Charlie Parker saying that he knew he was ready when he could play three jazz songs in every key. I totally admire that level of musicianship. I admire Glyn Johns' [Tape Op #109] level of engineering and those amazing engineer/producers. But I've never aspired to that. What I like about what I do, and I sense a big part of what other people like about what I do, is the punk aesthetic of naivete. When I say punk, I mean more like Syd Barrett, really.
Sure.
A post-punk aesthetic, where things are stripped back and simplified to their essence. Doing things that are wrong, making mistakes, featuring them, and putting the wrong drums with the wrong bass. Experimental. That's where I'm coming from. Despite all the success I've had, I still retain that naivete, mainly from still being a fan. I still buy records and go to gigs. But, also, I've never wanted to get so involved in deep with the engineering or the technical elements where I forget what I'm doing with the song, or what I want to hear as a fan. That's easy to do as an engineer or producer, getting lost down those rabbit holes. It's a perennial rub with my engineers, because they're intuitively trying to up their game technically. I'm like, "Well, sometimes when we do that it doesn't always sound 'better.' Sometimes it's better when we keep it simple and raw." It's about finding that balance. But I've worked with Pink Floyd, co-producing The Endless River, so I know what exacting perfectionism is. I like that; I like working with artists and engineers who go that deep sometimes. I also like riding that wave of cutting-edge; what's going on now.
If you put Gina's record up next to The Endless River, they're completely different sonic worlds, right?
Absolutely. But not if you put her record up against a Syd Barrett solo album. Syd and early Floyd were almost a proto-indie aesthetic. That's what I was going for. Gina was a central pillar of post-punk and an influential artist. I wanted to honor that by not overproducing it.
We saw that era of late '70s and '80s, where records could get a little too slick.
When I worked with The Orb, there would be 200 or 300 tracks; it was like Pink Floyd! That's definitely the other way. Even with The Orb, sometimes we did things simply. It's wherever the song is demanding we go that I tend to follow. I try and rein those things in, because I did go through the '80s, and I had major deals as an artist with producers spending five days on a snare sound and recording all the drums. By the time we'd get to put bass and guitars on it, I couldn't tell what it was. We'd never heard it played with everything. We'd only hear it finished when it's mixed. It used to drive me nuts. They'd always say, "Oh, we're doing this to get better separation." It actually just made the producer's life easier to do it like that, because he wouldn't have to move the mics. He could do all the drums in one go. I've done that myself a couple of times and regretted it. These days I go back to a '60s template of people playing in the room; we go for that performance with the engineer, and we cover it. We've got a good signal; everything sounds great, and we can replace it if we want to. Essentially, we're recording that invisible magic performance that you can't replicate afterwards with overdubs. Having said that, I love Steely Dan. I love [Pink Floyd's] The Dark Side of the Moon. I love albums that have been made meticulously in that way. I've only worked with Trevor Horn [Tape Op #89] once, and he's legendary for that. It's a bit like I love Sergio Leone movies, because he never recorded sound on set, and he always had [Ennio] Morricone do the soundtrack first. That allowed him to sound design the soundtrack properly in a studio, where every sound and every Foley sound he could push up or down. Control. I get that.
I always felt that a lot of inspiration for the way you work comes from dub mixing. Experimenting, muting, and taking parts out.
Absolutely! From the age of 16, living in West London, surrounded by Jamaican sound systems and dub sessions, that was an absolute revelation for me. It went hand in hand with punk at the time. It all fit the aesthetic and vibe. The deconstruction of dub, courtesy King Tubby and Lee Perry [Tape Op #136], absolutely revolutionized it. Also, at seven years old, my dad brought back [The Beatles'] Sgt. Pepper's…, and I got totally immersed in that. Those were the records that showed me what one could do with sound in terms of facilitating an inner cosmic journey.
Taking the studio to another place, instead of just capturing sounds.
Yeah, and it bled into conceptual art; the whole deconstruction and creating by taking out elements. They say art is generally 20 or 30 years ahead of music, in terms of where they're [both] at. Like now, we're still getting our heads around sampling, which, when it happened, was radical. Today people accept those concepts fairly readily in music; but in the '80s, it was very controversial.
Do you feel like doing remixes allowed a freedom to apply that experimentalism?
Absolutely. It was just, "Reimagine this song in a way that you want to hear it." It was all about me being the audience, and asking myself, "What do I want to hear?" An orchestra without a conductor, or even a conductor that's a committee, can be absolutely awful. You do need that one person at the top of the pyramid saying, "This is the vision." I enjoy doing that. I have got a vivid imagination, and I can visualize what I want to hear and then be able to create it. Also, I work a lot with random processes, where, in some remixes, I would randomly pull out six records and go into the studio without even looking at them. I'd get to the studio, I'd find a sample from all of them, and I'd start constructing a track out of that. Those were the cards that came up that day. I like that.
We all need limitations of some sort to make a project move forward.
Yeah, it's a very Zen thing of limitless possibility or a strict discipline and limitation.
With Gina's record, you were taking raw materials from her recordings she'd done at home. Was it similar to doing a remix?
A little bit, although she'd already defined the direction a little bit. I was exaggerating that or developing that. Sometimes it was more arrangement and getting the beats right. A lot of the songs were long narratives that didn't have choruses. Finding the chorus, then creating a chorus around that phrase, or getting an arrangement that allowed you in and kept your attention. Sometimes when you've got a very strong narrative, you're working with artists like Gina where the lyrics are meant to be heard, like Leonard Cohen or someone. The arrangement's super important, because with that amount of concentration on the narrative, I find it creates fatigue in the listener's ability to retain a focus or a connection. Arrangements become important, where we'll have a little instrumental refrain, or there's a chorus that we've come back to before that lets the listener know where they are. All of that can help keep them engaged.
You mean information overload, lyrically?
Like Leonard Cohen. I don't always listen totally focused on the lyrics when I listen to music. At some point, I will follow that narrative; but, more often than not, I'm listening to the sound of it and the emotional vibe. I'll navigate from there. Once I'm in there, what I am listening to is like reading a book. It's fatiguing on your concentration levels. When you're listening to the vibe of a song, like "Breathe" from The Dark Side of the Moon, you don't have to listen to the lyrics. The lyric is there. It's the sound and the atmosphere that envelopes and carries you along.
There's space between the words.
Yeah. You can have long instrumental passages and it doesn't matter. With someone like Cohen or Gina, it does matter. You do need to be paying attention to what's being said, as well as the atmosphere. The arrangement becomes critical then, because if the arrangement doesn't facilitate that then it puts the listener off, and they stop listening. What Gina does is almost like spoken word. She doesn't even have a melody, sometimes. It's just the narrative. I've been working with Allen Ginsberg recordings recently, for the Ginsberg Estate, and I did this epic piece, "Iron Horse" – this 40-minute spoken poem. I did an imaginary soundtrack to it. Especially with Ginsberg, which is very amphetamine poetry, I had to breathe this in, where your mind could go into neutral for a moment, cruise, and then go back to the narrative. I've worked with a lot of poets, so I have my theories about that. The John Sinclair album [Beatnik Youth] I did was similar, where he was doing beat poetry, but, again, I had to arrange it so that we had choruses that were sung with backing singers to give a break from the narrative.
Right. Speaking of breaks from the narrative, Pink Floyd's The Endless River had one traditional vocal-led song on it, and a lot of instrumentals. What was that process like? I know Phil [Manzanera] and David [Gilmour, Tape Op #138] had sorted out parts before you got in.
Well, that's right. Phil had been on it for a few years. The album was in four sections: four ten-minute tracks. They gave me the multitrack of the first part, which I thought was the whole album. They said, "Arrange it. Do what you like with it." David's brief to me was, "Make it sound like us," because it didn't really sound like them at the time. It was the '90s recordings that actually sounded a lot like The Orb in a weird way, using sequencers and loops. I got rid of all that, and I turned that ten-minute section into a 40 minute album. When I played it, David said, "That's great, but that's only the first track!" They still laugh [about that], actually. We ended up using lots of sections from that and developing those sections into other tracks. It was a recurring issue, the vocal thing. Nevertheless, two of my favorite Floyd albums, Meddle and Obscured by Clouds, were very experimental and free. I was thinking of that. It was hard to get the one vocal that we did get. In the end, David was like, "That's fine. That's all we need. That's all I want." We left it at that. My inclination would have been, "Let's get some more vocals!" I quite like that we didn't, in the end, because it made it a bit more intimate in a way.
It's like an elegy or a coda.
I think it's a requiem to Rick [Wright, Pink Floyd's keyboardist], because it's all featuring him, mainly. It was an incredible experience for me.
I imagine.
And I've always been a bit hard on myself, so even when I was having a lot of success in my 20s, I thought, "Oh, I don't know how I'm getting away with this. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm faking it. I'm making it up as I go along." Of course, now I see that as my greatest strength. My naivete, again. Back then, it gave me a lot of insecurities and paranoia, because I've never been trained, musically. I've learned a little bit of music theory at school. I learned trombone a bit. I started writing songs. I could play guitar at 13. But I never had done the academics with the engineering or production or anything. It was only when I worked with Pink Floyd that I thought, "You can call yourself a producer now."
It only took a few years to get there. [laughter]
