It was my first professional record. I did Dragnet in '79 and I suppose the last thing I did was this "Chilinist" thing, which I suspect is the basic track that they still used on the single, which must have been '97. The third album with The Fall was Slates. Adrian Sherwood came in and did some time with it. He had the whole kind of snare mic'd up on the stairs, put through the reverb and then fed back in. I thought, "Okay, I like this. I'm not going to spend as long as Adrian does getting it, but if it happens, go with it." You've heard a sound, it's worked really well, and you spend 3 hours setting up in your studio and it just doesn't work. I've really learned lots of things like pointing the mic down away from the [kick drum] beater, make sure it's right in there. And then one day you don't do that, you mic it from the front. The mic is outside the drum and it sounds great, and you're like, "Oh my God! Everything I've learned is wrong." But I can look back at The Fall stuff and think, "I don't mind." It's looked upon as brilliant stuff. I think The Fall are probably the best band in the world. 20 years of sheer brilliance.
Grant's career with The Fall lasted until leader Mark E. Smith's erratic behavior and alcohol problems made things difficult.
What you see is people going over their peak. Certainly with Mark E. Smith I was thinking, "Well you're not making sense anymore." It came to head for me when we made "Chilinest". I was up there working on it, and Craig Scanlon, who was one of the great guitarists of The Fall, had gotten a clarinet and we tried really hard to get it to work, to get a good sound. Then Mark heard it and said, "What the fuck is there a clarinet on this song for?" He told us to wipe it off the track. He went back to the pub and came back three hours later. We played the mix again and Mark was like, "This is shit. Where is the clarinet? That was the best thing on the track." I've seen Mark since then and he's much more stable now and I support him dearly — the last record he made was absolutely fantastic — but I just thought it's not for me. You make a decision. You say, "I can't do this anymore!" I'm very close to Mark, I'm in contact with him 8 or 9 times a year. The last time I saw him he was very, very sober after a lot of this trouble with the band and Steve Hanley finally leaving. So he cleaned up his act. He did say, "We should work together," and then I thought, "You've got to actually ask me to do this." I can't phone him up. He never did and I thought, "Okay, well, I'll leave this. I'll just carry on buying their records." As a kid, you think you're going to say to a cabbie, "I worked for The Fall. I've done about half a dozen albums. They're a seminal punk band." And the guy's like, "The Fall?"
After some of his early productions for The Fall and Alternative TV he opened his own studio. Briefly.
I formed a studio in '79 called Street Level. It was myself and a guy called Kif Kif. He was the drummer of Here and Now. We had lived on a bus together for five years. We went off and did this studio — and did a lot of great work — but he really didn't do a lot after that. He's kind of out of the loop, and if he had a little bit more sense at the time he would still be making music. I hate when people do that. He was a great producer, great musician, but the tide's gone out and he's been left there. The problem I had running the studio (until '82, when it closed) was that we definitely had to have heavy metal bands in. Now I look back at those times in affection, but it was the pressure of doing too many bands like that that got to you. It was like, "I can't do this. It's too much for me." I had a 1" 8-track which is what I started working on. It got dismantled and then it was in a house that got repossessed... I never saw it again. If It was around I'd still be using it I guess.
During a lull in The Fall's schedule he stumbled across The Smiths.
I was there from the beginning. I was taken by Rough Trade to their third or fourth gig. It was me, John Peel, the writers from NME, the writers from Sounds, and the writers from Melody Maker. There were about twenty people in the audience. I was like, "Oh, this is really interesting." Then I went along and produced an album for them [Rank] and did some tracks for them and I had nothing written down on paper.
Then the band broke up. I went back to Rough Trade and said, "I've got points on this album." They said, "What are you talking about? Of course you haven't gotten points on it." I found Johnny [Marr] and I said, "Johnny, they're saying I haven't got any points on this record." He said, "You've got points on this record, Grant. I'm going to find out and tell them." If he just said, "I'm sorry, I got something better to do. See you later." That would have been it.
After that I managed to think, "Okay, I'm not going to leave it to Johnny Marr now." If I hadn't have gotten that then, I'd be sitting here whining about all that stuff like so many of my friends do. Passion and dreams will only take you so far. Then you have start thinking about some return on it. I was so lucky that The Smiths came along. I can remember them asking me how much I wanted to be paid. I said, "Oh 13 pounds." Because 13 is my lucky number. 13 pounds a gig, and that lasted for quite awhile. People thought it was crazy. I did basically all the live sound. I must have missed only four or five gigs.
During a Smiths' concert he caught an opening set by a young man playing electric guitar and singing with no backup band. This led to work with Billy Bragg, live and in the studio.
When I did Don't Try This At Home, which was the "big" pop album for Bill, we did the three singles, three videos and a world tour. But at exactly the same time that this was happening, which was '91 or '92, Mood Swings took off so I just didn't do the world tour with his group. It was a very unhappy tour and at the end of that Billy got a psychosomatic illness and decided not to tour for five years. I was so pleased that I missed out on this horrible tour. That meant that I'd never done any bands [with Billy].
This new tour's been going on for about a year now. Hopefully we'll do the next album together — I really want to. I'm really excited about this band We've got Ian [Mac] McLagan from the Faces. When I was 14, I used to go see the Faces and I loved it. It was the first time I thought, "Maybe I could do something." They looked so normal and had such a good time. We've also got people like Ben Mendelson and Lou Edmunds. Lou was in the Damned and Public Image, but Ben was also in a band called 3 Mustaphas 3 who were this fake Eastern European band. They were fantastic, and now I'm working with these guys as well. So they're putting in this weird Middle Eastern thing into the band. We got a bouzouki, saz and a cumbus, which I had never seen in my life. We have this mix of Ian and these weird ethnic instruments. It's great. Like Bill says, we've spent so long in the studio, saying to people, "Play like Ian McLagan, play like the Faces."
Mac has got all these great stories about the fantastic tape phase on "Itchycoo Park" [by the Small Faces]. How really it was just an engineer saying, "I was just over at the Beatles session the other day and they were doing this weird thing, let's see if we can do it," and they did it. I love that shit, and I think people imagine it's all been done, all that magic and excitement is over, and now it's just a science. That just isn't true.
On William Bloke, the album before we did the Guthrie stuff [Mermaid Avenue], we had a mandolin player and we worked out the track in the front room [of the studio] with a double- bass player and a baran player and Billy. We went into the studio and after about a half hour, we went back and did it in the front room. It sounded really good in the front room. So we set up a couple of mics in a room which wasn't designed in any way for recording. Suddenly we've moved out of the expensive, spectrum analyzed studio, and we were back in the front room, with [mic] leads that were too long. Of course I have to say the engineer came back and said, "What the fuck are you doing?" And I said, "Too late, we've done it."
