How did you get started in music?
At age 15, through my mate, Clive Franks. In later years, he became Elton John's front soundman. London in 1967 was a bit of an amazing time. We were in bands, and I wanted to be a singer/songwriter in a band. Clive was being promoted, and there was a job available at Dick James Music as the office boy. It was £6 a week pay, but compared to what I'd been getting, it was amazing! And just to be in London, you know? I might be asked to take some stuff to Paul McCartney's house. It was very, very glamorous, even though it wasn't a glamorous job. We had a demo studio there, but as the office boy I wasn't allowed in. It was quite a strict regime, in some respects, and then in other respects it was very laid back. There were a lot of characters in this place, and one I met early on was a guy called Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who was a pretty outrageous dresser. We sort of became friends. We all know him as Elton John, but he was completely unknown then. He was writing songs for the publishing company.
How did you get involved with Elton John?
You would go from office boy to disc cutter, which was cutting demos. I cut demos for The Beatles and for Elton John. We had an amazing band there called Hookfoot, and Caleb Quaye was their amazing guitarist. He was actually Elton's first producer. Pretty much every day was just amazing. I went from disc cutter to studio engineer in this little demo studio we had. We'd have all sorts of bands coming in; people off the street could book the studio. Elton was making piano and voice demos. After hearing his music, I was totally mesmerized by what he was doing. So, although I got the job as an engineer, I had my eye on working in the office in A&R, promotion, and getting into that. Steve Brown came to work there and got along with Elton very well. He convinced Elton to write fewer poppy songs, and he produced Elton's second single ["Lady Samantha"] as well as his first album, Empty Sky. Steve and I got on very well, even though he was a lot older than me. I think he was 26 and I was only about 17! We started DJM Records, and I was assistant to Steve Brown, who was the head. All I was doing was working. We were working on the record company and on Elton John's career. I booked the studios for the Elton John album, which was a mega undertaking. It was going to be the best album ever made. We were given £12,000 to make it, which was a ridiculous amount of money for those days. We had Gus Dudgeon as the producer, with Paul Buckmaster as arranger, and all the session guys that were on it. It's a very, very structured album, and we thought the result was incredible. Gus became this big hero who had transformed Elton songs into these amazing productions. Sound-wise and production-wise everything really was ahead of its time. And that continued. The Tumbleweed Connection album was different because it was now a band, rather than session guys. While this was all going on, Elton went to America and played the Troubadour; the historic start to Elton's rise to fame. I toured with Elton on the second American tour as his personal assistant. It was the 1974 tour that I did with Elton where we had Kiki Dee as the support, and we played Madison Square Garden.
How did you end up at The Mill Studios?
Coming back from that Elton tour, I'd had enough. I thought, "I'm 23, and I'm gonna retire." [laughter] But I went to see Gus, and he told me he was building a studio in Cookham, Berkshire. I started working for Gus as his assistant, and then we built The Mill Studios. When we built The Mill, it was the most sophisticated and probably the most expensive studio on the planet at the time. It was like an ‘80s-type studio. It wasn't a big live room like Abbey Road, but very dead. I was wondering how we were going to do that, technically. I got back into recording. We had all this incredible gear, so I then became Gus Dudgeon's assistant engineer at The Mill. We produced Chris Rea and started his career. We did an album with a band called Voyager that had quite a lot of success, and then we did an American band called Shooting Star. It was mainly [a place] for Gus to work with new artists. There weren't any megastars that we recorded at that time in this five-year period. Gus wanted The Mill to be the most up to date, amazingly equipped studio on the planet. He wanted to make everything correct that he thought was wrong in any studio he'd ever been in. He wanted an MCI desk, because he used them before. So rather than having the off-the-shelf MCI, he went to Florida and had one designed. It was an MCI 42 channel desk – a beautiful desk.
How did you become Jimmy Page’s engineer?
Gus ran into financial problems, had to sell The Mill, and he sold it to Jimmy Page. I didn't know him, but he obviously thought he should keep me on in the studio. I became Jimmy Page/Led Zeppelin's engineer and studio manager. [Jimmy renamed it Sol Studios. -Ed.] When Jimmy bought the studio, he was quite happy to use that MCI desk. All he did was bring in his own 3M tape machines and a lot of Eventide Harmonizers, because there weren’t many effects around in those days.
