So the new record was done at home?
It was actually done in our own studio. Volume 1 was done in a mixture of all sorts of places. It was done in kind of a converted stable that Haydn Bendall had, then we did some in Abbey Road and finished it off in Colin's living room. And this one... I think that we realized that recording in Colin's living room had great results. You know, as long as you have nice quality gear you can just about work anywhere. So having decided that, it was just a case of, "Well, look at that big double garage out there that you don't use. It's just full of junk. And look at the room next to it that you just store coal in. Why don't we get converting." So this is the first album that we've recorded in our own studio, which was Colin's double garage.
That's great. What kind of gear do I think we've got over a lot of problems like that you have in there?
We have a Radar.
A Radar? [laughs]
Do you know Radar?
No, I don't.
Oh, you don't know Radar. Well, it's hard disk recording. 24-track [by Otari].
Oh, okay. I thought you were making a joke.
[laughs] So we can detect people coming up the drive there.
Well, you were saying earlier about recording at Colin's house and being afraid someone would come in the front door.
I think we've got over a lot of problems like that now because it's kind of a dedicated studio space. It's not actually his house. Before he had to give over the front half of his house and we had a mixing desk and some bits and pieces in one room and a mic stand in another room or in his hallway. But this time we had a dedicated space to do it in. It's a great luxury. It's better than throwing a thousand pounds a day at somebody else's studio.
And you can work in your jammies.
Exactly. You can sit there in your slippers picking your nose. It's a luxury not to have a clock on the wall that's going, "100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds, 400 pounds."
It seems like the record is a simpler record. I knew you were recording at home so I was thinking we might have another The Big Express on our hands, as far as a lot of stuff in the production.
No, we wanted to make a more stripped sort of record.
So there's a lot of single guitar rather than two-part guitar stuff.
What happens is people say, "Oh, that's nice stereo guitar." But, actually, a lot of the tracks where you think there is one guitar, it's an electric guitar with a microphone on the solid body, so you have just the sound of the strings coming out. Then you take a DI and treat that and that becomes the other channel, so you have a wide, schizophrenic sound. In one channel you have this very thin, ultra-present sound which you can't get down pick-ups, and that becomes, say, the left channel, for example. And over on the right channel you have a kind of fuzzy, deep, electrified sound which is the DI part of it treated. Then you blend them together and you can sort of put your head inside a four-dimensional guitar sound.
Did you have any trouble with time alignment on that thing?
No, because it's all happening as is. The DI is pretty instantaneous. By the time it comes down the mic it's the same time it takes to come down the DI. So I don't think we were changing phase or anything like that.
You guys recorded guitars like that first with the song "Beating of Hearts."
Yeah, that's right. That was also weird tuning on that one. That was every string tuned to the note of E. But yeah, we mess around with guitars a little bit.
There's a really great variety of guitar tones on this record and I was wondering if you have a bevy of amps at your disposal or...
No, I'm afraid it's a bevy of Pod, it's a brace of Pod we have at our disposal. Uh, it's probably the [Line 6] Pod then going out through my little Sessionette 70, which is a pretty crappy solid state amp. Or through Colin's bass equipment. Sometimes, if we want it with a little extra deep poke, we put it through his Gallien-Krueger bass setup. But it's usually Pod and, as I say, a lot of the guitar tones have this mic'd up-close, dead sound in there as well for ultra-presence. But yeah, I think we have to thank Pod for a lot of those tones. It's highly recommended. I think everyone whose tried one out has bought one. We also put a lot of stuff in the mix through it as well. A lot of drums went through it. Any keyboard things we probably put through it. Vocals went through it, guitars all went through it, bass went through it — you name it, it was going in there. "Stupidly Happy," the devil voice is singing through the Pod. Plus, we used a little bit of Pod on some of the mixes to give it just a very little bit of very smooth tube-y distortion on some of the vocals. "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love" I think had a little bit of that. So Pod, I think is one of those beautiful things that you can just about flatter anything when you use it.
So the whole CD was tracked to disc?
Yeah, we recorded everything to Radar and we planned to use two Radars in the mix. So we started recording on Nick's, filled up what we needed to fill up, sometimes we only used one. But as we got near the maximum of the 24-track Radar, we said, "We'll, we're going to get one of our own in any case," so we bought one of our own second-hand. Just ran the two of these together, giving us 48 tracks.
Is this a stand-alone or do you need a computer?
It's all self-dedicated. It's excellent quality and in practice it works like a tape machine, so you really don't have to read the manual. You can sit at it and away you go.
Do you know what the recording resolution on that is?
Sheesh. No. You're going to have to look that up. That's out of my depth there.
It sounds great. I was wondering if it was tape or not, because this morning I was doing a shuffle with Nonsuch, Apple Venus and Wasp Star, and trying to see how well they went together, and the sound quality is different but it's all very contemporary feeling.
Yeah, it is different. A lot of that has to do with the engineering as well. I mean, Nonsuch is possibly... it's a bit of a toss up between that and Oranges and Lemons, possibly the best engineered record we ever had. That was Barry Hammond at Chipping Norton Studios. Unfortunately, he doesn't engineer anymore. He gave it all up for computer. And this one is Nick Davis who — god, this sounds terribly insulting, but it's not meant to be — but I don't think he's as good an engineer as Barry, but he's certainly a fantastic mixer, so... it's got a different sound. It's a harder, more wasp-y sound, damn it.
So did you do any of the engineering? How involved are you in the whole recording process?
Pretty total. For example, mostly it will be Nick, but occasionally we brought in Alan Douglas, who's a well-known engineer in England, to do things like the drum tracks. He also did the string quartet and oboe on "The Wheel and The Maypole".
So that's a real horn on that?
Oh yeah, that's Kate St. John playing oboe. And it's a string quartet tracked up twice so it's eight piece thing — two violins, viola and cello. But most of the engineering was Nick. A little bit was by Alan Douglas, a few bits and pieces were left over from the original sketching out sessions with Haydn Bendall, and a couple of bits were recorded by Barry Hammond. I think Barry was responsible for recording most of "My Brown Guitar", cause we initially started a whole lot of these songs in one session cause it was supposed to be a double album. But we just ran out of time and money and had to divide it up into two discs. So imagine it as a double album with a year between finding the other disc at the back of the package.
That was part of the reason that I threw those three records in at the same time, 'cause I think some of the variety that you've broken up between the two new discs is kind of on one disc on Nonsuch.
Yeah, see Nonsuch was a bit schizophrenic and I think that if it has a fault it's schizophrenia.
Oh, I don't think so.
Really?
Not at all.
Oh, good man. Well, it also contains some of our better material, so I'm pleased with Nonsuch as far as songwriting goes. But I don't know whether it suffers from its schizophrenia. I don't know whether stuff like "Rook" and "Wrapped In Gray" and "Bungalow" sit well with things like "Ugly Underneath" and "Peter Pumpkin Head".
Yeah, well I think "Bungalow", that one definitely sticks out a little bit, but I think if you go back through all your records there's always the song or two like that, where people are going to be distracted by it. Like on Mummer...
Probably the odd one on Mummer was "Funk Pop a Roll," which was sort of the first song that was written for The Big Express, if you see what I mean. You could see where I wanted to go with that one.
Yeah. I was thinking that I've listened to this music so much that I don't question it anymore. If there is something that sticks out, after a while it's just part of the record. You absorb it and take it as a whole.
Right. I can't think of an album, anybody's album, that doesn't have a stick out track on it, whether you're Captain Beefheart or Joni Mitchell or The Beatles. I mean there's always at least one track that doesn't feel like it belongs with the bunch.
And it's usually the last tune. Hidden. [laughter]
It's usually the George Harrison one. But no, there's usually something that even on the kind of most joyfully banal records like The Stooges Funhouse, I mean "LA Blues" is just four minutes of feedback and screaming, it doesn't even have a structure.
On the new one then, what do you feel is the odd duck?
Uh, hmm...
You can change your opinion later.
Probably — it's either "Standing In For Joe," because I know — that's cheating really — I know that it wasn't written with this album in mind.
That's an older tune, right?
It was actually written for the bubblegum project. Colin didn't want to throw it away, and I can't blame him 'cause I think it's a good song. We just kind of did it in the way that it demanded to be done, without doing a bubblegum pastiche or anything. We just kind of did it. It's either that or "The Wheel and The Maypole", but that's cheating really cause it's two songs that are glued together.
Are you playing harmonica on "In Another Life"?
It's not me. It's actually Colin. There's a little story behind that. Colin did a demo of that, and I think he was playing two harmonicas, either two harmonicas at once or he dubbed one into the other one. He did it on a 4-track cassette machine. He either lost or broke one of the harmonicas. It was like a cheap Chinese one. It was probably 99 pence. It had this great rasping, wheezy, punctured sound and he either busted or lost the thing and we could not get that sound again when we went to do it for real. And we said, "Look, I don't suppose there's anyway we could take this cassette demo, take the harmonica off of it." And Nick did it, by putting it into Radar and chopping it up. I think we changed the tempo a little bit, but he just edited it so that it fit the track. And everything else was brand new, apart from the harmonica which was, I think, a combination of a blues vamper and this cheap Chinese harmonica which was on a cassette demo.
So since you've got the home studio you're probably not going to be demoing as much anymore.
No, I will, 'cause that's how I get to know a song. I have to.
I have to demo it because that's how I get inside the song and can put it on and can wear it. I know my demos have been getting very polished over the years, but that's the process of finding out what works. And I don't think I can do it in front of a room full of people. I think I have to be on my own, making a lot of mistakes and making decisions that — it's part of the writing process. I can't leave demoing alone. It's built into writing a song I think. You discover what works or what doesn't work in that stage of the song.
So are their earlier versions of demos then...
No, they probably get worked out on a mono cassette, you know, structurally, so it works with one guitar and me stamping my foot and yelling into a cassette machine. Then when it feels good like that, it then goes on to, "Does this work on electric guitar? Should it be on piano? Should it be on acoustic guitar? If it's on acoustic guitar, should it be on electric guitar? Or a keyboard or an organ sound? What should it be?" And then you can start that process of finding out how to wear the song properly. But it's got to work in idiot-form on a cassette machine for me first.
That makes sense. But all the demos of yours that I've heard don't sound much different to me from what's on the record.
No, well that's the process. Finding out what works. Then when you've found out what works, you don't have to go so much further when you get into a proper studio. But now we have a proper studio. I don't know. It might change. It might make me lazier, I don't know. I don't want it to. I want to stay vigilant. But the demo process I think is very precious for almost psychiatrically understanding how the song should be.
I see. So you're not concerned with losing the demo charm?
No. That's its own world, it's kind of trapped in that world. I don't think too much when I'm doing the demos, it's just lazy engineering and lots of sloppy playing. You get to know that, whatever, a fuzzy sound will work there, a keyboard will work there, whatever it takes — you get to know a trumpet is needed there. That's the sort of thing you can suss out on your own time without other people sitting around playing with their thumbs. I think it's a habit from being in expensive studios in the past. You know, I want to find out what works before I bring it along to everyone else.
It's economics. It will be interesting to see if the luxury changes the process.
Mm-hmm.
What's in the works now? Do you have any ideas for the next project?
I think the next project from us is going to be a lot of demos that were never released. You know, fans have got bootlegs of this stuff and it sounds pretty awful by the time they get it. So, I thought it would be quite nice to let them have better quality things, or slightly better quality things. But as far as the next official recording, I honestly don't know, which is frightening and exciting. It really is a blank sheet now, because Apple Venus and Wasp Star were a long time in writing, a long time in putting together. And, initially, it should have been a double album. But finance, and the speed of certain people and personality problems, contributed to not making it a double disc in the first place, I think this kind of rectifies it now. We've recorded the other disc that is part of the package.
What are you going to be doing to support it, as they say?
Well, for my part, it's just going to be talking. But to be truthful I'm finding it tricky to talk about this record because it's just a bunch of songs. They have no deep inner significance. And it's not like a comeback record or a record made on unusual instruments. It's just a real solid, honest-to- goodness Sunday dinner.
Well the last two records, since they were such a long time coming, seem like very solid XTC-type records, in the regard that they don't have the pastoral setting of English Settlement or the hyped up machinery of Oranges and Lemons. They're more just kind of like you guys, to me.
Yeah, I know what you mean, but then again, I could certainly explain the atmosphere of any of the albums, and why the circumstances made any album have that certain atmosphere. For example, English Settlement, to me, part of the charm of it was the fact that it felt sort of sprawling and unfinished. And that was the first time we'd worked without a producer as such. We just had Hugh Padgham — "No, record this Hugh." So hardly any editing went on. It was also, that we wanted to broaden the palette. And you can hear that. Acoustic instruments start creeping in, keyboards start creeping in...
And the fretless bass...
Yeah, and then the fact that I didn't want to take the thing on the road kind of literally released me from having to make an album that could then be shoved in the faces of an audience and that it would sound similar to the record.
You guys ended up performing some of that, though.
Yeah, but I wasn't happy with it and it never sounded right. So, I can take any album and say why it sounded like it did. It's not a mystery to me. The circumstances and the personalities involved at the time and the instrumental choice and whatever's the flavor-of-the-minute instrument- wise. I mean stuff like The Big Express, I wanted to make a noisy record. Most of the songs were written on open-E tuning so they have sort of a blues-y edge. We just bought ourselves a Linn Drum, so you can see this already starting to form a picture. It's going to have a harder, blues-y edge, with a blues kind of tuning. There are mechanical drums for the first time. They're tougher, simpler songs, but they're done with a producer who had a thing for orchestral arranging. So, you throw all these ingredients in and that's the sound of The Big Express.
