Let's talk about Bolts of Melody. You've been sitting on this one a while, right?
Yeah. Around '98 Swervedriver toured with the band SIANspheric. Ley [Taylor] from the band called me up and mentioned doing some sort of release, which ended up being the split release [Magnetic Morning/Aspirin Age]. Ley and I hit it off really — he turned out to be a good guy to bounce ideas off of. At some point he said, "Why don't you come up here to Toronto to record?" His friend Dean Williams had a little cottage by a lake in a place called Hawkstone, Ontario, and we decided to go up there and record it. We did the drums in three days with Matt Durrant [SIANspheric] in a little studio in Toronto [Broadcast Lane]. Then we transferred it and went out into the wild by this lake and recorded on Cubase [for] about two weeks, drinking loads and jumping in the middle of the lake at night. It was just three of us out in the wild — a great way to record.
So when you were at the cottage, was Ley engineering?
Yeah, both of those guys were just cracking open the beers and then going into the other little bedroom on the side which is where everything was set up. There was a Focusrite Platinum OctoPre thing and a MOTU 2408 MKII.
Bolts has such a warm coloration and isn't fatiguing, which are things that I usually associate with tape, but was recorded entirely on hard disk. Was that coloration achieved in the mixing stage at all, or was it more the mics and pres you were using?
Yeah, it's both. Charlie [Francis, producer] is very much into the classic records. He grew up in the '80s, well aware of how hideous everything sounded. So he's definitely a man who's going to skirt that. It's like a lot of mediums, such as graphic design, where people are actually working to make things look handmade, with bits of pieces of tape over the top, or whatever. The advantages with digital are plain to see, but you've got to work against the robots and bring it back to the humans.
You mentioned that you tracked the drums at Broadcast Lane.
Yeah. There's a good guy there called Lurch [Chris Rudyk]. It's a cool little studio space. We basically just went in and recorded the drums with the needle in the red — not so much fuss with it — just getting a good sound setup and the two of us playing guitar and bass along with Matt. He's a really great drummer.
And then to the lake house — how did you feel about recording in that environment?
I think when you record out in the middle of nowhere it can go either of two ways. You can either just relax and get into this sort of headspace where you wake up in the morning and the only thing you've got to think about is maybe driving to the store to pick up some more beer and food, and then just get straight back to it. Or it can go the other way. I remember with Swervedriver's very first EP — the Son of Mustang Ford — we went out to a residential studio in Suffolk, south of London. It really mellowed us out way too much. We had the demo that got us signed to Creation [Records], which was recorded in a day and a half and had the energy and the hunger. Then we went out to this studio for a couple of weeks, took it back to London, and everyone at Creation and [Alan] McGee heard it and said, "What happened? It's really mellow." It didn't seem to have the rawness, really.
Your singing has changed over time and become more confident.
I think on the actual very first 4-track recording that I did of Swervedriver songs, because I was recording the vocals in my room, I was really not wanting everybody else in the house to hear me. So my vocal was much more laid back — much more like a J. Mascis kind of vocal. When we actually got in the studio, the girl that was engineering was saying, "I think you have to sing out more." I think I got led into doing something that I wouldn't normally have done, which I think is something that usually happens with bands that first get into the studio. You don't actually know how it all works. The first time we ever got in a studio was doing a Shake Appeal [Adam's earlier band] session when I was the bass player, and of course live I had the bass up to get a nice distortion. That engineer said, "Well, you know, you can't really have it that loud. This is studio recording." So we ended up turning it down and never really being that happy with how the bass sounded. Years later somebody comes along and says, "Well, of course you can do that. You can do whatever the fuck you want to do. That's the whole point." If any engineer tells you you can't do something... I think that's something an engineer should never really say. It's a tricky thing with vocals. In the end I'd be with Alan [Moulder], seated next to him at the desk. I didn't like going into the other room and standing up in front of a mic. I remember there's a line in "Harry and Maggie" from Mezcal Head, about the Houses of Parliament. I kept getting stuck on that line. I said, "There's something wrong with this." Alan said, "Well, you're pronouncing it wrong. Par-lee-a-ment?" Sometimes the best vocal tends to be the one you did when you were more relaxed. Sometimes we'd end up flying in the 4-track vocal and having to stretch it over what we played in the studio because it was a better sound. Have you heard that track "Syd's Eyes"? [Syd's Eyes 7"]
Yeah.
Well the vocal on that and some of the stuff I've done recently has been singing into a laptop on GarageBand. It wasn't until I tried to sing that I thought, "Can I just sing into it?" I'll go into the bathroom 'cause there's better acoustics. I remember taking it into Stratosphere Sound here in New York, and Arjun [Agerwala] the tape op saying, "That sounds really good, man." Then my friend T.J. Doherty, who came into mix it — he asked me about it. He said, "You're just singing into it? You're not using any mic at all?" You just put a bit of reverb on it. Sometimes you're just singing into an SM57 or 58 and it just sounds kind of flat. But with this sometimes it doesn't even matter if you're singing flat, because there's just a sort of spirit to the sound.
What was the genesis of the Mezcal Head album?
We used to have access to EMI's studio on Tottenham Court Road — we used to demo stuff down there with Marc Waterman. We decided to just go in and demo this new idea, "Duress", with a drum machine. So me and Jimmy [Hartridge] just went in with Marc, programmed the drums and got this whole thing going. We thought, "Well, there's definitely gas in the tank here." Around that time I was getting more into demoing the songs more completely on the 4- track. We didn't have a drummer so we thought, "We've got to have stuff to present with new ideas." I think there are demo cassette tapes of probably all the songs off Mezcal Head. I think that's when we first started really flying in sounds from the 4-track.
It's amazing how much you hear about bands doing that that you wouldn't think would be doing that — even U2. I guess you just get attached to those cool, accidental sounds.
That's definitely true. For Ejector Seat's "I Am Superman", that whole guitar line — we tried to rerecord it and it just wasn't sounding the same. We'd forget the configuration of the pedals. I guess you should write it all down when you're [demoing]. But of course you don't, and then when you try to recreate it a month later...
Even if you get something similar, it's just never the same.
Yeah. It doesn't have the same kind of vibe. Alan said, "Yeah. It doesn't sound the same. We can't fly in the demos 'cause it's at a different tempo, slightly. I've got an idea." He assigned every single little guitar line to a control on the keyboard. I think it took up every single key on the keyboard.
How did you get involved with Alan?
I was at some show and was at the bar and somebody appeared next to me and said, "Aren't you the guy from Swervedriver?" It was Alan Moulder. He said, "I'd love to mix you guys."
Moulder had made his name doing stuff like Curve and My Bloody Valentine?
Yeah. He was working in studios with Flood, and Flood was doing production and he was the tape op. I guess that's probably how he started working with The [Jesus and] Mary Chain. I think Flood was off doing other stuff and they said, "We'll use Alan." I'm not sure when he first did My Bloody Valentine — it might have been around '89. I guess Curve would have been a little later, maybe around '92.
