For twenty-plus years you've had a track record of staying busy and, especially in the U.K., keeping things in the charts.
I think the thing that's kind of amazing is that I've always chose to work on things I believe in, instead of working on things to just fill the calendar. I think if you try to take work simply to keep yourself busy, you usually don't do a good job. I generally take on things because I like it; I feel a certain empathy with it that I can do a good job. Some things I've heard and I think they sound great, but then I think, "What do you want me to do? I can't think of a thing to do with it." [laughter] I have a certain natural empathy with bands. I've done an occasional singer/songwriter thing, but I'm much better working with bands. I like to see that chemistry of four or five people working together and see what makes them tick. I like to keep it oiled. I like making every person feel positive, important and not just focus on the front man. So much of producing is band management — it's much more than knowing how to twiddle the knobs correctly.
Oh, absolutely!
It's like being a big brother — not in the [George Orwell's] 1984 sense [laughter] — but in a "put your arm around someone" kind of way. I've been there before; I want to make them feel comfortable for the session. I'm working for them, for the band. I worked with The Cranberries in the late '90s, and those kids were seventeen to twenty years old. They were so young. So, I had to tread carefully with them. Especially someone like Dolores [O'Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries]. I made the best possible record I could make for them. But at the time, when it first came out, it kind of stiffed. It wasn't until the record came to America that people started to take notice. They re-released it in this country and then it finally took off. But, it was the same record. I didn't really think I'd make The Cranberries sound like Blur or vice versa. It's the band's album, not mine. I'm there for them. I want to make sure I transfer what they have in mind. I count myself very lucky though. I've kept going in this industry for twenty years plus — that's not bad by anyone's standards.
Do you still have your ear to the street? Or are people coming to you? Do you go to clubs?
I don't go out too much. It's like a busman's holiday. I don't usually go from the studio and see gigs. [laughter] If a new band gets signed to a label, especially if it's a guitar-based thing, hopefully I'm one of the producers on that list. I am fortunate. I've had access to some good acts over the years and it's a good calling card. A lot of bands come looking, and the first thing they want to know about is The Smiths and that was twenty years ago! [laughter] They are still asking how I got that guitar sound. The guitar sound comes from the guitar players. [laughter]
How did the Kaiser Chiefs end up working with you?
They were Blur fans. I produced a band called The Ordinary Boys, they are no longer together but they were quite popular about five years ago. Their first album created a little bit of a buzz. The Kaiser Chiefs were touring with them at the time. I met Nick [Hodgson], the drummer — he's the one who instigates things in the band. I met him backstage, although I had missed the Kaiser Chiefs, but I heard from The Ordinary Boys what a great band they were. Nick gave me a CD of their demos. They didn't have a deal and B-Unique, the label The Ordinary Boys were on, decided they were going to give them a deal. They said, "Could you give them a little test session?" I recorded a version of a song called, "I Predict a Riot." It really kick started their career and it was recorded here! It was a new band that needed to make their debut album. Sometimes I think that's one of my strengths.
Is the drum sound kind of cool in this space?
Yeah. It's snappy — it's a nice tight drum sound. We leave the door open and leave a mic out [in the hall]. It catches a bit of it.
It's like your little clubhouse down here.
It's one of the few studios that get daylight. I think it helps. I love a bit of daylight, if I can. It helps with my version of reality. [laughter]
With a band like the Kaiser Chiefs, are you examining their songs before you start sessions?
The longer you're in this game, the better you get at making arrangements and decisions. I don't like to do too much pre-production. I'll do a little bit, but I don't like bands that go over and over and over it. Sometimes it really doesn't hit me until I hear the song coming over the speakers. I'll realise, "The bass drum pattern is wrong here," or something similar. I like to get a certain amount of preparation done, but I like to leave it open for when we start tracking. Then I can play it back to them and say, "Listen. You can tell this is not working." In rehearsal, it's hard sometimes to find what's wrong. I don't get too hung up on pre-production. It's nice to do some, don't get me wrong. But sometimes you get these demos and the sound is so cool. Like with the Kaiser Chiefs, there was no way to really recreate it so I said, "Why don't we just lift it?" [laughter] Why go through the whole thing again? Let's use it! The cool little sounds came right through. I pasted them where I thought they sounded best in the track.
That's great! [laughter]
Back in the '90s, when I was working with Blur [on the self-titled album, 1996-7] they had always recorded on 2-inch [tape]. We were beginning to see the first signs of Pro Tools popping up. I sighed and thought, "I don't want to be pushing a mouse around all day." I went to [iZ Technology's] RADAR. This was great; to me it gave the sense of still working with a tape machine. It also gave me so many editing possibilities. Not as many as Pro Tools, but I was really able to let bands play live and just cut the best bits out. It was a real boon. I bought a RADAR system, which cost a lot of money in '96. I think it was about £20,000 for 16-tracks. But it still sounded great. Now Pro Tools has become the standard. We use RADAR for the ins and outs. But now we mainly stay in the domain of Pro Tools.
When did you start working with Cenzo Townshend?
I think around 1996. He had been working a lot with a bloke, Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds. He's also a producer/engineer. Cenzo used to engineer all his records. Ian put being a producer on hold for a bit to be an artist. It turns out his manager at the time spoke with my manager and he said, "You know Stephen is looking for someone to engineer with." We did a session together, working with a band from the UK called Sleeper, and that went well. He's a very nice, easygoing character. I'm a little bit more fire. [laughter] He's much more technical-minded than myself. I tend to botch things; I don't look into things very particularly. It turns out to be a good combination. Neither of us gets bogged down. I don't get too carried away.
Kind of a division of labor?
Yeah, a little bit. I used to engineer myself. My inspiration, when I first started, was the likes of [Steve] Lillywhite [Tape Op #93], Martin Rushent and Martin Hannett; all those guys who were doing post-punk. That's what I wanted to do. I quit the band I was in. I learned to be an engineer at Islands Records' Fallout Shelter Studio — a studio below the label [offices]. And I was very fortunate, as it happens in this game. I met The Smiths and they were on the ascendance. I worked with them on quite a few records. That was my passport to getting into production. So, at one time, especially when I was working with The Smiths, I would be engineering. That gave me the co-production thing and then I moved forward to full production.
Did you start working with The Smiths with John Porter producing?
The first session I did with them was with John producing and I engineered. It was "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", but the band then decided they didn't want to work with John on the next record, which became Meat Is Murder. They wanted to do it on their own; with an engineer they thought they could work with. Bit-by-bit, I started taking on certain production responsibilities. I started dictating the way the drums would sound, that sort of thing. It was natural. The first album I did with them was engineering credit. The next album was co-production credit. That was an eventual kind of thing.
That turned into working with Morrissey on his solo album and co- writing [Viva Hate].
Yeah. Well, I don't want to go into that too much. I had recorded Strangeways, Here We Come [The Smith's final album]. When they split up, I thought it was going to be some kind of short argument and then they'd get back together in a few months.
Apparently not! [laughter]
Exactly! There were no tracks left in the can to use as b- sides on the singles. They had been scraping around, using some very dodgy covers and those sorts of things. I had a little box of ideas — recordings I had thought of over the years. I sent off this cassette of ideas that I had [to Morrissey]. The way he used to work with Johnny [Marr] was Johnny would prepare complete backing tracks and Morrissey would sing the words. I sent off the tape and said, "I don't want to be presumptuous, but if there's anything here that you'd like to use for b-sides, or whatever, please feel free." I couldn't see whether Mike [Joyce, drums] and Andy [Rourke, bass] were making any effort. They'd tried a session with another guitar player and that hadn't worked out. I got married and came back from my honeymoon and there was a little postcard from Morrissey saying, "I want to make a solo record with you. Would you do it with me? I love what you sent me." So, that was it, really. That was in August and we started in September. We did a couple of weeks, went back and wrote some more songs, and by Christmas that year the whole record was recorded, mixed — everything. That was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I made myself feel pretty ill by the time the whole thing was done.
Because you were too involved?
Because of depression. I've always had [a problem with] a build up of acid in the stomach. The stress of it — I chose the song, the drum and the bass sound and the musicians. I would set-up, mic them, record them. The control was upstairs — there was a camera just to connect with the live room. Come downstairs, play it again. It was just so exhausting. But, you know, I'm very proud of that record. We did some songs afterwards that went on the b-sides, the Bona Drag album and stuff. I think we were writing stronger and stronger material. But Morrissey is a strange character.
I know things ended up going sour on that.
Yeah. It's one of those things. But I'm very proud of what we did together. After that, I went back and really worked at concentrating on engineering. In the mid-'90s I did start to delegate a bit more, instead of trying to do everything myself. I was working with Blur and they had a really good engineer, John Smith of Matrix Studios, that they liked working with — he had been recording their demos. I was happy for John to be there too. It was nice. It enabled me to see the overall thing more.
Was that the first time you'd been able to step back from the console more?
Yeah, a little bit. Not getting so hung up on the technical side of things so much. I worked with John for quite a few years and for the duration of the Blur albums.
Did you have to kinda figure out who did what?
No, it was good. The way I worked with John is very much the way I work with Cenzo. Neither one of them would have gotten upset if I had reached over and started messing with the EQ myself. When it came to mixing it would be a case of, "Get the track back up to where we had it." Then I'd leave them alone for a little bit. Nine times out of ten, we'd be mixing on an SSL console. John would fiddle with it for a bit and then I would sit and mess with it for a couple of hours. Then the band would come in and hopefully everyone would be happy. It was a nice, natural kind of progression there. John went on to do more things and Cenzo got involved. There was a period where I was working with one or the other and then John moved overseas for a bit. I started to use Cenzo more, so it was a nice, gradual swap-out at that point in the mid-'90s. Cenzo and I don't work exclusively together — he's so busy nowadays. In the genre we work in, which is alternative guitar-based music, there was a period where it was pretty hard. It wasn't until The Strokes came along that it kick- started the whole thing again. Cenzo had been working with me on a lot of things that I had done and he was getting quite a reputation for mixing guitar-based stuff. He started going off and doing work for Snow Patrol and things like that. He's now doing a lot more mixing for people rather than being my engineer, as it were. I'm pleased for him. For the Babyshambles album I did last year, Cenzo mixed about 2/3 of it and the other third I was quite happy to mix myself. Especially for a radio-type mix, it gave Cenzo a little push over the finish line.
That sounds like a good relationship.
Yeah, it's good. Because of Cenzo's ascendancy in the mix market, rather than tracking, he's here all the time. We have a good rack of gear here. We have this DDA desk that Ian Broudie sold him — he didn't need it, so we got a good rate. We pretty much had everything we needed to get the ball rolling as a small recording studio. I've got some MIDI stuff over there, not a huge amount, but the usual [Roland JV-1080], [Apple's] Logic and computer stuff. We're not in here all the time. Sometimes other people come in here and use it. But it's a useful workspace.
What do you see as the advantages of having your space in an existing studio structure as opposed to renting a space and putting this together?
It turns out when we first started looking for a space it was quite scary. We'd go looking around these industrial estates and we'd think, "God, how are we going to get anybody to come here?" [laughter] Olympic caught wind of the fact that we were looking for something and knew we could convert the downstairs space here. It works because it means nearly everything I bring in comes in to Olympic Studios — they get good use because I'm often off using their other rooms. It's a really good working relationship. We've got a good space here, which we can use for certain parts of projects.
Do you get any kind of technical support?
We do. I mean, again, Cenzo tends to do more on that side of things. The maintenance guys here are helpful. Yeah, a nice bottle of wine — it depends on the size of the job. Cenzo has his own maintenance guys in from time to time if something needs complete rewiring. But if it's general, if something needs a tweak, they're very happy to help out. It's a good setup.
Do you find it's more of a community vibe too? Like, other projects coming through — you bump into people?
Yeah, you get to know everyone here. The good thing is, say you want a particular mic, if they're not using it, as long as you okay it, you can borrow a mic from someone else or one of the rooms. Everyone is here to try and make music.
Have you guys mixed records on the console here?
I mixed [Kaiser Chiefs] "I Predict a Riot" here. We haven't got computer-assisted recall in here. Sometimes b- sides, where you're not worried about recording it for a record company or anything like that. I'm still a bit old school. I still like to bring up things individually. I like mixing out of the box. I'm a big believer of it — there's something about the air. Everything sounds a bit more separate. The perception of depth is better, I think. I find nowadays I use far less effects than I used to. Back in the '80s I used to reverb the snare, put a bass drum on its reverb. [laugher] Now it's one plate, one room reverb.
In your mixes I always feel like the snare is front and center, with guitars wrapped around and vocals up front.
I think stereo placement is very important. I like to feel like you're in there — like things are coming out around you. In the last few years, it seems people are getting hung up on the compression thing. I guess what we're trying to do now, with compressors, is to get the air that we've already got in the recording, instead of relying on the snare through a big reverb plate, like we used to in the '80s.
To get an increase of the actual ambience?
Exactly. I think it's more creative. It's more gratifying if you get a good ambience.
There's a great quote from Wikipedia. It says, "Stephen Street has a reputation for producing commercially viable music." [laughter]
"Commercially viable?" That's horrible! [laughter] It's like I'm at K-Mart or something. I mean the main thing is that I like a good vocal. There's something there that grabs me if I like the melody. There's nothing more boring than verse, chorus, verse, chorus. There's nothing wrong with that, but you might not want to hear every single track on an album that way. But it's not a bad way to start when it comes to getting together an idea for an album. [laughter] I grew up on [Marc] Bolan and [David] Bowie. Those two guys were my heroes when I was a kid. In '73, I was thirteen years old. To me, all the heavy rock-stuff that was out back then — I didn't like that. I liked melody. I've always been that way. I appreciate the heavier rock artists that have come around, but when I was that age I wasn't much into [Led] Zeppelin or [Jimi] Hendrix, as much as I can appreciate them now and how good they are. I like that pop sensibility that Bowie and Bolan had. I think that's still at the heart of what I do, really. I mean good pop. Sometimes the word "pop" is a dirty word! [laughter]
That's kind of interesting to think that Tony Visconti [Tape Op #29] ended up working with Morrissey a few years back.
I smiled to myself when I thought of Morrissey working with Visconti. Morrissey and I were both huge Bowie and T-Rex fans.
Tell us about albums you have made that didn't get enough attention.
Did you ever hear that album [Wood/Water] I did with a band called the Promise Ring?
JB: I was gonna ask you about that.
They were a really good band. I came across it the other day on my iTunes and I thought, "This is a good record."
JB: It bombed. And that's their best record. It's my favorite record of that band, and I have all the records before that one.
It's funny, sometimes you make a great record and for whatever reason it just doesn't happen. The label sat on that album for months. I finished it and they sat on it and sat on it. You could just tell that no one knew what to do with it.
