When I first heard Wire, it felt like such an anti-learning-how-to-play- band. Rudimentary ability was trumped by concepts and ideas.
I've always famously said that I'm no better a guitarist than I was when I was 16. I'm probably slightly better now, but not much. I'm not obsessed.
Most Wire fans were introduced to the band via the first two albums, Pink Flag and Chairs Missing. But I obsessed over your third album, 154, for years before hearing its predecessors. When you first went in to record that album with Mike Thorne producing, I assume there was an engineer there as well.
Paul Hardiman, who produced Chris de Burgh's "The Lady in Red" later.
I've heard the Behind The Curtain (Early Versions 1977 & 78) demos. How much of a change did you see between the demos and album?
There's always a great squabble over authorship and who did what and who had all the great ideas, but there's also the Rockpalast video that we released [Wire on the box: 1979] which is us playing live. It's the same band playing the same material that's unproduced. A lot of what is assumed to be production was, in fact, just the band playing the arrangements that we worked out between us. The opening track on 154 ["I Should Have Known Better"] was originally a Graham [Lewis] song based around this bass line, and it wasn't my favorite song. We got into the studio and it was the first thing we worked on. I started playing this sort of "duh duh duh duh duh," then Bruce [Gilbert, guitar] immediately picked up on it and we were playing single notes. Robert [Gotobed/Grey] came in with the drums. Within five minutes we had that arrangement and we recorded it. That's an eclectic piece of work, and that's how the band meets the material and works with it. Of course Paul and Mike knew stuff that we didn't know [about working in the studio]. This was back when it took three days to get a bass drum sound. You'd come into the control room and they'd still be listening to one bass drum.
On these records?
Oh, yeah. It was a really top of the line studio — very expensive — and we had three or four weeks to record an album. It was considered a very decent amount of time to make a record, so certainly time was taken to get the drum sound. I think that's what happened when Wire came back in the '80s. I had already done some solo records with Mike in the early '80s and we had a fundamental disagreement about how we wanted things to go on. I became the default producer and I didn't really know what I wanted, but I was talking with Steve [Parker] at the time — he was with a studio called Scorpio Sound. It was a learning process for me about how to make a record and it was enormous fun. I'm sort of a minimalist.
Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish is one of my favorite solo records of yours.
That was my first production.
The record really sounds like, "Let's play this part and then let's put this part on, and this part on." It's so much layering.
Usually we started with the drums.
Was that a concept of how to build it up?
Well, the original thing was that I had done some demos where I'd play something and then I'd play it back twice as fast — like chipmunk style. I thought it was really good. Playing with speed was sort of how the early things were born, basically. It was based on things I used to do at home, tape-to-tape. Just building tracks by layering. It was just Steve Parker and me in the studio. There were no musicians coming in. We'd say, "What are we going to do now? Alright, let's start with this." It's got my appalling drumming on it.
And then you were asked to produce other folks.
My first production job was for the Virgin Prunes [in 1982, ...If I Die, I Die]. Steve was with me because it seemed a really wrong thing not to [ask him]. At that point I didn't have my hands on the mixing board — my idea of production was the grand overview: make the band happy and get the best performance. You know, work on the arrangements. Then [in 1985] I went on to work with Minimal Compact (which is how I met Malka). They wouldn't employ Steve Parker, so I used the house engineer at the studio, Gilles Martin, who is now a well-known producer in France. Raging Souls was a weird record because it's really poorly produced, from a technical standpoint. Gilles Martin assumed I knew what I was doing sonically. I was just taking care of the band, the arrangements and all that stuff, and I was falling in love with Malka while she was doing the bass guitar parts.
When did you put together a home studio?
When Malka and I started living together, we bought an 8-track [tape deck] and a mixing board; then, by default, I suddenly started recording. And Malka, who has zero patience, just expected me to do it. That is how I learned to record and mix. That was also about the time when [Steinberg's sequencer software] Pro-24 came out for the Atari. That was the late '80s and we were still living in Brussels in an apartment. Then we moved to a house in Brussels, set up the studio in the basement and started making something — it wasn't really even a record, at that point. We were just recording. Then we moved to London in '92 and decided we wanted a house that could have a studio in it. Our realtor called us one morning and said, "You have to see this house in Wimbledon. It's got a garage and it could be perfect for your studio." It just so happens that it has this thick wall between here and next door, so you can't disturb [the neighbors], and we built a wall between the studio and the garage door, so it doesn't really let much sound outside.
I think one of the changes we've seen is that people can have setups like this that are affordable.
This is not a commercial studio, so you can't make a record in here unless you have some reason to be working with us. You know, it's not for hire. It's just in our house. There's no way that it could be [commercial]. Unless someone asks me to do a remix or something, I'm not really working on anything else apart from our projects. For me it's always about affordable studios. I've always believed I didn't want to create something in a studio that's too expensive to work in. Over the years I've spent a lot — I just upgraded my Waves plug-ins recently and it's really nice. But the reason I like Pro Tools, and I don't use any other [product], is that it's actually recording and mixing software — it's not creative in itself. You have to be creative.
Some of the early MIDI programming was very rigid.
It was very rigid and [Steinberg's] Cubase was revolutionary compared to Pro-24 because Pro-24 was a pattern-based drum program, whereas Cubase had a multitrack thing going. But Pro Tools is just straight ahead. I don't have to double click on anything, because it's there.
We saw the real progression, from sequencing software to recording software.
Absolutely. In the end it is about recording. I think there was a period last decade where I was interested in creating a band in a box. I've become more interested now in just recording while a band is playing. Because they make the arrangement for you — they just do it.
You hear that on Wire's Send [2003]. The band seems tight and controlled, as far as their parts.
Absolutely. And it was all done here except for some drums we caught in rehearsal, which is the most stupid place to record drums. It had zero ambience. That was the innovation for Wire's Object 47 [2008], although that had originally happened on the Githead tracking. Because with [Githead's] Art Pop [2007] we had recorded in London and added live drums and other stuff in Rotterdam; I could see how it just let all the light in. And also doing things like recording drums and vocals in the same room, or feeding guitars out to amps that have been recorded in the same room as the drums.
That kind of glue...
It's kind of "old school," but it works! That's why they did it in the first place. It's hard when you get to a certain age, because if everything you do is "old school" then you are just living in the past. But, on the other hand, you shouldn't be afraid of "old school". As you can see, I'm not any kind of analog purist.
It seems like a lot of your focus has centered around creative tools that you have on hand, as well as working within budgetary constraints.
Well, the budget is zero.
So, there you go.
For both our swim ~ and Pink Flag record labels, I actually make money after. I can't charge back studio time. If I charged back studio time to all of the projects then nobody would make any money, apart from me. That's not a way of doing any kind of business.
Right.
We did Red Barked Tree's basic recording in February 2010 at Resident Studios [in London]. We did a tour of France, which ended up at Primavera [Barcelona's music festival]. Then the rest was pretty much all done here until the album was finished. We did one extra session at Andy Ramsay's Press Play Studios where we did some Graham vocals and a few extra bits, like organs and bouzoukis. Apart from that, up until it was delivered in September 2010, I worked every day on that record.
Would Graham come over and work on bass or vocal parts?
That was all done. The original parts were done there. If we needed to, we had that second session to replace anything that needed doing. Then we would add some extra instrumentation and Graham's vocals, but that was it.
So you were in here overdubbing guitars and...
