What were you doing before Dirty Vegas?
I fell in love with music in school. I was in different indie bands around the London live music scene. I had a band called Fluid. We just did the local circuit and we were getting interest from labels.
Were you playing guitar?
Guitar, yes. Some of us were going off to college and some of us weren't. We decided if we didn't get signed by the end of the summer that we'd go our separate ways. We got down to the wire and the band split. I didn't want to go back to college, so I applied to every recording studio in the city, looking for a job. Tea boy, gofer; anything. I sent out a letter to 70 studios and got one reply back; luckily I got the job! [laughter] It was at a studio in Camden. Camden is a big hotbed for live music and clubs. I started to grasp the basics of how to record. It was fun to learn.
What kind of work were you doing initially?
I wasn't allowed to touch anything. I couldn't even touch the tape deck at first. It was about sitting in the room and being quiet, and fetching a drink if anyone asked! I'd run errands at lunchtime. You just ask questions when you get the moment. After I'd been there a few months, they let me man the 24-track machine. I was there for overdubs and whatnot.
Literally the tape op.
Yes, literally the tape op! I was lucky, with how technology is, to be young enough to get my foot in the door when people were still using 2-inch tape machines. That was great. It's incredible what you can do with technology these days, but there's some fundamental basics of recording sound that you learn from those old methods. Just to see the old pros using that in front of me was just fantastic. Occasionally they'd sync up two machines to get to 48-tracks. You have to get creative! Sometimes I think limitations can spur the creativity. Too many choices aren't necessarily a good thing.
I'm sure you end up with tracks where there's a lot of stuff going on with the Dirty Vegas stuff.
Yes. That sometimes is the hardest thing; especially when you're trying to write an album and you've got an overabundance of software. You can literally come up with anything within one song, but the challenge is to keep the focus across the album. That's where it gets tricky!
How did you meet up with Paul Harris (band member, not related)?
Paul and I met first, but the three of us all lived in the same neighborhood. We didn't meet until we were 18. I'd opened up a small record shop in my little hometown of Bromley. The house techno scene had really taken off and it gripped everyone. We were selling a lot of those records. Paul was a DJ in London; he came in the shop to buy records for his work. We started talking and we got on great. I got to a bit of a stale point and I wanted to try something different. I called Paul and we started laying down some tracks. We started a thing called the Hydrogen Rockers, which was an underground house techno remixing production outfit. We'd do that underground club rock thing that was going on in London at the time. From there, he had a chance meeting with Steve [Smith, vocalist] at the airport. Paul said, "This guy is pretty good. We should look into producing his albums." We sat down one day and listened to some acoustic tracks. One of them was "Days Go By," and that was it. We just went straight into the session and had it done in three or four hours!
And that changed your life, just a bit! [laughter]
Umm, yeah! That changed everything. We felt, "Something great happened yesterday. We've got to explore this." It just took off from there.
I thought it was interesting that you guys were initially being compared to Fat Boy Slim and Paul Oakenfold. But you were really working more with a songwriter. It's a different thing.
Completely. The way to think about us is that Steve comes from the traditional singer-songwriter place. I'd been playing in guitar rock bands for years. Paul was coming from the complete opposite end, having been a DJ. Nothing quite fit, but it didn't matter. It was about trying to keep the sensibility of keeping the dance/rock thing together. They don't really mesh, but if you can get it, it's great. Sometimes a lyric can be inspired by the mood and the music, and vice versa. When we first heard the lyrics from "Days Go By," it was really important to us that they mood fit. It's a bittersweet kind of thing.
Don't subvert the message!
Exactly. We wanted to keep the message, but still have the electronic thing.
When you were remixing before this and rebuilding the tracks with Steve, what kind of systems were you working on?
I had a little flat in London and part of the studio is stuck in the kitchen. Not the best! I had a Soundtracs analog desk — a 24-channel thing. We were sequencing on an Apple LC III. Really old.
So the computer is running MIDI.
Exactly. We had samplers for drums. We've always had a very experimental approach. For example, on "Days Go By," that drop that sounds like a trippy, dreamy synth pad is actually an acoustic guitar that's been printed in a sampler and played with LFOs and filters. It's one bar out of a 16-bar sequence. It was really basic. No audio in the computer.
Were you putting his vocals into the sampler?
Into the sampler, yeah. I had an [AKAI] S3200. It had a hard disc section in it as well which gave you two or three minutes of audio.
It's weird to think how fast all that's changed.
Back to the limitation thing. You've got a ten second sampling time and some hard disc space — sort it out and make what you can.
What would you mix down to? Was it a DAT machine?
Yeah. Oh, god — those days!
I remember suffering through those bastards. [laughter]
I'm very pleased to see those gone!
Did you do the whole first record with that equipment?
Yes. It was all done in that room. I think towards the end we swapped out for an Apple G4. That gave us the first chance to hard disc record to a computer. We were using Logic, I think. All a sudden it was like, "Whoa! We can play tracks and record a guitar part that goes for a whole song."
Initially you'd have MIDI tracks, but you couldn't have audio tracks right next to them.
Oh, yes. That was all separate. For us, it all obviously came together on the desk. That was the focal point. It's weird to see people working now — there's no desk and everything is spread out. I think the limitation thing helps focus you. It focuses your mind.
With the first record, were you mastering off your DAT?
We found a good friend of ours, a guy called John Davis. He now works out at Metropolis, which is one of the big mastering houses in London. We had a relationship with him. We'd been friends with him for years and years. It was a natural progression for him to master the album. He just mastered out third album at Metropolis. He used to love it; it would come sounding really raw.
It would give him some room to work?
Yeah! He felt like, "Oh, I can really go to town on this!" He used to love that. He really knew the sound. Good mastering is so important, especially using someone who knows your style.
With the second record, One, it's very different from the first. I read that part of that was from touring with drums and bass.
Completely.
Did you guys build a studio around that point?
Well, it was the same kitchen, but expanded! [laughter]
Could you still live there?
Well, that was it. I was getting to that point! We bought a secondhand SSL 4000-G. Getting that through the window of the second floor was tricky! [laughter]
Did you have to hoist it up?
Yes, we had to get a crane. As it was going up the crane operator asked, "Is that thing insured?" We said, 'No. Don't ask me that after it's forty feet in the air!'" But we got it in. It literally overtook the studio, but we just love doing it ourselves. Going into a big studio just isn't our thing.
Did you go to a "real" studio for drum tracking?
The only things that we did do separate was tracking drums and a string section. We went to the old Sony studios for that, which is now closed down. That was amazing! It was incredible to watch all of that going on. We started as an electronic project that was a production-based band, and it came together during the making of that first record. By the second record, we'd done a whole tour of the world. We'd brought a drummer and bass player on board. We'd done the States and all the festivals, so we came back a live band and we wanted to capture that. It just felt right doing it live, and we felt it had to go on the record.
Were you working out any new songs on the road?
Yes, a few. The schedule made it really hard. When you're on a bus, that's cool. You can take the guitars out and work. But it got really tricky with all the flying. We ended up working a lot of it out in the studio. You take the time where you can.
Were you taking things on the road, like a laptop and some recording stuff?
Yes. We had the laptop. Nowadays, it's great. This was the early laptop phase; they weren't quite ready to do those things! [laughter]
That's true!
It can go into overload after two bars! Just press record. "We know the melody and we've got the chords. We'll go in the studio and do it Monday." It was really just notepad stuff.
