Three dynamic shots of
The Producer in action
I've got a new job. For the last few years I have been a 'musician', and sometimes a 'freelance musician' (which is the same except you get paid), and also a 'songwriter'. I've enjoyed it, the travelling, the performing, the tourbuses, the aeroplanes, the Unbelievable Glamour of Everything. To be honest, 99% of this experience has been to do with Aqualung, which is the name of a Musical Entity, which is a kind of creative exoskeleton worn by my brother Matt. Look <<< there's part of him there. Aqualung has been the most successful Musical Entity that I've ever been involved with in terms of recognition and record sales, and it has taken up a great deal of my time since it began in 2002.
Aqualung was like one of those babies that comes as a surprise to its mother. It popped out four years ago and took off with an alacrity that was almost insulting to the decade Matt and I had just spent believing in the failed rock band we'd formed. I wasn't sure whether it had anything to do with me at all, but as time went by it became clear that, naturally enough, I was Aqualung's Uncle. It wasn't my kid, but I would still have to change its nappy every once in a while. Although the truth is I haven't had to change any nappies for his actual child.
Which brings me to my new job. I am going to be what is called a 'Co-producer', and my job is to 'co-produce' the new Aqualung album. I'm not quite sure what this means. I think I must be the new album's midwife, or perhaps its Nanny. Or if this is my brother's child's child, then perhaps I am its Great Uncle.
Producer ["Daddy"] is of course Matt himself, but there is also a further Co-producer ["Great Aunt"?] whose name is Dan Swift. Between us we have to ensure the safe delivery of the new progeny to its wicked stepmother (Columbia Records), who will then whisk it out of our loving grasp and set it to work sweeping chimneys and/or flaunting its young body for sensory pleasure, by which I mean 'they will sell it at music shops'.
The concept of an 'Album' is rather amorphous these days. I'm beginning to wonder if it's even a word that people use anymore, so me using it just sounds quaint. But it is the word I use, perhaps because I am
To me, an album represents a Serving of Creativity delivered by an artist. Because records tend to be made one after the other, each one is the product of a particular period of time, thought and experience, much like this morning's poo is made out of last night's lobster. Or vice versa. That seems to be why some artist's albums come out so much better than their others. It's part of the reason why being a music fan is so exciting - you get these strange coded messages from your artists' lives and you have to try and adjust your own mind to understand it. It also explains why you get brilliant first records followed by turgid sack-of-shit saxophone-solo second albums followed by 'oh shit we're going to lose our jobs' brilliant third albums followed by the intermittently brilliant, 'we don't like each other any more but we love being rich' fourth album followed by a few irrelevant solo projects followed by creatively-bankrupt-but-brilliant-by-mistake fifth album (which will also contain the massive hit you despise) followed by death. Followed by the Greatest Hits.I used to refuse to listen to Greatest Hits collections because I hated the way you were sick of the hits when you finally got all the original albums. I figured if you liked all the greatest hits you were bound to like the rest of the stuff. But there's a lot of stuff by the bass player on the original albums, isn't there?
That's how it used to be when I was growing up, anyway. I suspect that the market is changing in favour of individual songs, now that music is almost always shuffled out of its original context, and that's fine - it means that individual songs have to be better because it gets less important who's singing them. But the album will never really die, because it corresponds to the way artists' minds work.
The record is just the final result of a long period of work that begins immediately after the last record. People don't make three records a year like they used to when Pop was young, which dictated that virtually everything anyone wrote was released, so albums genuinely were untidy snapshots of a few months. The whole process has slowed down to allow for maximum exposure of each product, so there is a lot of time and a lot of agendas at play when it comes to the statement your new album is going to make.
Aqualung's case is interesting. Matt has an advantage because it is his project, and he's also the producer, so he gets the final say on every creative decision. That doesn't mean he gets to have his own way in every decision, because as with any artist who is under contract to a record company, he has to accept that this commercial business has a huge interest in the music he's making, so he can't just tell them to fuck off. Happily, Matt has never been interested in making music that is hard to understand, so both parties have the same objective (for now at least).
This is going to be Matt's third album. He's never made a third album before. The first Aqualung album was made with absolute freedom because he made it for free. The second album was remarkable because it was the first time he'd made an album that someone actually wanted, but that came with quite a lot of pressure attached for the same reason. A lot has happened since 2003 when we made Still Life. Aqualung is now effectively an American artist, and we find ourselves in the highly unusual position of increasing success. The last eighteen months of near-constant touring in America has really paid off. The Strange & Beautiful album approaches a quarter of a million sales - nothing extraordinary in American terms, but a very real achievement for Matt - a professional mandate, if you like, to keep making music, with a growing audience to fire it at. It changes things.
Because Aqualung began with the huge exposure of a TV commercial in the UK, it was always going to be difficult to judge whether people were connecting with the artist or just the familiar song. In the US, despite extremely fortuitous early TV and film exposure, success has not been predicated on a single factor. It has been a nice little snowball, starting very small and getting bigger and faster in a very organic way. It hasn't really been that long since Matt and I played a semi-disastrous gig at Shuba's in Chicago in January 2005 (that there were nearly 100 people there that night was already amazing), to our last visit in March 2006 when we sold 1000 tickets at the Metro. I am generally cynical about the definition of 'success' ("so long as it sounds good!"), but that is as clear an indication that Something Has Happened as I can imagine.
So this is the backdrop to Aqualung's new album. Matt was thirty four in January. He was twenty when we got our first 'record deal'. It's been a long and convoluted journey, but somehow it's all led to this pivotal moment. Will Aqualung be another one of those promising bands that just sort of fizzled out, or is this going to be the moment when everything went crazy?This is a rhetorical question; you're not expected to know yet.
It's a little bit intimidating.
In October 2004, Matt spent a week in Toronto in a sort of songwriting sweatshop where Professional Songwriters from around the world had been gathered together to write Awesome Hits. This sort of thing is very useful for creating Professional songs which you can sell to whoever likes them, but by the last day Matt had had enough of latin disco and FM power ballads and decided to write something for himself. The song was called Capsize and it was the first new Aqualungy song he'd produced since finishing Still Life. It was a languid 6/8 seaside song with bulging passionate bits. We performed it at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that December. Our version was quite reminiscent of 'Sailing By', which is a languid 6/8 seaside song they play EVERY FUCKING NIGHTOn Sundays they also play 'Bells on Sunday' - recordings of bell ringing from various churches. Radio 4 is a national institution and you should check it out, but its music selection is wretched. on Radio 4 at 12.45am before the Shipping Forecast.
After that, every so often Matt would play me bits and pieces of new things and it was clear that an embryonic album was forming in the back of his mind. Meanwhile things were taking their course in America, and Strange and Beautiful came out in March 2005. Since Aqualung had left Warner Records after Still Life, it had never been certain what the future would hold, but the deal with Columbia finally guaranteed that there would definitely be at least one more album. Naturally this was very inspiring for Matt, and he began to start making demos of new tracks, many of them featuring a characteristic 'woo-woo' vocal which means 'this is how the song goes and this is the tune, and these are some of the shapes the words will be but I haven't got round to them yet and perhaps never will'. It sounds a bit like the Cocteau Twins.
As time has gone on, this has become the standard Aqualung writing process. When we were younger Matt was always the King of Music and I was the King of Words, and that's how we wrote songs for a long time. Then I got interested in writing the music too and both elements began to even out. Then we both got more interested in writing our own songs and barely ever wrote together and instead acted as sounding boards/vicious critics, which is how it was by the end of The 45s, especially the vicious critic part.
The key tracks of the first Aqualung album were written by Matt and Kim [Oliver], who is a fine musician and lyricist in her own right, which immediately defined the project as something new and different. The rest of the album was quickly pulled together from pre-existing songs. My contributions to that album Can't Get You Out of My Mind and Halfway to the Bottom had been written years before, but had never worked in the context of the band at that time.
It was only when it was time to make the second album that we had to work out how to Make Aqualung Songs. Firstly, all the music comes from Matt. It's not the kind of project where you turn up and go 'listen to my brilliant riff'. You can try, but he won't be interested. When it's Aqualung, it's his music, which of course is the reason it sounds like Aqualung. At this stage he'll probably only play ideas to Kim and I and collect comments. Sometimes Matt and I will play through things on piano and guitar to see if we can develop the basic idea a bit and see if it feels good. This may or may not have an effect on how the song turns out, which is more often than not predicated on the demoPatronising Glossary, which is the next thing that happens.
Like all keyboard-players, Matt has accrued a massive selection of tools to replicate all other instruments, and in recent years these tools have become frighteningly realistic. It's very easy for him to create a huge symphonic arrangement in his computer which might as well be the finished product. This is effectively what the first album was. The making of demos has become an integral part of the writing process, to the extent that there is an almost seamless continuum from the birth of the chord structure and tune to a fully conceived arrangement. I think songwriters from every era have had the concept of what the finished song should sound like from very early on in its creation, but now it is possible to execute the concept at an extremely high level on your own in an afternoon. And this in turn blurs the line between the demo and the master recording. (This prompts some philosophical questions for Co-producers such as myself that I'm sure I'll ponder at great length for you later.)
Aaaaaanyway, after his afternoon's work you can hear an intricately wrought song idea with a vocal that goes 'woo-woo'. Matt has written a lot of excellent words for his songs over the years, but I don't know of any song of his that started with lyrics. Melody is his primary interest as a songwriter. Sometimes words come along with the tune, but if they don't, most of the time he'll sing a woo-woo version and ask me or Kim to turn the woos into words.
If there's one thing Matt and I love almost as much as making albums, it's talking about making albums. We whiled away many many tedious flights and drives over the last year expounding on the theory of the album, on all its facets and nuances, without really having any idea what it was going to sound like or what would be on it.
One thing there was a lot of talk about was The Drum Sound, which we knew all about from way in advance. It's The Small Dead Sound, thuddy and brown, like on The Band or Trident-era Bowie.
The first handful of songs he demoed did indeed have this feel. They were very densely constructed and featured quite a lot of brass and jerky rhythm patterns. The verses were tight and paranoid and then suddenly twisted and burst into soaring choruses. They sounded very shiny and hard, but perhaps a little too much surface; it was difficult to get a grip on them. The main thing you noticed was the songs were faster, and a lot less 6/8, and had a new sense of urgency about them. I thought this was an exciting development for Aqualung, and probably had its roots in the surprising career renaissance in America combined with the incredible impact on Matt of becoming a father. I was also happy because fast songs really need more guitar in them.
Eventually, Matt abandoned the concept. Perhaps he'd started staring at a different book cover, also he had fallen in love with Wilco (another exponent of The Small Dead Sound), and the new ideas were generally warmer and less manic. He doled out some songs for me and Kim to write words for, and a few songs later the flavour of the project seemed very different. It was about this time (December 2005) that serious recording schedules began to be discussed, selected demos were played to the record company (to see if they'd laugh/vomit) and that was when I was offered my new job.
This was also the point at which Dan Swift joined us. We'd first encountered Dan while we were making Still Life. He'd been brought in by Jacknife Lee to engineer the tracks he was co-producing. He immediately impressed us with his enthusiasm for distorting things, which is something studiously avoided by most engineers, who may have to pay for the equipment they destroy. It turned out he lived down the road from Matt, and once Still Life was finished Matt asked him to come and work on the (still unreleased) Melanie Blatt album he was producing.
Dan started off as a drummer, but gravitated towards studio work in the early nineties and has been engineering and producing ever since. Aside from his ability to make stuff Sound Brilliant, he's spent so long in studios that he actually knows what the thing you're recording should sound like, and he also knows what the best tools are for every job. Matt and I have quite a lot of experience of making recordings, but we have tended to specialise in recording the instruments we own, whereas Dan will often say things like, 'well, of course we should really be using a tin bath instead of an enamel bath to really get the classic bath sound'. And then when you try the tin bath it does sound better. So that's his job, to make everything Sound Brilliant and also to Know Things.
I'm still not sure what my part of the job is. Perhaps it's as Professional Second Opinion. Perhaps it's a bulk deal on guitar playing. I suppose the best thing I can do is be aware of what needs to be done to make the project work and do that. In this respect I think of myself as a tool, and I hope that Matt and Dan would also say I truly am a massive tool.
Did you have a nice Christmas? I did. We rented a cottage in Dorset and went for walks in the snow that turned out to be mud.
After Christmas, we instigated Plan A.
We had a bit of a conceptual problem to overcome, which was: what the fuck does Aqualung sound like? In years since we made Still Life, there have been five or six different configurations of Aqualung, which had lent a looseness of interpretation to the sound of the band. This, combined with the new demos which didn't sound like any of the versions of Aqualung so far, meant we had an almost completely free choice about how to produce the songs. So long as Matt was singing, it could just be bassoons and bongos, if that seemed to be for the best.
Plan A was our first idea, and was mostly a product of our year of touring in the US. We had discovered that American audiences were generally much more tolerant of Rock Behaviour. For example, if your song broke down to a squall of feedback, they'd all go crazy instead of pelting you with bottles of piss. The whole thing got a bit more amped up. We started touring as a classic rock four-piecePiano, guitar, bass and drums. We weren't 'a Classic Rock four-piece' in the sense that we started with House of the Rising Sun and ended with Freebird., covering Queen, and very occasionally breaking into a sweat.
The idea was to make the record as if we were a band, arrange the songs for the individual talents of that band, and then record it all together. We booked some weeks at a rehearsal studio in London so we could get really tight and then dash the whole thing off in a week or two at RAK or Abbey Road or somewhere suitably expensive, because according to Dan, well, of course, The Small Dead Sound requires an enormous live room in which the sounds barely reach as far as the walls. The band was Matt, me on guitar, Alonza Bevan on bass, Dave Price on drums and Jim Copperthwaite on keyboards, guitar and whatever else was necessary.
By the first day of rehearsals the plan was already suffering. We had been offered the David Gray tour in March, and we had to fit in three UK gigs we had postponed from December. That was fine, we thought, we'd do some rehearsal then take the new material on the road and hone it to perfection. Of course, we'd also have to fit in some regular rehearsals cos we hadn't played as a band since October, but still, it would be fine, plenty of time.
Rehearsals began, and it was slow going. We were working on about fifteen songs, and it took the whole first week just to learn the notes. It was all working, but it often seemed like we were getting ready to tour the demos rather than finding new angles on the songs. We were also hampered by the proximity of a fine gastropub, which tended to extend lunchtime rather too far into the afternoon. Fat musicians are never inspired.
At some point in the first week Columbia announced that they were very very excited about one of the new tracks, Outside. So excited that they were seriously considering tacking it onto the Strange & Beautiful album and releasing it as a single RIGHT AWAY, so could we possibly record it RIGHT AWAY?
We interrupted rehearsals for a week for a foolish trip to New York for a gig sponsored by Vogue magazine. I was ill on the way homeIf you would like to know more about my illness, I have written extensively on the subject here.
We came back with Plan A(a), which was similar to Plan A, except that we would spend a few days concentrating on Outside, then go into the studio at the end of the week and dash it off in a couple of days, which would be a trial run of our recording strategy.
I think it's fair to say that we made a bit of a bollocks of recording Outside. Some songs just work from the first time you play them, and other songs don't. Outside was one of the don't. Well, that's not quite true - it was very easy to do a version that sounded like bad U2. The problem was to find a route that allowed the song to be fast and uplifting while not defaulting to sounding like Today's Rock Band.
The demo, beloved of Columbia, was pretty cool, and centred around a ticking glockenspiel and crazy marching snare, reminiscent of Sloop John B. It sounded a bit like a marching band. By the time we got to the studio it had gone quite guitary with an elastic bassline, and Dave somehow being a marching band all on his own.
Next day we started adding more keyboards and guitar, big loud guitar and plenty of it. Matt was more ill, Dan started getting it and Jim went to the dentist.
On the third day Dave played some glockenspiel and violin, Matt played a celesta part, a trumpeter and a tuba player came in. I wasn't there because it was My Birthday and I'd already done my quota of guitar playing. I spoke to Matt that evening and he was very down, sick, partially deaf and dispirited. Dan was much the same.
The next week we spent preparing for and doing the three gigs in Hebden Bridge and Brighton. We didn't attempt to play Outside.
Matt had been listening to the session, and decided that somehow we'd failed to record the crucial guitar part, so we went round to Dan's and did some even bigger, louder guitar.
By now there were only a few days before we were due to leave for America to support David Gray, which was the deadline for finishing the track. All that was left to do was vocals, which Matt would record at home because he always gets the best result doing vocals on his ownPerhaps he has a Dorian Gray-like secret surrounding his vocals. A specially trained parrot or marmoset perhaps, that actually sings the songs. Either way he goes into a closed room and emerges with The Vocal. What goes on inside? Nobody knows....
On the Sunday before we were due to leave he emailed me a finished version. I think you know when you've fucked something up, because there arises a strange tension around the subject, there's none of the excited self-congratulation and endless re-listening that goes with a successfully delivered song-baby. When everything goes quiet, it's a bad sign. I thought the vocal was underdone, and didn't sell the song. It didn't sound like a hit to me. I felt bad, deeply bad, because I knew I'd have to take Matt to Singer Hell, which is where a singer goes when someone tells them their singing isn't good enough.
It goes without sayingapparently not that The Vocal is the most crucial thing in a pop record. You don't listen to Elvis for the drumming. Aqualung's persona is defined by the voice. It's not surprising that Matt is sensitive about it, and of course it's always the way that you can hear a million compliments on something, but the only thing you remember is the one criticism.
In fact he took it pretty well. There was only arctic silence for a few moments. He had done some takes that were louder and more dynamic, but he'd been having technical issues and those takes had ended up distorted so he'd ruled them out. In the event he was able to assemble a take's worth of exciting vocal that didn't sound too fucked up, and it was better, which was good because there was no time to do any more. So we sent it to Columbia and left the country.
Columbia went quiet for a bit, and came back saying that they thought what we'd done was really good and everything, but that they preferred the demo. This provoked a lengthy triangular musical correspondence between Dan in London, Columbia in New York and us in Texas or wherever the fuck we were. The combined analyses were: we'd recorded it too fast, we'd gone with the wrong drum part in the chorus, there was far too much big loud guitar, we'd missed out all the good things from the demo. About the only thing that everyone liked about the new version was the vocal and the extra chorus we'd put on the end. It was time for Plan A(b).
Since we were in the middle of a tour, Dan turned to our friend Technology to fix the problems. It's almost unbelievable how many options there now are in the realm of digital musicPatronising Glossary to jigger with your music. The signal you get through your microphone is merely the beginning of the journey your sound can undertake.
The big thing in the last five years has been Virtual Instruments. It all started with the synthesizer, whose sounds were waveforms created electronically that could be edited to resemble the waveforms of acoustic instruments. The results were generally piss-poor, but as usual, the piss-poor saxophone sound began to be used for its own piss-poor merits and a wholly new-sounding music was created. The next development was Sampling, which grew out of DJing, where you could use snatches of existing records to make new ones. This initially allowed you to add James Brown going "Get on up" and orchestra hits to all your music, but it wasn't long before the Keyboard Player's arsenal of sounds were based on samples of actual source material. This was where it started to get difficult to tell the difference, because the fidelity of the sample was only limited by the computing power of your sampler.
As computers became increasingly powerful and everyone threw away their tape machines, developers started creating software that, instead of replaying previously recorded source material, would construct a digital model of the source and get it to behave exactly like the real thing. It's the same concept as computer generated animation, which creates an environment and subjects it to logical rules whereby if it rains things get wet and if it's windy stuff blows around. So we've had thousands of software developers analysing the rules that make an amplifier sound like an amplifier, or a Hammond Organ sound like a Hammond Organ and then making a digital amp out of digital wood and and speakers and putting a little digital mic in front of it in a little digital room. Then they can ask you if you want to plug your digital Mesa Boogie head into a digital 50s Fender cabinet and replace the digital 90's valves with 70s ones, and whether you'd like to replace the digital 57 with a digital 87, and whether you'd like to digitally move the mic digitally nearer or digitally further away.
This kind of technology has gone crazy; you can run your virtual piano through emulations of classic microphones and compressors, and then you can place it in a recreation of Sydney Opera House or (for some reason) the back of a Lincoln Navigator. Does it make the song any better? No. But it is useful if you discover you've fucked up your recording and need some emergency help.
Dan started bringing in elements from the demo (which had to be timestretchedPatronising Glossary to be the right wrong tempo) and programmed an alternative drum part using a program that allowed him to recreate the sound of Dave's drums, but playing something different. We began gingerly playing the song during soundchecks to try out the new ideas with partial success.
Eventually we moved on to Plan A(c) and the whole thing got passed, like a heaving octopus in a greasy bag, to the renowned producer Jack Joseph Puig, who had done a radio mix of Brighter than Sunshine the previous year. The great thing about this was that he was an Expert, and since between us and Columbia nobody seemed to be able to explain what they wanted any more, we could just leave it all up to Jack.
His solution was something else again - slowed to the original tempo, with machiney drums and a formless harmonic mush in the middle, topped off by the vocal INCREDIBLY LOUD. It was closer to New Order than U2. I had absolutely no idea how it had been arrived at. But it sounded a lot more like a hit. Matt and Columbia announced themselves satisfied, then everything went quiet again.
At some point in the tour, after the all the to-ing and fro-ing toing and froing, Matt announced that he'd gone off Plan A, and he'd come up with another plan altogether. Perhaps it had been a mistake to treat the demos as demos, perhaps the band sound was too restrictive. After all, the spirit of the first records was much more individual. Why didn't we rent some studio space and use the demos as the basis for the final versions? Without huge studio costs we could have a lot more time to experiment with sounds and ideas, we could redo things as often as we wanted, and we weren't ditching the important aspects of what already existed. It made a lot of sense to me - in fact it was weird that no one had thought of it up till now. We'd always been very self-sufficient, and in fact still owned all the useful bits of the equipment we'd got years before when we were making the RUTH/45s album. Dan, whose recording rig was what we'd actually use, was also looking for a space to work in for other projects. We had happy visions of a collective-style creative haven where all manner of crazy shit could happen, and we could record it. And the World Cup would be on! We could get a rug, and maybe some nice lamps and beanbags, yeah! beanbags...
The other advantage of Plan B was that it would impose some sorely-needed parameters for what everything sounded like since we would, within reason, record everything there. Never mind all our talk, if the drums sounded like a chimp banging pots and pansWe assumed they wouldn't sound that much like a chimp banging pots and pansDan: "Well, of course, if you want the classic chimp-banging-pots-and-pans sound you have to use a Rwandan Nymph and a set of La Creuset shellfish pans, 10" and 13", preferably from before they switched production to Riems, because they used more resonant handles.., then we'd work with that.
Initial concepts for the location of the studio included various stately homes (Stargroves!), water towers and abandoned shops, along with a self-sufficient smallholding complete with dairy herd close to the beach in Cornwall Jim's idea, for the surfing. and a lighthouse. Then once we'd found out how much that kind of thing cost we scaled it back to suburban semis, industrial space and eventually 'purpose-built studio units'.
I'm not saying this to make a point, or get credit, or to show How Brilliant I Am, or anything like that. No. I wouldn't do that. But about six months previously I had noticed a sign up at the rehearsal studio we use advertising a 'Self-contained Project Studio, control room and booth'. Matt had been talking about moving his equipment out of his house because apparently Kim was tired of seeing him hunched in an office chair wearing headphones breathing too loud, so I rang him up and told him about it, and do you know what he said? "Naaahhh, can't be arsed," he said. "Fair enough," I thought. "His decision. 'Strike while the iron's hot' I always say, but there you go. Nobody's business but his, just trying to help," I thought. "But wouldn't it be funny if at some unspecified point in the future we went all round the houses looking for somewhere to work and ended up taking this place? That would be ironic. Well, not technically ironic, but you know, 'ironic' like something at which you could chuckle dryly, so self-defeatingly simple does life turn out to be. I would laugh long and loud should this sequence of events unroll.
Long and loud.
But still alone."
Did you have a nice Easter? I did. We went to the Brecon Beacons for a few days and walked behind a waterfall.
Plans to affix Outside to the Strange & Beautiful album were abandoned because Columbia fired everyone who'd thought it was a good idea. Now we can do it again properly.
Matt also went away, so we left Dan to wander around the project studios for hire. By the time I got back from Wales he too had discovered the room at the rehearsal studio and had pronounced it ideal.