Taylor Made

Rip It Up, Issue 93, 1 April 1985, Page 16

Taylor Made

by Russell Brown

Talkin’ to the Producer

Late last year it didn’t look like the Dance Exponents would be able to do another album. A suitable producer hadn’t been found, the people at Mushroom Records Australia were less than encouraging, it was going to cost a lot of money and prospects were fairly bleak. Then word came through that an international producer, lan Taylor, had picked out the Dance Exponents from a bunch of demos sent to him by Mushroom and wanted to produce their next album. The band recall the Aussie record company people being considerably friendlier after that... “It just stuck out a mile for me,” Taylor says, explaining why he picked up on the Exponents’ demo. "Mainly because Jordan had goodsounding words and the music was... not weird, because I didn’t think it was weird, I just thought it sounded interesting to me. “I thought ‘I don't know where this is coming from’ or how they’d arrived at that. Because lots of music you can listen to and think ‘Well, yes, I’ve heard that before, no surprises, nice sound and so on ...’ And the two guitar players I thought ‘Well, they’re not going to sound like anyone else I've heard before.' Maybe bits of it do but tons of it doesn’t.” So Taylor spent something over a month in Mandrill Studios with the band often working through until 6am during the last two weeks. The result was Expectations, probably the most expensive album to be recorded in this country and the big punt for Dance Exponents and Mushroom NZ. A well-spoken 27-year-old Londoner, Taylor has produced groups ranging from Ministry to Sham 69 to Romeo Void. Working as engineer to US supremo Roy Thomas Baker he was part of albums by biggies like the Cars. He also mixed the last Bob Dylan studio LR Infidels. His most recent production work before the Exponents album was with Ministry and, before that, Rick Ocasek. He told the Exponents one of the attractions of their tape was that it "sounded like a band playing” and admits he was looking for a break from the recording-as-electronic-construction method of doing things in the studio. "With Ministry it was just one guy, myself and Vince (Ely, the former Psychedelic Furs drummer who also stood in on the Exponents’ album), in a control room with a load of synthesisers and a drum kit and so on. And apart from four songs which we’d recorded earlier, we more or less made the whole thing in the studio. I ended up getting a songwriting credit, which is sort of unusual for a non-musician. But I can sit with a tape machine and construct a song. Instead of having to actually sit down and play it, if the notes are there on the tape but they’re in the wrong order or something, you can sit there with a tape machine and help somebody write a song “So I did Ministry and that took quite a long time and prior to that I’d just done some work with Rick Ocasek’s album, which was a similar sort of thing except he had the songs, but it was just one guy sitting in a studio fiddling with synths and stuff. The Ministry record I really enjoyed, Rick’s record I quite enjoyed, but it took so long that I got to know it really well and by the time.it was finished, listening to the record you

didn’t get that thrill of hearing the finished product. “So I just felt the process of doing that was becoming a bit dull and I decided I’d like to do some work again with people who were actually playing together and creating something that wasn’t just a polished sound, creating a feel. You can create a feel in writing and have synthesisers and drum machines and still in the vocal create a feel but you can create a lot more if it’s actually four people playing off each other” Taylor actually began his engineering career a long way from synthesiser technology, and even from guitars, at the twin studio owned by the publishing firm Chappell Music in London a studio which recorded more MOR acts than anything else. “I wrote hundreds of letters away when I was at school and started out as an assistant making tea. I didn’t actually do any tape operating for about two months I just made good tea. But if you make good tea and you get on with the people you work with, you eventually get to do some assisting. I started that when I was 16 or 17. “Chappell had a 24-track studio and a 16-track. The 24-track was a big studio with big rooms and everything and we’d record stuff like Shirley Bassey and Bing Crosby. With a lot of those you’d have the whole band of 40 musicians in the studio at one time and the solo singer standing in a booth. We used to do that sort of thing just about every day. Then in the 16-track we’d do bands, mostly demos for the publishing company and then if they turned out alright maybe actually doing some tracks for a record." Unlike some producers, Taylor didnt get involved in studio craft through being a musician: “I just liked playing around with mixing consoles. What actually made me start was being a mad record collector and going to gigs and seeing the guy at the sound desk sitting there and thinking “Wow, look at that, he doesn't have to pay to get in, he probably gets paid for doing that what fun!’. ” Those early gigs were in pre-punk days and he had been working for about three years when punk turned the British music scene upside down. “That was a really good time, because I’d just started engineering really. And without being a brilliant engineer I just sort of got involved in the music. “It was quite a funny old time ... I was doing some demos with a friend, because in London studios you can usually get the studio to work in over the weekend if there’s no one there. This friend was a guitar player and we got in a bass player and a drummer and recorded the whole song with a melody on and the guitar player sang it and it was awful, because he was such a bad singer. And that night we went to a party in South London and there was a guy there who was going on about how brilliant the Sex Pistols were He said ’l’ve just seen this band play at the 100 Club, they’re fuckin’ marvellous! You’ve gotta see them.’ “And we just got talking to him about being in the studio and how the singing we had was crap and he said ‘I could fuckin’ sing it! So I asked him if he’d ever done any singing before and he said “Yeah, ‘course I have’ and I said ‘ln the studio? and he said ‘No, no ...’ “He was actually lying about having sung, but the next day he came in and sang this song and that was Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs. That was the first time he’d ever sung it was good though." So did he have the style and mannerisms we’re familar with back then? “He didn’t quite have the style but nearly, nearly. He was into a lot of bondage gear then this was pretty early days.” Soon after that Taylor moved onto Phonogram

If M » I f 1 I L.V/1 1 » f » Studios, where among the fledgling producers was a chap called Steve Lillywhite: “He was just starting to produce things. He got in this band called Ultravox to do some weekend sessions and then took the tapes Stol Island Records who .said ‘Ooh, this is really good. Another guy there at the time was Steve Brown, who went on to do Wham and various other people. “I did a lot of work with Jimmy Pursey (of Sham 69) _ his own stuff and the stuff he started to produce there, like the Angelic Upstarts. It was great fun at the time, absolutely great fun.” But one day there was a half page ad in Melody Maker, calling for “a brilliant engineer”. The man behind it was Roy Thomas Baker, the man who had first made his name with the over-th sound of the early Queen records. Taylor became Baker’s right hand j man for several years (once even accompanying him to this country for the Harlequin School of Engineering in 1980). His engineering skills have clearly stayed sharp since he has struck out on his own Mandrill man Tim Field was heard to echo those words “brilliant engineer" more than once in the course of the recording.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the role of the producer in modern music becoming too great understandably, Taylor doesn’t subscribe to that view ... “I don’t think: it can get too great. All these things come and go ... one day people will want produced-sounding records, in a period later maybe people will get bored with the sounds and it’ll go back to something else. I think we’ve already seen that in the whole punk thing. Records were getting to be very technical before ithat?But'l don’t think you can have too much of things a talented producer is just as entitled to make a record as % talented musician. “For me, people like Trevor Horn are pushing ■the' boundaries of modern recording technology, which is something that has to keep expanding. It’s no good saying ‘you shouldn’t be using Fairlights and all those keyboards and | let’s get back to makingreally earthy records,’ because making earthy records or whatever you’re not breaking any boundaries as far as the actual recording of things goes. And there’s an awful lot happening technically, with the digital recording process. There’s a whole new process of making records .with] the] Fairlight Computer” In what respect is it different? "Because it’s less people all playing together. You can shape the sound to be exactly what you want. You’re getting a quality that you’ve never heard before. "For instance, most songs will have sections in them that repeat themselves, most songs are fairly symmetrical. And it’s possible for you to do sections once and repeat them, or if the band didn’t play one section : so well . you can ' move whole sections of the songs around. So the whole song itself becomes very fluid, as opposed to having to sit there and play it onto a tape in a 'correct’ sort of form.” But how much is it becoming a matter of cost? "That’s very true, r yeah 7 I think in all recording, [if you make a record on an track, k you’ll get an eight-track-sounding 1 record, whereas you go to the best T 24-track there is, providing you have pretty competent people working with you ; you’re going to; make a professional-sounding record. And it’s the same thing with Fairlights. You’re just getting the best keyboards and it’s just another studio] tool that allows you to have better sounding'records.”J|MßMMWWpM r]Does it matter if bands can’t reproduce their [ records Iive?JBBM “No, not at all. It is sometimes, in that seeing a band with tapes can be a bit 1 boring, but I’d much rather see a band t that have tapes backi ing them up and sound good t than a band ; who don’t have tapes backing them up and sound out of tune and crap and not- half as good as the ‘records. But I suppose it’s only the ; records being so well put together that makes the situation arise in the first place.” What’s it take for a band to make a successful record? Are there certain ingredients? “No, nothing that you could put your finger on. I think there’s too many important things to list or put in order of priority or anything. You just know it when you hear it.” So you had no specific things to apply to the Dance Exponents’ record? “Not really, it was just more parts of songs that let down the song as a whole that’s how I tend to think about things. You wonder how much the band have thought about a weaker section of a song and whether it’s possible to maybe think about it a little further and try and develop something that’s better. But you want to retain as much of the quality of the band as possible you don’t want to walk in and turn it into something else because all you end up with is nothing. You have to . somehow maintain the magic qualities of the band!that excited you in the first place but pull up some of the weaker parts.” Tim Field commented that a lot of the things you did |in the studio went almost right against L what he’d been taught was the right way. Do you work differently from most overseas engineers or is it just us in New Zealand? ML don't know really. 1 just fiddle around with it till it sounds good. I’m not really too conscious of it' because it seems so long ago since I was taught anything that I cant really remember what 1 I was taught. And I don’t think I was taught that there was | particularly a right way and a wrong way to do certain things. I L think what you listen |to, the balances you have, what EQs you use and 5 how much echo you use, I dont think there are rules for that. There cant be rules for that j there’s rules for things like this is how you make this work’ and {this is how you plug this piece of equipment in’ and these are the boundaries within which This piece of equipment works well’. ” Well, the album has now been completed, mixed, cut and pressed. The month of its :making seems to have been a successful and enjoyable one for all concerned. It’s now down to lan {Taylor to offer, a word on the album’s chances overseas “It’s very difficult to tell, quite honestly. I think the chances are very good for this album but the problem is always whether, anybody .will ever get to hear it? If , the band becomes more internationally visible ... which may entail going to America. A bunch of New Zealand guys in America is already sort of ‘Well, they've come this] far...’ and they’ll create interest when they, play.] They’re a good band and I know that if people hear them they’ll like the music. The secret is actually going to these places ‘l’m Jordan Luck, I’m an interesting guy, listen to me.’ That’s what it’s all about.” £