On the second day of the Urban Hymns recording sessions at Olympic
Studios, the band played 'Space & Time'. It was the first time Chris
Potter, their engineer, had heard the track and the point at which he
first knew he was embarking on a journey which would result in a record of
rare quality. Chris manned the recording desk for the duration of the
sessions, co-producing, mixing, living and breathing Urban Hymns for
almost nine months. Now, approximately six months to the day since the
record's release, Chris sits before me on a capacious black leather sofa
in studio A, Metropolis Studios, Chiswick, ready to impart memories of the
making of Urban Hymns, recorded next door in studio B and over at the
aforementioned Olympic Studios, Barnes. Having given up smoking since he
finished recording The Verve - he says there was no way he was going to
attempt to do so while working on the album - , as we speak, joy of joys,
he thinks he's broken his chewing gum addiction and he's looking most
relaxed.
Like many a producer or sound engineer, when Chris was a youngster he
was in bands. "I play bass, badly,that's why I don't do it anymore" he
confesses. Through his band experiences he got a feel for working with
sound and when he left college at twenty he figured that was the path to
follow. In time honoured fashion he banged on the doors of all the studios
in London, trying to get a job and was taken on as tea boy/tape op. at
Maison Rouge Studios. A couple of years later he became house engineer
there. This was the mid-eighties and a lot of high profile acts were
passing through Maison Rouge. Chris is a little coy when asked if he has a
favourite piece of work from this era, allowing, quite reasonably I
suppose, that "it's tricky, because it was the eighties remember".
Nevertheless, he appreciates that working with a lot of different people
was an excellent grounding, enabling him to pick up and learn from the
good things that they did.
Having impressed with his professional prowess, Chris was asked to do
some engineering at other studios and obliged, becoming a freelance
engineer/mixer in 1990. He did a lot of work with a fellow called Chris
Kimsey, who'd worked with The Rolling Stones as far back as 'Sticky
Fingers', including two albums - 'Steel Wheels' and 'Flashpoint' - for
Mick, Keith and co. Others he's worked with include The Orb, De La Soul,
Killing Joke, Heather Nova, Comfort, Gabrielle and Flowered Up,
engineering the much loved 'Weekender' for the latter.
Although Chris has been
producing records since almost the beginning of the decade, he only
recently began to consider himself a producer proper. These days producing
is pretty much all he does but he does attempt to keep, as he puts it,
"all the balls in the air: the engineering side, the production side and
the mixing side." As he says, there are many different types of producer.
Some direct things from the back as it were, not getting involved with the
nitty gritty. Having approached from an engineering background, Chris has
trouble letting someone else handle that side of things. "A lot of people
who've come from an engineering background will let it go and let someone
else take over the controls", he says, "and there will come a point when I
probably should. But it's a difficult thing to be that hands-on and then
let someone else get on with it. Every time they're EQing or doing the
hi-hat, I'll be like....(feigns concern, leaning over someone else,
fretting)".
Whether he'll be able to relinquish control of some of the hands-on
aspects of the job when he enters the studio with The Verve for their
fourth album is, therefore, a hard one to call. Whatever happens I'd like
to think he'll get the chance to unchain himself from the sound desk and
play a little more table tennis with the lads than he managed last time
because he was showing a lot of promise.
And the strength of the material? When I first
heard the depth of the songs and the amount of them that were as good as
they were, I was impressed. Quite often you'll do an album where a couple
of the songs are good or great, but to have an album with that many great
songs on is really unusual. As you said, the band likes to experiment, what in
particular did you experiment with? They're into this thing of
having the sound in the studio really loud, which is quite difficult to
achieve. It's not such a problem to get spill down the microphones until
it comes to the vocal. Most bands will cut the track and add the vocal at
some point in the future. Richard quite often gets the vocal as they're
recording the track and it's important that you record it in a way that
you can use. If you've got more guitar and drums than vocal on the vocal
track that can be a problem. I got into trying out different ways of
keeping the sound in the studio live but still keeping the stuff going to
tape relatively manageable. I think we'll probably end up pushing that a
bit further with the next one.....I've got a few ideas. Do you have a particular set-up for recording vocals or
guitar? There are things I quite often do but you've got to
tailor it to whoever you're working with, keeping their wishes in mind all
the time. With the mic-ing up and so on, you start from a point that you
know generally works and then adjust it from there to suit. How much computer
jiggery-pokery did you do, using Pro-Tools and suchlike? It's OK
to use that sort of technology in the right ways but it is easy to abuse
it and use it for everything. I try to use it to keep the creative process
going but I think a lot of people tend to get too hung up and reliant on
computers etc. I'd taken my Pro-Tools system to Spain and it sort of got
buggered on the way back and I hadn't got round to getting it fixed. I
didn't really feel we were going to need it at all during this record but
after the break I'd had it fixed and it became useful for doing some of
the guitars. There were places where Nick had specific parts which he'd
just record and that's fine. In other places he'd want to try out a lot of
different things once we'd got the basic parts, experimental guitars I
guess, in his own inimitable style. Having listened to what we already
had, he instantly had a lot of ideas. With every tune we'd let him have
about 4-6 run-throughs, playing whatever he wanted without being tied to
any parts. During those takes he'd do stuff which was pretty much
unrepeatable so I'd use Pro-Tools to move some of those parts into some
sort of structure or into points where we felt they'd work. We used it for
things like 'Catching the Butterfly', 'Stamped' and 'The Longest Day'
which came about from jams that were maybe half an hour long. I'd use
Pro-Tools to get them into manageable form, to edit them down. In May '97 the band embarked on ten days of jamming at
Olympic Studios. Did you realise at the time that you'd get five or six
new songs out of those tapes? I didn't actually no. I was kind of
concerned because I knew at that stage that Richard was concerned about
the record, the over-reliance on his own songs. We ended up with an awful
lot more from those ten days than I thought we were going to - Weeping
Willow, Catching the Butterfly, Stamped, Three Steps, The longest Day.....
There's still some stuff left, definitely at least one other that I know
is really good. The band always maintained it couldn't be 'The Verve'
without Nick. When he rejoined after Christmas I got the impression that
spirits rose. What do you put that down to? I think that the
problems that led to them splitting were sorted. With Nick involved I
think everybody felt more confident that we were going to get the record
that it could be, because he is one of a kind. His playing isn't like
anyone else and he has a lot of good ideas. In places what Nick did was
very subtle. It varies from track to track, on some he completely changed
the whole thing. He completely changed 'This Time' from what it was to
what it became. There's quite a lot of Tongy on that one as well, also
'Lucky Man' and 'One Day'. A lot of the more intricate stuff is Tongy
actually. I guess they hadn't played with each other before. They're very
different style-wise, very different, but the two styles really compliment
each other. Was working on Urban Hymns intense for you? Yeah it
was quite intense. There were moments where you just have to hang on and
battle through. I was shattered at the end of it. During the mixing I'd
been staying over the road at the Chiswick Hotel and I'd be up at 10:50
am, sitting in the control room by 11 o'clock, mixing all day, leaving at
4:30 am, in bed by 4:40 am and up again..... The only thing I was seeing
outside of that control room for three weeks was the 100 yard walk across
the road. It was quite intense for a while there. We were under pressure
to finish at that point, it had to be done. 'Neon Wilderness' was
finished at the last possible moment wasn't it? We were due to
finish on a Sunday and I was finishing off the last mix and I think they'd
been rehearsing for the tour and were going to come down and check the mix
out, finish it off and go through some running orders. They came down, we
finished the mix and then started fiddling around with this other guitar
loop of Nick's which he'd done quite a while previously at Olympic. We
ended up starting that track at 6 o'clock in the evening on the final
Sunday and finished about five in the morning the next day. What do you think of Urban Hymns
then?...If you can detach yourself from the obvious emotional
involvement!? It's the best thing I've ever done. The best collection of
songs I've ever recorded. You mixed the entire record as well. Did you expect to do
so? I didn't, no, because initially when we came back and started
after Christmas, what they wanted me to do was finish the recording. Mark
Stent (who mixes a lot of artists from The Spice Girls to Massive Attack)
was going to mix. He did start mixing upstairs at Olympic Studios while we
were recording downstairs, but it was difficult for the band to
disentangle themselves from recording, go upstairs, hear a mix once and
have to make a snap decision and come back down and get their heads back
into recording again. It was too difficult so it was called off and we
carried on recording. You ritually listened to songs on your car stereo just
before completing them. What's all that about? Right as I get
towards the end of a mix, I'll always make a cassette and take it out to
the car. I've got a crap stereo in it so if it sounds good on that.....
It's just a thing I've always done....a superstition. Was winning the Brit award unexpected? I didn't
expect to get it. I expected the album and band to win stuff but I didn't
expect to get best producer. It's not really a goal when you start but
it's one of those bonuses you can pick up. What does it mean.....? It's a
funny one.... For the rest of your life you'll be known as "Brit award
winner" Chris Potter. Exactly, yeah. It was a funny night
actually. I don't tend to do those sort of evenings, it's just not me that
showbiz, razmatazz thing, getting on stage in front of all those people,
but I had a laugh. Do you have a favourite
track from the album? Probably 'The Drugs Don't Work', which is
certainly the best song I've ever recorded. His vocal on that track is
something else.... There are quite a few really.... I'm not actually
putting it on the stereo at the moment but I hear it every day. If you
wander around you hear the whole thing anyway. I've had some mad moments
with this record though. I went skiing in January and I was in a bar in
Val d'Isere and this band came on doing covers and stuff. The second song
they did was 'Lucky Man' and 'Drugs' was fourth. The first three minutes
of 'Lucky Man' were bollocks but the end bit was really good. Their
'Drugs' wasn't much of a version though. Also that week I went way up into
the mountains, where it's really peaceful and there was this little guy in
a hut up there listening to 'Drugs' on the radio - right up in the
mountains. I thought "f***in' 'ell, it's gone everywhere".
Did you expect that? I knew the
potential of it early on and could see that all the way through, but just
because you've got a great band, brilliant songs and a great record, it
doesn't mean that everyone's going to like it. It could easily have been
critically acclaimed but have not sold in the millions.
Do you look back on the recording of Urban Hymns as a
particularly fertile creative period. Something to be proud of?
Definitely. I put a lot of myself into the record. Like I said before,
there are quite a few different types of producer. Some will be totally in
charge of the record and everything that goes on it, but obviously it just
doesn't work like that with them. They know what they want for the records
they make and it's a challenge to help them get in a position to realise
it. It isn't a relaxing job. You do have to keep it in perspective but
there can be a lot at stake. You've got responsibility for something very
important to the band. Knowing how potentially good it is early on brings
pressure of a kind too. When you set out doing this as a producer, you
want to make an album full of great performances and great songs that
people love and I think this is a record that people will be listening to
a long way down the line. Time will tell. I don't think it's particularly
got a time stamp on it, which is a good thing. It's not at all fashion
conscious, which is a good thing. Some records use "sounds of the moment",
I don't think Urban Hymns has at all really. Bitter Sweet Symphony It started with the infamous Andrew Loog Oldham loop which Pete
and Si (Jones) played over the top of. That loop, just for the record, is
very little. It's a basic chord progression and a couple of bongos, it's
not the string riff. It's no big deal. I've seen a couple of things where
they say the strings were pinched, that's bullshit. Then we started laying
down guitars and vocals and things. I remember we used quite a lot of
loops. I think some of the guitars were looped guitars that start at the
beginning of the track and end at the end of the track. We didn't have too
much of a musical arrangement for it until quite late on. It hadn't been
set in stone. A lot of things on this track go from beginning to end,
playing all the way through on the tape, so we muted things in and out in
order to get the musical arrangement. There are Nick's guitar noises at
the beginning. It was one of the first things he played on. He gets
amazing things out of guitar feedback, that you've never heard before. He
seems to be able to control it and when you think about what guitar
feedback is, it's a really difficult thing to keep a rein on and make the
tones and noises that you want to. He's really incredibly good at it, so
that's what those swirly, seagull noises are. He also plays some Coral
(electric) Sitar on this. I still hear things in this record and I can't
quite put my finger what they are, and I know exactly what's on it, I
mixed the bloody thing. You can hear the way that some things mingle
against each other and some sounds sort of intertwine producing some other
sound as a result. There's a lot of stuff on it, it was a bit of a kitchen
sink job sometimes, this record. Some of the sounds only come in for odd
moments here and there, the odd bar. It was the right first single from
the album but when it was first talked about as first single I was quite
surprised. We hadn't finished it at that point and it developed much
further until in the end there wasn't really any other choice. The first
single couldn't have been anything else. Sonnet We recorded this one quite early on. This was quite structured.
I really like the bits towards the end of the middle eight, you can hear a
big rush go on when the track speeds up and they're all doing their stuff.
There's an eight-piece string section, but the strings are pretty
subliminal really. It's a live vocal recorded with the band as the track
went down, which we then overdubbed on top of. We kept the vocal from the
band performance and I think there's an extra acoustic guitar on it. I
think Nick's work is important on this one. He made a big difference to
the dynamic of the track, as it hits the chorus it kind of soars, with all
the various guitars coming in and out. Also the duelling solo bits after
about two minutes are great, first it's Nick and then Tongy comes in.
Richard plays piano on it andWil Malone had the idea to loop the string
figure after everything had died away at the end. There's also a Nick
guitar figure as the track closes. The Rolling People This song had been around since the 'A Northern Soul'
sessions. We did this in February '97. I think that was the first song I
cut with them on my own actually. It was done in the same session as 'Come
On' and 'Space & Time'. It came together quite quickly actually, there
weren't a lot of takes. Everybody played at the same time. We cut the
backing track and got quite a clear idea of how it was going to sound from
then. We then spent the rest of the day putting some overdubs on it. Rich
did a live vocal at the time but that was a point when he was having a bit
of trouble with his voice, a throat infection or something, he was a bit
hoarse, so we went back and did the vocal later. Tongy played Hammond
Organ on this one. I really like what Nick did, all the licks and the
madness that goes on at the end. Rich and Pete did some percussion and the
claps were done by all the band and two fiends. We pretty much did that
tune on that one Saturday. It's a mighty drumming performance by Pete and
Nick's guitars at the end are great. He's quite minimal with his use of
pedals, he just seems to extract these noises out of his guitar without
very much trickery at all. We mixed the bulk of Urban Hymns at Metropolis
in March and April. This one and 'Come On' we came back to as the mixes
weren't right. They needed to be a little heavier. The Drugs Don't Work The track was cut with Pete, Si, Tongy and
Rich before Christmas and Nick put slide guitar on afterwards. The vocal
performance was all live, a one take with the band where he really did get
the moment. Easily the best vocal I've ever recorded, which I realised at
the time. Nick took it in an interesting direction. There was a slight
country flavour to it and he took it a little bit further. He played some
great stuff. Wil Malone did the string arrangement in early December.
There were two sessions I think, or was it three? It's a twenty two piece
string section. Richard gave Wil a good idea of where to start from and
the arrangements he did fitted the tunes very well. I've got a tape of
just the strings form this and they stand up as a piece on their own.
Tongy played the picking guitar figure on the chorus through a Leslie
cabinet, it's a speaker cabinet that goes with a Hammond organ and it has
a rotating speaker in it that gives a sort of warbling sound. Catching The Butterfly This was done in May, as part of that ten
day jam session we did after we'd completed the bulk of the album. It
started out as a 25/30 minute jam which we went back to two weeks later.
During those days it was mainly jamming though I think we may have covered
three or four songs in that time. During the course of the jam I think
Richard came out with some of the lyrics. He has an amazing knack of doing
that, to be able to sing a vocal over something that's never existed
before, as it's happening. He got the basis of the lyrics while they were
cutting the track and then went away and came back with a finished lyric
we then recorded afterwards. It's a bit different to the structured songs,
although it has ended up sounding fairly structured. On the jam stuff they
were a bit more free to do anything they want basically. It's difficult to
explain but if you've got a song that's written, then from the moment
someone plays it with an acoustic and sings it, then you can picture how
it's supposed to work. But if they're out there playing and jamming , the
music's coming from nowhere really and there are no boundaries to where it
can go. We kept both live guitars and let Nick go back in and play about
half a dozen other tracks, just playing whatever he wanted without being
tied to a part or structure. It was a mixture of cutting up and taking
moments from those tracks, looping bits of them, taking off sections and
keeping other sections - a bit of a mish-mash of different guitar parts
fitted back together into a guitar picture. The track was played first and
the song was written afterwards. It makes things a little more free but
it's quite a difficult thing to be able to do, to make it sound cohesive
like that. If they play the right things then it becomes easier (laughs).
It worked out really well, and there's another 25 minutes of it somewhere.
Neon Wilderness We were due to finish the album on a Saturday and I was
finishing off the last mix. I think they'd been rehearsing for the tour
and they were going to come down and check the mix out, finish it off and
go through the running order. They came down, we finished the mix and then
started fiddling around with this other guitar loop of Nick's which he'd
done quite a while previously at Olympic (studios). We ended starting that
track at six o'clock in the evening on the final day and finished about
five in the morning. So it's the guitar loop with bass and drums on top of
it. Rich did a pretty much ad-lib vocal. In fact I'm pretty sure it's all
ad-lib. He just went out and did it, didn't have anything written down. Space & Time This was the very first song that we cut. I thought we
had a great take on the second day but Rich thought it was too fast. We
re-cut it the next day a bit slower and it was a bit too slow. This went
on for a bit, before Christmas, and then we got a version that people
generally liked, but after a couple of weeks doing other things we came
back to it and decided it wasn't quite right. We re-cut it again and did a
lot of overdubs on it and it was pretty much ready to mix but I wasn't
quite sure about some of the guitars we had from a sonic perspective, they
didn't sound as good as they could have. We started back after Christmas
and it transpired that Richard didn't like the version we had, it hadn't
turned out how he'd originally envisaged the song. I think the problem we
had with it was that we always tried doing it with a click track and it's
a song that needs to start off a bit slower and speed up in sections, slow
back down in the quieter bits and then take off at the end. I think you
need to let this band do that, you can't bow too much to a rigid
structure. Let them do what they do. We cut it again after 'Rolling
people' and 'Come On'. Rich and Pete did it in the studio, Rich singing
and playing acoustic guitar. It was a first take job. I'm not sure how
well Nick knew the song but he we gave him seven or eight tracks to do
what he wanted with. He'd go out, do a couple of tracks, come back in and
listen to them, decide what the actual parts were and go back out and play
them in the right places. This was one that was pretty much built from the
bottom upwards..... obviously the bass went on pretty early. The intro is
Nick's work and Tongy played Mellotron strings in the verses. We'd done
the whole record in Olympic (Studios) up to March 17 and then we came here
(Metropolis Studios). We hadn't finished recording 'Space & Time' and
we started doing some overdubs on it. The bridge section changed
completely. Nick played some keyboards and there's various
other.....noises and backwards stuff. I think Richard felt it was a bit
straight, so Nick did some stuff. Weeping Willow This was done during those ten days in May that we were
at Olympic, when they were jamming. Richard did have a few tunes he wanted
to try out, one of which was 'Weeping Willow'. I think he'd had it for a
while but it wasn't really worked out. Nick had to go to a wedding or
something so the others spent a day working the arrangement out for it.
They worked out the arrangement, got a take of it and then Nick came back
the next day and played great guitar all over it,...really great guitar. I
was knocked out. They're incredibly loud guitars that are played really
quite softly, if you know what I mean, what I call 'guitar tension'. Not a
lot of overdubs. I seem to remember him doing three tracks of guitar and
he pretty much had the parts worked out straight away. It came together
really quickly, this one. Rich didn't have the lyric for it initially. He
had some of it when we cut the track and a finished lyric when we cut the
vocal here (Metropolis). It took a little time to get the verse lyric I
think. It's a moody track with a lot of atmosphere. Richard played the
piano but not with the backing track because he was playing acoustic
guitar when we cut the backing track. There's what I call a talking guitar
after the second verse, after "believe me friends", Nick's guitar seems to
say "oh yeah" or something. I've no idea how he did it. Lucky Man Another live vocal cut with the band before Christmas. I'd say
definitely Tongy's finest moment (he played most of the lead), very
precise, smooth and melodic. I really like the stuff he plays on it.
There's a lot of dynamic in it, with the long intro, the middle section
with the whole thing rising and rising and rising up to the break at the
end. Twenty two strings were used and Nick plays a lot of interesting
noise, there's a lot of good Nick ambient guitar and some licks and stuff.
Rich went off it for a while and for a time it looked like it wasn't going
to make it, which I could never understand because I think it's fantastic
and it's one of the best loved tracks for a lot of people. It's quite an
involved track, there's a lot of stuff on it and there's another great
string riff at the end. One Day One of my favourites. Rich plays a Fender Rhodes I think. It was
done relatively early and as a backing track it was a first take. I really
like the mood of it and the three part vocal on the choruses, three
different tracks working together very well. There's quite a lot of Tongy
on it and quite a lot of the stuff that Nick does is to the point. There's
a little Nick loop figure at the end section and some little licks in
between lines that work well. The drums and the bass are so in the pocket,
too. Definitely one of my favourites. This Time It was built up gradually and originally it was known as
"Discordant". There's a bit of Richard's mad piano, it's the only one we
cut with him playing live piano. It has a lot of lead guitar by Tongy. It
wasn't going to make it when we came back after Christmas, it wasn't a
contender for the album. Nick heard it and really liked it and said he had
some really good ideas for it. So, in the course of an evening, Nick
transformed it, he changed the drums quite radically. Nick had an idea for
the rhythm so we sampled and looped some of Pete's drums and made them
sound really clattery. He added this really choppy rhythm guitar. He went
out and started putting guitars on while Rich was doing the vocals and
that was the point when the track started to come together. Nick also
plays some Coral Sitar on this, a nice sound you don't hear very often
these days. Velvet Morning We had done several takes of it, none of which were
quite right. It wasn't boredom but Rich wanted to try something for one of
the takes, just to see what it sounded like. We ended up gaffer-taping a
megaphone to the microphone. He sat down, played his acoustic guitar and
sang into the megaphone. He only did it once but that one ended up being
not only the take of the band but the vocal performance as well, which is
kind of limiting because it was through a megaphone, so there wasn't
really anything we could do about that. It might have been better with a
straight sound but that happened to be the take we kept so we decided to
go with it anyway. Pete recorded those big tom fills and we overdubbed
them as a seperate part and sped the the tape up so they came out really
de-tuned. There are twenty two strings again but they're not that
important, they're sort of a bed underneath. Tongy plays great lap steel
on it on the choruses, sounds like George Harrison. I don't think he'd
ever played one before, we borrowed it from Eric Clapton who was working
in the studio upstairs. Nick does a lot of what I call guitar shimmering
or shimmeryness on it. Come On We cut this in February and kept all of the live guitars and
stuff, kept everything pretty much. Rich was struggling a bit with his
throat that February which is why he did the vocals again in March. They'd
had this track since the last album sessions (along with 'Rolling
People'). There are big, big live Nick guitars and we added some extra
guitars, maybe three or four. We did some radio noises, Rich with a radio
tuning it all over. Rich played Hammond organ on it as well. Essentially
it's a band performance with a few overdubs. It was pretty much recorded
in a day, apart from the vocal, which was the last one we cut apart from
'Neon Wilderness'. They were rehearsing for the tour and I was halfway
through mixing the album and I'd come to that track so we did it then.
Richard changed some of the verse lyrics a little bit, that took a bit of
work but it was pretty much a one take job. But his vocals usually are.
It'll either work very quickly or it won't work and he knows to come back
another day. I've never known a singer who gets anything like as many live
vocals, as the track goes down, as Richard does. It's very rare that
people do that these days. Generally, throughout the album, we kept a lot
of the stuff that went down live, a lot of it. They love to catch the
synergy out there, when the magic's on. Very rare. Deep Freeze We had this idea for the beginning of the album, a
collection of sounds going into the front of 'Bitter Sweet Symphony', city
noises, computers, radios being tuned, a basic kind of urban madness going
on. Just a short thirty second thing. We actually did it, put it on the
front of BSS but decided it was kind of interesting the first time you
heard it but after that it would get a bit tedious, so we sacked it off.
We ended up using a couple of sound affect things we'd done for that with
another one of Nick's guitar loops. Throughout the album Nick would
occasionally do some guitar loops. He'd go into the studio, fiddle about
with his guitar and we'd be doing domething else. He'd come back in and
say "can you record a bit of what's going on out there", and you'd listen
to the guitar mics and even though he was standing next to me, his guitar
was still playing a mad loop. We did that from time to time and there's
still quite a few that haven't been used for anything. I like what this
track does, it's very simple - Nick's guitar loop with a baby wailing and
snippets of radio collected over time placed over the top.
B-SIDES
Lord I Guess I'll Never Know I
always thought that was a contender for the album actually, but when we
started again after Christmas it was never really mentioned again. We had
the basic track and ended up finishing it pretty damn quickly. We got into
a bit of a deadline thing with the B-sides for 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' and
ended up spending a night on it. We had a cut for the single booked for 10
am and so basically we started working on this at about 9 or 10 the
evening before. We did a few overdubs on it and mixed it and as soon as
we'd finished the mix we went straight to the cut. There are bits of
backwards acoustic guitar on there by Rich and it might be another live
vocal but I'm pretty sure we re-did it just before mixing. Nick plays a
tremolo guitar pretty much all through the song. Tongy plays guitar
through the Leslie cabinet on the choruses on this one as well and there's
great bass playing by Si Jones - Si's work is uniformly excellent, very
classy, particularly perhaps on 'Sonnet' and 'Space and Time'. The sound
of the track changed quite a lot during the mix actually, it's quite
different to what's on the multi-track and how we'd always heard it
before. Country Song It's one of Owen's (recorded in '94
with Owen Morris), done during the 'A Northern Soul' sessions. I think we
just did the vocal again and mixed it. There might be some Nick overdubs
on it. So Sister This was done right around the same
sort of time. We were under pressure to get the B-sides done. With two CDs
you do need another four extra songs. Richard came in early one morning,
went out into the studio with an acoustic guitar and just started playing.
He was going through a few different songs and ideas for songs and we
recorded 'So Sister' out of the blue really. He already had the song. It's
a vocal and acoustic performance from start to finish, really, really
good. First take. He just sort of launched into it, and me and Gareth
(Ashton, Assistant Engineer) just sat there open mouthed. There are some
overdubs on it, some Nick 'atmospheric' guitar and Nick playing a toy
xylophone, a really high-frequency sound towards the middle of the song,
you can barely make it out. There's also a vocal harmony and tambourine by
Richard. I really like it as a performance, it's excellent.
Echo Bass Originally done during the sessions for 'A Northern Soul', we
re-cut the track in studio B at Metropolis, one of the only ones we did in
studio B. That and 'So Sister'. It was second or third take I think,
everyone playing together and everything that we cut live we kept. The
vocals we re-did straight afterwards. There aren't many overdubs on it. I
think Nick and Si Jones played a little bit of keyboards on it, a bit of
flute, and Pete played some vibes on the Octopad. I love the bass on this,
very Si Jones. It was originally fifteen minutes long, this tune, but we
cut it down. The Crab This was a contender for
the album to begin with. It was one that (John) Leckie had started and was
literally a vocal and acoustic, nothing else, to which Nick added some
ambient guitar and piano. It's very dark. Stamped Done during those ten days in May that
we went back to Olympic Studios for. It was cut down from a jam, with a
live vocal again. One of these jams started out about 45 minutes long, it
could well be this one. It's some sections edited together and some bits
looped. There are some crazy, crazy guitars on this although Nick did only
one overdub on it. Three Steps Again, that was a jam. It's a five
minute section from the middle of a longer....thing. We might have hacked
a few little bits out of the middle of it. Like 'Stamped' it's pretty much
as they played it and I think Nick overdubbed one guitar on it. I don't
think there was much of a vocal on it originally. He re-did the vocal and
the high-pitched vocal was an added extra. It was just bass, drums and
guitar originally, with Tongy on rhythm, and was briefly a contender for
Urban Hymns I think. It does sound like it was worked out but they didn't
have a clue what they were doing. The vocal on the original jam was used
as the basis for where he went with the lyric and melody. This was the
only one that we mixed upstairs in studio C at Metropolis and I always
fancied having another go at mixing it, but everybody really liked it so I
never got the chance. Never Wanna See You Cry It was originally done
in the early sessions but we ended up replacing everything. It was
specifically done as a B-side for 'Lucky Man' in the course of a day.
There are strings on it by Wil Malone. It was originally thought of for
the album but kind of discarded after Christmas. When we started again it
wasn't one that people thought was going to make it. We decide to go for
it again because it is a very good song and I was amazed at how much we
got done in one day. That's Tongy playing the sort of ethereal guitar, it
sounds like Nick, but it's Tongy. We did the vocal really quickly, two
tracks. Originally on the chorus, he'd gone right up for the chorus,
vocally, but I think it works better going to where he goes now. Pete
comes in with this off-kilter rhythm thing which he does....which is
excellent. Lucky Man (Happiness More Or Less) A remix of
Nick. It's 'Lucky man' without anything other than Nick, the bass, drums,
strings and a bit of vocal. It's actually a Potter remix of Nick's stuff,
an ambient guitar mix. I did it at the time that we mixed 'Lucky man'
actually, fishing around for other versions. The Longest Day We did get through quite a lot
of stuff in those ten days at Olympic and this is another jam from there.
It has Tongy playing Fender Rhodes really well. There are very few
overdubs on this, might be none actually. It's quite sparse really, as
much about what everybody isn't playing as what they are playing. You can
sort of hear the sound of the P.A. We used a P.A. for a lot of these
tracks, we liked to get the sound in the room really loud and you can hear
it. I like the atmosphere you get. You get it with 'Stamped' as well, you
can hear the P.A. on that, too. I'm pretty sure the vocal is live. It was
all cut down from a much longer version.
I think for 'Lucky Man' we went back into the studio to get the B-sides
together over a week in October. We ended up doing them all from scratch.
There was talk initially of mixing 'History' again but it's one of those
things. I would have done it but with records like that you have to have a
bit of respect for the moment. To go back a couple of years later and
remix it and make it sound, well... not even better, but different
somehow, might be wrong so we didn't remix it and I'm glad we didn't.
Thank you Chris.
Thanks also to Chris Floyd
for the use of his photographs.
Although Chris has been
producing records since almost the beginning of the decade, he only
recently began to consider himself a producer proper. These days producing
is pretty much all he does but he does attempt to keep, as he puts it,
"all the balls in the air: the engineering side, the production side and
the mixing side." As he says, there are many different types of producer.
Some direct things from the back as it were, not getting involved with the
nitty gritty. Having approached from an engineering background, Chris has
trouble letting someone else handle that side of things. "A lot of people
who've come from an engineering background will let it go and let someone
else take over the controls", he says, "and there will come a point when I
probably should. But it's a difficult thing to be that hands-on and then
let someone else get on with it. Every time they're EQing or doing the
hi-hat, I'll be like....(feigns concern, leaning over someone else,
fretting)".
Initially it was to finish the guitars and the recording. It
then transpired that we needed more songs. Once Nick had played on the
stuff we'd started before Christmas, once we'd finished recording those,
it was obvious we needed more songs. They weren't really happy with the
version of 'Space & Time' we had, so we ended up re-cutting that, and
we did 'The Rolling People' and 'Come On'. I think Youth helped bring a
bit of discipline to the recording process for them. Yeah, I think he must
have helped them get a bit more disciplined or focussed, which was
definitely a good thing.
How much computer
jiggery-pokery did you do, using Pro-Tools and suchlike? It's OK
to use that sort of technology in the right ways but it is easy to abuse
it and use it for everything. I try to use it to keep the creative process
going but I think a lot of people tend to get too hung up and reliant on
computers etc. I'd taken my Pro-Tools system to Spain and it sort of got
buggered on the way back and I hadn't got round to getting it fixed. I
didn't really feel we were going to need it at all during this record but
after the break I'd had it fixed and it became useful for doing some of
the guitars. There were places where Nick had specific parts which he'd
just record and that's fine. In other places he'd want to try out a lot of
different things once we'd got the basic parts, experimental guitars I
guess, in his own inimitable style. Having listened to what we already
had, he instantly had a lot of ideas. With every tune we'd let him have
about 4-6 run-throughs, playing whatever he wanted without being tied to
any parts. During those takes he'd do stuff which was pretty much
unrepeatable so I'd use Pro-Tools to move some of those parts into some
sort of structure or into points where we felt they'd work. We used it for
things like 'Catching the Butterfly', 'Stamped' and 'The Longest Day'
which came about from jams that were maybe half an hour long. I'd use
Pro-Tools to get them into manageable form, to edit them down. 
'Neon Wilderness' was
finished at the last possible moment wasn't it? We were due to
finish on a Sunday and I was finishing off the last mix and I think they'd
been rehearsing for the tour and were going to come down and check the mix
out, finish it off and go through some running orders. They came down, we
finished the mix and then started fiddling around with this other guitar
loop of Nick's which he'd done quite a while previously at Olympic. We
ended up starting that track at 6 o'clock in the evening on the final
Sunday and finished about five in the morning the next day. 
Do you have a favourite
track from the album? Probably 'The Drugs Don't Work', which is
certainly the best song I've ever recorded. His vocal on that track is
something else.... There are quite a few really.... I'm not actually
putting it on the stereo at the moment but I hear it every day. If you
wander around you hear the whole thing anyway. I've had some mad moments
with this record though. I went skiing in January and I was in a bar in
Val d'Isere and this band came on doing covers and stuff. The second song
they did was 'Lucky Man' and 'Drugs' was fourth. The first three minutes
of 'Lucky Man' were bollocks but the end bit was really good. Their
'Drugs' wasn't much of a version though. Also that week I went way up into
the mountains, where it's really peaceful and there was this little guy in
a hut up there listening to 'Drugs' on the radio - right up in the
mountains. I thought "f***in' 'ell, it's gone everywhere".
It started with the infamous Andrew Loog Oldham loop which Pete
and Si (Jones) played over the top of. That loop, just for the record, is
very little. It's a basic chord progression and a couple of bongos, it's
not the string riff. It's no big deal. I've seen a couple of things where
they say the strings were pinched, that's bullshit. Then we started laying
down guitars and vocals and things. I remember we used quite a lot of
loops. I think some of the guitars were looped guitars that start at the
beginning of the track and end at the end of the track. We didn't have too
much of a musical arrangement for it until quite late on. It hadn't been
set in stone. A lot of things on this track go from beginning to end,
playing all the way through on the tape, so we muted things in and out in
order to get the musical arrangement. There are Nick's guitar noises at
the beginning. It was one of the first things he played on. He gets
amazing things out of guitar feedback, that you've never heard before. He
seems to be able to control it and when you think about what guitar
feedback is, it's a really difficult thing to keep a rein on and make the
tones and noises that you want to. He's really incredibly good at it, so
that's what those swirly, seagull noises are. He also plays some Coral
(electric) Sitar on this. I still hear things in this record and I can't
quite put my finger what they are, and I know exactly what's on it, I
mixed the bloody thing. You can hear the way that some things mingle
against each other and some sounds sort of intertwine producing some other
sound as a result. There's a lot of stuff on it, it was a bit of a kitchen
sink job sometimes, this record. Some of the sounds only come in for odd
moments here and there, the odd bar. It was the right first single from
the album but when it was first talked about as first single I was quite
surprised. We hadn't finished it at that point and it developed much
further until in the end there wasn't really any other choice. The first
single couldn't have been anything else. 
We recorded this one quite early on. This was quite structured.
I really like the bits towards the end of the middle eight, you can hear a
big rush go on when the track speeds up and they're all doing their stuff.
There's an eight-piece string section, but the strings are pretty
subliminal really. It's a live vocal recorded with the band as the track
went down, which we then overdubbed on top of. We kept the vocal from the
band performance and I think there's an extra acoustic guitar on it. I
think Nick's work is important on this one. He made a big difference to
the dynamic of the track, as it hits the chorus it kind of soars, with all
the various guitars coming in and out. Also the duelling solo bits after
about two minutes are great, first it's Nick and then Tongy comes in.
Richard plays piano on it andWil Malone had the idea to loop the string
figure after everything had died away at the end. There's also a Nick
guitar figure as the track closes. 
This song had been around since the 'A Northern Soul'
sessions. We did this in February '97. I think that was the first song I
cut with them on my own actually. It was done in the same session as 'Come
On' and 'Space & Time'. It came together quite quickly actually, there
weren't a lot of takes. Everybody played at the same time. We cut the
backing track and got quite a clear idea of how it was going to sound from
then. We then spent the rest of the day putting some overdubs on it. Rich
did a live vocal at the time but that was a point when he was having a bit
of trouble with his voice, a throat infection or something, he was a bit
hoarse, so we went back and did the vocal later. Tongy played Hammond
Organ on this one. I really like what Nick did, all the licks and the
madness that goes on at the end. Rich and Pete did some percussion and the
claps were done by all the band and two fiends. We pretty much did that
tune on that one Saturday. It's a mighty drumming performance by Pete and
Nick's guitars at the end are great. He's quite minimal with his use of
pedals, he just seems to extract these noises out of his guitar without
very much trickery at all. We mixed the bulk of Urban Hymns at Metropolis
in March and April. This one and 'Come On' we came back to as the mixes
weren't right. They needed to be a little heavier. 
The track was cut with Pete, Si, Tongy and
Rich before Christmas and Nick put slide guitar on afterwards. The vocal
performance was all live, a one take with the band where he really did get
the moment. Easily the best vocal I've ever recorded, which I realised at
the time. Nick took it in an interesting direction. There was a slight
country flavour to it and he took it a little bit further. He played some
great stuff. Wil Malone did the string arrangement in early December.
There were two sessions I think, or was it three? It's a twenty two piece
string section. Richard gave Wil a good idea of where to start from and
the arrangements he did fitted the tunes very well. I've got a tape of
just the strings form this and they stand up as a piece on their own.
Tongy played the picking guitar figure on the chorus through a Leslie
cabinet, it's a speaker cabinet that goes with a Hammond organ and it has
a rotating speaker in it that gives a sort of warbling sound. 
This was done in May, as part of that ten
day jam session we did after we'd completed the bulk of the album. It
started out as a 25/30 minute jam which we went back to two weeks later.
During those days it was mainly jamming though I think we may have covered
three or four songs in that time. During the course of the jam I think
Richard came out with some of the lyrics. He has an amazing knack of doing
that, to be able to sing a vocal over something that's never existed
before, as it's happening. He got the basis of the lyrics while they were
cutting the track and then went away and came back with a finished lyric
we then recorded afterwards. It's a bit different to the structured songs,
although it has ended up sounding fairly structured. On the jam stuff they
were a bit more free to do anything they want basically. It's difficult to
explain but if you've got a song that's written, then from the moment
someone plays it with an acoustic and sings it, then you can picture how
it's supposed to work. But if they're out there playing and jamming , the
music's coming from nowhere really and there are no boundaries to where it
can go. We kept both live guitars and let Nick go back in and play about
half a dozen other tracks, just playing whatever he wanted without being
tied to a part or structure. It was a mixture of cutting up and taking
moments from those tracks, looping bits of them, taking off sections and
keeping other sections - a bit of a mish-mash of different guitar parts
fitted back together into a guitar picture. The track was played first and
the song was written afterwards. It makes things a little more free but
it's quite a difficult thing to be able to do, to make it sound cohesive
like that. If they play the right things then it becomes easier (laughs).
It worked out really well, and there's another 25 minutes of it somewhere.
We were due to finish the album on a Saturday and I was
finishing off the last mix. I think they'd been rehearsing for the tour
and they were going to come down and check the mix out, finish it off and
go through the running order. They came down, we finished the mix and then
started fiddling around with this other guitar loop of Nick's which he'd
done quite a while previously at Olympic (studios). We ended starting that
track at six o'clock in the evening on the final day and finished about
five in the morning. So it's the guitar loop with bass and drums on top of
it. Rich did a pretty much ad-lib vocal. In fact I'm pretty sure it's all
ad-lib. He just went out and did it, didn't have anything written down. 
This was the very first song that we cut. I thought we
had a great take on the second day but Rich thought it was too fast. We
re-cut it the next day a bit slower and it was a bit too slow. This went
on for a bit, before Christmas, and then we got a version that people
generally liked, but after a couple of weeks doing other things we came
back to it and decided it wasn't quite right. We re-cut it again and did a
lot of overdubs on it and it was pretty much ready to mix but I wasn't
quite sure about some of the guitars we had from a sonic perspective, they
didn't sound as good as they could have. We started back after Christmas
and it transpired that Richard didn't like the version we had, it hadn't
turned out how he'd originally envisaged the song. I think the problem we
had with it was that we always tried doing it with a click track and it's
a song that needs to start off a bit slower and speed up in sections, slow
back down in the quieter bits and then take off at the end. I think you
need to let this band do that, you can't bow too much to a rigid
structure. Let them do what they do. We cut it again after 'Rolling
people' and 'Come On'. Rich and Pete did it in the studio, Rich singing
and playing acoustic guitar. It was a first take job. I'm not sure how
well Nick knew the song but he we gave him seven or eight tracks to do
what he wanted with. He'd go out, do a couple of tracks, come back in and
listen to them, decide what the actual parts were and go back out and play
them in the right places. This was one that was pretty much built from the
bottom upwards..... obviously the bass went on pretty early. The intro is
Nick's work and Tongy played Mellotron strings in the verses. We'd done
the whole record in Olympic (Studios) up to March 17 and then we came here
(Metropolis Studios). We hadn't finished recording 'Space & Time' and
we started doing some overdubs on it. The bridge section changed
completely. Nick played some keyboards and there's various
other.....noises and backwards stuff. I think Richard felt it was a bit
straight, so Nick did some stuff. 
This was done during those ten days in May that we were
at Olympic, when they were jamming. Richard did have a few tunes he wanted
to try out, one of which was 'Weeping Willow'. I think he'd had it for a
while but it wasn't really worked out. Nick had to go to a wedding or
something so the others spent a day working the arrangement out for it.
They worked out the arrangement, got a take of it and then Nick came back
the next day and played great guitar all over it,...really great guitar. I
was knocked out. They're incredibly loud guitars that are played really
quite softly, if you know what I mean, what I call 'guitar tension'. Not a
lot of overdubs. I seem to remember him doing three tracks of guitar and
he pretty much had the parts worked out straight away. It came together
really quickly, this one. Rich didn't have the lyric for it initially. He
had some of it when we cut the track and a finished lyric when we cut the
vocal here (Metropolis). It took a little time to get the verse lyric I
think. It's a moody track with a lot of atmosphere. Richard played the
piano but not with the backing track because he was playing acoustic
guitar when we cut the backing track. There's what I call a talking guitar
after the second verse, after "believe me friends", Nick's guitar seems to
say "oh yeah" or something. I've no idea how he did it. 
Another live vocal cut with the band before Christmas. I'd say
definitely Tongy's finest moment (he played most of the lead), very
precise, smooth and melodic. I really like the stuff he plays on it.
There's a lot of dynamic in it, with the long intro, the middle section
with the whole thing rising and rising and rising up to the break at the
end. Twenty two strings were used and Nick plays a lot of interesting
noise, there's a lot of good Nick ambient guitar and some licks and stuff.
Rich went off it for a while and for a time it looked like it wasn't going
to make it, which I could never understand because I think it's fantastic
and it's one of the best loved tracks for a lot of people. It's quite an
involved track, there's a lot of stuff on it and there's another great
string riff at the end. 
One of my favourites. Rich plays a Fender Rhodes I think. It was
done relatively early and as a backing track it was a first take. I really
like the mood of it and the three part vocal on the choruses, three
different tracks working together very well. There's quite a lot of Tongy
on it and quite a lot of the stuff that Nick does is to the point. There's
a little Nick loop figure at the end section and some little licks in
between lines that work well. The drums and the bass are so in the pocket,
too. Definitely one of my favourites. 
It was built up gradually and originally it was known as
"Discordant". There's a bit of Richard's mad piano, it's the only one we
cut with him playing live piano. It has a lot of lead guitar by Tongy. It
wasn't going to make it when we came back after Christmas, it wasn't a
contender for the album. Nick heard it and really liked it and said he had
some really good ideas for it. So, in the course of an evening, Nick
transformed it, he changed the drums quite radically. Nick had an idea for
the rhythm so we sampled and looped some of Pete's drums and made them
sound really clattery. He added this really choppy rhythm guitar. He went
out and started putting guitars on while Rich was doing the vocals and
that was the point when the track started to come together. Nick also
plays some Coral Sitar on this, a nice sound you don't hear very often
these days. 
We had done several takes of it, none of which were
quite right. It wasn't boredom but Rich wanted to try something for one of
the takes, just to see what it sounded like. We ended up gaffer-taping a
megaphone to the microphone. He sat down, played his acoustic guitar and
sang into the megaphone. He only did it once but that one ended up being
not only the take of the band but the vocal performance as well, which is
kind of limiting because it was through a megaphone, so there wasn't
really anything we could do about that. It might have been better with a
straight sound but that happened to be the take we kept so we decided to
go with it anyway. Pete recorded those big tom fills and we overdubbed
them as a seperate part and sped the the tape up so they came out really
de-tuned. There are twenty two strings again but they're not that
important, they're sort of a bed underneath. Tongy plays great lap steel
on it on the choruses, sounds like George Harrison. I don't think he'd
ever played one before, we borrowed it from Eric Clapton who was working
in the studio upstairs. Nick does a lot of what I call guitar shimmering
or shimmeryness on it. 
We cut this in February and kept all of the live guitars and
stuff, kept everything pretty much. Rich was struggling a bit with his
throat that February which is why he did the vocals again in March. They'd
had this track since the last album sessions (along with 'Rolling
People'). There are big, big live Nick guitars and we added some extra
guitars, maybe three or four. We did some radio noises, Rich with a radio
tuning it all over. Rich played Hammond organ on it as well. Essentially
it's a band performance with a few overdubs. It was pretty much recorded
in a day, apart from the vocal, which was the last one we cut apart from
'Neon Wilderness'. They were rehearsing for the tour and I was halfway
through mixing the album and I'd come to that track so we did it then.
Richard changed some of the verse lyrics a little bit, that took a bit of
work but it was pretty much a one take job. But his vocals usually are.
It'll either work very quickly or it won't work and he knows to come back
another day. I've never known a singer who gets anything like as many live
vocals, as the track goes down, as Richard does. It's very rare that
people do that these days. Generally, throughout the album, we kept a lot
of the stuff that went down live, a lot of it. They love to catch the
synergy out there, when the magic's on. Very rare. 
We had this idea for the beginning of the album, a
collection of sounds going into the front of 'Bitter Sweet Symphony', city
noises, computers, radios being tuned, a basic kind of urban madness going
on. Just a short thirty second thing. We actually did it, put it on the
front of BSS but decided it was kind of interesting the first time you
heard it but after that it would get a bit tedious, so we sacked it off.
We ended up using a couple of sound affect things we'd done for that with
another one of Nick's guitar loops. Throughout the album Nick would
occasionally do some guitar loops. He'd go into the studio, fiddle about
with his guitar and we'd be doing domething else. He'd come back in and
say "can you record a bit of what's going on out there", and you'd listen
to the guitar mics and even though he was standing next to me, his guitar
was still playing a mad loop. We did that from time to time and there's
still quite a few that haven't been used for anything. I like what this
track does, it's very simple - Nick's guitar loop with a baby wailing and
snippets of radio collected over time placed over the top.
Originally done during the sessions for 'A Northern Soul', we
re-cut the track in studio B at Metropolis, one of the only ones we did in
studio B. That and 'So Sister'. It was second or third take I think,
everyone playing together and everything that we cut live we kept. The
vocals we re-did straight afterwards. There aren't many overdubs on it. I
think Nick and Si Jones played a little bit of keyboards on it, a bit of
flute, and Pete played some vibes on the Octopad. I love the bass on this,
very Si Jones. It was originally fifteen minutes long, this tune, but we
cut it down. 