OK, so I’ll paste the SOE instalment below. I would have sent it sooner but I was trying to write something about the ‘edgy’ humour that infused the sessions and I failed, it’s too tricky and loaded to try and describe so I’ll leave it out. I can do a very short follow up on Laughing Stock if you like, but I’d actually left Wessex when that was recorded so I don’t imagine I’ll get much past a paragraph, maybe two; ‘the view from the outside’. Please correct any typos if you spot any. Thanks!
Spirit of Eden
The first tell-tale sign that planet Talk Talk was now installed in Studio 1 was the sight of the two ‘4-wheel drives’ parked next to each other outside the reception of Wessex Studios, one being Tim’s, the other Mark’s. Joyce the studio manager had previously told me of Tim’s adventures driving a complete circuit of Africa in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, I can’t remember with confidence which species of animal it was that had surrounded his vehicle one night while he slept on the roof. But I do remember Tim telling me about how Toyota had provided him with a brand-new engine at the halfway mark of his trip.
I didn’t work consistently on Spirit of Eden as I was chief engineer at Wessex and was generally working on other projects but every now and then I was called on to stand in for a few days. There wasn’t a great deal for me to do, the core team that comprised the band, Tim Friese-Green and Phill Brown was a well-oiled machine so, as mentioned previously, I was left to enjoy a fly-on-the-wall view of the album unfolding over time. It soon became very clear that this was going to be a VERY different album to Colours of Spring
The control room and recording room of Studio 1 did not have any windows so the entire recording process took place divorced from sunlight. Apart from Phill making trips to the maintenance room upstairs none of my memories of the others are in daylight! Sometimes all the lights were on full and the place was as indeed as bright as day, while at other times the place was thrown into darkness save for a few coloured spotlights and the infamous oil wheel. But these shifting atmospheres had no relationship to the actual time of day outside. As has been well-documented, they spent the best part of a year living in this ‘altered reality’.
The studio’s Bösendorfer grand piano and Hammond Organ with Leslie cabinet had been joined by two harmoniums for the sessions. I became fascinated by the fluid way in which Mark and Tim would take it in turns at the keyboards trying to work out what a particular part should be. There was no possessiveness at all over who would eventually record the part, everything was done in the service of the song. In fact, I think there were probably some parts that combined both of their playing. It was the same with guitar parts, either one might try out ideas and record a part.
Alla asked me for any memories of the recording process. Phill Brown, who is the star witness for all things Talk Talk, captures the nuts and bolts of their process brilliantly in his book ‘Are We Still Rolling?’ For example, the way they would record several takes of a guest musician and cherry-pick the choice sound bytes, which might be one note or the sound of someone tripping over a guitar lead, and erase the rest. Sometimes they erased it all.
If it hasn’t already been covered elsewhere I think the bit that I can bring to the conversation is my recall of what I think we can refer to as their ‘Give It Back’ principle.
If something they were recording started to remind them of another artist, Tim would adopt a shrill, high-pitched voice (think Monty Python doing the Piston Engine sketch) and yell out that they should ‘give it back’ to whoever the artist was.
“Give it back to Miles Davis!!”
“Give it back to Aretha Franklin!!”
“Give it back to The Andrews Sisters!!”
The list was long.
Sometimes the references were made tongue-in-cheek, and at other times they were entirely literal. Mark and Tim shared a dogged insistence on not being reminded of other people’s work. It’s a fine line to walk, if the principle is applied to its extreme there is a danger of ending up with silence. But, applied as a general attitude, it beautifully encapsulates their insistence on breaking new ground and defining their own sound. Creating something genuinely ‘new’.
In Phill’s book he recalls the time they first recorded a choir on the track ‘I Believe In You’. I wasn’t working with them that day, but I happened to be upstairs near the large red wooden door that lead to the recording room of Studio 1. I could hear the choir and was transfixed. I very carefully opened the door a few millimetres so that I could hear them better. Because I was upstairs I couldn’t hear the backing track that was being played in the control room and through the headphones of the choir. I was just hearing an ‘a Cappella performance of a choir singing ‘How long, spirit of illusion?’ in an old church hall. The hair was standing up on my arms. It was beautiful.
I was down to work with Talk Talk the next day and Phill and I were in the control room discussing how wonderful the choir had been when Mark and Tim arrived and directed Phill to erase it! Phill remembers Mark saying “It sounds too good – like The Cliff Adams Singers.”
My memory from that day is of Tim shrieking “Give it back to the King Singers!!”
This incident really consolidated something for me around ‘strength of conviction’. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to record a particular part, or even a whole section of a song. In many respects, it’s also best (though not always possible!) if it doesn’t matter how much it cost It doesn’t even matter how great it is! If it doesn’t fit the overall project, you have to get rid of it. I often think of that time as I hit delete . .
And the second choir they recorded for that track was even better.
It would have been around that time that Kate Bush released her first single since her epic album ‘Hounds of Love’. I can remember that we’d somehow got hold of a pre-release copy and played it for the first time through the main monitors in the control room. I can still remember the bated breath of a room full of respect for Kate Bush as the church bells that open the track ’Sensual World’ started playing.
Speaking of female musical icons, there are two in my world; Kate and Joni. So I was extremely pleased to be parked in fly-on-the-wall mode on the couch toward the back of the control room the day they had Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell’s husband) come in to do bass overdubs. The conversation was polite, I remember him likening his current home in California to a French vineyard, and then they got down to the business of working out some bass parts. The session was wrapped up and he left. I think his parts were deleted before he’d been gone an hour. He was clearly an excellent musician, but his parts didn’t fit what they were looking for.
They gave him back to Joni Mitchell.