Fact #171026

Trevor Horn (producer) : After Relax was a hit, we first went back into the studio to do the next single, Two Tribes. When we were doing Two Tribes, which took a fair while, there was a lot of messing around with things like starting pistols. I had bought a starting pistol which fired very loud blanks. This was in the days before terrorists, so everyone was much more relaxed about that sort of thing. One night, we'd worked very late and I crept into the studio at seven in the morning where all the Frankies were all asleep on the floor, and I fired off this starting pistol right above their heads and they didn't even stir. That's how tired they were.

The album came after that. We probably started on the album in May, and we worked on it right through that summer, up to about the start of October.

The band had a certain amount of material already written when we started, but more stuff was being written as we made the album, kind of thing. The thing was, everyone had heard Relax and Two Tribes so much because they'd been so big on the radio, we felt that in order to somehow mitigate that we'd make a double album. We were concerned that, eh, you know, in retrospect, it was a slightly kind of naïve thing, but we were very concerned about giving value for money.

We felt that an album that just had three hits and a few more tracks might seem like a bit of a rip-off, you know.

It put a bit of pressure on us.

We were very much a team. Holly had a unique voice and the guys in the band came up with great ideas, I was like the ring-master, you know, running the show. That first year when everything was so successful, we all got along extremely well.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome was a long and complicated track. That one track, which was the main one on the album, took us about three months. It started out as three and a half minutes but we kept extending it until was over sixteen minutes long. I remember we got the two girls from Propaganda (another ZTT Records band), Claudia Brucken and Suzanne Freytag, to climb into a bath of water in the studio, to make noises for the sound collage at the beginning. They were in their underwear but we weren't allowed into the room while they were in the bath. We just set the mikes up and retreated outside.

Anne Dudley did the orchestrations, but she didn't play the keyboards or anything like that. We had a guy called Andy Richards who did all the keyboards.

We were all exhausted by the end of it. We worked very hard for several months.

Also, they were being interviewed by Jack Barron of NME and at the start of the interview I walked into the room and said, 'You're that Jack Barron bastard, aren't you? I've been waiting to do this!' Then I fired the gun off at him. Just for a second, he believed he'd been shot. I'd never dream of doing anything like that now, but it seemed funny at that time.

For most of that year, once it kicked off, every day when we came in to start work, there was a crowd of people outside the studio. It was mainly fans but also some media people looking for stories.

At that time they were so successful, they seemed unassailable.
(Source : interview by Johnny Black, Oct 2009, for Music Week).

Steve Lipson : That song was quite interesting because I had the idea of getting another tape machine in," says Lipson. "It suddenly occurred to me, if you could make digital copies, you could offset. I had no idea what I was talking about, but I did an offset so that, where the song ended, I had it start again, and when I demonstrated this to Trevor he absolutely flipped out. It was a remarkable thing. The concept of offsets freaked us out. Nobody had ever considered doing anything like this, and all of a sudden we were sort of inventing a recording equivalent of the wheel. It was like a super-sampler."
Trevor Horn : Steve had copied a multitrack and offset it eight bars, and it was like 'Wow! Let's use this on 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome'!' So he and I were basically upstairs for three months doing that track, which had started out as three minutes long, and we just kept overlapping it on itself, lengthening it and doing all sorts of stuff."
Steve Lipson : I hung a Neumann U87 out the window, went to the point in the song where the first round ended and the rhythm dropped out, hit 'record' and captured the noise of cleaning up the carnival. It was a remarkable thing. It gave that moment in the song an amazing atmosphere.
"Steve Howe also played some acoustic guitar on 'Pleasuredome', a few funny chords that no one else could get their heads around. That song had so many vast expanses of music where nobody knew what was going on — one time, I was around the other side of the desk in Studio One, nowhere near the console, and I plugged in my old Strat, which was the only guitar I had in those days, and began figuring out a solo. I was telling Trevor how it could work, and he said, 'Show me what you mean.' Unbeknown to me, he went into record, and all the while I was talking to him, saying, 'Here it could go up, and then it could stop.' He said, 'OK, let's hear that back,' and what he played turned out to be the solo."

Steve Lipson : Interestingly, I screwed up with one thing that I didn't know at the time," he now says. "When you do this stuff, your time code needs to be word-clock locked. But because I didn't know that, by the time it got towards the end of the song it had somehow drifted to the offsets that I'd done. In other words, whatever we were sync'ing up after the event, by the time it got to the end of the song everything was slightly out of time. On the one hand, that really pissed us off, but on the other hand it gave the track a certain kind of freedom and energy at the point where it needed it. So it was fortuitous, but it was also a big lesson."
(Source : not known)