Fact #51920

Save Lipson (engineer) : In those days, the gear we had was pretty limited, and although the Synclavier had just arrived, it was still sitting in the corner of the room and nobody was using it," says Lipson. "JJ had the Fairlight, Andy wasn't interested - he had his equipment - so one day I said to Trevor, 'You bought this thing, do you want me to look at it?' He said, 'Yeah,' and I therefore became the Synclavier operator. At that point, I was the engineer, the Synclavier operator and the guitar player, and it was quite interesting how, reverting back to what Phill Brown had taught me, the engineering was invisible. It was like osmosis. That didn't mean it was easy, but it just happened in a very fluid sort of way. We plugged things in and set them up as we needed to. It was about the concepts and the freedom, about using the available resources, and the result was that all those things sort of engineered themselves. There was no studied engineering going on.
(Source : Interview with Richard Buskin, Sound On Sound, April 2008)

Trevor Horn : "Steve (engineer Steve Lipson) was the first guy I ever saw running a computer all of the time in the control room. The Synclavier... incorporated the first timecode-based sequencer, and the significance of that was being able to continually run it like a slave machine. It didn't run on MIDI Song Pointers or anything dumb like that, and so if an idea came to us or we needed an overdub, we could instantly sequence it. I never saw anybody do that before Steve. He was a great guy to work with, because he'd be constantly coming up with ideas."

Steve Lipson : About three weeks into working on 'Relax', Trevor came in after dinner one night and said, 'We're going to start again.' I couldn't believe it. This 'start again' thing was new to me. I'd always thought that you started and then you finished, and that was the record. Starting again was alien. However, Trevor looked at me and said, 'I've got a rhythm in my Linn 2 that I've had for ages, and I want to work around it."

Trevor Horn 1994 interview SOS, "It was like my pet drum pattern which I fiddled about with. I thought it was more like an English square dance than anything else, but when I saw the effect that this had on the guys in the band, I realised that it was probably going to be a very good dance record."

Steve Lipson : "He had three patterns and he wanted to do it live. He told me, 'The bass needs to be programmed, and I want you to play guitar, Andy to play keyboards, and JJ to get a whole load of shit going on the Fairlight.' That's precisely what happened. Trevor had this rhythm and we just recorded it live, probably in one take. He heard the bass with this drum pattern and went, 'That's unbelievable. Let's go.' The rhythm track is what did it. We flipped out. It didn't exist, and then suddenly it did. The three patterns consisted of one that was the entire thing — hi-hat, bass drum, possibly a snare, and a little conga pattern — plus another without the congas, and then there was the fill: the 16's part where it goes mad. I think this was all done on the fly to a blank pattern, and we put it down with me playing guitar, JJ creating funny noises, Andy playing the chords and Trevor stepping through the presets. Then he called Holly and got him in to sing it there and then, that night, right in the middle of Studio One. I can't remember how many takes, but it was really quick.

All of the effects on that song were overdubbed. The pissing sound, for instance, was Andy playing his [Roland] JP8, as were the explosions. He had a JP8 and [Roland] MC4, and he sequenced stuff as well. I myself added some guitar synth with a Roland GR300 — I think it was the second one they ever made — and Paul Rutherford did a whole load of stuff, such as the backing vocals, while JJ programmed all of the weirdness.

Steve Lipson : I did mix 'Relax', but because Trevor didn't know me very well he wanted to get someone else in, and so Julian Mendelsohn ended up doing the mix. The same was true for 'Two Tribes', and also for 'War', which was mixed by Nick Ryan, the Sarm chief engineer, who did a mix at Sarm East. For some bizarre reason, he turned the toms up really loud and compressed the mix, and it sounded brilliant. Anyway, I think those are the only tracks that I did with Trevor that I didn't mix. He was just a bit unsure, so it was a comfort-zone thing and I think he was probably right. It really didn't matter to me. We were working on the album, and we just kept going, and there was also 'Ferry 'Cross The Mersey', which we were all really excited about because of the start - we thought the sounds and the whole atmosphere were magnificent.

Trevor Horn : One of the reasons we did all the remixes was that the initial 12-inch version of 'Relax' contained something called 'The Sex Mix', which was 16 minutes long and didn't even contain a song. It was really Holly just jamming, as well as a bunch of samples of the group jumping in the swimming pool and me sort of making disgusting noises by dropping stuff into buckets of water! We got so many complaints about it - particularly from gay clubs, who found it offensive - that we cut it in half and reduced it down to eight minutes, by taking out some of the slightly more offensive parts. Then we got another load of complaints, because the single version wasn't on the 12-inch - I didn't see the point in this at the time, but I was eventually put straight about it.

When I was out in New York producing Foreigner, I went to Paradise Garage. The Art Of Noise was happening and I'd just done 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' [for Yes], which was huge in America. There was a great remix of it which made number two in the dance chart there, and yet it was only when I went to this club and heard the sort of things they were playing that I really understood about 12-inch remixes. Although I myself had already had a couple of big 12-inch hits, I'd never heard them being played on a large sound system, and so I then went back and mixed 'Relax' again and that was the version which sold a couple of million over here [in the UK].

I wasn't being clever. It wasn't some great scheme that I dreamed up to make three 12-inches; I was just desperately trying to get the record right. I had a kind of ethic with 12-inch remixes. I never wanted them to be boring, even though they were going to be nine-or-so minutes long. I didn't see that as an excuse for them to be self-indulgent or boring, so we would work quite hard on them in order for them to make sense as pieces of music.

Steve Lipson : SARM was a busy and expensive studio, so rather than mess around there trying to come up with a new song, Trevor asked me if I knew a cheaper place where we could go with the band. I told him about the Producer's Workshop in Fulham, and so we all decamped for there. Even though he'd already figured out what the next single should be, it was a real long shot. The song was 'Two Tribes', and I remember when we first heard it we all looked at him like he was mad, but he said, 'It's all about the bass line.' He completely got it. He was firing on all cylinders, whereas the rest of us were completely in the dark.

"For one thing, there wasn't much to the song, and for another, the demo wasn't any good. However, out of all the material it was the only track that he could envision being the follow-up single — it wasn't a positive choice, but one made out of necessity. The thing about the bass part on the finished record is that it drops an octave, whereas the original bass part didn't do that. It sounded like kids were playing the song, and they were. What Trevor loved about it was the beat, and so after we went down to the Producer's Workshop and the band members did their thing, they then left and again it was down to the four of us - Trevor, Andy, JJ and me - all feeling depressed as anything because it just sounded terrible. We therefore set up and played it ourselves, and interestingly the only part that ended up being retained from the Producer's Workshop was my guitar.

I played a sort of harmony, and that, together with dropping the bass down on those notes and sequencing it, as well as Andy then coming in with the chord movement — a minor chord to a fourth and back to the minor — were the key elements. Once these were all in place, we then moved back to Sarm to work on the track, and while we were in Studio Two, figuring out how to make the bass sound good, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley were mixing an album in Studio One, and they then went away to record another album, came back to mix it, and we were still working on the bass. We were looking for sounds, trying to get the articulation right.

During the recording of 'Relax', having become more familiar with Trevor and his wife Jill, I had suggested that they buy this digital tape machine called a Sony F1. It was a Betamax two-track recorder and it wasn't that expensive, so they went for it, and that was a revelation because we could now record loads of stuff and it was pristine quality. At around the same time, digital multitracks happened, with Sony producing the 3324 and Mitsubishi the 32-track [X850]. We were in Studio Two, and I asked Trevor, 'Why don't we look at these machines?' He was always up for trying things, and so a Mitsubishi was wheeled in for us to try out, but it didn't work. A short time later, a Sony was wheeled in and it worked perfectly, so he bought one and we recorded 'Two Tribes' on that machine.