Fact #73448
When:
Short story:
The Cure finish recording their second album, Seventeen Seconds, at Morgan Studios, London, England, UK, EuropeFull article:
Mike Hedges (producer) : It wasn't something to elate you, it was something to really make you think. It was so introspective and so depressing, it did us all in. It was a dark, dark, dark record, and when you work on something like that you're not laughing and smiling the whole time. You get heavily affected by the music, and by the time we finished it I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. God, was I depressed. I mean, we didn't fight or anything in the studio. It was just bloody miserable. You know, we'd have a drink and relax between sessions, but we took the recordings themselves very seriously. Robert had a cathartic outpouring of emotions on that album, and because of that it affected all of us.
It was a very large studio, high and rectangular. The control room was up some stairs at one end, with the desk to the left of a window that looked down on the main room. For the backing tracks on Seventeen Seconds, the band essentially played in there as a live unit, with the drums in the centre of the back wall, bass to the left, guitar to the right and the keyboards immediately in front of us, under the window.
Robert said to me he thought he and I could actually produce the record more to his liking than if a third party did it, and he wanted the freedom that afforded. At the same time, I wanted to get a more unusual sound than that on the first album, something different to the standard recording. As an engineer I was very, very keen to experiment, and Robert encouraged me to do this, so as co-producers he was in charge of the musical direction while I took care of the sonic direction.
The band members were very individual, so I wanted a really individual sound, and this led to quite a bit of experimenting and equipment changes. Robert got a better guitar amp and a better guitar - I think he changed to a Fender Jazzmaster - and he also had the Woolworth’s Top Twenty guitar that he'd used on the first album. You didn't want to lean on that thing too heavily.
Robert knew his limit and he stuck to it, and it was within his limit to be able to work and actually do a really good job of it. The others, meanwhile, would finish their parts and get so off their faces that they'd sort of fade out of the way because they couldn't stand up. Once they were told, 'You've finished your bits for today,' they'd really, really go for it, and if their drinking ever encroached on the recording itself we'd just stop that particular part and carry on the next day.
You see, they were virtually living in the studio - they slept on the floor of the studio - because with such a limited time we'd be working 16 or 17 hours a day.
It really was the drum sound that largely defined the album's sonic direction. The C-ducer contact mic had just arrived on the scene at that time, and after testing it in another studio I decided to mic the entire drum kit with C-ducers. I had initially tested the mic on other instruments, not drums, but then when I briefly tested it on drums I thought 'God, they sound fantastic like that.' There's absolutely no spill between the different drums when you use a C-ducer - each drum is completely separate. Every part of the kit was therefore miked with C-ducers - kick, snare, hi-hat, three or four Rototoms and two crash cymbals - and this gave us a very, very contained drum sound with no space at all. Everything is right up close, there's no ambience whatsoever, and we then used reverbs and delays to give us the shapes and the sizes. I think the fact that the drums had such little ambience and were so sterile and cold really set up the mood we loved.
Having recorded the cymbals this way, we also did cymbal overdubs because we wanted a very, very heavily compressed sound that had total sustain. You can hear that on a couple of songs, including 'Play For Today' — when the cymbals crash there's a click followed by a long, long sustaining cymbal, which is three 1176 compressors in a row. It hisses for about twenty seconds.
Seventeen Seconds probably cost between £2,000 and £3,000 to produce.
With all of the recordings in those days there was very little A+R input; almost none. You were pretty much left to it, and when A+R did turn up you'd sort of down tools and look around until they went away. In fact, Chris Parry (The Cure’s manager) did once say to me that he thought The Cure should be working with a more athletic producer, because every time he came to the studio I was messing about. What I would have liked to say to him was, 'Well, actually we were messing about because you were in the studio. We just wanted you to go away!'
As it happens, Chris Parry was very, very relaxed. We said we wanted to do it on our own and he pretty much left us to it. He came in once or twice. Generally, in those days, when it came to recording The Cure, the Associates and Siouxsie and the Banshees, we just did it. We recorded it and we delivered it. We didn't actually know what the budget was, we were just told 'Right, you've got five days to do it,' or three weeks sometimes, and without the pressure of having to do a certain style of record we just did what felt right at the time.
(Interviewed by Richard Buskin for Sound On Sound, 2004)
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It was a very large studio, high and rectangular. The control room was up some stairs at one end, with the desk to the left of a window that looked down on the main room. For the backing tracks on Seventeen Seconds, the band essentially played in there as a live unit, with the drums in the centre of the back wall, bass to the left, guitar to the right and the keyboards immediately in front of us, under the window.
Robert said to me he thought he and I could actually produce the record more to his liking than if a third party did it, and he wanted the freedom that afforded. At the same time, I wanted to get a more unusual sound than that on the first album, something different to the standard recording. As an engineer I was very, very keen to experiment, and Robert encouraged me to do this, so as co-producers he was in charge of the musical direction while I took care of the sonic direction.
The band members were very individual, so I wanted a really individual sound, and this led to quite a bit of experimenting and equipment changes. Robert got a better guitar amp and a better guitar - I think he changed to a Fender Jazzmaster - and he also had the Woolworth’s Top Twenty guitar that he'd used on the first album. You didn't want to lean on that thing too heavily.
Robert knew his limit and he stuck to it, and it was within his limit to be able to work and actually do a really good job of it. The others, meanwhile, would finish their parts and get so off their faces that they'd sort of fade out of the way because they couldn't stand up. Once they were told, 'You've finished your bits for today,' they'd really, really go for it, and if their drinking ever encroached on the recording itself we'd just stop that particular part and carry on the next day.
You see, they were virtually living in the studio - they slept on the floor of the studio - because with such a limited time we'd be working 16 or 17 hours a day.
It really was the drum sound that largely defined the album's sonic direction. The C-ducer contact mic had just arrived on the scene at that time, and after testing it in another studio I decided to mic the entire drum kit with C-ducers. I had initially tested the mic on other instruments, not drums, but then when I briefly tested it on drums I thought 'God, they sound fantastic like that.' There's absolutely no spill between the different drums when you use a C-ducer - each drum is completely separate. Every part of the kit was therefore miked with C-ducers - kick, snare, hi-hat, three or four Rototoms and two crash cymbals - and this gave us a very, very contained drum sound with no space at all. Everything is right up close, there's no ambience whatsoever, and we then used reverbs and delays to give us the shapes and the sizes. I think the fact that the drums had such little ambience and were so sterile and cold really set up the mood we loved.
Having recorded the cymbals this way, we also did cymbal overdubs because we wanted a very, very heavily compressed sound that had total sustain. You can hear that on a couple of songs, including 'Play For Today' — when the cymbals crash there's a click followed by a long, long sustaining cymbal, which is three 1176 compressors in a row. It hisses for about twenty seconds.
Seventeen Seconds probably cost between £2,000 and £3,000 to produce.
With all of the recordings in those days there was very little A+R input; almost none. You were pretty much left to it, and when A+R did turn up you'd sort of down tools and look around until they went away. In fact, Chris Parry (The Cure’s manager) did once say to me that he thought The Cure should be working with a more athletic producer, because every time he came to the studio I was messing about. What I would have liked to say to him was, 'Well, actually we were messing about because you were in the studio. We just wanted you to go away!'
As it happens, Chris Parry was very, very relaxed. We said we wanted to do it on our own and he pretty much left us to it. He came in once or twice. Generally, in those days, when it came to recording The Cure, the Associates and Siouxsie and the Banshees, we just did it. We recorded it and we delivered it. We didn't actually know what the budget was, we were just told 'Right, you've got five days to do it,' or three weeks sometimes, and without the pressure of having to do a certain style of record we just did what felt right at the time.
(Interviewed by Richard Buskin for Sound On Sound, 2004)