{"id":2987,"date":"2015-04-26T17:59:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-26T17:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arpjournal.com\/?p=2987"},"modified":"2015-04-27T21:40:24","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T21:40:24","slug":"tony-swain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/tony-swain\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview With Tony Swain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony Swain is a record producer, composer, session musician and A&R consultant. He has been active in the industry for over thirty years. He achieved significant success during the 1980s in a production and song-writing partnership with Steve Jolley, working with acts such as Imagination, Spandau Ballet and Alison Moyet. Their work has subsequently appeared (as direct samples or close emulations of key elements) in records by Mariah Carey, PM Dawn, Boards of Canada, 88 keys (featuring Kanye West) and The Pharcyde. Swain then went on to solo production work as well as A&R consultancy, eventually becoming Head of International A&R for the Universal Music Group. He has been nominated for Ivor Novello song writing and BPI production awards, was awarded a BPI technical excellence award and has also seen his work as executive producer (for Michael McDonald\u2019s Motown <\/em>recordings) nominated for a Grammy award. This interview took place in 2013, thirty years since the release of the albums True <\/em>by Spandau Ballet and Night Dubbing <\/em>by Imagination, which epitomise the contribution made by Tony Swain and Steve Jolley to pop and dance music production in that era.<\/p>\n

Tony, at what point did your career in music production begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was trained a long time ago by Geoff Calver, who used to work with the Walker Brothers. I had been working in television, but left when I was twenty-six: I had a great job in as a cameraman but I was so desperate to get into the music business that I left and went into the studio. So I really learnt from the ground up about recording and engineering and, although I was a musician at the time, went up via that route. Geoff taught me the basics. I\u2019d been recording on a Revox since the age of eleven and track bouncing, but he showed me \u2018this is how you use a compressor\u2019, \u2018this is how you use reverb\u2019, \u2018this is what you do with gates, de-essers\u2019, \u2018this is how you don\u2019t overload tape\u2019. He was a great engineer and really gave me a ‘from the ground up’ training on how to use everything properly, this enabled me to go further and experiment within certain audio parameters, \u2018how do you get a clicky sounding bass drum?\u2019 and things like that.<\/p>\n

Your work with Imagination began with the single \u2018Body Talk\u2019 in 1981. It is a very distinctive sounding record, and it certainly has a \u2018clicky\u2019 sounding bass drum. You\u2019ve said in another interview [Myners, 2007] that you wanted the bass drum of \u2018Body Talk\u2019 to cut through so it\u2019s high in the mix, and in that sense it anticipates house music.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the key to \u2018Body Talk\u2019 was the bass and the claps. Also, Morgan Khan who ran Street Sounds, when I mixed it, he was going to the clubs all the time and he sat with me and he drove me as well: he\u2019s going to me \u2018we need to go louder\u2019. People ask me \u2018how did you get that sound?\u2019. Obviously it was the attack of the bass drum, and that was due to the DBX 160 we used; but it wasn\u2019t just that, it was the fact that we got a balance and then we put it up another 6 dB. So when we thought it was right we put it up much higher; so it dominated the mix, and drove it.<\/p>\n

So the bass and the kick would go up by another 6 dB (leaving everything else as it was)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, we\u2019d sit there and go \u2018yes, it sounds right\u2019 and then: \u2018let\u2019s put it up louder\u2019. We didn\u2019t sit there and say \u2018that sounds great, that\u2019s right\u2019 but instead \u2018it\u2019s right, but let\u2019s put it louder\u2019. I used to take mixes home and play them in the car \u2013 the drawback of that was cassettes. We were always struggling with cassettes because that was the only way that you could take mixes out of the studio; when you played them on a hi-fi, whatever you thought in the studio was toned down, so you had to push it. We were listening to this stuff on studio grade monitors with a great sound and then you had to put it on to vinyl, so you\u2019d have to think that if you were going to overdo it then you were going to have to overdo it twice as much as you thought, otherwise it just sounded too subtle.<\/p>\n

We once had a meeting with The Human League as we were going to produce them. They\u2019d already had success with Martin Rushent who did their early records and he was working at Red Bus Studios as well as with us. Phil Oakey said about the bass drum \u2018it sounds like two billiard balls clicking together\u2019! But they liked it, that\u2019s why they wanted to meet us. There was a lot of love for Imagination then. It\u2019s difficult to understand the changes in the production sound of that era. There was a lot of crossover from engineering. Engineers weren\u2019t just the people who could get a great drum sound any more. I\u2019m a drummer, so I was able to do that. I got a lot of work because of that, I understood the drums. But engineers weren\u2019t just these people anymore, roles were changing. It was a case of \u2018can you do this too?\u2019 and becoming a science.<\/p>\n

The bass drum for [Spandau Ballet\u2019s] True <\/em>was a spin-off from the Imagination drums: lots of boost at 3.5 kHz and DBX 160 compression. When I heard it on the radio in mono it sounded pretty loud but it didn’t bother me, in fact it made it more R and B. Someone else I worked with who thought he knew everything phoned me up and said \u2018God, the bass drum\u2019s loud in that\u2019, I said \u2018who cares? It\u2019s number one!\u2019 Sometimes overstatement can make a mix and too little bass drum is a real disaster.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got a pair of DBX 160s. They\u2019re just incredible (although they\u2019re costing me a fortune to maintain): they wouldn\u2019t distort; you could put a compressor across a vocal, from a decent Neumann mic or something, and it would sound alright and then you would put a 160 on it and it just didn\u2019t distort. Its capabilities are just amazing. I would always use it on vocals and then limit them with a Urei 1176 on the mixes. You\u2019d have to ride them a bit anyway. The thing is, it\u2019s trying to control this stuff and not ruin it.<\/p>\n

The whole album is very distinctive: Leee John\u2019s vocal, down-tempo grooves with big bass drums and claps. Most tracks have a standout element: for example the flange in Flashback<\/em>, the repeating parallel motion of the piano riff in Burnin\u2019 Up <\/em>(which, like the bass drum levels here and elsewhere, anticipates house music as Frankie Knuckles has acknowledged). The IMDB entry for yourself and Steve Jolley sums the album up as \u2018a sophisticated fusion of emerging new wave synthesised pop and Motown R’n’B arrangements\u2019 adding that \u2018today it is considered a landmark in dance music\u2019 [\u2018TP\u2019, undated].<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting. The thing is that they were pop records and we never pretended that they were anything else. That sound on Flashback is the noise coming out of a Roland SH1000, through a Drawmer gate keyed from a hi-hat. My SH1000 had a sustain pedal input but apart from that you couldn\u2019t do anything with it \u2013 you couldn\u2019t trigger it, you couldn\u2019t do anything with it, you just played it. So anything like that, you could hold notes, and that\u2019s what we used to do and to trigger them, we used the gate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very bold production stroke for a pop record like that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I suppose so.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one thing that stands out in those productions: the kick and the bass line are prominent, which anticipates a lot of current pop music; and, particularly delay-based effects like flanges, you were prepared to say \u2018this isn\u2019t going to be in the background; this is the main <\/em>feature at the moment\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to blow your head off! I think because we were so limited at the time on the equipment, we just got every new thing that we could lay our hands on that we knew would do stupid stuff. On \u2018Burnin\u2019 Up\u2019 I played that piano riff but I couldn\u2019t keep that up, I played all the solos and everything else and it was hard work. If you\u2019re not playing the piano all of the time, you\u2019re playing synths, your fingers just go to pieces, and they feel like spaghetti. So that riff was a tape loop. I thought \u2018I can\u2019t do this for however long\u2019 so I just did it with the bass drum on one track, piano on the other in mono and then we made a quarter-inch tape loop. That\u2019s what it is, just going round and round and round; and then Tim Goldsmith dubbed the drums on it and it became a cult record in New York.<\/p>\n

You then consolidated that sound on Imagination\u2019s second album In the Heat of the Night <\/em>from which the singles \u2018Just an Illusion\u2019 and \u2018Music and Lights\u2019 came which were both very successful commercially. \u2018Just an Illusion\u2019 has to have one of the most well-known synthesized bass lines in pop music. Recently, on your blog and on UK national radio, you ended all of the speculation about which synthesizer was responsible for the sound (it was a Roland SH1000) [Myners, 2006; Swain, 2013]. You followed that with Night Dubbing<\/em>, which is an unusually bold collection of remixes of some of the tracks from the first two Imagination albums. What was the motivation for this album?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The record company. They said \u2018why don\u2019t we do some remixes?\u2019 I said \u2018oh my God, I\u2019ve got to get the tapes out again!\u2019 I always felt that when you\u2019d finished something you\u2019d finished it, you\u2019d put it to bed. So this felt like a sort of regurgitation to me and we were doing so many other things at the same time. I wouldn\u2019t say I didn\u2019t enjoy it and we went mental on it! There\u2019s one track, \u2018Heart and Soul\u2019 where we swung Neumann microphones over two loudspeakers at the end. It was ground breaking because I was tired and I didn\u2019t really want to do it. What kept us amused was \u2018let\u2019s do something really nuts\u2019 and that was it; because otherwise what was the point? We\u2019d done what we thought were great versions, the twelve inches, we\u2019d had hits with them, we were getting work and getting approached by people because we were having chart and dance hits. Madonna was phoning me all the time when she had \u2018Holiday\u2019 out, \u2018Tony when are you going to work with me?\u2019 because she absolutely loved Imagination, I met with her at a hotel after one of her Top of the Pops performances and we talked and she said \u2018I want to do it now, I can\u2019t wait \u2018til August\u2019. You tend to think, \u2018my God! I should have done that one\u2019. I said to Seymour Stein who was head of Sire, her record company at the time \u2018oh my God Seymour, we should have done that\u2019 to which he replied \u2018no, you did the Alison Moyet album, that was great\u2019. To be honest, we would have done a few tracks with Madonna and she would have fired us, like most people.<\/p>\n

With Alison Moyet, we did one album with her and then there was a falling out which we still don\u2019t understand. The bad thing about that is we could have done another album, and we had a lot of success with Alf<\/em>. It cost, say, around \u00a395k to make and Raindancing<\/em>, her next album, cost something in the region of \u00a3400k. Alf <\/em>sold five million and Raindancing <\/em>sold one million. But she didn\u2019t like Alf <\/em>and she was going through a difficult time herself. We worked with Muff Winwood on that album and his brief to us was \u2018Dusty Springfield!\u2019 That said, the end result is not particularly like her work, but she loved the album and flew over to meet us with a view to writing and producing something for her but sadly it never came together. Steve Winwood, who is one of my heroes, he came to the concerts and loved Alf<\/em>. He asked us to do the Higher Love <\/em>album, so I\u2019ve got all the demos for that, but unfortunately that fell apart in negotiations so we didn\u2019t do that either, never mind!<\/p>\n

But despite those setbacks there have been lots of successes<\/strong><\/p>\n

There have been some terrible stories but when I was at Universal I did work with Michael McDonald [as executive producer on Motown <\/em>and Motown 2<\/em>] which was my greatest ambition: I\u2019m a huge fan of his. He is absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But, it\u2019s a business and things go right and things go wrong. It\u2019s quite upsetting because you put your heart and soul into things and we were sometimes criticised for stamping too much of ourselves on to the acts.<\/p>\n

What did the record company think of Night Dubbing <\/em>when you\u2019d finished it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think they understood it. I think they went \u2018er, yeah\u2019. It\u2019s what they wanted. I mean this is a brilliant thing for them isn\u2019t it? They don\u2019t have to make a new album, they don\u2019t have to record anything, it\u2019s another album made from existing material.<\/p>\n

The first track they would have heard would have been \u2018Flashback\u2019 where you sped the tape machine up and that\u2019s probably the strangest sounding of all of the remixes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah.<\/p>\n

Although they\u2019re all pretty adventurous.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but people loved it. It was summer; everyone was sitting in their cars with the roofs open. I remember sitting in a car when it came out, hearing it coming from someone else\u2019s car. People just loved it. I think it stimulated people because there were genuinely things that were done in that record that had never been done or attempted. Absolute madness, \u2018what can we do next that nobody\u2019s ever done?\u2019 including swinging the microphones. I can\u2019t remember what loudspeakers we put on the floor, maybe Yamaha NS10s but I can\u2019t remember if they were out then, maybe it was two Auratones. We just put them flat on the ground and we got the Neumanns, held them by the cables and began to rotate them.<\/p>\n

A sort of reverse Lesley cabinet effect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, and I think we might have knocked one of them out of phase at the desk; we were always messing around with out-of-phase.<\/p>\n

In that track as well there seems to be almost granular stuff that BT was then doing fifteen years later, with a lot of re-triggers of the lead vocal, where we\u2019re getting Paul Hardcastle style stuttering, but even beyond that in terms of the granularity. Was that with a sampler or were you triggering a digital delay?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That would have been triggering an AMS digital delay and also we triggered stuff with a Drawmer DS201 gate. We did some of that on the pre Night Dubbing <\/em>stuff: \u2018Flashback\u2019, that sound that I mentioned earlier which is the noise coming out of an SH1000 gated by the Drawmer.<\/p>\n

Night Dubbing <\/em><\/strong>made the top ten album charts.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, and I was shocked.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d expect for an album of dub remixes there\u2019s a lot of delay processing going on with that record, but what else were you using?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Publison Infernal Machine, which was a French unit. It didn\u2019t glitch like everything else did. We used the Eventide 310 Harmonizer a lot. I used that on everything, set in a certain way: 15 ms delay on the left, I think 25 ms delay on the right and a pitch-up on one side only on vocals; Earth Wind and Fire used it a lot on vocals and I used to use it on a lot of the stuff that I did because it spread the stereo width. The bass I\u2019ve been questioned on so much and have spoken about elsewhere [e.g. Myners, 2007]. I\u2019ve also used a Fender Rhodes which you\u2019d normally record with a stereo chorus. I found one decent Fender Rhodes in the UK that we could hire, because they\u2019re all dull as ditch water sounding, and I\u2019d do a direct injection on one side and chorus, only one side, on the right, rather than stereo. So what you\u2019d actually get is a true stereo chorus coming out, not an artificially treated stereo chorus, which makes it sound completely different.<\/p>\n

How did you start with each track? How did you assemble it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On \u2018Night Dubbing\u2019?<\/p>\n

Yes, parts just seem to come out of nowhere and you think \u2018what\u2019s the basic material here?\u2019 Sure, you\u2019re swinging microphones around, you\u2019re spinning in triggered delays and that kind of stuff but how did you begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sections, really. You just say \u2018right, we\u2019re going to go from this bit to that bit and we\u2019re going to do this, and you do that, and you flick the mute on that, I\u2019m going to kick the Publison. That\u2019s what we did; we did a performance in sections. Actually, and this is what\u2019s changed now, it\u2019s not dissimilar to doing a movie take. You go \u2018right, we\u2019re going to go up to the first chorus. You do this, you do that, you do the feedback, you do this\u2019 and some of them would go horribly wrong. I\u2019ve got a box of cassettes of different mixes of all the stuff I worked on and I will get them out and listen to every now and again them because there will be some disasters in there. Sometimes the feedback just went crazy or you flanged the thing and it was just sheer luck. I wish I hadn\u2019t sold it now but the greatest flanger ever is the Bell flanger: this thing is wicked. It\u2019s digital but you can control it manually. I had some specially made Bell 26 second delays, stereo paired, in my studio when I had it built in \u201989. This flanging thing was just unreal. That was something I used later. The units we used on \u2018Night Dubbing\u2019 would have been MXR phasers and flangers, Drawmer gates….<\/p>\n

You gated the electric piano sound on the Night Dubbing <\/em>version of \u2018Body Talk\u2019. There\u2019s something about the treatment of that which just makes the sound very \u2018sticky\u2019. You\u2019ve talked previously about making the keyboard sound like a guitar. The thing about rhythm guitar is that the gesture is \u2018down and up\u2019 so for every one sound, you get another one which is exactly what you don\u2019t get on a piano: when you take your fingers off, nothing happens. How were you doing that, were you programming the release and the sustain to give \u2018it\u2019s on\u2019 now \u2018it\u2019s off\u2019, via some kind of filter lift?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was playing everything, but I don\u2019t play guitar. The reason wasn\u2019t really anything to do with the Imagination stuff. The guitar riffs were turned into keyboard parts. Steve Jolley did play guitar, but it gave it a different sound.<\/p>\n

The electric piano sound on the dub version of \u2018Body Talk\u2019 almost sounds like a pad sound.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That would have been the same Boss CE-2 chorus pedal that we used on the bass with the DBX compressor. The bass was the Roland SH1000, the CE-2 and the DBX160. For the \u2018Flashback\u2019 dub the multitrack tape is half-speed and the vocals are pitched up with the Publison. So there are things like that happening with everything going in opposite directions.<\/p>\n

At the end of the \u2018Flashback\u2019 dub you seem to have gone up a major scale, rather than doing a semitone each time it\u2019s tone, tone, tone, semitone etc. It\u2019s as if you\u2019ve done the pitch shifts according to the key that of the piece.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We probably would have done that with the vari-speed of the tape machine: we knew the speeds that needed to be applied so we just shifted it up, up, up like that.<\/p>\n

It seems to be a pattern of semitones and tones, but then it speeds up dramatically. I wasn\u2019t even aware that tape machines had that range of speed variation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They could go really fast. They were MCIs and they looked more like an American fridge and they either worked or didn\u2019t work, but they sounded good. Something that we found out was that Studers didn\u2019t sound good.<\/p>\n

They looked the part, they certainly didn\u2019t look like a fridge<\/strong><\/p>\n

They were like a Swiss watch and they were fantastic until one went wrong and then you\u2019d have to try and battle with it. The A800s which, when they came out, everyone just went \u2018Oh my God, this is a Rolls Royce\u2019 but I\u2019ve seen them spool in opposite directions, out of control: you\u2019ve got a master with one motor spooling one way and the other going in to reverse and you can see the oxide coming off the tape and people would have to dive for them to switch them off. The basic thing always with a Studer was that it had a sound to it where you\u2019d record drums on it and say \u2018what happened to my drums?!\u2019 they\u2019d sound as if the wallop had gone out of them.<\/p>\n

So it wasn\u2019t doing enough to the sound in some ways, it was too neutral?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was to do way the recording amplifiers were designed. People modified them, but it just wasn\u2019t good. The MCI sounded much better, a bit crunchy but better. There was probably more noise with the MCI, but we always used Dolby A noise reduction because of that.<\/p>\n

The only remix on that Night Dubbing <\/em>that you didn\u2019t do was Larry Levan\u2019s remix of \u2018Changes\u2019. That mix also has its own classic status. His work on that seems to be a lesson in choosing the parts of the multitrack that go well together. There\u2019s Leee John singing \u2018I know you think you\u2019ve got where you want me\u2019 over a short, pulsed synthesizer sound with lots of delays on and it\u2019s a striking moment in the record but it doesn\u2019t sound anything like the rest of Night Dubbing<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

No.<\/p>\n

Did you think of other remixes to put on there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that was the only one that was available. It was hard, because there have been so many bad remixes done where they don\u2019t work. It\u2019s difficult because the essence was always driven from the bass, so when you take those elements away a lot of it doesn\u2019t really work. I think people think that they can just take this stuff and remix it. Actually there\u2019s a classic example of this, I can\u2019t remember who did it: in order to cover up the joins on tape edits we used to put extra things on the multitrack: ends of sung lines etc. to mask the transition. Well someone did a remix and left all those bits in the remix, they didn\u2019t even think about what they were doing! And you just think \u2018these people shouldn\u2019t be allowed to do remixes\u2019. I\u2019m happy when someone picks up my work and makes a good job of it but it\u2019s quite tragic when they don\u2019t because it\u2019s like someone painting over your own work.<\/p>\n

The tempi are very consistent within the tracks on Night Dubbing <\/em>and the other Imagination records too. Were they sequenced or played to a click?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the Imagination records the only sequencing was the Linn drum. Graham Jarvis, a session drummer who has since sadly died, played Body Talk<\/em>. Then Errol Kennedy started to play drums and we also copied the drum parts from some songs and used them for other songs. The drums for So Good, So Right <\/em>are sped up from Body Talk<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A lot of records from the disco era don\u2019t have that same consistency of tempo. Michael Jackson\u2019s \u2018Don\u2019t Stop \u2018Til You Get Enough\u2019 is one that comes to mind.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earth, Wind and Fire as well, they speed up, a lot of disco records get faster. We used a click on every track, even on something like Spandau Ballet\u2019s \u2018True\u2019 and if you didn\u2019t do that then editing them later was a nightmare: you couldn\u2019t move anything about because it was going to be at a different tempo. If you were to say \u2018I love that bit at the end, let\u2019s put it at the front\u2019 then you would be stuffed and there was no way of manipulating the tempo. There was nothing like Serato\u2019s Pitch and Time (which I think is the greatest thing ever invented) available back then.<\/p>\n

Going back to the motivation for Night Dubbing<\/em>, the record company wanted it because presumably there was a fallow period before Scandalous, <\/em>which was released that Autumn? That was the final Imagination album that you were to produce.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, Scandalous <\/em>was a difficult album and the depression of what was going on, there were publishing arguments and litigation. It\u2019s in the album, in the grooves. I\u2019m struggling, there\u2019s a DX7 all over that, the sound of it is spiky.<\/p>\n

It does sound spiky, \u2018State of Love\u2019, the style of that is what I recall the magazines of the time were calling electro-pop or electro-soul. It\u2019s a very different groove, it\u2019s certainly not as laid back as \u2018Body Talk\u2019, but it\u2019s a very sophisticated sounding record and some of the slower numbers, such as \u2018Wrong in Love\u2019….<\/strong><\/p>\n

… I love \u2018Wrong in Love\u2019! About two years ago I re-stretched it and sampled it and sped it up to be a dance track, because it really works. But finally I decided \u2018no, I\u2019ll leave it as it is\u2019.<\/p>\n

Scandalous <\/em>was an album that was difficult. It was the timing of it, it was the pressure that we were under and the technology was changing. I borrowed Steve Levine\u2019s DX7 and what I also used on that was a Quantec QRS, a digital surround reverb, which had a \u2018freeze\u2019 function. It was great, you could freeze a reverb and it would just hold it. I used it on \u2018State of Love\u2019. It was also used on \u2018New Dimension\u2019. We also used a Sony DRE2000 reverb, which was a stereo one. But nothing else other than the Quantec had a freeze function, it was brilliant. I used the DX7 a lot on the Alison Moyet album Alf. On \u2018Love Resurrection\u2019 I knew that there was a kind of Telecaster or Stratocaster strummed sound that I wanted. So basically what we did was we got the \u2018down\u2019 sound of it, which was sort of like a guitar, on the DX7. Then you\u2019d get the echo repeat (via a delay) and we\u2019d EQ that and flange it so that sounded different from the down-stroke.<\/p>\n

So every time you play a note you know you\u2019re going to get something a quaver later.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, an up-stroke, so once you get into it you get something that starts to sound like a guitar. Alison actually said to me, when she was doing \u2018Love Resurrection\u2019 on Top of the Pops, Scritti Politti were next after her, they were all miming to it on their guitars so I thought \u2018great! Maybe they all thought it was a guitar as well\u2019.<\/p>\n

They too were making some fantastic records around that time weren\u2019t they?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, unbelievable: Arif Mardin\u2019s production.<\/p>\n

Then they followed Cupid and Psyche \u201885 <\/em>with Provision <\/em>which wasn\u2019t very successful. I don\u2019t know whether you\u2019d agree with this but Provision <\/em>was almost a parallel of Scandalous <\/em>in that it pushed the technology but it didn\u2019t seem to take off from a sales point of view. The singles from Scandalous <\/em>didn\u2019t do nearly as well as those from the first two albums. I think \u2018Looking At Midnight\u2019 was 29; \u2018New Dimension\u2019 was 56. Was that behind the decision to stop working with them? You\u2019d done four albums with them by then, three of original material.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We were tired. As I said, it was in the grooves. It was the same, but in the opposite sense, with the first album we did with Spandau Ballet, True<\/em>, which was recorded in Compass Point in the Bahamas. The place is in the grooves: we\u2019re all relaxed. But it was a bad time as we were in litigation with the record company, Red Bus. We were just tired and we thought it was time to move on. It just fizzled out, it was a shame. Leee John and I are still friends and we\u2019ve done stuff not that long ago, including remastering the Imagination back catalogue for Sony.<\/p>\n

Your success with Spandau Ballet came in the same year as Night Dubbing <\/em>and Scandalous<\/em>. In the last few months of 1982 you produced their album True<\/em>, released in March of 1983. Both the album and the singles from it enjoyed great success in Europe and the United States.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The single, \u2018True\u2019, was my only UK number one. When it was recorded it was intended to just be an album track, not a single. When I was told it was going to be a single I said \u2018you\u2019ve got to be kidding, this thing is six and half minutes long! It\u2019s an album track, it\u2019s mixed as an album track, it sounds like an album track\u2019.<\/p>\n

Structurally, it\u2019s a song where everything happens at the end: there\u2019s a constant tease all the way through and then in the last chorus you get this instrumental play through of where it was going to go, it all unfolds.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but six and half minutes! So I put it through a Harrison desk that was in the smaller studio at Red Bus, compressed it with the DBX 160 and cut a minute out (which was a struggle).<\/p>\n

Was there a single minute that you could take out, or was it a case of 20 seconds there, 20 second here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a technique that you use where you look at it like a haircut. You look at the intro: well that\u2019s eight bars, can you get it down to four bars? If you imagine that section is in quarters, you would cut the middle two quarters. You keep going through like this: there are links at the end of the chorus, and then the instrumental. All of the Imagination stuff was recorded and mixed as 12\u201d singles, and then the nightmare was cutting them down. It took me two days to cut \u2018Just An Illusion\u2019 down. The beginning of the final single version of \u2018True\u2019 is actually taken from the middle of the original track, with the drums muted. For the recent three disc Spandau Ballet anthology CD [released in 2003], Gary Kemp and I did a mix of \u2018True\u2019 as it was on the original multitrack so it\u2019s got that different beginning. I\u2019ve got the parts for it so we just did it in Pro Tools, but in that version you\u2019ll hear how the beginning was originally intended. It\u2019s listed on there as a new remix, but it was actually a reconstruction of the original version on tape. You\u2019ll hear the difference in having the chorus at the front. Interestingly enough, that construction, the chorus at the front with the drums muted, is the thing that gets sampled by others.<\/p>\n

Presumably you had to splice all of this [with tape]?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. And then you\u2019d got no overlaps: you might want to cut something but then you\u2019ve got a piano that suddenly gets cut off, so then you\u2019d have to lay that overhang into the multitrack.<\/p>\n

Continually trying to shave bits off until you\u2019ve got it down to the required length?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, there was no cross-fading because there was nothing like Pro Tools to do it with.<\/p>\n

So all of the edits have to be on a bass drum or some kind of percussive event?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, and \u2018True\u2019 was put together literally in edits. Even though we had an automated desk I decided not to do it via automation. It was the early days of half-inch mastering and I decided to mix it in pieces: we\u2019d get the intro, construct it by muting stuff etc., then elongating the strings and then there\u2019s a cut there etc.. There are hard edits everywhere through that track.<\/p>\n

Were you editing the multitrack?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, the half-inch master that we were mixing to.<\/p>\n

The resultant opening is very powerful, an example of \u2018less is more\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s another thing that I\u2019ve used on a lot of records which I guess I learned first when doing the Imagination stuff, that was my first success: If you go through a track and you think \u2018I love this bit\u2019 or \u2018I love this middle eight bit\u2019 or \u2018I love that bit where the synth drops out\u2019 or whatever, then put it at the front. It immediately creates an identity for it and it sets it up, why wait three minutes for it?<\/p>\n

There were a lot of vocal drop-ins on \u2018True\u2019 and then with \u2018Gold\u2019, when I came to mixing that it\u2019s literally \u2018thank you for coming…\u2019 drop \u2018…sorry the chairs are all worn…\u2019 drop. I can remember, it\u2019s still in my head because we were doing it through the night and we were all going mad. I think that\u2019s down to care and correcting tuning where it needed correcting. The point is that myself and Steve [Jolley] were both musicians. There are records out there that I\u2019ve heard where I think \u2018whoever\u2019s produced this is tone deaf!\u2019 I couldn\u2019t stand out of tune vocals. The vocal for \u2018True\u2019 took over a week to record. One time Colin Thurston was working with Duran Duran in the studio next door to us and Colin and I became friends. Simon Le Bon was really learning to sing at that time with Colin. It was a challenge when you\u2019d got singers who were struggling. We had no Autotune then, we had a harmoniser with which you could tweak things a bit here and there but we had no constant control. (Sat nav and Autotune are the two other greatest inventions in my life!) So I came up with this double tracking thing, the Beatles would use something like a 27 ms delay, but I thought that you could sense that it was artificial. What I used to do on the 24 track was jack out the vocal into the harmoniser and change the pitch slightly and then bounce it to another track with the machine in record but winding the varispeed all over the place, so the varispeed was shifting the delay between the two voices. So the machine would be varispeeding all over the place: 30 ips down to 7 1?2 so it was fluttering and wowing and everything else, plus it was changing the delay all <\/em>the time. When you played it back it sounded very close to a proper double track. Colin said, ‘what the hell are you doing?’ and in the same way I\u2019d go into his room and say ‘how are you doing that?’ and that\u2019s what happened, we used to exchange ideas because we were all struggling.<\/p>\n

One thing that I used to do a lot and some people didn\u2019t was riding the reverberation on vocals. I\u2019d have my fingers on the reverb sends all of the time. I wouldn\u2019t just leave it stationary, at the end of the lines you\u2019d quickly turn it up and by doing that you\u2019re keeping it alive. These days, people put their computers on, they\u2019ve got the track in their digital audio workstation (DAW) and they don\u2019t really do much when the mix is rendered, the DAW just goes \u2018whoosh!\u2019 and that\u2019s it. Yet, there\u2019s an interactive thing in doing, for example, live reverb rides in a real-time mix down. You\u2019re sitting at an actual desk, whereas there\u2019s no physical desk now. Some of the comedy times my engineer [Richard Lengyel] and I would have if we were alone mixing which we were most of the time: I\u2019d go \u2018right, you do those faders, I\u2019ll do this, do that for the chorus, lift that at this point\u2019 and then I\u2019d make a mistake and I wouldn\u2019t say anything and then I\u2019d wait for him to make a mistake and say \u2018oh for God\u2019s sake Richard, come on!\u2019 and he\u2019d say \u2018but, I saw you mess up the first chorus!\u2019. The thing is though that you\u2019re playing <\/em>the mix.<\/p>\n

There are some great mistakes in my records. For example we had no digital pre-delay so I used tape pre-delay, which is what people used to do, on \u2018Body Talk\u2019 it ran out so there\u2019s pre-delay on the strings but then at the end they\u2019re dry! Those things used to happen. I was working so much at that time that I\u2019d hear it on my alarm-clock radio and I\u2019d wake up going \u2018God almighty! What\u2019s going on with the echo on the strings?\u2019. In \u2018True\u2019 where it goes \u2018why can\u2019t the truth be said?\u2019 and then into the long reverb, that chorus has the hi-hat and the bass drum playing but the sidestick has disappeared, it\u2019s muted by mistake. It\u2019s just not there! Actually that did it a favour, what happens is that chorus sits down and then it picks up when it comes back in.<\/p>\n

For the thirtieth anniversary of True <\/em>Sky TV made a documentary. We got the multitrack from Metropolis Studios and pulled each of the parts up to have a listen. There\u2019s this piece of gear called the Marshall Time Modulator. It did time wobbling, flanging and all manner of quirky effects \u2013 brilliant, absolutely brilliant. In the verse of \u2018True\u2019 there\u2019s a piano with a sort of wow and flutter effect on it and that was done with the Marshall. We did it and printed it to tape out there [at Compass Point] I think.<\/p>\n

There are quite a lot of modulation effects going on in Night Dubbing<\/em>: pitch comes and goes and you get tape stops.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well we probably used it on that as well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an extended mix of \u2018I\u2019ll Fly for You\u2019, a track released as a single from Parade, <\/em>Spandau Ballet\u2019s second album with you. This \u2018Glide mix\u2019 appeared on the 12\u201d vinyl release of the single, as the B-side, and on subsequent extended reissues of Parade<\/em>. In terms of both style and technique it feels very much like a continuation of what you had done with Night Dubbing<\/em>. There\u2019s a tape stop effect that ends this mix. Is it actually a tape stop or is it a modulated delay that grinds to a halt?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably a tape stop because we got a bit obsessed with what we could do with the track, with the varispeed etc. We were doing everything that we shouldn\u2019t have done. Did we do any backwards stuff on that?<\/p>\n

I think there is, certainly some speeding and slowing down going on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My Otari multitrack tape machine used to play backwards, that was the great thing about it; you could play the multitrack backwards without having to re-lace the tape on the machine.<\/p>\n

You were involved in the Imagination \u2018best of\u2019 that was recently released by Sony. What was your input?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote and produced a new track called ‘Art Of Love’ with Leee John. I actually remastered some key tracks a while ago due to many master copies for international use being made on badly aligned analogue machines with mis-tracking Dolby noise reduction, I decided to track down the original analogue masters and transfer them with some EQ enhancement to digital media. This was done some years ago and these digital masters have been re-sweetened recently.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019ve already touched on, the technology of the studio has changed dramatically over the thirty years since True <\/em>and Night Dubbing<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently my partner and I were working on track using Garage Band on the iPad which is an incredible piece of software. First of all I thought \u2018this is amazing\u2019 and then \u2018oh no, it\u2019s a toy\u2019 and then \u2018no, this is actually pretty amazing\u2019. I started to write this song and because it\u2019s eight track and restricted like that it has turned out in a completely different way. It turned out so well, I just transferred the audio into the main computer and we\u2019ve used it. It\u2019s amazing. The thing is it reminded me of having a Tascam eight track.<\/p>\n

Well it\u2019s almost back to the same constraints that you were under thirty years ago for a completely different reason.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I think the new gadgets for recording have made us very lazy. When we used analogue equipment and went to the studio, if we were going to put a guitar down or anything like that, we\u2019d get the guitar sound, we\u2019d mic it up, DI or split it on an amp or whatever, decide what the balance of that was, usually because we were running out of tracks we couldn\u2019t just say \u2018let\u2019s put a DI on that and put the mic on that one\u2019, we\u2019d get a sound, put compression on it, chorus it and lay it down. So when you come in in the morning and you put the tape on, pull the fader up, the sound is there as you want it. The important part of that is that that sound that you\u2019ve got on the guitar is the tape saturation, the compression, the mixture of DI will influence the other parts: the way they sound, what you\u2019re doing and all of that and you don\u2019t up with this sort of infinite changing mush, which I\u2019m guilty of, I do it: cut and paste, cut and paste.<\/p>\n

It stops you and it makes you think, when you\u2019re restricted like that. There are some brilliant records that have been made on eight track tape. Sometimes in my car I\u2019ll put some jazz on or a compilation of some sixties stuff. And on the sixties stuff a lot of them have got split stereo so I just throw the balance and listen to, for example, the Hollies isolated and then listen to the drums. It\u2019s fascinating, even for me who\u2019s sat in a studio for thirty years, it\u2019s really interesting to hear this stuff isolated. It\u2019s quite eerie, it\u2019s the only medium where you can get the multitrack and revisit it and it\u2019s like isolated history, you can\u2019t do that with film. You put the tape on and you can hear the person singing, hear their guitar part and it\u2019s just frozen.<\/p>\n

But analogue technology comes with its own set of stresses. The lack of an \u2018undo\u2019 button on tape recorders for example.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, you haven\u2019t lived until you\u2019ve wiped a lead vocal! I remember when we got the Studer A800 multitrack machine the most annoying thing about it was that, whereas on all the other manufacturers\u2019 remotes the safe, sync , play etc. controls were in groups of eight tracks, the idiots at Studer decided to do it rows of six. It used to throw us all the time! You\u2019d realise \u2018oh no! I\u2019ve just dropped in on the lead vocal track\u2019. It was one of the tape-operator\u2019s jobs to leader-up a tape and if it was a master it would have to have line-up tones on it, 1 kHz, 10 kHz etc. so that they could line the machines up. Usually they\u2019d be doing the tones afterwards , so there\u2019d be leader, master, mixed master (stereo, no backup) and something would happen, like the phone would go, the tape-op would get distracted and it would go through the leader and wipe the master. That\u2019s happened: I had somebody drop in to record on all twenty four tracks with line-up tones at the end of a groove track that I mixed for Street Sounds where all the ad-libbing was and it just stopped. I had to break it down and do it in edits and so it just went round and round; I played it to them and they said \u2018where are all the great solos on the end\u2019, I said \u2018I didn\u2019t like them\u2019!<\/p>\n

Good for you! You saved the tape-op\u2019s bacon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They looked at me but I couldn\u2019t say that the tape-op had bloody wiped them! It was released actually and I think it was hit.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Myners, Neil. The Producers: Swain and Jolley<\/em>. Produced by Magnum Opus Broadcasting. Broadcast on BBC Radio 2, 7 May 2007. \u2018TP\u2019, \u2018Tony Swain Biography\u2019 at Internet Movie Database<\/em>, undated, <http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm1788172\/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm> (accessed 17th July 2014). Swain, Tony. Comment on \u2018Tony Swain Producer Composer\u2019 blog, 5th February 2013, < http:\/\/tonyswainproducer.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/08\/tony-swain-producer- composer.html?showComment=1360063648803#c5724806522905584155> (accessed 22nd July 2014).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Swain is a record producer, composer, session musician and A&R consultant. He has been active in the industry for over thirty years. He achieved significant success during the 1980s in a production and song-writing partnership with Steve Jolley, working with acts such as Imagination, Spandau Ballet and Alison Moyet. Their work has subsequently appeared (as direct samples or close emulations of key elements) in records by Mariah Carey, PM Dawn, Boards of Canada, 88 keys (featuring Kanye West) and The Pharcyde. Swain then went on to solo production work as well as A&R consultancy, eventually becoming Head of International A&R for the Universal Music Group. He has been nominated for Ivor Novello song writing and BPI production awards, was awarded a BPI technical excellence award and has also seen his work as executive producer (for Michael McDonald\u2019s Motown recordings) nominated for a Grammy award. This interview took place in 2013, thirty years since the release of the albums True by Spandau Ballet and Night Dubbing by Imagination, which epitomise the contribution made by Tony Swain and Steve Jolley to pop and dance music production in that era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-editorials-provocations","author-jez-wells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2987"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3037,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions\/3037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}