David Motion interview

2 Aug 02

(and a bit on 15 April 03 cos some of the original tape didn't come out properly)

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What you did to the songs was such a departure from what they'd done before. Did they have any reservations about any of it?

Not that I was aware of. Whether or not it was something I was ignoring in the general euphoria of it playing out that way and me having this enormous freedom, but basically everyone seemed happy with the way it was going. I did have a very clear idea about what I wanted to do, and I was always very interested in creating a very clear atmosphere, something very concrete something loaded and cool and with all sorts of interesting sounds. I was very interested in pushing the sonic side of it, lots and lots of processing, I was interested in mucking about more.

I have a very low attention span so I tended to work very quickly on it. We did the album in six or seven weeks, although there was a bit of pootling around at the end with a bit of remixing and that sort of stuff, it was essentially six weeks which was fairly quick at the time.

We never disagreed in a major way. Occasionally it might be, 'are you sure?,' that kind of thing, but I'd modify it.

Both of them remember it being a very easy very smooth working process.

It was. I never felt as if we were steamrollering them into something they didn't want to do, I never got any sniff of that.

You've said that they were happy with what you'd done to the songs. Were there any of their ideas you didn't go for?

No, not really, because they'd always deliver them as, 'well here are the songs'. It wasn't that it was not under discussion but it was kind of 'see what you can do with it', and that was it. My angle was very much that I was having fun and I'd come in one day and say, well, I feel a bit of Michel LeGrand or something, so - what was that track that David Bedford did, the last track; Being Cold - so with that I just started and thought it could be a really nice Windmills Of Your Mind kind of vibe and it kind of grew from that and sort of seemed to work, and the melodica added to that sort of thing.

Jill says she was actively discouraged by David Bedford from putting a melodica on it.

Oh yeah! But I just thought that added the final touch. I think that's the nice thing, you've got this quiet pro backing and this slightly ramshackle thing on top and that kind of gives it the edge. Going back to the Phil Thornalley things, they're a bit too polished, it might not have been the right song, I don't know, but maybe people sense if it's not quite real enough. I like quirky stuff, and I wasn't trying to thrash the quirkiness out of them, maybe that's why that worked. Those kind of touches really helped, I think.

It was nice to have those little bits of orchestral stuff on as well. I was doing lots of stuff like triggering white noise and tuned noise and stuff like that on 10 James Orr Street. On my version of Who Knows What Love Is, which you can hear on the reprise, it got quite in deep with the sampled brush sounds, stuff like that, each with their own slightly different reverb and positioning, that took quite a while to construct. And then there was this trumpeter Bruce Nockles; I was very keen to have a texture, there was something kind of missing, so I just sent him out and he said 'why not just do some long notes?' and then it was 'yeah that's great, but can you do more different ones?', so there are these clusters and this slightly drifty backing.

How much were WEA watching over your shoulder?

Not that much, really. I mean, they'd pop down from time to time. We did a week in [rural residential studio] Chipping Norton and that was fairly close to the end, and I think I might've arranged it like that cos I didn't really want them to come down that much. It was harder for them to do that if we were at Chipping Norton. I think we did a week at Martin Rushent's place as well, at Goring [rural Berkshire]. It wasn't actively to discourage people from coming down, they were welcome whenever. They didn't really come down that much, they were really just listening to the end result and saying 'that's great' or 'no it isn't'.

The moment that it really happened was with Since Yesterday. We did two mixes that were not quite right. The third one was the one, and that was a long mix, three days. By that stage we were also working with Trigger as engineer, and we were kind of trying to come at it more radically.

It is a very odd sounding record, even in the context of the album, it's not conventional pop by quite some way. The hardness of the drum sounds is really arresting.

Well that was one of those moments, we'd been working away for three days and we were determined to try and get it to work. It was quite late at night, I was saying to Trig, 'it's not quite right, let's pull the faders down and start again'. We started with the drums and he was EQing the snare and he just said, 'maybe it should be something like that' [turns hand vigorously], and there was this moment we went, 'yeah! That's it!'. It was very mid-EQ'd, a short bandwidth so although there was a lot of top on it there wasn't much bottom, and from that everything else slotted into place, the bass drum and snare just suggested everything else. The stuff was already on tape, but it was possible to cut away all the unnecessary stuff and it became very clean and angular, everything was there for a reason and Rose's verse vocals just sail over the top of it.

And then there was a moment of 'what the hell are we going to do with the middle eight?'. It was basically the same as everything else. That was another three in the morning one, I said, 'why don't we try gating it off the hi-hat, gate the whole track?' That was fairly radical, and it was born slightly out of desperation! We were pissing round, but we were having such fun cos at that point the rest of the track was in place, everything was happening, there was just this one section that wasn't up to the same level as everything else. So we tried that, and that was it, it just sounded great.

I remember thinking WE thought it was great, but then thinking it might be a bit dangerous for the record company. We had no idea when we sent it off and all went to bed at six or seven in the morning. And then at eleven or twelve o'clock I got a calls from everybody, Max phoned, Balfey phoned, Drummond phoned, saying there might be a couple of minor reservations but it's fantastic. So I thought, yeah, goal!

The song itself was rewritten quite late on, the version you would've heard on Peel sessions or demos would have been called Dance, which was substantially different.

I didn't realise that. It's possible she said, 'I'm going to rewrite it' and when she sang it it just sounded so natural, but I can't honestly remember that.

I remember doing something I did an awful lot at the time, at the end of a track to have all the vocals running at once for the end choruses. I think they really enjoyed that because all of a sudden it takes it to another level and you can see how everything fits nicely together, you get extra texture. I think it was something they hadn't really come across before. It worked really well, you just ran a section of the verse vocal while the chorus vocals go on at full tilt.

Part of what I did with a lot of it was just change. The chords were always fairly straightforward, the song came as them doing a demo, demo vocals sometimes with incomplete words and very straightforward guitar chords. Nothing wrong with it, but a lot of what I was doing was changing it so there was a lot of substitution so it's not just E or A or whatever, putting different things in the bass, just to make it all flow a bit better and have a bit more colour and texture.

I can't remember the process for that, but it was a very evolutionary thing. Things would get chopped around a lot as well, partly by the way that I was working in the studio. It was quite techno, in the sense that we were using a lot of technology, but it was still very early technology, so it was very early sequencing. A lot of the stuff was triggered - and this is stuff I'd picked up from people like Martin Rushent and Chris Hughes when I was tape-opping at Air - where you put linn drum code down and fire samples off that. Sometimes there'd be delays and the linn code would be before it by a second or something and you'd have to have a delay for the sample. So you'd put down the linn drum where you wanted it to start, just as a reference point. Then you'd load a sample of a particular drum sound into an AMS, which was a delay at the time, trim that down and then that would always be slightly late, so you'd have to turn the tape over to measure how far you were out. You could do it by ear if you like, but if you were doing it methodically you'd measure it so you'd get it bang in time. It was painstaking stuff. I'm amazed it only took six or seven weeks, that was quite quick considering the technology.

And then there was some early sequencing. I can't remember the name of the sequencer, but there was a guy called Gary Hutchens who I worked with a lot round that time. This is pre-computer as well, before Cubase and stuff like that.

Everything else had to support that, but it wasn't like a guitar band, it's not like we'll play this live. You kind of build a concept and graft this on to that, but I always believed about production that you want to leave somebody with a very clear impression after they've heard it, even if they can't necessarily remember the melody you want to leave them with a very clear sense of atmosphere. And the atmosphere needs to kind of match what they look like and what they're trying to project.

How do you remember the working relationship between Rose and Jill?

Very friendly, very kind of tight. They seemed very close. The more I got to know them the more I realised how different they were. They seemed to get on really well, I never really saw them argue but they were coming from slightly different places I think. Rose was always slightly kind of -you can see it in the vocals - her vocals are harder, possibly less... if I say 'sentimental' it sounds like I'm saying Jill's ARE sentimental which they're not, but Jill's were always softer and sweeter and that's why quite often she would be doing the chorus ethereal stuff, Jill's was always more logical and Rose's voice would always cut much more. That's how they were as people as well.

I never really saw them arguing, they seemed quite close. They also had their support network as well, 'entourage' is a strong word but Jill's boyfriend at the time, Peter, was with her everywhere. With her agoraphobia and everything, she would appear in a cab and then he would always be around. I don't know if [Rose's husband] Drew was around that much, but there was a sense that it wasn't just Rose and Jill, there were other kind of lobby parties around.

Did it seem like an equal partnership between them?

It did to me. I was very keen for there to be a good relationship amongst the three of us, but I always saw them as presenting a fairly unified front. I don't remember thinking, 'if I can get Rose on my side on this one we can get it through,' or it ever being anything like that. They seemed to be getting on really well, and be having fun also with the forthcoming success.

I think they did get a little frustrated with the lack of time they had. The cabs would start to arrive later. That was such a record company thing in those days, instead of travelling by tube or any other way it'd always be a cab from home, a cab back. They'd have more marketing meetings and have to go, as it got closer to the end there was more of that which had an impact on our time. Which gave me space to do even more stuff.

There was a residual thing about the album, that Rob Dickins was saying about my sound basically, which was that it was incredibly bright and it hurt his ears and there was no bass and stuff like that. Which I don't think is really true, although I was very fond of that kind of that really bright, jangly, angular kind of sound. Which is why Phil Thornalley did a couple of tracks on the album. Obviously I'm bound to say this, but I still think my versions are better, but his were much smoother and more commercial really.

I was just about to ask this, what brought Phil Thornalley in?

I think because of this residual thing that somehow my sound was a bit hard. They - that's Rob and Max - were obsessed about things crossing over into the States. I'm not sure Strawberry Switchblade were ever a Stateside proposition.

I don't think anything was ever even released in the USA.

No, but they identified that if it was smoother and a little bit softer it might work better for the States. We did have this ongoing tension between us, Rob and Max versus myself, about the sound. I loved it, the brighter the better as far as I was concerned at the time but, as I said, I did have my own agenda. So he [Phil Thornalley] was brought in and he did Jolene and he did..

It was Clive Langer did Jolene, Phil Thornalley did Let Her Go and Who Knows What Love Is.

Yeah. My version of Who Knows What Love Is, there's the reprise at the end, which forms the basis of my version. I only just relistened to it today for the first time in five or six years and a lot of the arrangement was stuff lifted straight off mine. They were quite open about it, they said 'all the arrangement stuff is fantastic but if you can't get that sound we need to try it with somebody else'. Phil Thornalley had been doing the Thompson Twins - I don't know if that was the same time, but I think it was [it was earlier: Thornalley engineered the two previous Thompson Twins albums] - and he was just starting to work with The Cure then and was seen as a useful choice.

Do you still have copies of your versions of the other two tracks?

I probably do. I need to dig them out. I've got an original test pressing with the original running order which I just saw today. I'd need to have a little poke around and see what I can find.

There was also... I don't know if we ever finished it... I'm a bit hazy on my memory... we did two more tracks after the body of the album, and I think there's a version of Let Her Go that I did and then there was one other track, I can't remember the name. We did two more tracks down at Sarm East and they were never released. I can't remember what it was, it might've been the sort of thing where Since Yesterday had been a hit and there was a certain kind of acknowledgement that maybe it was right for me to be doing it or something - this is a guess rather than anything else - and we did do another two tracks and for whatever reason they weren't released. I'll try and find those. It might only be a backing track.

They were very very busy, the second the single came out they were very busy with interviews and stuff, I didn't see much of them for ages after that.

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