ISSUE 15 I
PORT
UNI T Y
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MM
SUP
TIVE CO
MAGAZINE
THE CR
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S PA N D A U
JOE WEST
BALLET
The new romantic supergroup talk songwriting & stadium shows
Hit making, mixing & cigar smoking in Nashville
BEARDYMAN
DIMITRI VEGAS & LIKE MIKE
MAY / JUN 2016 RRP $6.95 USA/$7.95 CANADA
UK beatboxing expert gets everyone inspired at Electric Brixton
The world #1 DJ pairing reveal how Ibiza changed their world forever
I M O G E N H E A P T U R N I N G O N
T H E
I T S
W O R L D
F E E T
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Contents #15 Cover Story P30 / Imogen Heap
Grammy-winning columnist, DJ Swivel, talks Beyoncé and Drake, two of the world’s musical uber-powers.
08 SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS
We explore the invisible diamonds of music, courtesy of our Ibiza correspondents at Sonic Vista Studios.
10 MOGUAI
An insight into songwriting and collaboration from Moguai, one of Germany’s finest DJs and producers.
12 BROTHERS IN ARMS
Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, the world’s number one DJs, speak out about their live shows, and how Ibiza changed their lives forever.
14
JOE WEST
We get invited into Joe West’s Nashville-based musical hub to discuss songwriting, record production, and Music Row.
18 ZACH FOWLER
LoCash bassist and band leader, Zach Fowler, tells us what not to do in Nashville if you really want to succeed.
20 KAT DEAL
Trumpet, trombone, flute, vocals, record production. It’s all in a day’s work for this London-based songstress.
22 DOING THE LAMBETH TALK
Beardyman and his Dream Team recently delivered one of the shows of the year in Brixton. He reveals exactly how he did it.
25 ESPA-NENTIONALLY SPEAKING
44 MUSIC MAKER
26 SPANDAU BALLET
46 PULLED APART BY HORSES
She’s collaborating with Linda Perry in LA, and a new record is on the way. Meet the lovely ESPA.
We chat to the legendary New Romantics about their rollercoaster of a musical journey, and the successful 2015 revival.
30 IMOGEN HEAP
Multi-talented songwriter and producer, Imogen Heap, is turning the world on its feet with her superb Mycelia initiative. A must-read for any musician, or music fan.
34 PAUL YOUNG
The ‘80s megastar is back with his first album in more than 20 years – and it’s bloody good, too.
36 WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS
Olivia Ray gives you her take on the much talked about new Beyoncé album, Lemonade.
38 THE LUMINEERS
We chat to Brad Galvin and Josh Osmond about life on the road with The Lumineers.
40 DAN GILLESPIE SELLS
The Feeling frontman talks about the band’s new album, and how it feels supporting Jeff Lynne’s ELO on tour.
42 JEFF LYNNE’S ELO
We speak to front of house engineer, Gary Bradshaw, about working on the ELO world tour.
H E A D L I N E R | I S S U E # 1 5 | J U N - J U LY
Oscar-shortlisted producer and songwriter, Pete Boxsta Martin, talks composition, artist relations, and music technology.
The talented Leeds-based rockers are making a new album, but wish there were a few more record stores to sell it in.
48 EXHIBITIONISM
We dive into the Saatchi Gallery in London’s Sloane Square to experience the fantastic Rolling Stones music exhibition.
50 IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BASS
Mark Egan could be the most recorded fretless bassist of all time, and it’s easy to hear why.
52 BRENDAN COLE
The Strictly Come Dancing star brings an eclectic mix of music and dance to the UK’s leading theatres.
54 AMPLIFIED
We head to one of Nashville’s finest rehearsal facilities to find out all about its new sound system.
56 INDIA’S AUDIO EVOLUTION
EDM has hit India in a big way, and Warren D’Souza is making the most of it.
58 GRUMPY OLD ROADIE
An amusing and quite enlightening rant from Robert, our resident roadie columnist.
PHOTO : IMOGEN HEAP BY JEREMY COWART
06 SWIVEL ON THIS
#15
FROM THE EDITOR W
elcome to Issue 15 of Headliner, where we bring you a fascinating interview with one of the most forward-thinking artists of this generation: Imogen Heap. Not only has Imogen broken the mould musically over the last 20 years, with her unique vocal sampling, production techniques, and heartfelt songs, she’s now ready to turn the music world on its feet through her new and exciting initiative, Mycelia. Any artist, musician, or even music fan really should have a read of this and find out more about Imogen’s masterplan which, if successful, will make sure all artists are remunerated completely fairly across the globe. Wouldn’t that be nice? By the way, have you ever met Beardyman? Well we have, and we were lucky enough to witness the award-winning beatboxer’s stunning 100% improvised show at Electric Brixton earlier this year. The guy is a genius, we’ve decided, and hilarious, too. Check out the interview and show review. Then it’s off to Ibiza to speak to the world’s number one DJs, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, about the affect the White Island has had on their career, and how they manage to keep up appearances night after night, pumping music out to the masses across the globe, with a few drinks and a nice dinner before each show. Tough life, eh? Across the pond, we’re in Nashville talking to cigar-smoking hit-maker, Joe West. Not only has he penned and also tracked a series of hit records, he’s a Grammy-winning producer, and an acclaimed mix engineer, too. And if he really wants to, he can jump on his bicycle, and be at Kenny Chesney’s door in just 10 minutes. We also single out two ladies to watch for 2016: Espa has been busy writing songs with the legend that is Linda Perry; and Kat Deal makes sweet music using brass instruments she buys off eBay. And if that isn’t enough, check out our very frank chat with ‘80s icon, Paul Young, whose new record deserves some serious credit. Or our production profiles with The Lumineers, who have a number one album in the UK, US, and Canada at the time of writing; and Jeff Lynne’s ELO – now what a show that is, with excellent support from The Feeling, whose frontman, Dan Gillespie Sells, talks about that unique gigging experience, and the band’s latest album. We hope you enjoy the issue, and thanks for choosing Headliner. Paul Watson Editor
SOCIALISE WITH US: headlinermagazine.net @Headlinerhub HeadlinerHub headlinermagazine www.tsu.co/headliner_magazine H E A D L I N E R | I S S U E # 1 5 | M AY- J U N
CONTACT Paul Watson paul@headlinerhub.com +44(0)7952-839296
Graham Kirk graham@gkirkmedia.com +44(0)7872-461938
Art Director Eimear O’Connor
Contributors Adam Protz Jordan Young Jonathan Tessier Louis Henry Sarmiento II Robert the Roadie Olivia Ray
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COMMENT DJ SWIVEL
Swivel on this VIEWS. No, not from my hotel
overlooking Central Park. Rather, the highly anticipated album by Toronto’s own, Drake. Now I tend to stay away from album reviews in this column, because frankly, I think that’s the one area my opinion doesn’t truly matter. We all have equal opinions on music, and I’d like this column to carry
“I SPENT TWO YEARS WORKING WITH BEYONCE, AND SHE’S THE BEST, HANDS DOWN; BUT TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE, AND IN THIS CASE, IT’S DRAKE’S TIME.” weight. So screw your five stars, mics, diamonds, or any other meaningless metric. This column is about a shift in the culture of urban music. Recently, we saw two major albums drop: Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and Drake’s Views. Both made big waves in the industry and filled up my Twitter, Instagram, and every other social media feed, as they should have. Music drives the culture, and these are two of the biggest (and most talented) artists ever to do it. But I saw a very unique shift happen this week, almost a passing of the torch, if you will. Now, by no means is this article meant to be a comparison of Beyoncé and Drake. Both artists are phenomenal, uber-talented, visionary, culture-drivers, and set the bar in their own ways. But what we witnessed this week was the next generation of artist really take centre stage. Both albums came out to massive fanfare. Beyonce with her surprise release and HBO film, and Drake with a giant Apple Music push, and huge momentum coming off a year that saw two massively selling mixtapes, the Hotline Bling video, and the best rap diss record in recent history. Now, I have to say, I listened to both albums, and they are both equally great offerings. Beyoncé delivered a raw album, with
06 HEADLINER
a great blend of songs and styles, yet with a very cohesive message across the entire album. A true body of work, which requires listening from top to bottom. We’ve sorely missed that in music. And Drake gave us a beautifully crafted album with honest lyrics, plenty of notable bars, and a complex musical score that seems to fit together tightly like a woven tapestry. Beyoncé came out, and began her tour the same week, and managed to push a very respectable 500k units in the first week, landing Lemonade the top spot on the Billboard 200. Then Drake came out the following week, moved over 650k units in the first day, and silenced much of the hype around Lemonade. The week isn’t over, but estimates seem to land him at about 850k units for the week. I’ll be the first to admit, sales don’t mean everything, and perhaps there were other factors that pushed Drake over the top in comparison, like the initial Tidal-only release of Lemonade. But I’d venture to say it goes beyond that. Drake has captured the entire new generation: girls, guys, young, old; everyone seems to listen to Drake, and he always delivers a broad spectrum of music, and somehow can turn even the most savage of hip hop diss records into bonafide pop smashes. We’ve never seen that before. What we’re seeing is the younger generation beginning to transition to the driver’s seat of culture, and eventually this pushes the older artists to the side. There’s only so much room in our pop culture lexicon, and with artists like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Adele, and Drake, we’re beginning to see the younger artists take centre stage. But this is Beyoncé, she’s the biggest artist on the planet, right? Who can do what she does? Let me help you, the answer is NOBODY. Trust me, I know; I spent two years working with her, and she’s the best. Hands down. But time waits for no one, and in this case, it’s Drake’s time. In fact, one might argue it’s been Drake’s time for the last five or six years. The difference with Views is, there’s nobody standing in his way. We’ve seen this before. Eminem had his moment, 50 Cent had his moment, Kanye had his moment. And eventually the next generation comes along and captures the people. In the last 14 months, Drake has captured the people with not one, but three number one albums, countless singles, and Ws across the board, and as a proud Torontonian working in the music business, I just have one thing to say, “What a time to be alive!”
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SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS
INVISIBLE DIAMONDS OF MUSIC
Making music is a journey. Growth is spawned from our constant desire to learn, and if we pay close attention to the silence between each sound, therein lies a world of possibilities. Words Louis Henry Sarmiento II & Jonathan Tessier
Music is born when you hit a note, and it also exists when you don’t. Perceivable qualities, like groove, feel, and vibe; these are all elements that have an impact on the way music is created and experienced. At Sonic Vista Studios, we like to call them invisible diamonds of music, because they are as precious as the golden cornerstones of notes that create the music we love to hear. When we play an instrument, be it a guitar or a MIDI keyboard, there are components that shape the way music is performed (live, or on a record), the most popular being notes, chords, melodies, and rhythm. However, there are other elements that play a crucial part in the performance of music, and that’s what we will be focusing on today. Groove An unspecifiable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular, and attractive way, working to draw the listener in. Musicologists have argued that a groove is an understanding of a rhythmic pattern and an intuitive sense of motion that stimulates listeners’ dancing or foot tapping.
08 HEADLINER
Emotion (AKA feel) Bass legend, Victor Wooten, wrote a book called The Music Lesson, a wonderful chef d’oeuvre about music that illustrates the equal importance of notes, articulation, technique, dynamics, rhythm, tone, phrasing, space, and feel. He describes feel as ‘the musician’s capacity to communicate a musical phrase into an emotion’. If the listener is able to grasp the message that is being conveyed, we can rightfully say that the musician was able to get across the right feel. Vibe A distinctive emotional atmosphere. The word is short for vibration, and can be explained as an emotional reaction to the aura felt to belong to a person, place, or thing. When a song has vibe, it means that the music is able to transport the listener into a specific place in his or her mind. Vibe highlights the familiar and nostalgic element of music, which helps the listener identify with the song.
Energy A combination of movement and tensions. In music, energy is an intangible element that causes a stimulus within the listener. When a piece of music is said to have energy, it means that it’s able to create a physical reaction to the listener. Essential to the existence of groove, the energy of a song is what causes the listeners to simply want to move. This movement can manifest itself through behaviours such as dancing, jumping, or even moshing. Understanding energy is vital because it allows the musician to understand the dynamics of a song, which consequently allows the composer to control the listening experience for the end consumer. Balance When all the pieces of a song work in harmony, and the musical experience sounds effortless. For art to be considered beautiful, there needs to be symmetry, so all the parts must flow together harmoniously. It’s true that ‘simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication’ (Da Vinci), but sometimes, ‘simple can be harder than complex’ (Steve Jobs).
Audio Effects Tools used by musicians; the lifeline of a great mix. Mixing is the process of blending all the individual tracks in a recording to create a version of the song that sounds as good as possible. Like a painter will use colours to create an illustration, the mix engineer will use effects (and other tools) to create depth, width, and harmony within a song. Mixing is an art form in its own right, and should be understood by every music creator in order to create the best recording possible. Technically, music is an invisible experience; we are entertained by something we cannot see, touch, taste, or smell - only hear. It’s an invisible treasure, and if we think about it, these invisible diamonds are quite visible to the human ear. Acknowledging the existence of these elements will help any music maker a more sensitive creator; and it will help them increase the quality of music they offer to their audience. www.sonicvistastudios.com
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Q&A MOGUAI
“I LOVE TO MAKE BOTH ELECTRONIC AND POP MUSIC, BUT IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE.” It turned out they loved it, took my music, and wrote a pop song over it. That was pretty cool. So you were doing EDM/pop crossovers before the EDM/pop crossover came about, then..? [laughs] Yeah, maybe, but it wasn’t planned that way! I had my singles out, and they came to me. I grew up with punk rock, as at the time, I was very into skateboarding; and then electronic music blew up in Germany. Before that, I was into hip hop, and then I became a mod; I’m very into modern soul and ska. I just love all music, really!
NEW HORIZONS
Moguai, AKA André Tegeler, is one of Germany’s most creative international DJs. Although more commonly associated with electronic music, he has written music for Sugababes and Girls Aloud, and after recently collaborating with a band from LA on what he describes as, ‘indie, guitar-driven, melodic music’, Moguai finds himself moving more in that direction. Headliner digs a little deeper... So what are you working on at the moment, then? I am always trying to create something new, and for the next year at least, I am signed to Warner Chappell worldwide to produce three singles, collaborating with pop/rock artists. The first one has an awesome vocal courtesy of Tom Kane, an English guy; for me, it sounds like an Empire of the Sun track in a 2016 Moguai remix! So that’s what I am doing right now. You’re not adverse to collaboration work, of course... Well, I am doing tracks for DJs also, but some tracks are just made for great songwriting; and yes, what I did in the past with bands like Sugababes and Girls Aloud let me combine my music with their lyrics and pop influences. The song I did for Sugababes [which became In The Middle] was my music, a track which I released years ago in the UK, and they then wrote the lyrics; it was the same with Girls Aloud with Something Kind of Ooh – the original was an instrumental single of mine called Get On.
10 HEADLINER
What’s your current production set-up? Well, I had two big studios close to Dusseldorf with lots of hardware, but now I am very comfortable producing ‘in the box’. I still have and still use some of the old samplers, such as the Akai stuff or the Emulator, and synths like the Roland JD-800 or Kurzweil K2000; then I sample these sounds and put them in the box. It’s great to have everything in the box, but I sample lots of stuff from my old machines. You’ve recently collaborated with Moby, right? That seems a pretty good fit... Yes, I did two remixes for him, but I would love to collaborate properly. I played a show with Moby at the end of 2015 in LA, and we had a chat about working together; it will happen, it’s just a question of time. And yes, I agree, it’d be a perfect match, I think. How would you describe the electronic scene today? If you look at the charts over the last five years or so – take iTunes as an example – in the top 20, there will likely be a minimum of 10 electronic tracks made from guys who are out of these electronic scenes. It doesn’t matter if it’s trip hop or underground. So I do think it’s definitely time to honour more of this kind of music. I love to make both electronic and pop music, but it has to make sense. But I am also up for producing nice electronic music influenced by the likes of Pink Floyd or other ‘60s and ‘70s bands, but with a new sound. I am tired when I look on Beatport or when I go to festivals, most DJs play the same, to be sure the party is going on - and to entertain is important, but from the music production side, it’s important to try something new. It’s what I always did, and what I am always looking to do right now. I am proud of the productions I am working on at the moment, as they’re challenging, and there is a mix of old and new school; and it sounds to me like it’s a bit of a step ahead, which is very positive. www.moguai.com
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INTERVIEW DIMITRI VEGAS & LIKE MIKE
BROTHERS IN ARMS We sit down with revered Belgian DJs and producers, Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike, whose electro and big room house music recently took them to the number one spot on DJ Magazine’s annual Top 100 DJs poll. These talented siblings (real names Dimitri Thivaios and Michael Thivaios) chat to us about their humble beginnings, the Ibiza transition, and the evolution of the Belgian scene. How did it all begin for you guys? Dimitri: From a very early age, we were both into music, but I was the first to really get into buying records and DJing. Seeing music as much more than a hobby: as a career. I started DJing when I was 13, and really pushed myself from very early on to try and make a career out of it, which led me to moving to Majorca, and then later, Ibiza. Mike: I was always into hip hop; it took me a few years to really catch up on the whole electronic music scene. But then around 2003, I visited Ibiza, and everything changed for me. The scene has changed dramatically since then, right? Dimitri: Yeah, it’s become a bigger, more global scene since those days.
12 HEADLINER
It’s evolved into something so wide reaching with so many new genres and artists. It’s exciting. Mike: It’s definitely evolved for the better with so much on offer nowadays, yes. What do you bring to the table that perhaps some other DJs don’t? Mike: I think it’s a spirit and a relationship with the crowd that’s hard to rival. Dimitri: For us, we’re just doing what we love; we’re not trying to compete with anyone. What matters when we’re on stage is what the crowd is reacting to: are they enjoying it, and how can we improve the gig for their benefit? Your music tastes must be
pretty eclectic - what are your main influences? Mike: For me, it’s hip hop, early electronic music... It’s really varied, actually. Dimitri: As a DJ, it’s important to always be searching for new music, discovering new sounds and ideas from what’s out there, whether that’s new or old. So our tastes come from all the years we’ve put in, as well as all the digging we do for new music. What is a current ‘day in the life’ for each of you, if there is such a thing..? Dimitri: We focus heavily on our music whether we’re touring or at home. The days are enormously varied because we’re always travelling, or in a studio somewhere, or having meetings with our team. The art of it all is to stay focused, and set targets.
Mike: I think we’re very good at finding our own space, actually, which helps a lot, because we both like to work on ideas separately when it comes to making music, and then come together in the latter stages. How do you prepare for the rigorous schedules both mentally and physically? Mike: It’s about eating well, looking after yourself, and giving yourself time to relax and unwind in between shows. On show night, we’re ready. We’ll enjoy a good meal and some light drinks with our tour team and friends before the gig, then to the venue where we will both prepare for the show. We like to enjoy the occasion just before the show, and soak up the atmosphere. What’s your setup? Dimitri: We have a number of
INTERVIEW DIMITRI VEGAS & LIKE MIKE
places that we work in, so we have different bits of gear in each studio. The biggest thing for us is having a good monitoring setup and acoustic environment, so I would say the most important part of our studio is our monitors. We like to use the Grimm Audio LS1s with the Trinnov Audio Pro Acoustic Optimizer. Mike: We like to get hands-on in the studio when we can, so we have a few hardware synths we use a lot. The Moog Minimoog Voyager is great, as well as the Korg MS-20 mini for those dirtier sounds. LennarDigital’s Sylenth plugin can also be heard in a lot of our tracks; it sounds massive! What are your main go-tos? Dimitri: We’ve been using Waves plugins for a while now; it’s not a question of why Waves, but really why not? They’re the premium plugin, and so a must for any producer. You know you’re using quality when the likes of Abbey Road Studios are collaborating with Waves. Waves are some of our favourite plugins for audio processing, and are most often the ones we reach for first. The CLA-2 compressor is great on basses as it gives it so much richness and character, and the H-Delay is a great delay plugin also. Using the parameters like the modulation, filters, and analogue settings, you can get a lot of movement, and some crazy effects. The ping-pong helps to give a sound a lot of depth, too!
13 HEADLINER
“DR. DRE IS A FIGURE THAT YOU HAVE TO GIVE HUGE AMOUNTS OF RESPECT TO.” Mike: We use the S1 Imager a lot, too; if your track is sounding a bit narrow, applying it to a select number of elements can really help to give the track width, and make the mix come alive. We find that if we have go-to plugins we can rely on, when we want to process a sound in a certain way, this really improves our workflow, as we’re not wasting time going through different plugins. How has the Belgian scene evolved since you guys started out as a duo? Dimitri: The reach of dance music has gone global, and of course this has been felt in Belgium. Seeing tracks of ours like The Hum and Higher Places reach number one in the Belgian singles chart is something we could only have dreamed of when we started out. It’s great to see the music we love and live for having such success in our home country.
Mike: You only have to look at the impact Tomorrowland has had on the world scene to see the benefits it has back home in Belgium. It’s so global now; we’re reaching so many people with our music. It’s incredible to see how far that festival has come since it first started in 2005. Who in the industry do you look up to the most? Mike: For me, Dr. Dre is a figure that you have to give huge amounts of respect to. A game-changer! Dimitri: Yeah, anyone who has ridden their own wave and been successful, really: guys like Tiësto and Carl Cox are great examples of inspirers from within the dance music world. What would you say is your most memorable show? Big question, I’m sure... Dimitri: [smiles] Yeah, that’s a
tough one, because we play so many great and memorable shows! Tomorrowland is always a special one for us; it’s our home, and the place we always give something truly magical at. It’s what Tomorrowland is all about. We love to play big shows, and festivals are a perfect setting for that. Mike: Selling out our solo arena show at Antwerp’s Sportpaleis for our Bringing The World The Madness is definitely up there. It’s an incredible venue, and a big homecoming show for us. We have another two events there this year in December at the arena which we sold out in less than 40 minutes - something you only saw with people like Michael Jackson and Beyoncé... Now that’s mad! Dimitri: Yeah, those shows are definitely our favourites, too. We had such an amazing time, and this year, we’re going to do it all again, but only bigger and better. Finally guys, what’s the most noticeable change you’ve seen in the industry since you started out? Mike: It has to be the production around the shows, and the experience the fan gets from not just the DJ, but the entire set-up and stage. It’s amazing, and great to see all this finally happening. www.dimitrivegasandlikemike.com www.waves.com
SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS
Music is born when you hit a note and it also exists when you don’t. Perceivable qualities, like groove, feel, and vibe; these are all elements that have an impact on the way music is created and experienced. At Sonic Vista Studios, we like to call them invisible diamonds of music, because they are as precious as the golden cornerstones of notes that create the music we love to hear. When we play an instrument, be it a guitar or a MIDI keyboard, there are components that shape the way music is performed (live, or on a record), the most popular being notes, chords, melodies, and rhythm. However, there are other elements that play a crucial part in the performance of music, and that’s what we will be focusing on today.
Groove Described as an unspecifiable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular, and attractive way, working to draw the listener in. Musicologists have argued that a groove is an understanding of a rhythmic pattern and an intuitive sense of motion that stimulates dancing or foot tapping on the part
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of the listeners. Emotion (AKA feel) Bass legend Victor Wooten wrote a book called The Music Lesson, a wonderful chef d’oeuvre about music that illustrates the equal importance of notes, articulation, technique, dynamics, rhythm, tone, phrasing, space, and feel. He describes feel as ‘the musician’s capacity to communicate a musical phrase into an emotion’. If the listener is able to grasp the message that is being conveyed, we can rightfully say that the musician was able to get across the right feel. Vibe A distinctive emotional atmosphere. The word is short for vibration, and can be explained as an emotional reaction to the aura felt to belong to a person, place, or thing. When a song has vibe, it means that the music is able to transport the listener into a specific place in his or her mind. Vibe highlights the familiar and nostalgic element of music, which helps the listener identify with the song. Energy A combination of movement and
tensions. In music, energy is an intangible element that causes a stimulus within the listener. When a piece of music is said to have energy, it means that it’s able to create a physical reaction to the listener. Essential to the existence of groove, the energy of a song is what causes the listeners to simply want to move. This movement can manifest itself through behaviours such as dancing, jumping, or even moshing. Understanding energy is vital because it allows the musician to understand the dynamics of a song, which consequently allows the composer to control the listening experience for the end consumer. Balance When all the pieces of a song work in harmony, and the musical experience sounds effortless. For art to be considered beautiful, there needs to be some form of symmetry, therefore all the parts must flow together harmoniously. It’s true that ‘simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication’ (Da Vinci), but sometimes, ‘simple can be harder than complex’ (Steve Jobs). Quality is born out of hard work.
Audio Effects Tools used by musicians; the lifeline of a great mix. Mixing is the process of blending all the individual tracks in a recording to create a version of the song that sounds as good as possible. Like a painter will use colours to create an illustration, the mix engineer will use effects (and other tools) to create depth, width, and harmony within a song. Mixing is an art form in its own right, and should be understood by every music creator in order to create the best recording possible. Technically, music is an invisible experience, because we are entertained by something we cannot see, touch, taste, or smell - only hear. Music itself is an invisible treasure, and if we think about it, these invisible diamonds are actually quite visible to the human ear. At Sonic Vista Studios, we believe that acknowledging the existence of these elements will help any music maker become a more sensitive creator, a better performer; but more importantly, it will help them increase the quality of music they offer to their audience. www.sonicvistastudios.com
INTERVIEW JOE WEST
MIXING THE OLD WITH THE NEW
We descend on one of the most stunning studios we’ve ever seen: a musical hub close to Music Row, Nashville, where songwriting, producing, mixing, and inspirational things happen. This is the home of Joe West: record producer, hit maker, music lover, cigar smoker. Come on in...
J
oe West started out working as a staff engineer in his home town of Pittsburgh, and achieved his first successes with some local bands who got signed off the back of some of his recordings. This would lead him to the Big Apple, where he had a top-end facility in the middle of Chelsea, and went on to work on some pretty sizeable records. But it was a move to Nashville that really set his musical wheels in motion. “As a kid, I was always imagining being successful; if I had one gold record, I imagined I would have made it, but when you get to where you want to be, every success brings some amount of agony, too; it made me realise that life is what you make of it,” West reflects, with a smile. “When I moved to Nashville and worked on that Emmylou Harris record [with Daniel Lanois in 2002], which was nominated for a Grammy, and then the Warren Zevon record that won a Grammy, I knew I was doing the right thing, and was on the right track.” West leased three or four rooms in Nashville before buying a place
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outright; he looked all over for commercial property, then decided to build his own facility: a stunning 40ft x 60ft purpose built barn, some 30
“I DID KIND OF BECOME THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE OF THE MUSIC BIZ.” minutes from Music Row. “It’s got a lot of volume, and a lot of space,” West smiles, adding that he is just a short bike ride away from Kenny Chesney, George Jones, and Luke Bryant. “When I did that Emmylou record, the way they wanted to record it meant everyone being in one room. I remember sweating that so hard, only to find out that when I pulled the faders up, it was really unique and beautiful. I
could now never go back to separate rooms, or go down a hallway, or look in a video camera to see someone playing in another room.” Which would explain the expansive, open plan layout of his studio, housed within the giant barn. According to West, his room ‘works commercially’, but it was designed and built because he had a workload, hence the fact it didn’t need to be on Music Row. So was there a master plan to all of this, Joe, or did it just ‘happen’? “[smiles] I don’t know that I had a master plan as such, but I did kind of become the Swiss Army Knife of the music biz,” he laughs. “People would ask me to do stuff, whether it be 5.1 surround, recording a 55-piece symphony, or doing film, TV, making hit records, or even mastering. And if I honour the art and pursue it, why can’t I do all that?” Why not, indeed. West admits he was always in fear of being out of work, as he recalls his father being out of work when the steel mills went down in Pittsburgh. It seems to have driven him on to be positive and determined in everything he does. “I do love doing a lot of things, I
have to say,” West enthuses, recalling a story of him ‘nodding off at the console’ once during tracking days when he was a kid, and confessing that he is ‘a little ADD in that regard’. “But I like to figure out new stuff, you know? And change things up a bit.” West has had multiple number one singles as well as cuts for the likes of Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, Toby Keith, and Jimmy Wayne to name a few. It was a moment with Wayne, in fact, that provided another pivotal point in his career. “The first time I had written, produced, played the majority of the stuff on a record, even cut the BVs, was this three-week number one [single] for Jimmy Wayne, Do You Believe Me,” West recalls, fondly. “That became ‘a Joe West thing’, and that’s when people looked for me out of a crowd. It was being played 80 times a week on one station, and in Nashville, we have five country stations, so 80 times on each of those, too - so double that now, and put it into every major market in the US, and it reaches critical mass and becomes a huge hit. That was really something else.” Wayne remains a great friend of
INTERVIEW JOE WEST
“EVERY SUCCESS BRINGS SOME AMOUNT OF AGONY, TOO; IT MADE ME REALISE THAT LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE OF IT.”
West’s; the two just did the Coca-Cola campaign for the Summer Push, in fact. “Soak it up man, and enjoy the ride,” West recalls Wayne telling him, when that record eventually went viral.
T
he Nashville pace is so quick, West explains, so every day he finds himself working, be it as a songwriter, producer, mix engineer, or sometimes all three..! That studio must have a very comfy chair... “[laughs] I’ve been doing this 27 years now, and really I was lucky enough as a kid just spending 10 years on tape machines, so I had the experience of large format world,” he says. “In 1998, I transferred over to a hybrid system - tape and Pro Tools, throwing tracks back and forth; and to this day, I still have a Studer tape machine, tons of analogue kit, tube gear, broadcast stuff - anything that will give me a vibe. So I have digital kit for what it does really well - and that is a lot – and then a lot of old pieces like a Neve 32-264, a Manley Pultec EQ, or an SSL compressor. Each piece has a purpose, and you want something to have personality, and have a little hair on it, you know? “Sometimes if you’re searching in a mix, you have a lot to have an opinion about, and you can shape your mix with some of this kit. Then when you need a hammer, you reach for a hammer.” West upgraded to a Pro Tools HD rig some eight years ago, and at that time began using a lot of Waves plugins. He’d had the Waves Gold Bundle for some time already, but a working relationship with the manufacturer opened the door to all the new plugins, and has led to the creation of his own Joe West Signature Plugin Series. “There’s not too much I can reveal about them at the moment, but I can say that my inspiration was to create plugins that make music come alive and are heavy on vibe, so they
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won’t be subtle,” he smiles. We can imagine! “That new plugin world has really taken me by surprise, because when you go to the presets, you get inspiration, and it takes your sound some place else. But much like the Waves LA2, whenever you use these new plugins, you immediately have an opinion about it and some level of inspiration. “Sometimes I just go through the presets, and then something will just work; and I’ll then tweak the release time. Working with Waves is like having a conversation with another person you trust, like an engineer; these plugins kind of talk back to you, and give you something really quick that you can say, ‘hey, I need to be doing that’. And not to mention the Waves modelling - it’s just incredible. “As an artist, when you’re looking for inspiration, just pull up an HCompressor or H-EQ, or the Eddie Kramer Tape Machine, or a lot of the JJP stuff - the 670, the West Coast Piano patch I use religiously. Then the Manny Marroquin stuff is great, too. I love the one knob stuff; talk about inspiration, you’ve got a whole other thing going on right there!” West explains that back in the day, he’d have an assistant come in to reset his SSL - even with all the automation - and then spend hours making printouts with pencil marks correlating to the settings of every piece of outboard gear. Not anymore, of course: “Even after two hours of recall, sitting down at the console, it was never the same as my original mix,” he smiles. “And nowadays, here you go, double click, and you’re back in the session making a tweak – it’s spot on.”
W
est is also a keen DiGiGrid user. Although he admits he was apprehensive at first, as it was hardware that needed to be brought in and installed, he soon became taken by its power and
INTERVIEW JOE WEST
multi-functionality: “When a new piece of hardware comes in, I worry about the situation: ‘am I gonna be a beta tester when not doing my work?’ But when I found out what it could do, I was very interested; it’s such a heavy box, and it does so much, it was tough to wrap my mind around its capabilities,” West enthuses. “But out of all the amazing things that it did, the one thing that I heard was, ‘ultralow latency plugins’, and I was sold on that alone, because when I am in my barn tracking seven guys at a time, if I can give them a mix in their headphones that lights them up like a record, they will play so much better, as they’ll be inspired.”
M
akes sense to me. So is DiGiGrid multi-tasking in the barn, then? “The best explanation I can give you for DiGiGrid is, it’s a porthole from anywhere,” West states. “When you put your track onto input, and there’s a producer or a co-writer in the control room, or on a couch working on the laptop, using an Ethernet connection, he or she can send you a drum loop you can use, a sample, a vocal – or you can use a laptop on the other side of the room with a guy in the live room that’s got a keyboard rig, and offload all that virtual DSP off to him. “It’s such an amazing box; it allows you to take your interfaces and put them 300 feet away in another building if you really want to. In New York, I used to mix at post production, accessing digi betas up three floors and sending audio to an Avid room down four flights of stairs; this is the kind of box that would allow you to do stuff like that. If anything, it suffers from being 10 boxes in one! Once you find your specific need, it’s a cure-all: not just for that solution, but for the future of what you want to do as far as expanding your studio or musical project.” DiGiGrid DLS is permanently wired into West’s system, and is used when he is tracking anybody live and needs low latency and a little bit of processing... So all the time, then? “[laughs] In a word, yes! Every single time, even if I’m hitting it on the front end with a really beautiful compressor and EQ and mic pre, and I’m going right in, I always end up putting something
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on it,” West confirms, adding that it’s also useful on the road. In what way, exactly? “OK so I had a deadline, and I had to be in Pittsburgh for a family issue, so I took a little Pro Tools rig and the DLS with me, and I was able to continue mixing. I actually mixed four of the songs off of the number one record by Joey and Rory [that I did] on my mother’s coffee table! And when I came back, I didn’t have to re-touch them. I put a final sort of two-buss thing on it, and printed the mix. “I have a passion project, too – me and another hit songwriter writing lots of stuff together, which
we put out under the band name, Lo-Fi; and that was toured with a full Pro Tools rig, with DLS for all our live DSP. It was great, because you can program a whole Pro Tools session for the entire concert that had not only lighting MIDI controls, but we were triggering video and a bunch of Waves plugins that were changing for each song; and it was DLS at the heart of that which allowed us to do it latency free. Amazing.” www.waves.com www.digigrid.net
Q&A ZACH FOWLER
ON TOUR WITH LOCASH ach Fowler hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico. For 11 years, he was in The James Douglas Show, and in 2014, made the move to Nashville, and ‘has been road dogging it ever since’. Today, Fowler is bassist and band leader for top country act, LoCash – a band whose popularity is growing exponentially. We chat to him about the band’s evolution, and why success in Nashville isn’t always a given.
So life has changed quite a bit since you left New Mexico, then? Yeah, I guess it has! Nashville is definitely a hub for everything; not just the music, but the music technology and the business end of the industry as well. It’s not only an incredible place to live, but the energy is unbelievable, too. Is the Nashville scene particularly competitive? Well, there’s a place for everybody, as long as you come prepared for it. Music is a 24/7 operation here in Nashville, and players are always needed, be it the Broadway thing downtown, or road work, or studio work. If you come in thinking you’ll clean up, that you don’t have to learn, then it’s gonna get ugly for you, but if you come in with passion, take it all in, and enjoy it for what it is, you will succeed. It’s every artist’s dream to perform in the big studios, and there are many still thriving; so many number one hits have been made here, but as well as the nostalgia of recording here, there is a certain sense of accomplishment when you go into one of those places and record. And the project studios are nice, too; I have recorded in a couple of really nice home studios, in fact – and you can do so much in them.
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“THE LECTROSONICS R400 HAS BEEN ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS.” Do you still have time for studio work these days, considering your role with LoCash? Not a lot! I started out as bassist, but amazingly enough, a couple of months in, I became band leader, so I am in charge of the live music aspect of their show as well. I have to make sure it’s tight, and that the musicians are prepared, so the show runs smoothly. My responsibilities have gone up a
little bit, and so has the pressure! It’s adventurous with these guys, as they like to go left field on me every now and again, but it’s fun by every definition of the word! So from a session bassist perspective, I have reverted to a live musician, really, and I will be on the road [with LoCash] for around 200 dates this year alone. If a session comes up, and I’m in town, sure I’ll take it, but I’m not in town all that much..! [laughs]
You need the freedom of being wireless on stage, and you use the Lectrosonics R400, right? Yeah, it’s funny how that relationship [with Lectrosonics] happened. It was doing jury duty in Albuquerque, and I served on a case with Gordon Moore, the CEO of the company, and he and I got chatting about wireless stuff, and it went from there! I started doing The James Douglas Show, then we got a regional TV show called The After After Party off of that, and we used Lectrosonics kit on that. That’s when their Quadra
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in-ear system came out. We also used the Lectrosonics stuff for the host and the show’s guests – that was the Lectrosonics Lab systems - so that’s been a solid relationship that continued when I went to Nashville. I couldn’t imagine using any other wireless system. I have used many of the ‘high dollar’ brands’ wireless systems, and none of them are as good as this. And the R400 especially, the tone is just unreal, and I have used it without a hiccup for five years now. I’ve been on some of the biggest festival stages with the likes of Keith Urban, the band Perry, and
a lot of the bigger names in country music, so god only knows how much wireless is going on around there! But every single time, the R400 has been flawless. Not even a drop out. I don’t know how they do it, but I ask no questions..! And looking at your tour schedule, LoCash are going from strength to strength... Absolutely! LoCash have a following that they call ‘the LoCash Army’, and they’ve been with them since the very beginning, and it’s expanding
exponentially since their first number one, I Love That Life. The follow up is doing pretty well, too, so it’s continuing to expand; and it’s a real trip for me to see it, as I’ve only been in the band for a year, and now I’ll go as far east as New York City, where we’ll be playing a sold out show, and as far west as California, for another sold out show! To see that kind of increase in their fanbase over a year is crazy, man. It’s an awesome feeling. www.lectrosonics.com www.locashmusic.com
ONE TO WATCH KAT DEAL
KAT DEAL
We’ve met many multi-talented musicians in our time, but few like Kat Deal. She was harmonising at just sevenyears-old, and now at 24, this talented songstress is doing her thing on stage and in the studio. As a player, whether it’s flute, trumpet, sax, or even trombone, she’s totally accomplished; and vocally, perhaps even better. Kat recently produced and personally funded a music video to accompany her dynamite single, Let It Rain, and with an attitude like hers, her musical goals can’t be too far away.
he first thing I played [on the sax] was Charlie Parker’s Ornithology,” recalls Kat. “My dad came in and said, ‘why don’t you play an easier instrument, or at least not tenor; try alto?’ I was like, ‘no, I really like tenor’; and that gospel, soulful tone is something that really resonates with me. So he ate his words, after that!” Not surprising, considering Kat has basically mastered every instrument she’s laid her hands on since. She’s self-taught in every sense of the word, and her father was a jazz guitarist and worship leader - “an interesting combo,” Kat smiles. Her musical journey began during a very early performance, during which she realised she could really sing. “I was only seven, and I remember performing at a random church - me and another girl – and I just started harmonising! So whenever the radio was on, I would harmonise from that point on,” Kat says. Music wasn’t her
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first career choice, though. “I was a professional runner from the age of 12, so I did no music in those early teenage years; and I didn’t write [songs] until I was 18. I had a treadmill accident, which meant I needed major hip surgery, and I had to learn how to walk again. That’s when I got back into singing, and when I found jazz and soul music really suited me.” Sliding doors, eh? Kat started to sing with a jazz band in St. Albans, then picked up the sax, thought it was an incredible instrument, and started to play it... As you do. “It really moves me, and speaks to me,” she admits. “I was about 18 or 19, and my friend gave me a gig. She was a promoter, and it’s only really because of her that I started to write originals at all.” Kat’s single, Let It Rain, certainly isn’t a jazzy number, but it’s definitely got soul. It’s also been put together tremendously well (by Kat and her brother, who’s an acclaimed producer with his own studio). The vocals, in particular, are really stand-out. “Thanks! My brother didn’t actually have time to do the vocals with me though, so I went in on my own, and laid them down,” Kat explains. So you’re studio-trained, then? “Er, not really... I just used the kit in the studio. And I recorded the backing singer, Aviola, as well. “Recording myself is one thing, but someone else is something else; I couldn’t really hear what she was singing a lot of the time, as we only had one set of headphones. But it was great fun, and I learned a lot.”
Evidently so! The track sounds rich, and super-smooth. But Kat says making music in the studio is something she’s just had to do, and actually this rings true of many artists looking for that big break. “I play all the horns now, too,” she laughs. Does the girl’s talent never cease?! “I realised I was about to do a gospel gig, and that I couldn’t signal to people while playing the sax, as I
this video, and the song itself; what inspired you to make it? “The video was very cool, but a lot of work. Two drummers and me, basically - and lots of smoke and paint, recreating the cover and image of the single,” Kat explains. “The song sounds like a storm, especially the bridge, which was the whole point; it’s really moody, which adds to that effect. I wrote it on Garageband, and
“I CAN’T SIGNAL TO PEOPLE WHILE PLAYING THE SAX, SO I BOUGHT A £45 TRUMPET OFF EBAY AND TAUGHT MYSELF THAT INSTEAD.” needed one hand free, so I bought it came to life in Logic.” a £45 trumpet off eBay and taught It did indeed, and we recommend myself that instead. So I was doing you give it a listen (and a watch). So this gospel stuff on the trumpet and what’s the next challenge? Flight of signalling to everyone! It had to be the Bumblebee on the piano, perhaps? done! I did the same thing with the “[laughs] Just to keep making trombone, and I recently put that on music, and reach as many people as a record. I like a challenge, you see.” possible; my stuff translates to a stage We should point out that when very well, and I have a full band and Kat isn’t making her own music, or three backing vocalists at all times; teaching herself new instruments everyone will be painted, and it’s (what next, the harp?), she is likely quite anthemic I guess,” states Kat. to be doing other gigs, sessioning “We’ve released the single, and now somewhere - pretty much doing the video, which solidifies the whole anything she can to make a living in image. It’s my brand, really. And after this industry. my EP is released, there’ll be another “Oh, I’ve done some ridiculous gigs,” single, and I hope things grow from she says, eyes widening. Do tell... “Oh, there. I would really love to do Jools seriously, you don’t want to know; but Holland... [pauses] But realistically, I you have to make ends meet, right? guess that’ll be in 2017... [smiles]” This industry is a tough one.” Ain’t that the truth. So tell us about Follow Kat on Twitter: @KatDeal
G E T C LO S E R
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Made in Denmark
INTERVIEW BEARDYMAN
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Doing B The Lambeth Talk BEARDYMAN’S DREAM TEAM SMASH IT AT ELECTRIC BRIXTON There are not many artists in the world like Beardyman. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who would voluntarily put on a whole show without direction, without a set list, without songs, even! But that’s exactly what this smart thinking beatboxer-cum-multi instrumentalist has done, with the help of a stunning ensemble of carefully chosen musicians, each of whom is a producer in their own right, and brings something unique to the stage. We caught up with Beardyman just a couple of weeks before the show (labeled ‘The Dream Team Sessions’), and then headed down to Electric Brixton to see this wacky idea become a reality.
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eardyman’s Dream Team Sessions, which took place at Electric Brixton on April 2nd, set out to fuse improvisation, telepathy, imagination, and beat boxing: the goal was to create an album out of all of these facets, and record it there and then, live in the venue, all in about an hour. Quite a challenge. We were lucky enough to be at the show, and we’ll come to that in good time, but first, we spoke with the man himself, just a week or so before he hit the record button. “With the technology I have developed, I am able to do a whole show of improvised studio music that sounds like it’s produced ahead of time, but what I have done is the preparation work to make that possible ahead of time, so I can now improvise my ideas,” opens Beardyman. “As good as that is, it’s never quite the same as working with other musicians; and over the years, I’ve befriended many people that can improvise lyrically, and with performance, and spanning a whole musical spectrum: up to twisted electronica, and down to chamber music and jazz, like I do. It took a long time to get to know that many people that could do a project like this, but now I have the team together and the technology, it’s a simple next step to get everyone in the room and make it happen.” Simple may be debatable, but Beardyman says he’s been developing the methodologies, and learning about the ways you have to run an ensemble if you want it to be able to improvise quite coherently, he tells us: “You have be a bit of a Nazi when it comes to arrangements, and who’s playing and who’s not,” he says, with a smile. “Luckily, all I have to do is tell them to play, and they will come up with something amazing and appropriate, at least. The really important thing is to play something easy on the ear, that bears repetition. If you play something very noodly, it won’t necessarily work. In most forms of music, it’s about repetition and variations on a theme; there are always patterns. In this band, we are making songs based on songwriting theory, and dance music based on dance music theory; in a way, it’s connecting the dots, painting by numbers... But that’s just the way I see it.” He has a point, considering the audience on the night won’t know the rules, or hear the instructions. Beardyman will have a mic next to him at all times that only the musicians can hear, all of whom will be on in-ears. He will send instructions of sorts, and they’ll play them... Right? “Yes, sort of, but I’ll never try and tell them exactly what to play,” he insists. “And although they’re prodigious, they’re also very sensitive to genres... [pauses] I guess there are loads of different methods of improvising in any art form; it’ll be a kind of improvisation happening in real time in your brain.” In short, Beardyman’s band is an eclectic mix of innovative genius: take Ben Sarfas,
an unbelievable musician on both violin and saxophone; and world-renowned drummer, Emre Ramazanoglu, who’s drummed with Michael Jackson, and written with Sia. Then there’s MCs Dizraeli and LeeN. Beardyman visited every one of his band, and developed a musical relationship along the way. “As well as playing drums, Emre is able to trigger sequencers and effects; he is going to be live producing his own drum track on the night, the kind of thing a producer might do in the studio with a drum loop,” Beardyman reveals. “No-one has really ever given the drummer the ability to produce their own track where he or she is not relying on a third party - the live guy - to do the live production. What I am trying to do is give these amazing musicians the ability to produce their own tracks, and develop sounds that don’t sound like their instrument. Our cellist, Rob Lewis, can make his instrument sound like crazy pads, big washes of beautiful harmonics – same with the violin and sax – or equally, we can just strip it all back and just play with these amazing musicians, you know? We have Bellatrix - a world champion beatboxer - but she is also an incredible double bassist and a good vocalist, as well. So everyone has a microphone, everyone has an instrument, and everyone has amazing production chops – it’s fucking insane!”
The Beardytron Talk turns to Beardyman’s bespoke software solution, the Beardytron, which has evolved so much over the years, he doesn’t even count the number of iterations he’s made anymore: “I used to use all hardware, but now it’s two laptops and currently five iPads, plus a bunch of outboard gear and MIDI pedals and inputs, and stuff like that; it’s a kind of insane flight deck cockpit of sound creation and manipulation tools,” he laughs. “It’s an ongoing project, because like anything, it’s always capable of refinement and improvement, but I really do just love designing things. “I did a project like this in 2012 at the same venue too, actually – Electric Brixton. It was awesome, but not exactly as I wanted, as my gear couldn’t do what I wanted it to do; I just didn’t have the technology. So that was one of the main reasons that I took a year off to make the thing – and what I’ve now got is basically a unique, vast, fully-featured music creation mechanism that sends out MIDI and click track, and all this sort of stuff for other musicians to follow. Also, I am older and wiser now, so I know from that project and others what to do and what not to do. So the Beardytron is vital to this being possible because it means that I can produce live and arrange live myself.” Beardyman also has ‘an insane synth beast’ that he has built and housed in Ableton which is, he reiterates, ‘just beastly!’: “I wanted to find someone to play keys in the band that would have the ability to switch genres and synthesizers in a matter
INTERVIEW BEARDYMAN
Beardyman Live at Electric Brixton
A “BEARDYMAN HAS GENUINELY CREATED SPUR OF THE MOMENT ANTHEMS, THAT NEVER WOULD HAVE OCCURRED IN DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES.” of a second, and be able to be really diverse and sensitive to the genres. However, one of these does not exist! [laughs] No one has a set-up where everything is organised in genres and sub-genres, with the ability to slip just like that between anything on the fly. Then I realised that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with Beardytron, so I am on the keys, which is fine... [pauses] I’m pretty good, you see [laughs]. I’ve got enough chops to get the ideas out of my head, and when there is incredible virtuosic musicianship to be done, I have incredible virtuosic musicians at my disposal in this band. But essentially, I have this crazy setup which allows me to do all of this by thinking about it and wiggling a couple of fingers.” The only person who has something slightly similar, Beardyman reckons, is the great Herbie Hancock, who he popped along to see recently at his studio (as you do). “Herbie got someone to build him a preset organisational system; with him, it was grouped by era or vague genre groupings, and then the individual songs he would play in his set, but we don’t have a set list in this band, so it’s an interesting prospect!” Beardyman laughs. “Everything you’ll be hearing on the gig, the structure is always my idea, but the musical ideas are always from the individual musicians. As with the show I did last year, the audience write down made up song titles, and we make them up into songs. We then pull them out of a bucket, and we run with them. So the inspiration is the audience, the ideas are from me and the musicians, and all the vibe comes from whatever happens on stage;
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then the structure is from me guiding it from the back, really. It’s a nice feeling driving this extremely powerful musical creation!”
Funnyman I ask Beardyman if this idea stems from a love of performing to people, given the fact he’s a fine comedian, too? “I really like improvising, because you can’t fake it; it feels very genuine. It’s another level of the emotional process when it comes to performance, because you don’t remember doing it afterwards, and it’s quite addictive, too... And tremendously foolhardy! You have to be OK with failure,” Beardyman explains. “Last year, I didn’t mean it to be a comedy show, but I’m doing it again at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year because it ended up selling out 750-capacity rooms every night up there! So I thought, ‘oh, I guess this is funny then!’ The more I did the show, the more I crafted it into a comedy show, so the parts that are funny, I would accentuate what was funny; I was like, ‘fuck me, apparently this is a comedy show!’ “But it’s all a learning process, so that’s fine; it’s fun for me to be able to wear the clothes of a comedian and see where that goes. I never wanted to be a stand up, to ridicule others, or laugh at myself, and have that be what I do, but I have always really appreciated the balls it takes to stand in front of people and know you’re there to make them laugh – it’s another performance challenge. The great comics aren’t clowns; they’re serious, and they surprise you with where the stories come from, but maintain a serious delivery. That is an admirable thing.”
facile way to look at the development of Beardyman’s career would be to pose the question: was it all more impressive when it was just him and a microphone, the traditional model for a beatboxer? These days, Beardyman (more lightly stubbled, although that wouldn’t have the same ring to it), alias of Londonborn Darren Foreman, uses a huge array of looping technology and computers to create his vast sound. But if there are still any lingering naysayers who consider this ‘cheating’, the question we’ve posed is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Beardyman is seeking to achieve through music. He definitively proved several years ago that he is one of the best there is when it comes to creating a beat with just a pair of lips, lungs, and a tongue (winning the UK Beatbox Championships two years running). But he now answers a higher calling: his astonishing talent for creating anthemic music entirely spontaneously. And while he’s been doing that with just himself and his complex looping set-up for some time, tonight, the people of Brixton are treated to something just that extra bit special. Beardyman has assembled his ‘Dream Team’, and has taken it upon himself to create (in the strongest possible sense of the word) an album entirely from scratch, totally unplanned, and totally improvised. The only source material is a bucket at the front of the stage, into which audience members have dropped song title suggestions. After making his entrance, and the obligatory bit of beatboxing to get everyone warmed up, Beardyman introduces us to his Dream Team one at a time. The first of which is, to most people’s surprise, a drummer. The self-aware beatboxer addresses this counter-intuitive seeming decision, and completely justifies it by challenging him to a beat battle, which erupts into an outrageously entertaining three-way when female beatbox champion, Bellatrix joins them on stage. Eventually, the
Dream Team is assembled, with a cellist, violinist/saxophonist, DJ, two freestyle MCs, and Bellatrix switches to double bass (as you do). They are tasked with creating songs with just the audience suggestions as inspiration; and how the opening album track is so good despite the dire name, Thirty Cheese-Related Reasons, is beyond me and everyone in the room. What follows is nothing short of spectacular. While each member of the Dream Team make great contributions, make no mistake that Beardyman is the focal point of it all. Stood behind his Star Trek-esque workstation (the Beardytron), his ability to wield genres and such a plethora of sounds using his vocoders, loop machines, and synths is essentially musical alchemy. When I’m Not Afraid Of Clowns is drawn from the bucket, he lays down a twisted, bouncing circus style bassline; against all odds, this also translates into a huge sounding song. MCs LeeN and Dizraeli do a very good job of freestyling all of their lyrics the whole evening, and the trippy split-screen visuals behind the stage keep everything nice and bizarre. Work Is A Shit Drug, But I Need It is probably the best song name offered (“that actually makes total sense,” Beardyman remarks), and also ends up being a real highlight amidst a set of very different genres spliced together, and all blurring together beautifully. As the madness ends, Beardyman urges everyone to go and pre-order this spontaneous masterpiece on their way out. Even if the music had not come off well, you would still have to admire these musicians for such a daring idea. But Beardyman has genuinely created spur of the moment anthems, that never would have occurred in different circumstances. Anyone who listens to the album upon its release who wasn’t here tonight, will have their listening tinged with knowing they weren’t part of its magical conception. www.beardyman.com
ONE TO WATCH ESPA
ESPA-NENTIONALLY SPEAKING Eclectic is the word best suited to 24-year-old Londoner, Espa. She’s a lover of UK grime and hip hop, but her aim is to transition into a classic songwriter (with a twist, of course); and when you’ve got Linda Perry as a writing partner, why not? Headliner investigates. “I was in Asia over New Year;
I try and go every January, and this time I came back via LA, because I had never been before, and everyone said I had to go out there and write,” explains Espa. “So I went along, and did some amazing writing sessions, and worked with some of my heroes.” Such as the great Linda Perry (Google her, if you’re not sure). Quite a U-turn after her last collaboration, Swan Song, with UK grime artist, Giggs... How did that happen? “Well, I’m occupying two territories: one is the music I have out right now, and the other is the music I haven’t yet put out, which is the stuff I’m doing with Linda,” she explains. “I love the music I make with Giggs; it’s less chilled, and it’s hip hopinspired, but I want to move into a larger, more global commercial sound, while still retaining some of my soul, hip hop, and jazz background. Linda nourishes that part of me, but wants to help me make it more accessible.” For any young artist, working with someone like Linda Perry is surely going to be a daunting prospect; what was it like singing with her for the first time, we wonder? “Well, her manager sat me down the day before our session and said, ‘she is very temperamental, and sometimes
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doesn’t bond with artists’ [smiles] “I got given this kind of manual on how to operate around Linda,” Espa recalls, with a giggle. “But it was actually a match made in heaven; I am a big personality, and I know what I want; and despite my young age, I’ve done a lot of living. Linda clocked onto that. “So our two day session turned into an entire week, day and night! I have an amazing woman championing me from the other side of the pond, so I am very lucky... But I have to say, it is a challenge to retain some sense of vocal identity when you’re faced up against that incredible powerhouse voice in the studio!” We can imagine! Espa has a wise head on young shoulders, and that’s probably due not only to her attitude, but her forward-thinking management team. “We have an interesting situation, as I’m not signed to a major label, but I am signed to a production deal, kind of like how Tinie Tempah does it with his manager and label; and how someone like Labrinth did with OddChild and his manager,” Espa explains. “It’s an in-house production, and I am blessed to have this team of bespoke people, hand-picked by my manager. He is quite maverick,
“I GOT THIS KIND OF MANUAL ON HOW TO OPERATE AROUND LINDA PERRY, BUT ACTUALLY IT WAS A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN.” and also represents Tinie, as well as Ellie Goulding and Katy B, so he knows his stuff; it’s a bespoke way of working, kind of A&Ring it as we go, you know? It’s like the highest level of self employment we’ve ever seen, and it’s really flourishing in many industries: fight the system by taking a different route, and start a new school of thought.” Espa describes herself as passionate, not about music as such, but the transformation that comes from music: “Music is the most interesting art form, because it’s the only one that’s intangible. In dance, you can see it, like you can in theatre; and with art, you can view it, touch it; with food, you can taste it and smell it. All of these other forms of expression. But music is a vibrational thing from some speaker or live scenario into some other part of you. Hopefully my music allows people to experience something; it’s a weird and wonderful
thing, music, as it brings out such an array of emotions.” This year, Espa will be performing at a string of UK festivals: Bestival, Latitude, Dot to Dot, and SW4, to name a few - and she’s keen to remind us that she’s still ‘all about the grime sound’, too..! “Grime is taking over the world,” she announces, enthusiastically. “It’s amazing, and I feel like I’m a part of that through my work with Giggs. When Disclosure ‘happened’, I was well into that, too. But I know what’s classic, and working with Linda Perry brings that part of me out – that timeless song. Writing with her is two people around the piano or the guitar. No strange beats. No weird samples. It’s beautiful.” We look forward to hearing the Espa/Perry collaborations, and in the meantime, look out for Espa at a festival near you this summer. Follow Espa on Twitter: @Espa
INTERVIEW SPANDAU BALLET
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IT
awas during the Summer of 1980 that Spandau Ballet really made their mark on the UK music scene. The papers at the time said they were ‘too hip, it hurt’, and undoubtedly their look was easily as unique as their sound. As frontman, Tony Hadley put it at the time, “We’re not just another band”... And he meant it. After hard musical graft across London, seeking the right venues to channel their music, they came across a series of West End clubs, and a man named Steve Strange, which together, would help catapult them to superstar status, and in the process, give birth to a whole new scene. The era of the New Romantics had arrived, and it was about to go global. Fast. The next 25 years of their career brought plenty of hit records and stadium tours, but there was also a nasty break-up, which led to a court case over royalties, and much resentment to boot. In 2015, however, everything got rosy again; Spandau got back together, started touring the world again, and reviews were better than ever. We engrossed ourselves in the band’s bitter-sweet 2014 biopic, Soul Boys of the Western World, before getting up close and personal with Hadley himself, and fellow band member, Martin Kemp. “The turning point for us was a small showcase gig one Saturday morning in a rehearsal room that Steve Strange had organised,” opens Martin Kemp, as we discuss the more pivotal moments within the film. “There were 10 of the trendiest, most important people in [London club] The Blitz, and if they liked us, we were in, but if they didn’t, it stopped there and then. Thankfully, they loved it, and we became the band that represented a whole new pop culture.” And that’s no exaggeration. After wowing crowds at not only The Blitz, but fellow West End hubs, Billy’s, and The Beetroot Club, Spandau took New Romanticism (is that a word?) global, and the band went, as we say in today’s world, viral. “Given that people didn’t have mobile phones with cameras in those days, two of the most amazing scenes in the film are us on HMS Belfast in London in 1979, and the Underground Club in New York City. It looks
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fantastic,” adds Tony Hadley, with a smile. Fittingly, HMS Belfast would also be the setting for the band’s press call, announcing their reforming some 30 years later. The film seems to portray Spandau as ‘under orders’ in the early days, in terms of songwriting duties. I ask the boys if this was the case, and whether other band members ever came to the studio with creative ideas that were totally dismissed by songwriter, Gary Kemp. “No, because the whole band was happy at the time with the winning formula we had created,” replies Kemp. “Each member was an important cog in a giant, successful machine, though in retrospect, I guess we all wished we had done a little bit more!” So it wasn’t creative control that led to the resentment, and ultimately the split of the band, then? “We all accepted our respective roles,” says Hadley, explaining that he always considered himself primarily the singer, and it wasn’t until later in the band that he started songwriting. “Steve Norman, on the other hand, was quite a prolific songwriter in the early days, but he was overwhelmed by Gary. None of us had a problem with Gary being the principle songwriter because number one, he was very good at it, and it was a tremendous responsibility; and secondly, he valued the other non-writing members of the band for their contribution by giving up some of his publishing monies. And the change in those circumstances is what led to the court case.”
GOLD
I deem it wise not to pursue the legal battle, as it seems to be water under the bridge; and if the band’s recent show reviews are anything to go by, they’re as good live now as they’ve ever been. They’ve been selling out arenas by the bucketload, so it can’t just have been the hardcore Spandau following coming out to watch... Right? “Yeah, I think an awful lot of younger people have tapped into us both as a band presently, and what we were in the past,” reflects Hadley. Kemp concurs. “I think there is a younger generation that are obviously influenced by their parents and older siblings, and with easy access to the past through modern media, those kids seems quite intrigued. I think the same is true of Duran Duran and Culture Club, too.” In the film, Gary talks about the power of MTV, and Spandau’s rise certainly coincided with the
INTERVIEW SPANDAU BALLET
EACH MEMBER WAS AN IMPORTANT COG IN A GIANT, SUCCESSFUL MACHINE..." dawning of the video age, allowing artists to bring music to the masses on a global scale. How do the guys compare social media with that phenomenon, and where do they see its benefits, in comparison? “Oh, the two are very similar in that they are both phenomenons that have helped bands get their music to the world,” declares Kemp. “Every band wants as many people as possible to listen to their music, their art; and both avenues do the same thing.” Hadley sees it slightly differently: “MTV was just one avenue. It was just TV, and extremely visual. It allowed artists to promote their music through the video medium, but now the options are now infinite; and I think that’s diversified music to a dangerous extent. The dawn of the Internet has changed the way we buy, listen to, and experience music, and we now have someone on the payroll 24/7 whose job is keeping the website, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube up to date by the minute.” I ask the boys to cast their minds back to the Spandau Ballet bidding war, which Chrysalis eventually won. The label gave the band full creative control (as well as a load of cash), but in today’s digital industry, where advances, and indeed labels, are nigh on non-existent, how would a band like Spandau Ballet have fared? “The thing about Spandau Ballet was, we were always breaking new ground, even in the late ‘70s, when we were searching for that elusive first record deal,” explains Kemp. “Then we were battling the punk hangover, where so many companies got burnt. But we were inventive, and always found
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new ways to dangle the carrot, so I think Spandau would have coped really well in today’s market. There are always 30 bands in the top 30, no matter what decade you’re in; you just have to play the team that’s in front of you.” Hadley believes it’s always been very difficult in the music business, no matter what decade, but he is also a great believer that ‘talent will always shine through’. “The problem seems to be that instead of clubbing together and retaining control of the changing music industry, the record companies have allowed the business to no longer be valued in the same way,” he says. “I take my hat off to Taylor Swift for not allowing Spotify to use her catalogue; in my opinion, no artist is making money from streaming or download services, and we need to change that. It sucks.” “Yes, at the moment it’s a real mess,” adds Kemp. “It will be a very good day when bands keep their streaming rights. Less and less money is spent on making new music because of this, so there is less and less care trying to keep costs down. I do think, though, like anything, it will change, because without the music, there is nothing.”
THROUGH THE BARRiCADES
Def Leppard’s frontman, Joe Elliott, told us in 2015 that bands such as his and Spandau remain some of the only ‘stadium bands’, in line with today’s Green Day, Muse, and Coldplay, yet he struggled to pick out any potential ‘future’ stadium acts. I put this to the lads, and ask them if stadium tours can still be sustainable. “Thanks for the nod, Joe,” smiles Kemp. “I agree, actually; things are going very pop at the moment, but these things always come in circles, as they did when Spandau and Duran Duran overtook the previous prog rock stadium bands.” “I think there are still bands or artists that can play stadiums, but there are probably fewer
acts then there were before,” says Hadley, adding that Joe Elliott is ‘a lovely man, and great friend’. “People want value for money, and tickets can be expensive, so multiple bills are becoming more and more popular. But then bucking that trend, Ed Sheeran performed as one man and his guitar at Wembley Stadium for three nights, which was pretty amazing.” As a band, Spandau have come through plenty of peaks and troughs, but ultimately, music has won. I ask them if they have any tips, or dos and don’ts for bands daring to try to break into the industry today? “Make sure you get full independent legal advice from day one,” states Hadley. “Although it sometimes seems that you are living in a utopian, ‘matey’ environment, always make sure you look after yourself. Don’t be too trusting.” Glad I didn’t go down that courtroom route, now... And Martin? “Do give each other the respect they deserve, and don’t ever think someone is less important than you,” he insists. Come on then boys, give me a story from the road! What’s the one memory that will always stay with you (that I can print)? “Oh, now you want the dirt,” laughs Kemp, reminding me that ‘what happens on tour, stays on tour’. “But seriously, the biggest moment for me has to be playing Live Aid. That day changed the face of charity around the world, a day you just knew would go down in history. An audience on TV of two billion! Yes, you could say Live Aid rocked!” Hadley ponders, and offers this little ditty: “One of the funniest memories was with myself and Freddie Mercury in New Zealand, when we got into a massive drinking session just before he was due to go onstage [smiles]. It was stupid, but what a great afternoon drinking with my mate Freddie at the bar! A truly lovely man, and very sorely missed.” www.spandauballet.com
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Turning d l r o W the t e e F s t i on
IMOGEN HEAP WORDS PAUL WATSON & ADAM PROTZ PHOTOGRAPHY JEREMY COWART
T
he signs that Imogen Heap was going to be a game changer came at an early age. As has been the case with many of our brightest musicians, Imogen did not get along well with her music teacher at school but found herself in the small cupboard which had an Atari and some music software on it. That was 25 years ago. She read the manual, and so began her work with music and computers. She attended the BRIT School of performing arts after that to do her A Levels, where she learned about mixing and engineering, recording real audio. She met her manager there at the age of 18, and even before she left school, had secured her first record deal. As is normal, Imogen has had her ups and downs with labels. Fed up with the battles, she went independent at the age of 25 when she wrote and self produced her album, Speak for Yourself. A vocoded acapella song, Hide and Seek, from this album, gained its fame when featured in the popular teen drama, The O.C. (which broke quite a few artists), and even more so when it was heavily sampled in the number one hit song, Whatcha Say, by Jason Derulo. The O.C. was Imogen’s first real breakthrough moment, and also the first time thousands of people heard her music and found themselves asking, ‘how did she do that?’ Imogen’s next album was followed up by the Grammy-winning Ellipse, which she video blogged the whole process (including the building of her home studio); and her most recent album, Sparks, saw her doing a project for every song, taking her to work with a Chinese city for Xizi She Knows, developing her music gloves for Me The Machine, and making a running app with Run-Time. Today, Imogen is focused on her Mycelia incentive, of which she reveals all below. We sat down with the sound master herself to find out more about this plan to save the music industry from itself by turning it not so much on its head, but on its feet.
WHAT IS MYCELIA?
In a nutshell, Mycelia (http://www.imogenheap. com/mycelia) has become a think and do tank, for the purpose of connecting the dots between artists, services, and fans to create a sustainable music industry ecosystem. This involves overseeing the building and protecting of a verified database for the music community creatives, their work, and their collaborators. Mycelia wants an open database that describes the whole music industry, so that everyone involved can be recognised and rewarded, to enable the artists and their teams to shape how their music is used from one day to the next. Currently, a song is uploaded, and then it’s as if it just falls off a cliff: there is very little data about
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“THANKS TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY, THE INDUSTRY IS BEING CATAPULTED INTO RETHINKING HOW IT DOES BUSINESS.” what it gets up to; and so it leaves the artist in a much poorer state, as this is essential information to better the progress on any campaign or future decisions on where to spend effort and money. It’s entirely focused on whatever it takes to enable songs and artists do better business with the world. To answer questions on what a song’s use and terms are by being beacons of information. The Mycelia project was put through its first real test when Imogen did an experiment with her latest song, Tiny Human. She was interested to see how Blockchain technology could be a part of her dream music ecosystem. She explains the process: “For years I’ve wanted to attach information to a song so that anyone needing to know details could consult it. Literally everything you could think of, from where it was made in the world, the gear used, the musicians, the lyrics, video, credits, the artwork... And with it, my latest biography, press image, and terms and conditions on how and where people could use that song. Anything from someone wanting to sync it to a film, to a fan wanting to play it at their wedding.” On Imogen’s website, she uploaded all the relevant information: video, artwork, credits, the stereo stems of that song for remixers, a making of her blog, the tempo, lyrics, you name it. “My friend Zoe Keating and I were chatting about this one day, and she introduced me to the idea of Blockchain, and how it could be used as a direct payment system,” Imogen continues. “I was intrigued, and that was the start of my journey into making Mycelia a thing. I realised then, that there was a technology that could be the catalyst in rethinking the music industry. As it’s long overdue!” Realising this sort of thing can also disrupt the brains of the less tech-savvy among us, Imogen kindly explains the nuts and bolts of Blockchain: “A Blockchain is a decentralised public ledger saying what transactions happened when. It enables two parties who don’t know each other to
trust that a transaction happened, and therefore business is done, instantaneously and transparently. Each set of transactions creates a Block, and it’s added to the Blocks before, creating the Blockchain. Right back to the Genesis Block (the first transaction that ever happened).” A momentary pause, a smile from Imogen, and she continues: “Let’s say you sent me some money: the Blockchain would say, ‘OK, Headliner has sent Imogen Heap some money’, and I don’t even have to know your name – it’s pseudo anonymous. But if I knew your ID, I would know it had definitely happened. So to create or falsify that would be impossible; you’d have to have 51% more computing power than any of the other people in order to have that happen.” It quickly becomes apparent that Imogen Heap has a uniquely intuitive mind among most artists. “So Blockchain enables people to trust one another without knowing each other, without using a centralised top down system. All kinds of things that need centralised services like Uber, or Airbnb, or banking, can be done directly without having to use somebody inbetween taking a cut.” OK, but how does all of this apply to music? “There are shed loads of people along the pipeline in our industry that get between the fan or services and the artist getting paid and receiving data feedback. Blockchain could help us with part of that,” Imogen explains. “If people were to adopt an ecosystem where everyone links to a song’s address for receiving and returning information on that song, multiple royalty statements and late payments would be a thing of the past. This is about looking at Blockchain, but also deeply about linked data. It’s a semantic music web I want to see come to life, accompanied with direct payments for any interaction, and clarity of data for anyone to find what they need. “Paul Pacifico from the FAC did a simple diagram for me once: ‘here’s the artist, here’s the fan, and you’ve got a circle: clockwise, you go up to the top, and you’re sending that info to the fan super-fast. But how they funnel that money or appreciation back to you (the artist) is very long, and sometimes can take up to two years by radio for example.” This may shock quite a few people. Do you have an example? “I do! [smiles] Take Kelly Clarkson, for instance; she released a Christmas album, and one of the songs on there is one of mine called Just For Now,” Imogen reveals. “That was released two years ago, and it was only in the last quarter that I received some money back from the PRS! And it was a serious sum that I could have really used two years ago when I had to get bank loans and all kinds of things to sort stuff out! Why should we have to wait that long when everything could be automatically data driven?
IMOGEN HEAP
“If we could collectively set technical, ethical, and commercial standards for a future music industry ecosystem, we’d see innovation flourish in services, and a whole new marketplace spring up from currently untapped metadata. How can we verify information so that we know it is correct? Then you could imagine the BBC using something in a radio show or a film, or a music supervisor looking for a song that fits a film, finding it easily. They can do business with you without needing to consult you. I could already have that info stating how much the song would cost if you’re an upcoming director or if it’s a major picture house, or whatever. You could put all of that information embedded into the track’s data in a new format or on the Blockchain, or creating a global database from the ground up.” Right, so Mycelia, simply put, is about cutting out the middle men? “Well it’s about simplifying the parts of the industry that are causing friction. Not cutting out anyone perhaps, but about some services looking to a shift in roles. In loads of other industries and services, they’re super streamlined, because they have to save money, but there are so many middle men along the way in the music industry due to its archaic structure based on old paper collections, that a lot of the money that could go to the artist, doesn’t. It should be about maximising efficiency for all the people along the way to benefit!” Imogen believes that the music industry is somewhat on the backfoot to those developing services in this kind of free for all, because no-one’s taken the lead and created a playground with rules we all agree on. And she has a point: “It feels like the industry has been chasing the tails of tech developments since the rise of mp3. Really, they should have grabbed the bull by its horns, but instead the music execs ran away from it, making criminals of music lovers, when they should have embraced it. We can’t afford to do that again in light of Blockchain technology. Now is the time for a major rethink. We need to come together and figure out how we can make this music industry work for not just the elite at the top, but more importantly, for those just stepping foot into a career of music. Otherwise we will continue to lose great talent, as there will be no mechanism to support up and coming artists.”
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Conversation turns to radio, and how the performers don’t get paid in the US, but we do here in the UK. That’s madness, isn’t it? “Yes, as people listen to music stations for the music, so they should be getting paid royalties. Everywhere is different, and this is also the issue. Hundreds of closed databases also make it hard for people to know sometimes where to send the money for an artist. The industry would really save so much money, cutting out endless paperwork, invoicing, and all that if we could agree on a unified approach and linked database,” Imogen explains, with more than a hint of frustration. “If everything was plumbed into an ecosystem linking to a verified database, then you could imagine services popping up, creating new services that we can only dream of now. I’d like to create an app called ‘thank the DJ’ that would alert you as to when a song of mine would be played anywhere in the world, and allow me to both thank the DJ for playing my music and connecting live, spontaneously, with those out there listening to my music in their cars or wherever, so that the songs and myself remain in contact, even once they’re out in the world interacting with others. Collection societies have a role to be efficient in receiving the monies for the works they hold; this would be the natural step, but perhaps not in total alignment with their business models. People feel their role could shift from collection to verification as this is going to be key to the integrity and use of the database.” Simply put, Imogen would like to know where and when her music is played in realtime, so she can act upon this information, and choose her next move. But Mycelia is also about binding the musical community together to its fullest extent. It really is – and rightly so - all about the artist. “There is a DJ in Krakow – a huge Heap fan,” Imogen recalls, “and every now and again I get a Polish fan saying, ‘oh I just heard Imogen Heap on the radio again’, and I’m sure it’s this same guy, as I have heard another friend of mine say, ‘oh yeah this DJ guy played your stuff ’, but I don’t know who it is. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to see that this DJ in this particular town supported me by playing my record? And instead of saying, ‘that’s nice’, I could actually ring him up and say, ‘Hi, it’s Imogen, I just wanted to say a massive thank you for playing my record!’ But I can’t do that at the moment. So really, it’s about helping the artists be the best entrepreneurs that they can be, and to say thank you, and to kind of find who’s in our ecosystem, our community, because at the moment, you don’t really know.” So what stage is Mycelia at, exactly? “The exciting thing is, I got asked by Forbes about the future of the music industry. Then people asked me to do talks, and I kind of fleshed it out in my mind much more; and along the way, I have just met incredible people who have got brains the size of planets! Now I have a much clearer picture of the technology out there, what it does, and where the holes are. So I’m finding myself connecting the
dots between all the services at the moment. The beginnings of this ecosystem.” It’s a beautiful vision for sure, but how is it to work financially? “I wanted to make a foundation for Mycelia so we could protect the artists and enable us to fund the technology we need to make this happen somehow, and to see if anyone was interested in helping, instead of taking money from big companies. There would be this buffer, and they wouldn’t be able to take any money out, as it’d be a foundation,” Imogen explains, adding that the main drama currently involves a domain name. “I was looking up mycelia.music, searching for a home for Mycelia, and I realised that ‘.music’ doesn’t exist yet, and I thought it did. And I looked on Wikipedia, and it turns out loads of different companies are in the running to get that domain. And I thought, ‘hold on, I’m thinking too small; Mycelia could be .music!’ That could be the identity of all musicians, managers, producers, and songwriters, where everybody knows ‘if I need to find a song by Imogen Heap, I need to go to Imogen Heap.music/hideandseek, or by the same token, TaylorSwift.music/Clean’, you know? So that song you want to put in your film or play at your wedding, you just go to that address, find the terms and conditions, and go ahead and use it.” Ingenious! So is there a company suitable for this kind of venture? “I found this company called ‘Dot Music’,” Imogen tells us. “They have been trying for the last five years to get ‘.music’ the domain, and I found out through LinkedIn, so I had to call this guy; I liked their mission statement, and I wondered if he knew about Blockchain technology, and wanted to share a big picture vision with him. So I contacted him through a friend, grilled him for a couple of hours, found out what he was about and what he’s hoping to do, and I felt we could really merge our ideas.” And this is where the people power really comes into play: “The time has now passed as to people being able to send in letters to ICANN (who decide these matters!), but in response, we at Mycelia have created a page where people can add their names to a petition. If Amazon or Google win the bid instead of DotMusic, perhaps this will encourage them to look at their domain names in a different and fairer light.” For our readers’ information, that page is: www. change.org/p/the-music-gtld-petition. So this all goes far beyond making life more convenient for songwriters. For Imogen, this is a question of ethics: “We are talking about a fair trade, sustainable music ecosystem – for the listener, fan, person interacting with that music; they shouldn’t have to choose between fair trade or not. It should just simply be down to the music industry to create that and deliver it. For services to grow within it, using agreed ethical, technical, and commercial standards. This won’t happen overnight, but perhaps in the meantime, you could imagine listening on Spotify, on one side you have the normal route of streaming subscription, which isn’t really working for artists at all, but imagine every time you listen to an Imogen Heap song, or Tiny Human - which is the song of mine that is free of all publishing and labels at the
IMOGEN HEAP moment - that a little light appeared on your Spotify playlist, and showed it’s being streamed via a fair trade route directly to the artist. So you know when you play that song, a small amount of money goes directly into my account that day.” By now, most of us have heard about how the money artists are receiving from the likes of Spotify is often way below minimum wage. But are these services to blame? “What streaming has done is bridged a gap from people not paying for music to people paying for a music subscription, so getting used to paying for music again,” Imogen states. “It’s not that people aren’t willing to pay for a good experience that works for them. Again, I believe it’s up to the industry and community at large to sort it out for us as artists. We want it to represent absolute fairness and transparency.” Mycelia would also be making life much easier for iTunes, Spotify, et al: “They would be able to get info like lyrics, videos, direct information, musicians’ information, latest press images, and a biography - and every time you had a new press image for your profile page. Last time I looked on iTunes, the biography was outdated, but if they were linked to the verified Imogen Heap content page in the ecosystem, then they would never have to worry about that. I could also use these mechanisms to share information or current projects with anyone looking at that page.” Imogen concludes her argument nicely by stating, “there’s no place in the world for greed.” There’s still plenty of that in the music industry, but perhaps thanks to her drive, that greed could be wiped out.
work, which is why we did the Box of Tricks together.” The Mi.Mu gloves (Google them) Imogen refers to are worth an article in itself. She worked with a team of technicians to create a pair of gloves more or less solely for the purpose of her live show, so that she could trigger all of her MIDI/OSC synths, stored sounds, and effects, play software instruments, and sample live, using just gestures while on stage. This may sound difficult, but Imogen turns it into a beautiful ballet. We recommend you watch her demonstration on YouTube from the TEDx event in Cern above the Large Hadron Collider. However, all this dabbling in music tech can have its ups and downs. “Yesterday, we dismantled a huge obsolete bit of kit - the ICON [console] by Digidesign; it’s really just a glorified mouse and a coffee table for those of us who know their way around Pro Tools software,” Imogen smiles. “I am nostalgic about when I did use analogue desks - there would be four of us across a desk adding delays, altering the mix; it’s how we mixed my first record, iMegaphone, all hands-on; and that nostalgia made me think I could do this with my digital desk. But I didn’t ever really use it, as it was too slow, and not as much fun! “We tried to sell it, but we couldn’t shift it, so I’ve decided I want to turn it into a mechanical art piece in the barn at the bottom of the garden – which is pretty big - so you can kind of ‘play’ the barn, and humiliate the desk by making it turn on the kettle, flush the toilet, and open the doors!” And when she’s not producing music, creating sounds, playing piano, scoring the Harry Potter play (something we haven’t even mentioned yet!) or being with Scout, she’s working toward a fair and sustainable music ecosystem vision she calls Mycelia, that will see all those who create and love music benefit. “It’s time the industry was turned onto its feet, as it’s always been the wrong way up. We need the creatives at the core, and for the ecosystem to be built around them. This industry is no longer sustainable the way it operates,” Imogen concludes. “It’s full of friction, and now thanks to Blockchain technology, the industry is being catapulted into rethinking how it does business, how it can flow better. Finally, we may be able to create together a verified music and its metadata database. Mycelia is doing its best to connect the dots to all those interested in seeing this come to life. It’s an exciting time!” Imogen deserves the full backing of musicians everywhere. Please sign the petition on change. org for the .music domain. We’re only in the first chapter of the Mycelia story, with many challenges ahead, but if this industry is to find the solution it so desperately needs, don’t be surprised if Imogen Heap is the one who delivers. www.imogenheap.com
Westminster Methodist Church, August 2015, Sennheiser’s Reshaping Excellence launch concert
TINY HUMAN
We were keen to find out more about Imogen’s song, Tiny Human, which as part of an experiment, was released and became the first ever song to send direct payments to all musicians in a smart contract using the Ethereum Blockchain. It started when Sennheiser approached her to write a song for their new Orpheus 2 campaign for arguably the world’s best and most expensive headphones. “They wanted something for a promo video, a campaign song to build the revealing of these very high-end headphones, and they also paid me for a concert in London. This was a great gig to get, and so I felt able to put it out for free and experiment, which is great,” Imogen explains. “But I was four months into being a mum at the time, and [Imogen’s daughter] Scout had colic, so I had no sleep, and needed to finish it. I watched the video, and there are breaking and cracking rocks, so I started with some drum sounds to match this.” Poor Scout’s colic ironically ended up being the creative impetus for the song: “Juggling Scout and music making, I had Scout in the studio with me, and she was messing around with her play gym. I recorded her squeezing and
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scrunching the toys; and when you pitched those sounds down an octave or two, hey presto! Breaking rock sounds! Technically, Scout is the percussionist on this song! [laughs] “And I liked the idea of it being a waltz, like a dance. I had been breastfeeding every two hours, and then changing nappies, then breastfeeding again, and I wasn’t getting much chunky time in the studio, so I got some industrial hospital breastpumps, and attached them to myself so I could pump up some milk for Scout. While I was doing that, I realised it actually made quite a good sound [Imogen imitates the rhythmic sound of the breastpump out loud], so I recorded it, and in the stems, it actually says ‘breastpump!’ [laughs] So that’s basically how it was built – out of pure necessity! Which actually is at the core of how most of my music is made, bringing life around me into the microphone.” Amazing! What other production techniques did you use, aside from breastpump recording..? “Well [laughs], at the time, I was working on my [Soniccouture] ‘Box of Tricks’ - it’s a virtual instrument sample set of 13 instruments recorded in my studio, from whirly-tubes to boomwhackers, voice and body percussion, all sorts,” she reveals. “Come and play with my Box of Tricks... [laughs]. Anyway, in the music, there’s boomwhackers and an arpeggio motif [Imogen sings an arpeggio], and that’s from my Box of Tricks. I was working on that at the time, so everything just fused into the song, and that’s how it happened.” Imogen first got into sampling at school and would trigger samples live on stage, but it wasn’t until she came across Swiss double bass player, Mich Gerber, that she realised she could do it live: “He was the first person I’d seen who sampled and looped his voice playing live. It was still a bit rough around the edges with timing and sync and all that due to the technology around, but for his tour I was on, I started looping my voice too, and never looked back! I bought an Electrix Repeater, and started to use that – I was 19 at the time. I do all my sampling inside the computer now, though! When I’m in the studio, I record pretty much everything on my TLM103 Neumann mic and the Avalon 737 preamp. I use ProTools and Ableton on my Mac, and more and more am integrating my gloves into both live and studio work. They’re my standards, and now I really love Soniccouture’s
PAUL YOUNG GOOD THINGS COME
TO THOSE WHO WAIT
“IF I'M GIVING AWAY ONE OF MY TRICKS, IT'S BY NOT PICKING WELL KNOWN SONGS.”
his own mark on certain songs: Words, for been more than 20 years since Paul Young example, has a minor chord change that wasn’t last released a solo record in the UK. Good there in the Bee Gees’ original. Was this the Thing is an eclectic mix of soul numbers by whole ethos behind the production? classic artists, but songs that you might not “Yes, basically; I love Bee Gees songs, have heard. And it works. It’s very nicely put so I decided to take the Al Green approach to together, and the performances are right out of the top drawer, from the individual players Words with the addition of the violin,” Young explains. “I reckon Al might have gone with a to the vocalist himself. In short, we reckon violin, too, if he’d have done that song; it gives this solo hiatus has done him no harm. Headliner catches up with him at his label it that human quality, and it becomes more HQ in London. melancholic.” Paul Young’s first solo album, No Parlez, So why now, after all these years, has Young was released in 1983, and included the two decided to make this record? It seems the mega-hits, Love of the Common People, and working relationship with Arthur Baker was that superb cover of Marvin Gaye’s Wherever a key factor. I Lay My Hat. It made him a major household “It was, for sure. Because I’ve always done name in the UK. Young performed at Live eclectic music, I wasn’t sure what a Paul Young Aid two years later, and delivered two more album was, really, or should sound like,” Young UK number one albums, and a string of Top admits. “So when Arthur came up with this 10 singles. Now he’s back with Good Thing, idea of taking as many songs as possible from which is the album he’s always wanted to one publishing house, he said the natural make. Put together by renowned American choice for me should be songs from the East producer, Arthur Baker, the record benefits Memphis catalogue. I thought that was perfect, from some fantastic musicianship, courtesy of as it would also take me back to where I James Halliwell. started, to a certain extent; I’ve almost placed “I’m really glad Arthur got James Halliwell myself back at the tail end of the Q-Tips going involved in the project; he is a great player, but into the Paul Young solo stuff all over again!” as a kid, he went to see The Who at Cornwall The album has taken roughly two years to Colosseum, and we were the support act! complete, as it was tough to get it up and James had seen us on The Old Grey Whistle Test,” running; but the finished article sounds terrific. So it was worth the wait, then? smiles Young. “He said the whole brass section “Yes, I think it was; the original plan was and the overall sound blew his mind, so it’s that the publishing company that owns the really nice for me to work with someone who’s East Memphis catalogue were going to finance inspired by me, and it must be a bit of a kick the whole album, but something broke down, for him, too, I suppose.” and they only wanted to pay for the ones they Indeed. Conversation turns to the type of songs on the record, and why Young thought they might use, so the project went on selected them. ice for a while; then we had a couple of false “If I’m giving away one of my tricks, it’s starts, plus Arthur has other projects he works by not picking well known songs; people are on, so it went on for a good two years,” Young less likely to draw comparisons, so straight reveals. “It also meant we were able to sit on away, you’re in a better place,” he says. “Having the songs, though; we could think about how said that, I hate going for a well known song to improve them over time, and that actually anyway, as you’ll know: Wherever I Lay My Hat ended up being a great thing.” is a good example; I like to go after unusual A lot of this was down to bringing in real musicians, as opposed to using heavy tracks which people didn’t expect me to do. programming, the latter of which is one of And for this record, why go for the obvious Arthur Baker’s trademarks. ones if the definitive version is there? So “The band are all connections of James that’s why I picked L.O.V.E by Al Green, as Halliwell; Arthur was straight in on the everyone knows Let’s Stay Together and Tired programming, but because we were sat on the of Being Alone. I like to go under the surface a tracks for a while, we had time to reflect on little bit, you know?” them, and James, being a real player, said it It’s a pretty up tempo record, which is unusual for Young; and he’s certainly stamped would benefit from real drums, so we brought
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in a guy called Jeremy, and James’ brother, too two drummers,” says Young. “Then it suddenly sounded so much more real, so he suggested we get his brother Paul to play a bit of guitar, too. I was sat in on that session. Normally, I am in on my albums from start to finish, so this was a bit of a weirder approach, as Arthur would take the tracks away and work on them himself, so I value the time I can be there when stuff is being put down. Paul is a really great player, too; very tasteful.” Like many people, I’d heard certain rumours over the years that Young’s voice isn’t what it once was. After listening to a few of the tracks off of Good Thing, however, I realised that they were indeed, just rumours. The vocal performances on the record are soulful, and fantastic. It sounds to me like Young was very much in the zone. “Yeah, all my hits were really high, but even my speaking voice is low,” Young laughs. “I got the chance to use that on this record, which I rarely did years ago. If you listen to Ku Ku Kurama on No Parlez, [sings: ‘close to me now, drive me’], you’ll know what I mean. So I’ve got to show it off a little bit, which the record company at the time never let me do! But I like to have a bit more versatility to my game. I’d redo the vocals as the album evolved, as I knew I could do it better. The same thing happened when I was recording The Secret of Association (1985); sometimes my first takes were the keepers, but other songs I would sing it once, and as they would add instruments, I’d keep updating it. So once Good Thing was less programmed and more played, I always wanted to give it another go.” It seems Paul Young is in a very good place. So what happens next? “Well, in January, I was too busy even to celebrate my 60th birthday... I didn’t do anything. That felt weird. I think I’ll celebrate when I’m 61, when I get older, losing my hair,” he reflects, with a smile. “But I am really pleased with the record, and I think it’s a good grounding move to then sit and think, ‘where do I go from here?’ I have had a few other offers from some trendy producers, and now I have this under my belt, it’ll be easier for me to make a decision where to go next.” We wish Paul the very best of luck with the album, and his upcoming shows. Go to www.paul-young.com to find out more.
REVIEW BEYONCE
When Life Gives You Lemons Words Olivia Ray
“Lemonade is bolder, harsher; it’s Mrs Carter being honest with herself and the world...”
W
hether you’re a fan of Beyoncé or not, it is clear that this is a woman who knows exactly what she is doing. The notoriously private star does all her talking through her music, letting the outlet that she feels most in control of speak for itself, and boy does she do that on Lemonade. Beyoncé has done the whole visual album thing before, but this is something else. Lemonade is bolder, harsher; it’s Mrs Carter being honest with herself and the world, interlacing themes of infidelity and her marriage with her own daddy issues, peppered with references to ancestry, slavery, the struggles of the black woman and police brutality. It starts with the blissed-out Pray You Catch Me, immersing us in intoxicating layers of Bey’s voice. Her vulnerable vocals take centre stage over mournful keys as she sings: “I can taste the dishonesty / It’s all over your breath / My lonely ear / Pressed against the walls of your world”. “Are you cheating on me?” she asks, before launching into the reggaeinfused Hold Up. It’s radio-friendly, light and gentle – then suddenly jarring when paired with the lyrics: “I don’t wanna lose my pride, but I’mma fuck me up a bitch.” “If it’s what you truly want / I can wear her skin over mine / Her scalp; a cap,” she suggests dangerously in the lead up to one of the album’s standout tracks, Don’t Hurt Yourself – a gritty and
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raw bass-heavy number featuring the unmistakable vocals of Jack White. “Who the fuck do you think I am? / You ain’t married to no average bitch boy,” she snarls venomously over thunderous guitars, calling out Jay Z’s ‘God complex’. This is Beyoncé as we’ve never seen her before; angry, imperfect, spiteful, and furious. The middle fingers up theme continues in the defiant girls anthem, Sorry (hint, she ain’t sorry): “Tonight I regret the day I put that ring on,” while 6 Inch is another highlight: a dark and woozy track featuring The Weeknd, celebrating the independent woman making her own money and taking no prisoners: “She murdered everybody, and God was her witness.” On Daddy Lessons, Beyoncé is the country singer we should have always known she was born to be (raised in Texas, and as she sings on Formation “My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana”). The song is one of the best on Lemonade, mixing New Orleans jazz with a country beat. It’s infectious and catchy – hell, it’s brilliant – blending her real life experiences with her father with fantasy: “When trouble comes to town / And men like me come around / My daddy said shoot.” I defy you not to reach for the volume button after a few seconds of listening. The breezy Love Drought is pleasant enough, but amongst the stronger tracks, it’s easily forgotten, although we see a ray of hope for her husband emerge as her tone softens: “You and me could move a mountain.”
Moving on to reconciliation, the moving track, Sandcastles showcases the power of Bey’s voice over simple piano chords. Never has she sounded as raw or vulnerable as when she howls, “What is it about you?” – her voice cracking with emotion. The haunting vocals of James Blake quiver on Forward, which acts as a perfect segue into Freedom, a powerful ode to #blacklivesmatter featuring Kendrick Lamar, which is thunderous and tremendous. “Freedom! Freedom! I can’t move / Freedom, cut me loose,” she belts out like it’s the gospel. Closing the chapter on the infidelity theme is the magnificent and uplifting All Night. The track soars, triumphant; a horn-led ballad intertwined with Bey’s fondness for staccato singing. However she’s not quite done. Formation rounds Lemonade off; a defiant, politically charged black power anthem: “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros / I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” At first, it sounds like a lot of noise, but listen closer, it’s saying something important. Yes, Beyoncé could sing the phone book and her loyal fans would cry, “Yas queen!” but Lemonade is a triumph of an album and is her most accomplished, adventurous, and fiercely proud work yet. Listen to: Don’t Hurt Yourself / Daddy Lessons / All Night Formation
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ON TOUR WITH THE LUMINEERS
The Lumineers After their ‘difficult second album’ hit the number one spot in the UK, US, and Canada, you could say that The Lumineers have officially gone global with Cleopatra. The critically acclaimed, two-time Grammynominated folk trio from Colorado are currently selling out venues across the US and Europe, and they’re only going to get better. We catch up with the guys that keep their live sound right on the money, Brad Galvin and Josh Osmond.
The Lumineers are Wesley Schultz, Neyla Pekarek, and Jeremiah Caleb Fraites – and their music is making serious waves all over the globe. Currently in the midst of a European tour, playing intimate, fan-friendly venues, it’s been a real treat to witness, says monitor engineer, Brad Galvin. “It’s a real breakthrough, as there’s always serious pressure with album number two, but they’ve knocked it out the park in my opinion, and the fans seem to love it,” says Galvin, who first became acquainted with The Lumineers while working with the Dave Matthews Band in 2012. “I was the fly guy for Dave [Matthews], and I would also mix monitors for the opening acts; we did an arena run with The Lumineers opening up, and that was that when [their big single] Ho Hey was really big. What struck me was, they were the only support act that attracted almost the entire audience when they went on.” From there, a relationship formed, and by April 2013, Galvin was a permanent fixture on The Lumineers team as monitor engineer. And rather impressively, he is one of only two remaining crew members from that time. Speaks volumes, surely? “I guess so, but the guys are such a hard working band, it’s just a pleasure to work with them; when we’re not doing a show, they’ll do promo, or radio shows,” Galvin reveals. So how has this new record translated on stage? “Oh, very well; and we’ve been playing intimate settings such as Manchester’s Albert Hall and The Olympia in Dublin. This makes it tough, as we have a full semi of
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production, but the band loves it, so it’s way more fun for them.” Galvin’s route into live sound began by playing sax as a kid, and then getting into the local club scene “just to see bands and stuff ”. He got his Bachelors in music recording, but found that the live arena was where it was at for him:
“THE LUMINEERS ALL THINK THE JH16 IN-EARS ARE PHENOMENAL.” “Recording and live are much the same thing, in my opinion; it’s just in one, you get one shot, and in the other, you get a bunch of shots,” Galvin laughs. “Playing in bands, I realised I never had a monitor mix, so making six or eight people happy on stage rather than the whole audience felt rewarding to me – that’s why I chose to work monitors.” Galvin has forged a very strong relationship with The Lumineers, and was pivotal in bringing
them onto the right in-ear monitoring system from wedges: JH Audio’s JH16s, which he used extensively on last year’s Weird Al Yankovic tour. “I explained [to The Lumineers] that it would take time to make the change from wedges, but they were cool about it; and they didn’t just want in-ears for sound, but for hearing preservation, too. They wanted to keep it at the same level, but not hear the crowd over the wedges,” Galvin reveals. “We had a level issue with [Weird] Al when using his previous in-ears, so we moved onto the JH16s; Kevin [Glendinning, Maroon 5 monitor engineer and artist relations at JH Audio] said I should put a mic through them to feel what they can really do, so I listened to them against my other in-ear system first, heard an obvious difference, but not that huge, then I took the Smaart analysis software, made a jig with a carton of something, shoved the earpiece in, padded it with play dough, and shoved the mic in there so I could mimic an ear canal... and that didn’t show me anything that I didn’t expect to see either! So I just jammed them in my ears and plugged a mic in, as Kevin had suggested, and as soon as I talked through it, I knew exactly what he was talking about! “When I listen to any other ear bud, anything in the centre comes out of my forehead, but when I listen to music and talk through a mic into the JH16s, it feels like it’s coming out of my face; and that’s what everyone wants. I asked Kevin how JH do it, but he wouldn’t tell me! [laughs] “It honestly floored me; and I’ve honestly never
“MAKING SIX OR EIGHT PEOPLE HAPPY ON STAGE RATHER THAN THE WHOLE AUDIENCE FELT REWARDING TO ME.” experienced that. So at that point, I had to go with them. On top of that, I’ll call JH Audio with two weeks’ notice, requesting 18 pairs of ears, and they’ll always deliver for me. So I did it with Weird Al, and all Al’s guys - even his drummer, who had always sworn by his headphones – moved onto JH16s. And we did that with The Lumineers, and now they all think they’re phenomenal, too.” When it comes to mixing, Galvin’s console of choice is a DiGiCo SD5, which he moved onto after previously using an Avid Profile. “The Profile did a job for me, of course, but when it comes to input count and scalability as far as I/O or outputs go, DiGiCo has to be my go-to,” he explains. “You can also get them anywhere around the world, and on top of that, if we do a TV show, maybe they can’t get me an SD5, but they can get me an SD8, or an SD10. It’s so easy to move between those consoles, as you can just take your show file and use it on any other console in the range. It’s the same core engine. I just use the SD Convert software, and tell it what console it’s going to. “Also, The Lumineers are very into their reverbs, which was hard for me at the start, as there were so many audience mics, but it now sounds really good – in fact, it literally sounds like the album, so I even impress myself sometimes! [laughs] And the sound quality of the effects from within the DiGiCo means I need zero outboard gear: I have 16 reverbs running, and there are no issues at all. The show itself is 72 inputs, but my show file is probably 98 with all the reverb returns and everything else. We expected it to be 56, so to make the jump to 72 is pretty exciting, and DiGiCo allows me to do that; the I/O really is a very big deal.” Before we leave Brad to soundcheck, we ask him to share a stand-out moment in his career with us. He thinks for a second or two, then says: “Well, my favourite and least favourite was the first show in Europe, which was Glastonbury with The Lumineers; everything was going downhill, we had a bunch of issues, and just a 15-minute changeover. So the band then starts playing, and I suddenly realise there are 60,000 people next to me as an audience, totally into the show... That felt very cool! With these guys, every festival we go to is like that; I love the music and the band, and it’s fun to mix. There are also a couple of songs just Wes and his guitar, and it’s like just me and him doing our thing up there. That’s always special.” www.jhaudio.com www.digico.biz
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JOSH OSMOND: LESSONS IN LIVE The Lumineers are some of the classiest folks I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Both band and the entire crew are all really great. I came onboard towards the end of the last tour cycle, and at that point, the band had already been out playing their record for a couple of years, so they already knew what they were trying to achieve. With this record, it has been really fun; the band was able to really utilise the studio in a way that I don’t think was possible on their first record. And for myself and Brad, we were able to re-think and re-design what we were doing with the live show. We were able to listen to the record after it was mixed, and then start coming up with ideas of how to achieve some of the things that the band was doing in the studio. That’s been great, and the band is really having a great time playing all of the new songs live.
DOS AND DON’TS DO be very thorough. Never
just expect that because you put a mic on a drum earlier in the day, that just before the show is about to start, it is still in the same location as it started. Always be prepared for guests... and problems! Have back-up plans in place should something arise, so that you can calmly and efficiently solve them while the show is running without anyone noticing.
DON’T
be complacent; that will lead to nothing good. Try to keep a good attitude as well; everyone gets tired and frustrated on the road, but it’s important to try and keep a good relationship with your tour mates as well as with the local crews at each venue. It can really affect everyone, and spread like a virus when even just one person has a really bad attitude.
I CAN’T BE WITHOUT... My Smaart system analyzation software: one of the most important things any front of house engineer can learn is how to properly tune and calibrate a system. Everybody has their own way, and their own specific EQ curve that they are looking for, but when you are able to figure out what system tuning works best for you, you can create a level of consistency that is not possible without that software. You can go into any venue, use any speakers, and create a system that for the most part, is the same every day. Obviously there are some aspects that will always be different, but for the most part, you can achieve a very consistent show from venue to venue.
INTERVIEW DAN GILLESPIE SELLS
DAN GILLESPIE SELLS
catch up with Dan Gillespie Sells, affable frontman for The Feeling, about a new way of songwriting, landing the mega-gig with Jeff Lynne’s ELO, and touring the world with Jon Bon Jovi, but never even meeting him. “It was certainly a surprise,” admits Gillespie Sells of the band nailing the support slot for Jeff Lynne’s ELO world tour. “We put our name forward, but so did everyone – we were told a lot of the bands from ELO’s period wanted to do it, but Jeff [Lynne] was obviously involved in the decision making, and that wasn’t the direction he wanted to go down.” Gillespie Sells has met Lynne several times, and Lynne has watched the show, though The Feeling often take to the stage around the time the ELO boys are arriving at the venue. Doesn’t that feel at all awkward? “It’s kind of just the way it is,” he smiles. “There’s a very nice feel with us and the band and the whole team, but the timing is odd for us, and his band soundcheck without him a lot of the time. Bearing in mind we did a whole tour with Bon Jovi once and never met him at all, it’s not that surprising! Especially on big tours, where the dressing rooms are miles apart, and although it’s never the artist’s choice, there is always some security guard keeping everyone away.” Conversation turns to The Feeling’s latest record. In our opinion, Gillespie Sells has always been massively underrated as a songwriter, and although he and the band have produced several big hit records, winning awards along the way, this record feels like it’s got something extra – it feels like
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one piece of work, less ‘produced’ than their previous releases, and... fresh? “Yeah, it’s because of the way it was recorded, written, and produced, in fact; we recorded it all in one hit, when previously we’d laid tracks down in a more modern style, setting up gear and doing these guitar parts one day, the drums the next, and so on,” Gillespie Sells explains. “But this time, it was all about the songs being written so they could be played live with five instruments, and the record was arranged and written with the whole band. I would make demos before, but with this record, we would jam, and then we’d do single takes; there was no editing between takes, and it was a very different – and great – way of working. I had to make sure I was totally happy with the lyrics though, as normally,
“OUR FIRST TWO RECORDS WERE HEAVILY INSPIRED BY ELO. WE WANTED TO MAKE SOMETHING VERY POPPY, BUT RICH IN HARMONY AND MODULATION, AND ALL THOSE THINGS THAT ARE RISKY TO POP MUSIC.” even when I’m about to do a take in the studio, I am tweaking them right up until we hit the record button!” The album was all done at Gillespie Sells’ Doghouse studio in Hackney – a converted pub, where the pub floor is now the live room. The old boozer boasts a Neve console, and a
plethora of top-end recording kit, strewn in quite bizarre places. “One amp goes in the bathroom, there’s one in the basement, and we stick the Leslie in the entrance hall,” smiles Gillespie Sells. “We get as much separation as we can, but we’re never super-anal about it; it’s part of the thing, you know?” Sounds proper old school, which is truly refreshing to hear, but not that surprising, given the fact that these guys have never had an air or grace between them, despite their successes. They’re also a tremendous live act; we’ve seen them do their thing all over Europe, be it at an old pub in Hertfordshire, their own festival in the Alps, or a headline performance at Hammersmith Apollo. So what about this gig at the O2, then? “I think The Feeling and ELO are a good fit, as our first two records were heavily inspired by ELO; we wanted to make something that was musically sophisticated, but very poppy, rich in harmony and modulation, and all those things that are risky to pop music,” Gillespie Sells reveals. “You risk foregoing the cool factor, don’t you? [smiles] Music is all cool if it’s spiky, and has the right energy, but that was a bit too easy for us, so we challenged ourselves to make records that, at the time, seemed not very cool. And there was a moment in time in the early noughties where ELO music was deemed to be a guilty pleasure; and I never agreed with that – it was the kind of shit old punks came out with, whereas my generation didn’t give a shit! We’ve always been a bit contrary because of that, and have always wanted to challenge the orthodoxy of the snobby music press.” And it’s working: MOJO recently gave the new record four stars (they never give five, FYI). Is this a turning point for The Feeling? “Well, MOJO fans would never have come to our gigs before hearing this [latest] record,” laughs Gillespie Sells. “It’s a representation of how we sound live, which they wouldn’t have heard before. I still think making a record that’s meticulous and slick - like we’ve done in the past - can be gorgeous as well. So I refuse to say it’s a better way; it’s just we wanted to make it this way.” Post-UK, The Feeling will travel across Europe with Jeff Lynne’s ELO before embarking on an extensive US tour. We wish both bands the very best of luck.
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ON TOUR WITH JEFF LYNNE’S ELO
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JEFF LYNNE’S ELO
Gary Bradshaw is one of the UK’s most accomplished live sound engineers. Having worked with Take That from the beginning, taking the ELO front of house role was somewhat of a no-brainer for him, as Jeff Lynne’s backing band is basically the same bunch of guys. We talk to Bradshaw about mixing, musicianship, and tea-making with Sir Paul McCartney.
ike a lot of people in this “Having said that, there are a couple of industry, I started off spin echoes in places, but what’s great playing in a band; I played is, there was no outboard gear necessary guitar, and my brother whatsoever. I then use a few Waves was the drummer, but plugins for compression, notably the we both realised fairly early on that we dbx 160 and CLA-76, CLA-3A, and CLA-2A.” could make a better living working as When it comes to mixing, Bradshaw technicians rather than musicians,” admits Bradshaw. “My first large scale tour is pretty hands-on, but also utilises was with XTC, first as a guitar tech, and DiGiCo’s snapshot functionality to set then as their sound man; and I haven’t up scenes at the beginning of each song; and like with Take That, the looked back from there, really.” combination of DiGiCo and his trusted The connection with the ELO tour d&b rig is making all the right noises was through Bradshaw’s longstanding for ELO. The touring system comes relationship with Take That: courtesy of UK rental house, Skan PA. “The band that are playing behind Jeff “I have used d&b with many acts, Lynne are all the same musicians who and although there are many fine play with Take That, with the exception of Richard Tandy, of course,” Bradshaw explains. “I have worked with Take That since the early days, so when [the band’s musical director] Mike Stevens mentioned he was looking at working with Jeff Lynne in 2014, I sounding systems out there today, this is signed up there and then.” my speaker system of choice,” Bradshaw At front of house, Bradshaw works says. “On this and the last Take That from a DiGiCo SD7, his favourite mixing console, which he says offers all arena tour, we used a thing called Array the power and functionality to make the Processing; I was a bit sceptical about show go as smooth as possible. using it to begin with, but having used it, “I used the [DiGiCo] D5 console it really does produce a very finely tuned when it was around for many tours, and tonal balance in the PA all the way to first and foremost, I have always liked the farthest seats in the arena.” the audio quality of all DiGiCo Conversation turns to musical products,” he reveals. “I also like the way legends (how can it not, with ELO in you can configure all the inputs and the picture?), and we ask Bradshaw if outputs; I tend to put the same channels any stand out in particular. in the same places on the surface, no “In 1994, I was asked to dep for Colin matter who I’m working with.” Norfield on Pink Floyd’s The Division Interestingly, there is next to no Bell tour; Colin had done all the North processing used on this tour: American dates, but for personal reasons, “The first thing Jeff [Lynne] said to was not able to do the European leg,” me when we first met prior to the Hyde Bradshaw reflects. “Like most people of Park show was, ‘can we have no effects my age, I am a big fan, so it was great on anything, please, and particularly no to be involved in any way with a Pink reverb on the strings?’,” Bradshaw smiles. Floyd tour. Also on the tour was Alan
Bradshaw, my brother, who was the drummer in our band. He was PA crew chief, and helping out on monitors with Seth Goldman, so it was great working on such a large tour with him.” Sounds it! And staying with legends, tell us about that strange Sir Paul McCartney moment... “[smiles] I did some work with Paul in 1991, mixing monitors for rehearsals at his studio in southern England; on my first day, we had just about finished setting up, the band were due in the next morning, and I was alone in the studio. The door opened and he popped his head in and asked if Keith Smith was around. I explained he had gone to the storage area to store some empty flight cases. “He said, ‘OK’, and left. Still slightly in shock at having met him for the first time, the door opened again. It was Paul again. This time he said, ‘are you the new chap doing monitors for us?’ I said yes. He said, ‘it’s Gary, isn’t it?’. He came in and shook my hand, asked if everything was ready for the next morning, and if so, was it OK for him to have a quick play on the piano. I said yes, and he sat down at the piano, which was only about two feet away from me, and played Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road! I thought if he doesn’t like the monitor sound and I get sent home tomorrow, it doesn’t matter, as I have just witnessed a great performance of two of my favourite songs by the guy who wrote them, while sitting two feet away! “Fortunately, he was happy with the monitors, we had a quick chat about Liverpool, as that’s my home town as well, and then he said, ‘has Keith showed you where everything is?’ Before I had a chance to say yes, Paul marched off to the kitchen and made me a cuppa!” www.digico.biz www.waves.com
“I HAVE ALWAYS LIKED THE AUDIO QUALITY OF ALL DIGICO PRODUCTS.”
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INTERVIEW PETE BOXSTA MARTIN
MUSIC MAKER
W
hether it’s an up and coming new artist, a former X Factor winner, a global superstar, or even a stormtrooper, Pete Boxsta Martin’s passion and enthusiasm doesn’t falter one iota. The Oscar-longlisted South African producer has a beautiful studio in South West London, in one of the city’s most musical buildings, you could say; and he admits that he does more business over a cappuccino in the café than anywhere else. We decided to check it out for ourselves.
On arrival at Martin’s studio, I am handed a bottle of water followed by a coffee (he has a great cappuccino maker, in fact). The first thing that strikes me is the vibe of the room: the artwork, the colours, the video games neatly arranged on the shelves, and that awesome picture of a load of stormtroopers from the seminal Star Wars movie. “Yeah, I love George Lucas, dude; and I try to apply that aesthetic to everything I do. I can push beyond the human element with this décor,” Martin smiles, as we take a seat in
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the control room. “We constantly have people coming in and out of here, because ultimately, the major labels are going to be done. I remember an interview with Sean Parker nine years ago, and he said the only people that are going to make the money [in the music industry] are the ones with the portholes. It’s so true, because the main guys at Spotify and iTunes might be cleaning up, but the songwriters are getting left behind. There’s going to be a revolution in the next five years; all the kids will be doing it themselves.”
Maybe. Martin – a published songwriter himself – seems to have a very strong relationship with a lot of up and coming artists, who are doing some pretty great things: he mentions singer-songwriters Lula Beggs and Nicole Dash Jones, both of which he is working with in some capacity. “We stack the [guitar] amps in there, and then there is a vocal booth, too,” Martin explains, signalling to a little side room attached to the main area. “It’s a little production house, really; and artists are constantly through the door. I’ve had a host of assistants, too, that have gone on to do great things: one of them went on to produce the last [The] Script album. Also within this building, we have Modest Management, Crown Talent, and Media Group; Crown looks after Jessie J, and I am doing joint ventures with Crown – there’s a young girl called Amber-Simone who I’ve been developing for three years; she’s fantastic. So really, just
walking into the café, the business that I have spun here is fantastic!” There is so much going on in Martin’s room, it’s difficult to know where to begin: I spy a sizeable keyboard rig featuring a Nord, a Prophet, and several more top synths; a set of the new Genelec 8351A monitors; a ton of G-Technology drives; and something white with lots of colourful buttons, that actually might not look out of place in a Star Wars movie... Martin informs me that it’s Native Instruments’ Maschine Studio, which is crucial in his studio workflow. “I do master classes with Maschine, and I am beyond impressed with it,” Martin admits. “I have always had Logic here, and Pro Tools, and server drives connected with Ableton - lots of DAWs running at the same time, basically. Then a couple of years ago, I changed to Maschine. At that time, Logic was getting super-buggy, and I loaded Maschine Studio, and it loaded all the Logic plugins just
INTERVIEW PETE BOXSTA MARTIN
“THE MAIN GUYS AT SPOTIFY AND ITUNES MIGHT BE CLEANING UP, BUT THE SONGWRITERS ARE GETTING LEFT BEHIND.” like that; for some reason, the new UI just loaded all the stuff. It was very fast and very fresh, so I just stuck with it. I look at it now, and it was actually a revelation; I am changing to Studio One from Pro Tools at the minute, too, as Studio One is another brand that seems to have taken all these functions and exploded them, basically. I am very impressed with both.” A very forward-thinking setup, with two forward-thinking companies, by the sound of it. And it keeps you ahead of the game then, Pete? “Exactly that. And yeah, it really does. One of the key things [in Maschine] is the mapping features, because what happens is, if you’re programming something on Logic, you’re constantly messing around trying to find parameters: if you open a synth, for example, you have all these parameters in front of you, you automate this bit, and so on. But this way of working means as soon as you click on something, you have the synths, and they automatically map in front of you! When you’re in a groove, all the parameters are mapped, so it’s like an exploratory mission; it’s so far beyond what anyone is doing at the moment. And they’ve just integrated this machine - the Komplete Kontrol - so now you’ve got a whole bunch of other effects in front of you, and you can do two different versions that are totally separate from each other. In short, it’s changed my whole world.” As Martin begins playing some mixes to me, conversation turns to the Genelec monitors he has recently acquired: the new flagship 8351As. “It’s always been about getting a crappy speaker and a very high-end speaker, and see how they react to sound; and I have to say, I have never been more convinced so quickly about any studio monitor than these 8351As,” Martin reveals. “I was invited to Grove Studios in London to the launch, and there were a bunch of older guys at the console, playing very bad music very quietly through them! [laughs] I was with a new artist I’m working with who’s just landed a deal with Universal this year, Arrow Benjamin; and I said to him, ‘come on, put on some Jackson stuff ’. So he played a track from the Off the Wall record, we banged them up, and when I heard it through these, I was ordering them there and then! When you have reference points
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that are seminal to you like that record, you know when something sounds unbelievable - and that was me done!” Benjamin’s first release was with Beyoncé and Naughty Boy - a track called Running, so he is destined for big things, no doubt. Martin and Benjamin also share the same management, and sometimes strange things happen... “Arrow [Benjamin] said to our manager, ‘I’ve had a dream about this guy called Mali Music, could we work with him?’ So he puts in a call to his guys, plays him some stuff, and they put him on a plane to New York to come and work with us,” Martin laughs. Seriously? “Yeah, and this was the first session I did with these Genelecs. The record (Sit Down For This) was recently shortlisted for an Oscar, so it was a really good omen - the first track I ever did on them! It was a steamroller. We got it on Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq movie, and that’s how the Oscar shortlist occurred. “Manny Marroquin mixed it, and it’s a good testament to how close the mixes are, as it was the first mix I did on them, and my mix and his final mix are very similar.” Martin goes on to play me the track, and he’s right: very little difference between the two. Is it normal to get used to a new pair of speakers so quickly, and be that at home with them? “Oh, absolutely not; the whole thing when you get a speaker is, you need three months with them,” Martin insists. “But that mix was finished during the third day I had spent with the speakers; and all the record company was saying was, ‘Pete, I think we need a vocal up a bit on this part’, and very minor changes like that. So instinctively, they were just really great from the get go. And Manny I trust implicitly; he has done four mixes for me so far on this guy, and he’s amazing.” Martin also praises the stereo imaging on his Genelec monitors, and says they’re suited to any genre of music: “I’m doing a lot of hip hop type projects, where the kids want to feel the whole sonic range, which these things can do with ease; they’re very heavy, too, so it reassures you in terms of build quality,” Martin smiles. And what about in terms of translating to smaller sound? “Oh, they do that very well. I stick the song in the car every time – old school –
and what’s also really important is laptop mixes; it’s my first port of call, in fact – that and ear buds - because it’s pretty much guaranteed when someone listens to a track for the first time, it’s coming from one of those sources. “But these Genelecs translate to smaller sound very well, which is pretty weird; I used to have Barefoots, which were great, but although the Genelecs sound big, the translation to a smaller system and sound is extraordinary, balance-wise - way better than any others I’ve worked on. Then, as with the previous generation Genelecs, the stereo imaging on these is phenomenal; and there is something about the mid range that makes you constantly concentrate more on it, I find.” No fatigue either, Martin insists, despite him blasting the system pretty regularly, ‘sub and all’, the latter of which is pretty unusual for most producers. “They’re 100% easier on the ear than anything else, and they have a bit more of a sheen to them, so they don’t hurt; and at very, very low levels, they are extremely detailed, which I love,” Martin enthuses. “It always feels like you’re listening to the same mix whether it’s loud or soft, so they feel very true to me; and unlike many producers, I want to hear all the sub. There is a great pop mix that I always reference to - Beyoncé’s If I Were A Boy - and there’s a real bass and a sub bass; on normal speakers you don’t hear them, but on these [Genelecs] you immediately hear it. The track was mixed by Spike Stent, and it’s a very clever thing, as there is a sub that attacks the one [beat] every time, and you hear it on these speakers every time. In my world, that is so important, as when you are doing hip hop, you have to understand where that hits in a club.” So who’s going to be the next big thing then, Pete? Seems like all your artists have a shot..! “[smiles] I’m working with a lot of talented artists – I’ve been working solidly with Arrow now for two years, and him getting that Universal deal is a big step, so the future is bright for sure for him; but also, all the others have something about them. James Arthur, who won X Factor a few years ago, and just got resigned to Sony, we work a lot together, and his stuff is excellent; he is a real ‘one take’ guy. And Lula Beggs is fantastic, also. “In fact, I was doing some backing tracks for Lula’s live shows on these Genelecs recently, and when I watched the show, it translated fantastically well, which also really impressed me about these monitors. The four acts on before her, I heard dips in the various backing tracks, but none whatsoever from hers!” www.genelec.com www.boxstamusic.com
Q&A PULLED APART BY HORSES
PULLED APART BY HORSES We chat to Robert John Lee, bassist and vocalist with British post-hardcore band, Pulled Apart By Horses, about music culture, vinyl, streaming issues, and a new album.
The industry has changed drastically since the band formed [in 2008]; how has your local scene evolved? When we first started, we had no ambition to do this as a living, we were just playing music for the pure enjoyment of it. We were inspired by bands in our local music scene [in
medium, considering in the UK alone last year, there were 2.2 million vinyl record sales, as opposed to just 75,000 in 2007? I think putting a piece of vinyl on a turntable, putting the needle on there, and hearing what comes through the speakers, is a beautiful experience.
considering the power of social media, and other digital channels? Probably fairly irrelevant. When you look at the history of music, who cares about the charts? Some of the worst music ever made has stayed in the charts forever, while other incredible artists have gone under the
You produce your own records. What is your recording setup, and how involved are the whole band in the process? Well, we produce them as far as pre-production and demoing. We like to be as prepared as possible before going into a proper studio.
“SOME OF THE WORST MUSIC EVER MADE HAS STAYED IN THE CHARTS FOREVER, WHILE OTHER INCREDIBLE ARTISTS HAVE GONE UNDER THE RADAR.” Leeds, England], and we wanted to be part of that. Somewhere along the line, we saw people were connecting with what we were doing, and we had the opportunity to go for it. So we did! It’s hard to do something important with music now, but there are still bands emerging in Leeds. Also, most of the bands who inspired us are still going. With the music industry in its current state, it’s even more important for bands to have that independent, DIY spirit. You don’t need investors to record your own material and put your own shows on. I still see that attitude driving the Leeds music scene. You released a vinyl single on Record Store Day. How important is vinyl as a
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Simple as that! It’s what addicted me to music. It’s also a physical thing: if you go to a live show and feel drums, bass, and guitar blazing at you, it’s a vibration; and that translates directly to the grooves in vinyl. Also, there’s kind of a ritual involved; it’s more time consuming, but you’re paying more attention, and consideration to what you’re hearing, rather than just having a load of mp3s on random. You can delete a load of mp3s ‘like that’, once you think they’re not cool anymore, but a vinyl collection is harder to get rid of. You have to live with your mistakes and learn from them! I think vinyl is here to stay. Your third album was your first to enter the UK Top 40. How relevant do you think the charts are now,
radar. However, I’m not ungrateful. In a world where most people seem to listen to music through YouTube or Spotify, it’s good to know that some people are buying your record, and we thank them for that. But getting in the charts isn’t why we are making music, and will continue to do so. What are your views on streaming, and the global issue of providing fair remuneration for artists? I wish we still lived in a world where if you wanted to hear your favourite band, you had to go to your local record store, buy their album, then wait to go to their gig. We don’t live in that beautiful world anymore, but maybe we should pretend that we do!
We’ve worked with some great producers over the years in some great studios and we’ve learned a lot from them; every time, we take something new away with us, so I think it’s important to get an outside perspective when you’re recording an album. We have our own studio/ rehearsal space in Leeds where I keep all the backline fully miked up. I have a couple of interfaces running 16 channels, and I record everything straight into Pro Tools, then mix everything on a Mac. I do all the technical stuff because I’m a geek, but we all get involved in listening, and making comments on mixing or sonics. How would you describe the band’s sound? When we first started out, there was
definitely more of a hardcore punk feel to it, but we’re currently working on our fourth album, and there’s definitely a garage-rock, psychedelic element in there. There’s more range in dynamics and tempo to allow the heavier parts to shine through; and vocally, there’s more melody and harmonies involved, but that comes from learning to use our voices and instruments over time, rather than everything being full-on constantly. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some nasty moments in there! You just signed to Raw Power. What do they bring to the table? We’ve only just started with them, but so far it’s going great, and they have some really good ideas for the future. We haven’t had the opportunity to play much in the States yet, and that’s something they’re keen to push and get more of our material available over there. The record industry can get very complicated when it comes to rights and releasing material in different countries; until you’ve done that, it’s difficult and very expensive to go and play in the US. It’s all over our heads. We try to concentrate more on the music and not get bogged down in the business side of things. Raw Power already have the facilities to deal with this kind of thing, so it’s good to have like-minded people fighting your corner.
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You guys use a lot of AudioTechnica kit: the System 10 Stompbox, microphones, and headphones... That [System 10] thing is great. If you’ve ever been to one of our shows, you’ll have seen that it’s quite hard to keep track of James, our guitarist. He often spends more time in the crowd, hanging from the lighting rig, or jumping off speaker stacks. He used to use really long leads, but they break, or you have to have a tech making sure he’s not strangling himself or anyone in the crowd. This way, he can do whatever he wants and not have to worry about it. As far as the [Audio-Technica] mics, they’re perfect for our band. We started using them live, and had great results. The build quality is awesome, they’re rugged and roadworthy; and they just suit our backline. The dynamic mics are great for stage use; I first started out using the AE6100 for my vocals, and was really impressed with it. The EQ seems to suit our vocal style really well, and the other important feature is the noise/feedback rejection; you get very little bleed from other instruments, which is essential when you play as loud as we do. This feature seems to run across the board with all the A-T mics we use. We moved on to using the AE2500 and ATM250DE on guitars; these are actually dual element mics designed for kick drum, but we found that a blend of both
a condenser and dynamic works wonders on our guitar sounds. Both mics are perfectly aligned in one unit, so you don’t have to worry about phase issues; that’s perfect for live. And on the recording side? I wanted to make it sound as honest, raw, and live as possible – just capture the sound of us playing together as a band. If I want to experiment a little more, particularly with James’ guitar tone, I use a combination of mics: I love the AE3000 condenser for guitar cabs, and the ATM650, which is A-T’s super-rugged, all-round work horse dynamic mic. It also sounds great on snare, and I even use it as a vocal mic in the practice room, because again, the isolation and rejection of bleed from other loud instruments is impeccable. On drums, I use the ATM350CW clip-on condenser mics for the toms; they’re really practical, because you don’t have to mess around with mic stands, and because they’re condensers, I can get a thunderous tom sound from them. For overheads, I use a pair of large diaphragm condenser mics, which was a little daunting at first, because I was used to aiming pencil mics. So I’ve been using a pair of AT4033s, and there’s so much more detail with them; you can either get the sound of the whole kit with great, tight, punchy, clear lows, or EQ them to concentrate on the cymbals. Changed my life, man!
You’ve also been using the AT4050SM for several applications... Yes. If you just want to throw one mic up and get an awesome sounding room recording, I would definitely recommend this. It’s multi-pattern, so you can experiment depending on your room/setup. Plus, A-T condensers come with a shock mount, which is essential; it’s a really simple design, which kind of utilises a rubber band! I know that sounds weird, but again, they’re really sturdy and practical, which is great when you want to work quickly. It’s also the go-to mic for Tom’s vocals. We overdub all the vocals last, and this mic is ace for Tom’s vocal style. It has killer upper mids which have been lacking or coloured with other mics I’ve used. And you’re now taking all this with you into the studio to record album four? Yep, along with my ATH-M50x headphones, which I use to monitor and mix! Again, in my experience, the best headphones I’ve ever used. So I’ll be giving all this to the producer we work with to try out, which may offend him to start with, but I’m sure we’ll all get over it..!
www.audio-technica.co.uk www.pulledapartbyhorses.com
THE ROLLING STONES
EXHIBITIONISM
Exhibitionism is a fitting title for anything Rolling Stones-centric, and this ode to Britain's finest rock and roll band does not disappoint. Spine-tingling and awe-inspiring memorabilia is draped across London's fabulous Saatchi Gallery, taking the visitor back to the band's beginnings, then right up to the present day. And to shine a light over proceedings (to borrow a title from the Stones' seminal 1972 record, Exile on Main St.), legendary illuminator, Patrick Woodroffe, has put the cherry on top, using a range of GLP lighting fixtures to enhance the experience, as you make your way through the Stones' remarkable musical journey. Headliner jumped in (like Jack Flash). So where to start? The beginning, I guess. A giant LED 'Ladies And Gentlemen' greets us, and on the adjacent wall, an interactive map of the world takes you through the years, and 48 HEADLINER
tallies up all the Stones shows from inception: where, and when; and it's in the many thousands, of course. The next room is a fantastic video wall, looking at the highs and lows of the band's illustrious career: the humble beginnings, the tragic death of Brian Jones, the antics of Keith Richards cropping up on various newspaper front pages, and the arrival of Ronnie Wood in the early '70s. Suddenly, we regress to 1962 London – Edith Grove, to be precise, where five young Stones spent most of their time making music, and stealing enough food to live on along the way: you get to walk through a replica of their abode, too, laden with cigarette butts, old records, the odd bashed up guitar, empty beer bottles, and seriously unmade beds. From here, it's all about the memorabilia, and the band's amazing 50-year journey: original drum kits, a plethora of guitars, tape machines, Mick and Keith's original applications to the PRS, a couple of virtual studio tours; you name it, they've got it, over two bustling floors. It all culminates nicely in a six-minute video experience, where you're
asked to don your black plastic glasses, and enjoy Satisfaction in glorious 3D, starting on stage with the band, and leaving the gig feeling you were actually part of the audience. Which is, aptly, very satisfying.
LIGHT ME UP
So how was this all done, then? Well, the Stones' long-term lighting designer and show director, Patrick Woodroffe, was heavily involved in Exhibitionism, and says the idea of a full-blown exhibition had been discussed regularly over the past 20 years. His firm, Woodroffe Bassett Design (WBD), specified a number of LED fixtures from GLP, the exclusive automated lighting partner for the exhibition, which were provided by London-based supplier, White Light. “It's gone through many iterations, but this concept was the first that seemed to have the necessary weight and commitment, and we started work on it two years ago. WBD were asked by the producers to light the show at the same time that I was helping to curate the content,” Woodroffe explains. “In the end, we chose to buy a lot of the equipment rather than rent locally, as much of the installation
THE ROLLING STONES EXHIBITIONISM
is custom, which enabled us to specify exactly the fixtures that we required. We wanted to have a dynamic lighting element in the final ‘Performance’ gallery, and so started to look at the idea of a small LED moving light.” And the GLP fixtures certainly come into their own in that gallery. They help create an atmosphere in the space where the audience walks in from the moody backstage set: as they leave that area and walk onto the stage itself, slow moving pools of blue light drift around the space, enhancing the impression that they are actually on the stage, waiting for the performance to begin. Moments later, the lights fade, and the first 3D image appears in front of them on the screen. It all looks very impressive. “Throughout the film, the lights copy the colours and effects that are taking place on the screen to give a totally immersive and dramatic experience,” Woodroffe explains. “The GLP X4 is used very much as a show element while the 3D film is being displayed, but it is also used as a technical fixture set ‘On Test’ in the backstage area. This lends real authenticity to the exhibit.” There are 25 X4s utilised in total, along with six of the manufacturer's new X4 Bar 20 high performance battens, all of which appear in the Performance gallery. Also, GLP Inc [in North America] supplied nine Fusion LED RGB fixed beam battens, which light 49 HEADLINER
up the 'Style' section of the exhibition, where the band's snazzy Kings Road suits and wacky stage outfits reside. For White Light's special projects coordinator, Simon Needle, it was the first time working with GLP kit: “They were ideal for the exhibition, as they are the only fixtures we know of that can cope with changing voltages,” Needle explains. “As an art gallery with an extremely low roof, the space was quite difficult to work in; and logistic issues with the kit delivery meant working closely with Saatchi to ensure that we weren’t disturbing their neighbours. Also, there is also limited power, which can be a problem, so to overcome this, we used as much GLP LED lighting as possible.” Summing up, Woodroffe praises Ki McGinity and the team from IEC Exhibitions, who made it all happen: “This was a hugely challenging, but ultimately rewarding project for everyone involved; a strong creative team with the support of a generous and imaginative producer, and the input from The Rolling Stones themselves at every step, resulted in a technically superb but also emotionally connected experience for everyone who will see it.” The London exhibition ends on September 4th, then the production will tour another 11 cities until 2020. www.glp.de
THE ROLLING STONES were pivotal in changing the music production
industry. In 1975, they hired riggers from Holiday On Ice to hang their sound system and take it from arena to arena, which changed the game, so to speak. The rest, as they say, is history. They now have some of the most formidable sets on tour, where lighting and video are just as important as the band's classic sound.
INTERVIEW MARK EGAN
It’s All About The Bass
Massachusetts-born Mark Egan first picked up the trumpet at 10-yearsold, and stuck with it until year two of his music course at the University of Miami, where he became more tempted by the bass guitar. He continued his studies in Florida, received coaching from the late and phenomenally great bassist, Jaco Pastorius; and then moved to New York in the mid-70s – a time where he began touring with a string of great musicians, including heroic jazz saxophonist, David Sanborn. He has since won a Grammy, and is arguably the most recorded fretless bassist of all time. Headliner investigates.
ark Egan has been a first-call studio musician in New York for some 40 years; in fact, it was in 1976 that he joined the renowned Pat Metheny group, recorded three records with him, and plenty of bootlegs, “which were coming out all over the place,” Egan says, with a smile. This was a real moment for the multi-instrumentalist, as he explains: “For me, it was a big shock playing with Pat [Metheny]; and that eventually led me to form my own group called Elements, which is a duo – me and Pat’s drummer, Danny Gottlieb. We have an amazing rapport having played together for so long - and we should do, considering it’s been 45 years!” Egan is no stranger to the recording environment, as expected from any session musician, but he was also once owner of a state-ofthe-art, John Stork-designed studio, which he sold to his good friend and musical accomplice, Karl Latham. “I’ve known Karl a long time; he’s a fantastic drummer, and I recently played on his Living Standards record,” Egan explains. “It was Karl
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that first introduced me to RME equipment – he brought in an RME Fireface UFX interface to the studio, and after hearing what it could do, the sound quality, and the ease of use, I felt I had to have one myself.” Egan’ is currently revamping a studio that he has rebuilt at home (which is now Connecticut), put
deliver perfect audio from the source every time. I’m not always a clean bassist, thinking about it... [smiles] I remember when I recorded the Joan Osborne record, One of Us, I recorded on a home-made enclosure with 15-inch speaker, which just about fitted into the cottage we recorded at, and the speaker blew,
“AS A BASSIST, IT’S THE SOUND OF THE CONVERTERS ON THE UFX THAT ARE SO PRISTINE.” together by FM Design, who he describes as ‘an incredible acoustician’. “I am so happy with the sound of UFX, and I’m looking forward to seeing the UFX Plus when it comes out, which is going to be a beefed-up version of it, from what I can gather,” Egan enthuses. “As a bassist, it’s the sound of the converters on the UFX that are so pristine; my sound is generally clean, and it really does
and that sound became part of that record! But what I’m really saying is, all RME kit translates whatever you’re doing perfectly.” Egan was also the bassist on Duran Duran’s Arcadia album, and was recently reunited with Le Bon and co. at a show in New York. “That was another record of note for me, and really put me on the map in terms of the rock genre,” Egan
reflects. “That record was very creative, and I think it really holds up; people know those guys as MTV glamour musicians of the 80s, but that record was more than that. It was great to hook up with them again.” So what about the role of a session musician today – hasn’t it become almost null and void in this technology-centric society? “In many ways, yes,” Egan admits. “A lot of the scene has totally changed from not only the ‘70s and ‘80s, but even up to 2000 and beyond. I attribute it to a lot of factors: yes, there is always going to be a changing of the guard where people get older, and new blood comes in; but studios had to close because they couldn’t compete with the new technology, and small studios making records. For instance, I’d get called to play on a soundtrack for a movie or commercial, and it’d be a full band playing a demo to see if we could win the contract, whereas now, it’s files being pinged back and forth, so there’s not as much concentration. “But I embrace it, because I have to; and people send me tracks now, so it’s important to have my own
INTERVIEW MARK EGAN
“THERE’S NOT AS MUCH LIVE PERFORMANCE GOING ON IN STUDIOS TODAY; IT’S A DIFFERENT WAY OF WORKING.” studio... [pauses] But I do miss playing with my bros! The detrimental thing is that there’s not as much live performance in the studio these days; it’s a different way of working. You morph together on parts, talk about things, and come to an agreement, whereas it was once free flowing, and all about coming up with creative ideas. With a file, the creativity ends there, and there’s no conversation.” An interesting point, and one for all musicians to ponder. Egan is clearly a live music lover, and due to the amount of shows he plays, he has to have a mobile rig. “I have just ordered the RME Babyface Pro; that’s for my mobile unit, as it’s the perfect interface to use directly with my laptop,” Egan explains. “The transparency is fantastic, and there is no latency on playback; Babyface Pro also has the same A-D converters as the UFX, so the quality is phenomenal, and it packs the same power and a lot of the same functionality it’s just way more portable. It also has 12 inputs, so you could do a whole band, no problem – I mean, The Beatles only had a four-track at the beginning, right? [smiles]” True enough! So what’s next for Mark Egan? “Well, Karl [Latham] and I have some live dates to support the Living Standards record, and that’s now getting airplay in the US, which is very encouraging; and I’ll be travelling with another band called Outreach over to Austria,” Egan explains, adding that it’ll be the fourth year he’s made this trip to Europe. “That’s going to be a very creative week which culminates in two-and-a-half days of televised concerts in Austria and Germany - big band avant garde international players including myself and Adam Holzman, who played with Miles Davis. Then I have a number of local dates coming up in the New York area with many players in May... So quite a lot going on, really!” www.rme-audio.com
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BEATING THE DRUM
We also caught up with Egan’s good pal, Karl Latham, who happens to be one of the world’s most respected drummers. So tell us about this studio of yours, that you bought off your mate, Mark Egan... “It’s fantastic, and my nearest neighbour is a 500-acre parcel of land,” Latham smiles. “I have many classical influences, rock influences, and some improv, but not really American roots-based music, so I play with Mark [Egan] as a result; he’s one of the best bassists in the world.” As Egan explained, he was heavily involved in Latham’s latest album, which was all recorded at the studio, using the RME Fireface UFX. The album is an eclectic mix of songs with
a Latham and Egan twist: “It’s just amazing songs with amazing players, basically,” Latham insists. “What’s great about the UFX is the piece in front - the total mix: this is the thing that separates it from other pieces, for me. It’s so clear, intuitive, and logical; and you can keep splitting the signal with no degradation to set up as many cue mixes as you want: EQ, dynamic processing, and any number of different scenes. And for overdubs, I set it up so that nothing comes through except for whatever instrument is going to be overdubbed, and then the main mix goes to their cue mix. And for drummers in particular, it’s amazing: unlimited I/O, no latency, and you can use whatever
pres you want: the ones on it are great, too.” Latham is also a fan of RME’s Babyface Pro, which he describes as something of a pocket-rocket: “You can do an entire tracking session on Babyface Pro, and what’s so amazing about that is, it’s USBpowered, so you just plug it into your laptop. It has phantom power on two channels, and you have two other balanced channels, and then you can use a Lightpipe piece to get an additional eight channels. So you can track 12 channels on this piece that’s barely bigger than your wallet!” www.rme-audio.com
THEATRE BRENDAN COLE
BRENDAN COLE:
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
A Night To Remember is Brendan Cole’s biggest and best theatre tour yet, and follows the successful Live & Unjudged and Licence To Thrill productions. The Strictly Come Dancing star has just completed an intense run of sell-out shows across the UK – 59 performances in 10 weeks, no less – fusing music and dance to deliver quite the spectacle on the big stage. Headliner goes behind the scenes to chat to front of house engineer, Rick Dickerson, and keyboardist and composer, Barry Robinson, to find out how it’s all put together.
Night To Remember is an energetic two-hour show, which covers pretty much all the dances that you see on Strictly: there are waltzes, tangos, salsas, and rhumbas; and a bit of ballroom, too: the foxtrot, and the Charleston. With such a mix, the cast has to be incredible; but this also means the musicianship has to be right up there, too – and it is, thanks in no small part to the very talented arranger, Barry Robinson. “Barry is so good, you don’t even notice that the orchestra is all track,” insists Rick Dickerson, front of house engineer. “The orchestral
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structure sounds so natural; it flows as if it’s being played live, which is quite a trick these days – you normally know straight away that it’s tracked on a lot of shows! Barry plays the piano and the keyboards, too, so it’s quite a full-on rock band on some occasions, actually.” There are 13 musicians in total, to complement the eight dancers (including Cole himself ): two main vocalists, a five-piece rhythm section, and a six-strong brass section. Dickerson is a big fan of DPA microphones, and looks no further than that brand when it comes to bringing the band to life. “I’ve got various DPA mics in my inventory, and I recently bought a DPA d:vote Rock Kit, which
contains four 4099s,” Dickerson reveals. “I accidentally put one on the drummer’s hi-hats, but we ended up leaving it there, because in his in-ears, he said it was by far the best hi-hat sound he had ever heard! There was no clatter of stick, it was all just clean hi-hats miked from underneath, without any spill or colouration from the other drums, because of its hyper-cardioid pattern, and the fact it was pointing straight up. “He asked if I’d stick another one underneath the snare, so I did, and suddenly he had this fantastic sound. Totally brilliant, and that came out of nothing, really. So the next day, he said he wanted 4099s on the toms, as he didn’t think he was getting enough depth from his tom mics. So
I went and bought another Rock Kit, put the 4099s around the toms, and he said it was the best kit sound he’d ever had! It cost me a couple of grand, but it didn’t stop there, as I ended up buying two more, but that’s how it goes! [laughs] So we now have 10 4099s in all, and what’s amazing is, we only have one mic stand on the whole drum kit. Everything is individually miked.” Dickerson mixed one of Brendan Cole’s first touring shows, then worked on another project for three years, but Barry Robinson was very keen to get him back at the helm: “Richard does a phenomenal job; he adds another level, which the production definitely benefits from,” Robinson insists. “He’s very
THEATRE BRENDAN COLE
“I PUT THE DPA 4099S AROUND THE TOMS, AND IT WAS THE BEST KIT SOUND HE’D EVER HAD.” professional, he’s been working in this industry for a long time, and he knows the kit absolutely inside out. Really, he’s like another member of the band for us, as we all work so closely together.” Although Dickerson loves the gig, he admits that as an engineer, you can get complacent if you do the same thing year in year out, which is why he still likes to mix things up. He’s worked with a real mix of talent over the years, which has helped hone his mixing skills, and keep his discipline: Matthew Herbert, Brother Beyond, Womack & Womack, Pia Zadora, and Petula Clark, to name a few; and he retains a longstanding working relationship with the awardwinning touring production of That’ll Be The Day, too. “It’s important not to get in a rut with live sound. I am always looking for ways to improve; and that’s not just about updating the kit, it’s about keeping your focus on the job in hand,” Dickerson explains. “It’s also about building relationships with the musicians, and making sure you understand each other. I have to say though, I love that you can clip the
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[DPA] mic onto the instrument, so the players can’t mess about with it, and screw with your settings! There’s nothing more annoying than seeing someone a foot away from a dynamic mic, messing about with placement, and half the time, they miss the mic anyway! But what’s nice with DPA is, the mounts are so discrete for the brass, sax, or trumpet, and they cause no issues at all. I love the rubber mountings; they’re streets ahead of anyone else’s. When I think about those horrible gooseneck clamps that you get with certain microphone manufacturers that give you all those nasty rattles, it makes me realise just how much ahead of the game DPA really is.” At front of house, Dickerson runs his DiGiCo SD8 at 48kHz, and utilises an SD Rack, configured 64-in and 32-out. The SD8 is his favourite board for processing. “I love the multiband compression; it’s one of a few features DiGiCo had way before anyone else,” he says. “And they’re very useful to tie things down, especially at the top of the show, when you might want to reign in the odd vocal, or tweak things; you
can cover a lot of minor sins with that bit of dynamics!” Dickerson also rates the SD8 for its ease of use, and overall layout: “I do find with other boards that many parameters are beyond the realms of quick and easy to use to get a good sound, but that’s not the case with DiGiCo: the parameters are all very simple, and everything sounds excellent, so it’s a no-brainer for me, really.” Another piece of kit that Dickerson has had his eye on for some time is the Lectrosonics Bob 88 Dante Breakout Box. After finally acquiring one, it’s fast becoming his favourite new toy. “I find the Bob 88 extremely useful, as I no longer have to plug in a sound-card with eight outputs; we had a cheap 16-way multicore last year, and it was forever dropping lines, but this cures all those problems,” Dickerson explains. “We use it for the tracked stuff, and the quality of sound is far superior to what we used to have. It was like everything came to life when we put it in the chain; even the recording engineer commented how good it was, and
how he could hear all the tracks very cleanly and seamlessly when he received them; there was no messing about required. “We use Q-Lab on stage for additional percussion and backing vocals, and it’s meant workflow is entirely trouble free, which is a nice change! We used to use a rack-unit sound card type breakout device before which split into a multicore and was forever causing problems, but this year, we ran the virtual sound-card on a laptop, and via a single Cat-5 across the stage to the Bob 88 at the monitor board, where we ran eight channels of playback in stereo pairs. Absolutely brilliant.” So what’s next for Rick Dickerson? “Well, I’m back on the road with That’ll Be The Day, now,” Dickerson explains. “That’s another very slick production that I very much enjoy being a part of; and for this particular stint of shows, I’ll be able to bring this new kit to the table, so it should sound better than ever!” www.dpamicrophones.com www.digico.biz www.lectrosonics.com
MUSIC CITY SIR NASHVILLE
SIR Nashville The month of June is a hectic one in Music City: Summer NAMM is just around the corner, but before that, there’s the city’s annual Fanfare, a week-long festival experience where artists of all levels get together to perform for their respective fans. We chat to John Whitehead, production coordinator at SIR Nashville rehearsal facility, which is attracting the city’s finest talent, from up and coming hit makers, to country legends.
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“This is by far the busiest busy time of the year,” smiles John Whitehead, a friendly Texan who moved to Nashville in 1995, and has been at SIR Nashville for some 15 years. “There are so many people coming here, because every week, four to five festivals are happening in the middle Tennessee area.” The ante has certainly been upped throughout Tennessee in terms of major music events. Knoxvilleborn country music legend, Kenny Chesney, tells Headliner that he owes everything to those early bar days in Nashville, where he ‘played for tips’ on Lower Broadway. This was the mid-90s, where, Chesney says, “It didn’t get much realer; there, you better bring the music, because those songs were all that mattered, and that’s a good baptism of fire for the Nashville music business.”
So on that note, how does Whitehead feel the Nashville music business has evolved, and having arrived into the city around the time that Chesney was learning his trade downtown, what are the big changes, music-wise? “Oh, there have been some very dramatic changes, but I would say the most significant is the overall musical growth that’s occurred in the last five years,” Whitehead says. “Traditionally, it’s been a country music hub, but it’s now evolving into much more of an independent scene: we have more rock and folk, and even jazz! They’re trying to start a new jazz festival up her soon, in fact, so it’s just the expansion of the music in general that’s happening here now. Also, every production company of any size has some kind of office here now; it’s crazy.”
SIR Nashville is one of the city’s finest rehearsal facilities, and brings in a plethora of musicians and artists. There are five rehearsal rooms in total: the smallest is 12 x 34; the largest is a 60 x 90 room; and they all have at least five to six discrete monitor mixes, making it the perfect spot for practically any live application. “We get everyone from songwriters that just want to come in and have their quiet time, to the big pre-tour recording productions,” Whitehead confirms. “Anyone from upcoming acts to the likes of The Monkees, who just left here. They loved it! They’re going out and doing a month’s worth of dates, and they came in for production rehearsals, rented a bunch of backline, then took off! “Lynda Carter is also in here very often, as is Britney’s sister, Jamie Lynn Spears; then we just had Tim
MUSIC CITY SIR NASHVILLE
“OUR MONITOR MIX IS NOW PHENOMENAL; HAVING THAT SONIC QUALITY TRULY HELPS US TO CREATE A LIVE FEEL FOR OUR REHEARSALS.” McGraw in, and Victor Wooten is a real regular; The Outlaws were just in, too, so was Skynyrd, actually... So it’s a real eclectic bunch, you could say! [laughs] And we have it all going on here, pretty much.” They do indeed. Recently, Whitehead and co. decided to give the place a major audio overhaul, bringing in new monitors, consoles, and power amplifiers – and it’s working better than ever. “The stuff we had was about 10 years old, and it was all analogue: the desks, the conventional amps, that sort of thing, so it was definitely time to upgrade,” Whitehead explains. “We don’t have crazy money to spend on kit, so we looked around, talked to a lot of people, and we found the Powersoft X Series amplifiers and the EAW Micro Wedge 15s worked the best. We tried a lot of boxes and amps, but these worked so well together, and the space that they take up is so very minimal, which is a huge issue with us; you have to
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maximise all your space, so that was a big factor. “We put digital consoles in all the rooms, and one Powersoft X8 in each room, with the EAW Micro Wedge 15s - and everybody absolutely loves it; it sounds great, and it’s so easy to work with. When we saw the spec of the X8, we actually couldn’t believe we were looking at a two-rack-space amp with eight channels delivering 1600 watts into 8 ohms! You don’t need any compression or EQ, you just bring it up and it’s right there. And it’s not only the sound that’s more efficient, Whitehead reveals: “All the bands are really pleased – and surprised – by how quickly their rehearsals are now up and running; when you have plenty of headroom, it makes things a lot easier; and that’s what we now have here. The less time our techs spend setting up, the more time the artists have to do their thing; and that’s the biggest thing for us at SIR. It also translates to money, of course, plus the artists get
the value, too, so we all win.” Country singer, Cody Webb, recently released his first single, More Than a Little. He’s been rehearsing at SIR for a year now, and has most definitely noticed the difference in sound quality since the facility recently upgraded all its kit: “Our monitor mix is now phenomenal, and there is more clarity, and a way better sound overall, whether it’s in-ears or wedges; our drummer is in heaven with his monitor mix! The experience is just way better: the rooms are nicely soundproofed, you can be as loud as you want, and having that sonic quality truly helps us to create a proper live feel during our rehearsals. “We’re a simple band that likes to produce feelgood music - old rock and roll, like Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. We’re in SIR twice a week now, honing a 30-minute set for a label showcase in June, with many shows inbetween. It’s a busy time, right now!” www.powersoft-audio.com
INTERVIEW WARREN D'SOUZA
With 80 Euros in his pocket, Warren D'Souza had a vision: he saw a gap in the Indian rental market, and decided to dive right in. The rest, as they say, is history. Headliner catches up with him in Frankfurt to find out more.
Tell us a little bit about your musical background... I was always brought up on Western music, actually. In fact, we only spoke English at home, as I came from a Roman Catholic family; and I have an English name, too, so we hardly even spoke the national language. Because we were colonised by the British and Portuguese, there was a large community like that in India, so I grew up on The Beatles and The Eagles, not on the Bollywood music. So why sound, exactly? Well, I always liked sound a lot, and everybody in India who used to do sound wanted to be a DJ, but a DJ would want to set up a sound company! [smiles] But I was clear from day one that I wanted to start a sound rental company. It always fascinated me that there weren’t good rental companies in India; there was one, and he was way ahead of everyone else. I thought there was a place for me, and a place to make something big. You worked in recording
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studios first, right? Yes, I got into the studio business, and I learnt a lot from that; and then took that learning and started my own manufacturing unit. I started by manufacturing loudspeakers, and the stock that I made, I ended up renting out - this was between 1995 and 1998. And then I used that stock to create my rental company. I boot-strapped my company from day one, really – I literally started off with 80 Euros in my pocket, and here we are. It started with press conferences and parties, then product launches, and on to medium sized gigs; and then building events, where you’d have a conference in the day and a band in the night. We invested in our first major PA system in 2005, and after doing the Commonwealth Games in 2010, everything went up a level. Evidently so! I see Sound. com provided the audio for Hardwell's huge show in Mumbai this year... Yes, Hardwell created the world’s biggest guestlist, and it was a huge show; it just shows how far India
has come, with artists of that size coming to perform. EDM is becoming very big in India, and that’s partly because Indian people are so extremely connected on social media – way more than in Europe, I would say. It’s the same with my business, too; you can really sell your story on social media in India. How does a DJ like Hardwell send his feeds to you guys at front of house? Well, from Hardwell’s desk, we have three outs going into a convertor; and his main booth out (deck out) is his third backup. So we have three lines coming into our Soundcraft Vi6 at front of house, and then sometimes we use some hardware or a plugin - a Waves MAXX BCL or an Avalon 737, usually; and everything is then going to a processor: JBL’s HiQnet Performance Manager. You're a big Optocore user; tell us about that... It started after we did the Commonwealth Games with
Norwest, an Australian company, who had brought Optocore to India. It was a joint venture tender with Norwest and Sound.com, and that’s where we first saw the benefits of Optocore; we invested in it right after the Games, and ever since then, we’ve done every major sporting event in the country with Optocore - and that’s a lot of events! [laughs] What does it bring to the table? When I do a gig, I know it’s the one thing that won’t let me down, ever. And [company founder] Mark Brunke is a visionary: his concept of making these products with industry standard protocols like AES, analogue, and MADI. He has always worked within the framework of industry standard protocols. Thirdly, it’s seen to people as a very premium brand - an aspirational brand. So I have created a stratospheric image of myself: other companies might have all the PA systems, but they don’t have Optocore; it gives me that edge as I am already using it in the field, and people have only scratched the surface in India. You describe Optocore as a brand that people don’t
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necessarily understand until they have dealt in it. Can you elaborate? Yes, it takes an incident and an experience for you to see the benefits of Optocore, then you take that technology and do something for yourself with it. Because when you look at Optocore as a brand, not a single product represents something in the audio industry: for example, take a DD2 or X6R; it’s not like 'that’s a console', 'that’s a processor', Optocore is not like that, so people are a bit perplexed; they know it’s great, and does the big events, of course, so it’s created a stratospheric level of, ‘if you're in the big league, you will use Optocore’. People didn’t understand the meaning of digital transport systems in India until I started talking about it, and the work I do; and now a lot of people have realised that it’s a technology in itself, digital transport mechanism; and I think Mark has been an evangelist for that. I have invested in the brand because I believe in his vision more than the products that he’s going to release; you buy into a company’s legacy way beyond the product and the cost. It’s the legacy and the forward thinking;
how stable the company is, just like the network. It’s not been bought out by some big daddy! [smiles] India is the core of most of your business, but how is the Indian gig culture? Well, the Indian drinking scene has improved… in a bad way! [laughs] With many Indians in the past, it’s been a country where people would have a great time without spending too much money, but this is an era of youth where they need to spend money in order to have a good time, if that makes sense..! It does! And what can we expect next from Sound.com? We are doing the opening ceremony for the Indian Cricket Premier League, which will utilise 12 JBL VerTec and VTX PA stacks in the round; and then after the monsoon season, which is always quiet, the season will kick off again from mid-September. We will welcome [leading Swedish DJ] Axwell to India, which should be another mega-show. www.optocore.com
“THE INDIAN DRINKING SCENE HAS IMPROVED... IN A BAD WAY!”
ROADIE RANT
Grumpy Old Roadie Trying to come up with a set of words every month that are both amusing and enlightening, whilst collectively flowing in a sort of ‘Boat That Rocks’ way, where we’re all on it together, rocking from side to side, with words that keep you riveted from paragraph one through the various and inevitable rapids of obscenity, right up until the jaw-dropping climax, which leaves you in a heap, but inevitably gasping for more. Well, I’ve not managed it thus far, as you both know, but then again, I don’t get paid for this shit. If I was any good at it, I’d be writing books, wouldn’t I? So, looking for something to write about this month is staring me in the face: funny. After all, we work in the entertainment industry, and I’ve been entertained by some of them many times; here are a couple of funny, but true, stories for this month’s contribution. They involve entertainers that are still alive, but don’t include either Elton John or his husband. All the names have been changed to protect their sensitive egos, but if they read this, they’ll know! And you’ll probably guess as well... It was a good few years ago now. Mobile phones had only been available for a couple of years. The popular one was a big stand up thing that needed its own power pack that you carted around over your shoulder. We all thought we looked so cool. “I’m on the phone!” we’d shout (if we had signal, which was zero by today’s standards). The phones cost about three grand each, and the calls cost 36p per minute in the UK. So you needed a mortgage. But you just had to have one. This artist in particular (let’s call him Ivan Tesco) loved technology. His accountant knew this, so one day he surprised Ivan with a brand new mobile phone. Ivan loved it, and skipped off home to spend 24 hours charging the fucker (it took a while back then) before exploring the possibilities of mobile conversations. A couple of weeks later, the accountant thought he’d check out Ivan’s progress, so gave him a call: “How are you getting on with the mobile phone, Ivan?” he asked. The line was pregnant with artist deliberation, then: “Well, it’s OK, but it’s a pain in the arse finding a phone box to make the calls from.” Yeah, right. On another day, in another town, and in another decade, another story was unfolding... It was cold as the artist pulled up outside his swanky hotel. Bill had been his driver and minder in the UK for a while now, 58 HEADLINER
and he was proud of the fact that he’d kept the job for so long, despite his client’s renowned temper. He was proud too of his new Mercedes S Class, and he liked the fact that heads turned as he cruised into town. Bill pulled up and quickly jumped out. Mindful of what the cold could potentially do to his artist, he opened the passenger door and respectfully (of course) hurried his artist into the hotel. As they passed through the revolving door, Bill tossed the car keys to the hotel concierge. A couple of hours later, after refreshment and a nap, Bill collected the artist from his suite. They rode the elevator in silence to the ground floor. Bill had nothing to say anyway, but was always ready to react, should the occasion arise. The artist was in his stage clothes; he looked the part. Bill thought he carried the stardom thing off well, but was mindful of getting him to the gig. Bill went up to the reception desk and asked them to bring the car around to the front as the artist waited impatiently. There was a handful of fans now eager to get autographs; after all, these were the days before selfies. “Pardon?” said the receptionist from behind his desk. “Get my car please. I gave the keys to your concierge.” “We don’t have a concierge, Sir.” The random bloke who was gifted a brand new Mercedes S Class enjoyed driving it around the town for a week before selling it for cash. There’s a rumour that it ended up in Europe somewhere. And remember... vote ‘in’, as per my last, more informative and serious, missive. Until the next time, Robert the Roadie