Overnight, David Nicholas went from being a musician on the dole to owing a quarter of a million dollars. It was the ’80s, the only time in musical history when even a broke guitarist from Surry Hills with a bad case of GAS* could convince someone that investing in a studio was a good idea. “There was a lot of venture capital going around in the early ’80s,” remembered David. “I learnt that getting $250,000 from somebody was no different from getting $2000, you’ve just gotta be talking to the right guy.” Luckily Andrew Scott, David’s business partner, had a father who was the financial controller for Yates Seeds. He guaranteed the loan that, at the time, was enough money to pick up a handful of Sydney properties. With it, David and Andrew bought the first SSL console shipped to Australia — an SSL 4000 series — and set it up at their newly minted Rhinoceros studio in Sydney. Neither of them had any idea it was the start of something big in Aussie music. RHINOCEROS REBUILT
Up to that point David, like most sound engineers, had been a reasonably successful musician. He’d been touring the support circuit with his band, Limousine. They’d drive the M1 down the coast from Queensland to Port Pirie, occasionally stop to unload the truck, set up the PA, make some mischief and leave before anybody noticed. On the way home, they’d head back inland to places like Albury, Dubbo and Orange. Some of David’s more memorable moments included kicking off shows for Cold Chisel on their Set Fire to the Town tour and supporting Midnight Oil at the Royal Antler. Back in Surry Hills, Limousine’s lighting guy owned a rehearsal studio called Rhinoceros that doubled as their home base and demo studio. But changes to Ordinance 70 meant all those tinderlined wooden buildings had to get up to code by installing fire extinguishers and sprinklers. One day a contractor walked in and drilled two-inch holes through all the walls. It was a total disaster for acoustic isolation; he may as well have gutted the place. Which, the more they thought about it, sounded like a great idea! Shortly after, they invited all their mates to a ‘trash the studio’ party, turned the whole thing into matchwood and left. With no place to go, a group of them decided to build another studio called Rhinoceros in a building on the corner of Goulburn and Riley Street, directly across from the looming Surry Hills Police Station. “Once, when we were doing INXS’ X album, there was a knock on the door at two in the morning,” remembered David. “I went downstairs to open the door and there was a guy dressed in full SWAT gear with a gun, balaclava, the whole lot. I just shut the door and ran upstairs. It turned out to be Mark Pope’s brother. He was a tactical response policeman and was coming for an interview with Hutch about doing security for their next tour! They thought it would be a really funny joke.” With barely a pamphlet’s worth of knowledge about studio design between them, the rag tag collective lucked out when acoustician Richard Priddle agreed to help point them in the right
direction. His lasting contribution was to instil in them the notion that good design is more important than exotic materials. They read magazines about studio design, aped the live room from The Town House studio in London and, having never got along with claustrophobic Westlake designs, decided to build the first Live End/Dead End control room in the country. “We were reading an article about the Tubular Bells guy who’d built the first Live End/Dead End room in England,” said David. “It made perfect sense to us because the only other studio I’d been into was Paradise, which had the Westlake design. That tiny, cramped space with rocks everywhere just didn’t sit well with me at all.” For a year, the group of musicians lived onsite, slowly massaging the building into a studio. David even put his electrician’s apprenticeship to work wiring the whole place up: “The only things we didn’t do were lay the carpet and put the glass in.” Because they were living in the studio while working on it, any jutting out corners were sawn off, and any niggly areas re-flowed. The end result was a studio built for musicians that had a control room big enough to fit 50 A&R guys, big windows, and the ergonomics of a Herman Miller chair. It also had a live room that had a knack for delivering incredible drum sounds, just listen to the deep rumbling punch of the kit on INXS’ Never Tear Us Apart. In the early days SSL designer and tech at the Townhouse, Chris Jenkins, let them in on why his studio sounded like it did. “It used to be a stage where they shot those films with all the girls diving into a swimming pool, so it was built on top of an enormous concrete box,” recalled David. “People always think live rooms should be bright, but it’s the depth that gives them the sound. We spent a lot of time making sure our room had that bottom end. It was all wood and we had big resonators that reinforced the low end.” The other two elements that gave that big ’80s sound were ambient miking and digital reverbs. David: “Before that it was all that close-miked, Fleetwood Mac, West Coast sound. Ambient mics weren’t a thing, apart from Led Zeppelin who were really the instigators. It was also when digital reverbs first came out. We had the first Lexicon 224, and it just had that sound.” SSL TOUCH DOWN
Now, of course, in those days you needed a console. They picked the SSL because they knew Jenkins, and felt more in tune with how UK studios, like the Townhouse and Olympic, were working at the time. At a quarter of a mil, it was a big risk, but you only take those sorts of risks if there’s a proportional upside. Even with such a big outlay, that upside was wilder than they could imagine. For the next decade, Rhinoceros was booked six months in advance — seven days a week, 365 days a year. There was a career upside too. Because they were the only in-house engineers in Australia with an SSL to play with, they were also the only ones who knew how to operate it. David had previously only engineered demos on his friends Tascam Portastudio, and now he was in charge of one of
the country’s biggest studios. It was a big leap, but David said engineering came quite naturally to him: “It always seemed quite logical. If you know what your endgame is, technology is just a tool. The end goal is to capture a performance as well as you possibly can, and usually, as clean as you possibly can. I always try and generate the sound at the source because performers react to what they’re hearing. We had really great producers come from overseas, so we watched and absorbed how they did it, and they all did it the way I imagined you would.” Rhinoceros’ rooms and the SSL console
As far as I’m aware, it was the first totally tapeless album ever released by a major label, and it was a nightmare
attracted a high level of clientele, which benefitted two young Rhinoceros members in particular, David and Al Wright. For the next decade they tag teamed on Rhinoceros sessions, resulting in a collective discography that almost covers the history of the decade in Australian rock ’n’ roll: INXS, Noiseworks, Hoodoo Gurus, Australian Crawl, Models, Midnight Oil, Jimmy Barnes, GANGgajang, Mental As Anything — the list goes on. The first record Nicholas ever got an engineering credit on was INXS’ third album, Shabooh Shoobah, which ain’t a bad first job. Nicholas went on to engineer most of INXS’ catalogue, including the Chris Thomas-produced, Bob Clearmountain-mixed Kick. David was nominated for ARIA Engineer of the Year every year from 1987 to 1991, winning it twice in 1987 and 1990. “I think I got on with a lot of those people, and ended up working on all of [producer] Chris Thomas’ records for eight years; because we had the same mindset on how records should be made,” he said. “It was also the commitment I learnt, that there should never be a technical excuse to have to do something again. People devalue performance now by being able to hit Apple+Z and do it 60 times. We were working with people that expected to only do it once or twice. There’s that story of Aretha Franklin coming in the studio and singing through the song, then the engineer says, ‘Okay we’re ready now.’ She replies, ‘I only ever sing it once,’ and walks out. “Over 40 years, I’ve been an hour early for each session, ready and prepared. I always try to make the process as invisible as possible so all you’re thinking about is the music.” *Gear Acquisition Syndrome AT 23