So, Neil, you're producing the new Erasure album...
Yep, co-producing it with Gareth Jones. There's the two of us on it.
To start with, how did you become a record producer?
I actually built a studio first of all. I got expelled from school when I was 16 and living in Malaysia - at the time my parents were out there - and I didn't have the nerve to go home and tell them that I'd got chucked out, so I went up to a friend's house and I remember we were sitting on top of an empty building saying, "Wouldn't it be great to turn it into a studio?" So we started off with a little four-track and one mic.
Were you already doing music?
I'm a flautist by profession, and had a little baby synth at school, but then [had] the idea of suddenly building a studio... Then later I came down to London and got a job as a studio assistant.
In those days programming rooms, which are rooms with just computers, were not really a big deal - no-one knew quite what to do without lots of tape, basically. So there was this room there which was full of MIDI gear which was never getting used and as I wasn't good enough to assist downstairs in the main studio, I just sat in this room all the time, learning to program on this state-of-the-art equipment.
Then a guy rang up one day, and the receptionist wasn't there, so I picked up the phone, and this guy went, "Hello? Hello? Have you got any good bass samples?" and I went, "Bass samples? No problem, I've got hundreds," and I didn't have any! The next week he booked time in the studio and I started working as his engineer. We went off and did a single, which was Guru Josh, 'Infinity'. I joined his band and went on tour, but got ripped off really heavily and made no money - they were doing really big festivals and I was getting ?40 a gig! But I was meeting lots of people, and through that I met Lenny Dee and Carl Cox and worked with them in New York for six months, doing tracks with Frankie Bones, Arthur Baker and Deborah Harry. After New York I came back here and worked for a year on an album called 'Saffron', which unfortunately didn't do very well, but then I had some more success with Carl Cox, and then moved on to The Prodigy.
That's where most people have heard your name from.
Yeah, 'Jilted Generation'. That album did really well, and then 'Fire Starter' also did exceptionally well. After this I'm going to go off and work on the rest of their album, which will be really good. And that's kind of, you know, a brief history!
You mentioned you'd worked with Deborah Harry?
Yeah, that was a track called 'I Can See Clearly Now'. It came out in America on Criminal Records, which is Arthur Baker's little label, just as a bit of fun, and then it got remixed and released over here, but it didn't do very well. It was just probably the wrong type of song for her. She is a lovely, lovely, lovely person, just amazing. Full respect for that woman!
So how did you get involved with working with Erasure?
There was a chap who was working at the Strongroom, Gareth Jones, and I'd seen him about, because I'm managed by the Strongroom. I didn't say hello, because he looks quite ferocious and intense, sort of mad professor-esque, and I was a bit too nervous to go up to him. Eventually after about eighteen months I think I said hello, and we got on really well and it kicked off from there. After doing a couple of mad sessions we developed a really good working relationship, which was excellent. Then Daniel Miller, I think, heard of me through Gareth and I did some work for Mute. Then we did an Erasure remix for one of the tracks, not from the last album but the one before.
"Run To The Sun"?
"Run To The Sun", exactly right, and another one, "I Love Saturday", which were actually done with Andy as well. It was really great fun, working with him, because he hadn't done any remixes before and he'd sit there, buzzing and really into it, with us getting direction from him and taking them in the direction he wanted to go.
Then we did a Sandra Bernhardt track, again with Andy. That was a good cover to do, 'Mighty Real'. It's a classic anthem. Then "Rock Me Gently". The first mix of that I did was with Gareth, which was where we took bits from everything. It's the one on the 12" with the real drums on it, or what sound like real drums.
"A Combination Of Special Events" It has real drums on it?
Well, it sounds like real drums, but it's not really, no. I did a bit of drumming but then I sampled it all so it stopped being real. So I did that, and then Daniel gave me a ring and asked me to come down and work on the 7" version of that song. That was completely different because I'm coming from a much more sampling-based background, where I use real drum sounds and loops, whereas Vince uses real analogue synths for everything. So I had to kind of leave my sampler at the door! That went really well, that was an amazing session.
It was an absolute learning curve for me, a totally different way of going about things. If you want a cymbal, you have to make one. You can't just go, "Right, I've got 68 cymbal samples here, all recorded in the best rooms in the world and they sound great.". All the synths have no presets on them, so everything you do is a twiddle and so for everything you're starting from a basic tone and you have to make your sound up from a sine wave.
And so you added programmed drum sounds for the "Rock Me Gently" single mix?
No, I added drums from Vince's stuff. Vince really liked that and then I went off to work on a new band called "Archive" on Island Records. I was just getting that finished when then they rang me up again and asked me if I wanted to do [this album]. I was just overwhelmed.
I've looked up to Vince since I was at school - when I was at school, it was like, "Dude! Major dude!" - and so to work with him it's like blowing my head off! Even today in the studio, he's so fast! He's so fast! I mean, on this equipment that most people would consider antique, he goes for it and he's faster on that than I reckon anybody is with the new gear.
You mean at creating new sounds?
No, just on the programming of the music. So if you want a bass line to go "Du du-du, du du-du", you play it in, but with his way of doing it you still play it in but it's just so much faster. And he's fast at it, man. Makes me feel like a tortoise and I'm pretty fast. He's really like "Neep neep!", Road Runner, you know. It keeps you on our toes, anyway!
He likes to work early, well, early for me is 11 o'clock, but he's always up early in the morning and likes to get things happening. We start about 10. We [Neil & George, the engineer] have to drive up from London, then we finish about 10 and then [drive] back again.
Andy's on the night-shift in Spain. They recorded all the vocals at Gareth's room for the last album but this time they've gone to Spain to record out there and apparently they're having great results. The vocals that we've heard so far, the lead vocals, are absolutely magnificent. I mean, he's a real talent as well. It's really amazing working with two very directional, talented people. It's kind of rare. Most of the time with other people you're pulling it back together again how it should be when they've gone!
When you were doing the Erasure remixes was it solely a case of Andy telling you what to do, or did you have some creative input?
Oh no! It was a good mixture. Andy would sing something to me and I'd go, "Oh, how about like this?" It's good working like that because if you've got someone like me who's done hundreds of remixes, you just go in and I know what you've got to do, which bits of the element of the record you're going to use. But when you get someone who hasn't necessarily done it before, they say "Oh, we'll use this bit and that bit," and they're choosing sounds I would never, ever have picked in my life to take off the original version.
You're used to listening for specific things.
Yeah, there are specific things that I think will make it right - but then Andy comes up with a completely curved ball! It's really good, because you think, "Oh, I wouldn't normally use that noise in this way," which makes you work really hard with the sound, because you're thinking, "Right, how am I going to fit this in?" rather than, "We won't use that, it'd be too much hard work."
A lot of the things he chose were really challenging in that sense. And it works! I don't know, I would say it was all three of us on those mixes, but it was Andy's chance to have a bit of fun.
Did you have anything to do with "Rapture"?
Yes, I suppose that was in the same context that I'm in now, co-production. It was the first track we did before we started the album. I love it. It's excellent. My girlfriend hates dance music and I played it to her and she loves it, so that's a really good sign.
Who is mixing the new album?
Mark Stent. He's a brilliant mixer. He's fantastic. He's definitely one of the country's most happening, top mixers, if not the top mixer, so him doing this album is fantastic news. His shit shines!
So with this album, are you working concurrently on tracks and sending tapes back and forth like last time?
There's a lot of that. This time round we're trying to run a much tighter ship. It's quite easy when you've got two different things happening in two different places to let one thing fall behind, even by a day or two days.
Obviously sometimes the music will be done so much quicker than the lyrics or the music can be done much slower than the lyrics, but the main thing is to always keep nice and tight on schedule. On this one we've done that. It's been much tighter and we've kind of cruised through it. We're using a few more modern grooves and loops, which is excellent, basically!
Some people have suggested that they should have a more modem sound.
Yeah, well that's kind of the thing that we've gone for, but it's still Erasure. One of the dilemmas I was faced with is that it would be quite easy to turn them into full-on electronic modern Euro-pop or something, but there would be no point, because the main thing with them is the songs. The way new music is going, electronically, it's very difficult to fit an actual song in there, but with Erasure the choruses are what make the songs work.
They're still traditional songwriters.
Yeah, they're great songs. A lot of [other people's] new songs don't have bridges in them, so you just go from, "Da da da da" into the chorus, which is no more than three "Oh! Oh! Oh!"s and "I can't stand it" and a "Take me higher!" - all the clich˙s.
So I tried in one way to steer clear of too much commerciality because it just doesn't fit the songs, you know. But it's much more modern. The grooves are more contemporary, but with the basic songs still in there, so it's going to work, I think. Today we sat down and listened to about 8 or 9 tracks, back to back. There's still work needs doing to them, basically, but they're pretty much in the bag. When you sit down and you listen to three months of your work, which you haven't done before, it's great! It gives you a bit of a buzz, a little tingle down your neck. I'm well into it!
When Vince is recording the synth parts, is he still experimenting with counter-melodies and arrangements or does he have it all planned beforehand?
Vince has an incredible musical mind - I'm very jealous about that! He freaks you out, 'cause he has it all in his head. He might only have one chord but he's got all the harmonies in his head already. They'll work out their demos on piano or guitar, which are really basic, but when you listen to them you can already hear the arrangement - Vince has already got the three parts on top of it worked out.
When we're recording, he's so fast that sometimes he'll shout the timings of the notes out to you, so he'll go, "Beat 2, 0.236, Beat 3, 0.396". He just knows the '396's -I have to look at the screen to work that one out, but he's already there!
For this album, are you using sampled drums or generating them from analogue synths?
Well, what I'm doing is quite interesting because on about six or seven tracks that we've done, I'll get a drum loop and then we'll go and replace it with all analogue synthesizers. So at one stage maybe they were digital samples but then the next stage is we'll try to recreate the drum loop, but with six different analogue synths.
And it sounds better?
It sounds completely different. In some cases it works, and in some cases it doesn't. It's about 70% analogue, 30% samples and where we feel the loop hasn't worked we'll replace it with analogue sounds. It's quite good working like that, but it means I have to chop all the beats up into little bits. If you've got a drum loop going "Doop doop pa doop" and it's all one thing, I have to chop it up into "Doop", "doop", "pa" and "doop" and then feed it all out to the different synths, so that one synth is doing the high hat and one synth is doing the snare drum and so on. It's totally weird, but in a good way. It's excellent.
When you're recording an an album not knowing how it's going to be mixed, do you know whether all the sounds you have recorded are going to be used?
You do, absolutely. I think disaster strikes when you leave indecision in the air, basically. If you don't make a definite decision on the day, if you leave four tracks on the tape lying around, "We might use that, we might not," then when it comes to mixing, you've left yourself more choices. When we come to mixing hopefully whoever mixes it will have a simple job of not having to worry about whether he's going to use which bits. It's pretty much on a plate. We've tried to fit it into a reasonable amount of tracks - on this album we have not gone completely mad on using loads and loads of tape so it's not like you've got hundreds of different things happening. We've simplified it quite nicely I think.
And is it pop?
Oh, classic, absolutely brilliant pop songs. I'm well happy with that, you know. There are some songs that you hear and you go, "That's a single," but basically they're all happening straight away and they're all really singalongable too, so I'm well into it! You start them, put them on, and bang! No song is longer than four and a half minutes maximum. And they're touring as well, which is excellent news.
He's got his tank in the garden, you know. The tank. It's brilliant. It's got ivy growing out of it and everything. I only realised what it was today, 'cause I've always looked out and I've never really gone up there. I always thought it was some weird thing that was put in the garden. And then I picked up some keyboard magazine from '91 or '92, and there was the tank! It's like, "So that's what it is!" I rushed up there - it's still got all the connections, audio and battery power and things like that. I'd get that out -bring it out of retirement, I say!
What bands do you listen to? What music do you like?
I love the new Fugees album. I think that's absolutely fantastic. Everything. I like all the old favourites, Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but when it comes to what I actually listen to, it can be absolutely anything. I can't particularly put myself into a category, mainly because if you do that, you're putting blinkers on and you're not really going to help yourself as a producer.
Of the new tracks recorded, do you have any particular favourites?
"World On Fire". That's a good last line of an interview!
Neil McLellan, thank you.
Neil's credits also include remixes for The Human League ('Filling Up With Heaven', Madonna ('Bedtime Stories', Baby D ('I Need Your Loving' and The Shamen ('Make It Mine').