Welcome to the Sound on Sound People and

Music Industry podcast. [upbeat music] I'm

Paul White, and in this episode, I talk

to Tony Platt, one of the industry's

legendary engineers and producers from the

1970s.

Tony was involved in recording albums by

the likes of AC/DC, Bob Marley, The

Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Foreigner,

Motorhead, Gary Moore, and many others.

I was very interested in how he got

started.

It was a sort of a strange thing. Of

course, there were no courses

or

nothing like that existed at all. And

I guess

things that I did at school,

they formed the background.

A friend of mine and I, we started a radio

station,

which was a lot of fun.

It got us off actual real lessons a lot of

the time, so that was useful as well.

And I was sort of half in a band, but

because I was the guy that could fix

things when they went wrong,

I think I was probably there for two

reasons. One was because I could fix

things, and secondly, because I had a van.

[chuckles]

And

I was a not very good drummer, so that

didn't come out.

So it was always these sort of tenuous

links really with

music in general. I

had the usual

careers advice

thing that came through, and

one of the teachers was the career

advisor,

and I said I wanted to do something with

music,

and he said, "Oh, well, you could join the

Air Force, or you could join the Navy.

They've got very good bands."

So that was about as much use as a

chocolate teapot. And

then the one turning point was this mate

of mine that I ran the station with.

His father had a sort of

clerical role at the BBC,

and he set up for us to go and have a bit

of a tour.

So the

first place we went to was the Paris

Studio in Regent Street where they did

live recordings, and we watched a live

recording of a comedy show called

"Round the Horne,"

which was great because this was a room

full of tape recorders and all sorts of

wonderful gadgetry.

And then we got to go to Broadcasting

House, and we

were able to go into the studios where the

fledgling Radio 1 was just starting up.

We were just coming out of the era of the

pirates.

And

I think that was the turning point for

real.

Again, it was a room full of tape

recorders and stuff, and people with

headphones on, and

I thought, "Oh, wow."

Up until then, I had no idea what I was

going to do, and I had no idea what I was

going to be qualified for.

And this was the first time I saw

something that was appealing.

Then my father,

I don't know exactly what the link was,

but he had some kind of link to a guy

called Bob Auger, who's a

legendary

sound engineer from way back in the '50s.

And he managed to get me a list of

recording studio addresses.

Bob Auger organised for me to go to see a

studio, and I can't even remember where it

was in London. And I went. I lived in

Reading, so it was easy to get to London.

And

so I actually got to see a proper

recording studio at that point.

I think I was shown around by another

legendary engineer called John Timperly.

And

I wrote,

God, in excess of 15, 20 letters to all

these studios,

pleading for a job.

I should make it clear,

I wasn't absolutely sure what a studio did

and what the jobs were within the studio.

I just knew that it was an

environment that excited me.

So I wrote all these letters, got no

replies whatsoever.

I'd pretty much given up hope of finding

anything at all,

and [chuckles]

I'd applied for a role as a trainee air

traffic controller.

The skies were definitely

safer [laughs] that I didn't become an

aircraft traffic controller, I think.

And it was one of these strange

serendipitous things.

It was literally the

Friday before the Tuesday that I was

supposed to start this trainee job that I

got two letters back from two studios, one

of which was Trident and the other

was De Lane Lea,

offering me an interview.

So I phoned them up, and I arranged the

interviews on the same day,

went down to London,

went to Trident first and then went to

De Lane Lea second,

and got offered both jobs.

That's amazing. So that would've been

around 1970?

Yeah. It's probably '69. '68, '69, I

think. The difficulty for me was to choose

which of the jobs to go to.

That was the first challenge really, was

assessing which of these studios was going

to be the better one out of the two.

And I just liked the people at Trident

more than I liked the people at De Lane

Lea. The people at De Lane Lea were just a

little bit up themselves, whereas the

people at Trident were much more welcoming

and easygoing.

So I guess you went in the traditional tea

boy route, which is not around anymore.

That was exactly it. It was the tea boy,

and sandwich getter.

But the other thing, of course, at Trident

was that I got to set up the studio for

sessions and break it down at the end of

the sessions. And

the other guy that got a tea boy job at

Trident at the same time as me was a guy

called Dennis Mackay,

and he went on to great things. I think he

ended up in the States.

Did a lot of highbrow jazz recordings,

if I remember rightly.

And so there was a guy called Jerry

Salisbury who also was in charge of us. He

was the sort of the fixer of the studio,

and

he was great because he was a jazz

musician as well,

and he

kept organizing for us to go down to the

100 Club

and put our names on the door. So we saw

loads and loads of gigs at the 100 Club

before we went home in the evening.

And I guess you had to absorb your

recording experience via osmosis almost

when you were working in the studio then.

You just had to watch what was going on

and try and learn.

Yeah, I guess

it was a little bit. One was very aware

that you had to watch, listen, and learn.

I think that was the impression. That was

a very clear impression that I got right

from the start. The engineers there were

Ken Scott, Robin Cable,

oh my goodness,

Roy Thomas Baker,

and Gus Dudgeon was around, and

Tony Visconti was around. So these were

important people in the

life of the music industry, and they were

great people to watch. It was interesting

watching them and their relationship, how

they nurtured their relationship with the

artists. And the artists who were coming

through were people like Elton John, Marc

Bolan,

Dr. John, The Beatles were doing bits of

"Let It Be" in there, and so on and so

forth. So it

was quite exciting from that point of

view.

I think the impression I got right from

the start was, don't make mistakes. You've

managed to get this job, you've got to

hang on to it now, so don't be an idiot.

So were you let loose on any sessions

there before you

jumped ship and went to Island afterward,

I believe, was it?

Yes, it was Island. Yeah.

When you say was I let loose on any

sessions,

I got the opportunity to do some tape

operating, yes.

It was quite amusing actually, because

Trident got one of the first 3M M56

16-track machines, two-inch 16-track

machines.

And Trident's machine room was on the

first floor, and the main studio was

in the basement, and the control room was

on the ground floor. And at the back of

the first floor was the mix room.

And

I found myself,

basically, I was allocated to be the tape

operator for Roy Thomas Baker doing some

mixing in the mix room

using the M56. And we didn't have a remote

control for the M56.

So I was given a set of headphones and sat

next to the machine,

and Roy had the

talkback wired open, stuck down with some

gaffer tape,

and he would be shouting things to me down

this microphone with the talkback.

And I'd be stopping and starting the

machine and spinning back and all this

sort of thing. So that was very much a

baptism of fire.

And the worst thing about it was that Roy,

of course, he monitored very loud, so the

compressor on the talkback microphone was

working overtime.

And there's not a great deal of

difference.

When he wanted something dropping in, he'd

shout, "Now."

But of course, with background noise like

that, there's not a great deal of

difference between now and no.

Yes.

And if

he wanted me to stop or not drop in, he'd

shout, "No." And I managed a whole

afternoon without actually making any

mistakes on that one, that particular

session.

Yeah, so that was

one of my early experiences of actually

being part of the session rather than just

sort of

running around making tea.

And then according to your biog, there was

a certain amount of bluffing and blagging

went on when you moved on to Ireland in

terms of your resume.

I was in the machine room at Trident one

evening, and there's a guy called Pete

Booth, who was the maintenance engineer

who was on, on that particular evening. And I

was reading through the Melody Maker, and

there was an advert for an experienced

tape operator wanted for West London

Studio.

And

Pete said, "Oh, that's pretty good. You

should go for that."

And

I said, "Yeah, but I'm not an experienced

tape operator." And he said, "Yeah, but

they don't know that."

[chuckles]

So I phoned it up.

It was a bit silly phoning it up in the

evening. Nobody was going to be there. But

there was a security guard on, and he

answered the phone and said, "Island

Studios." And that was quite an exciting

thing because most of my record collection

was made up of records that were on the

Island label. So yeah, there was a bit of

bluffing going on. I went to the

interview. I hadn't been at Trident for very

long. I went to the interview, was

interviewed by a guy called Frank Owen,

and offered the job. And

the main thing then was just, it was

another one of those instances of, well,

you got the job now, now you've got to

hang on to it.

Fortunately, all the people at Island

Studios were really nice people, and

people helped out and advised you. And

it was a very, very steep learning curve,

but I got there.

Yeah. So how did you graduate from tape op

to actually engineering?

Well, there was a sort of a set out route,

really.

What happened was,

if you were allocated

a session as the tape operator, as the

assistant,

and the engineer didn't turn up,

then it was your rite of passage that you

took the session.

So it would be at some point along the

way, somebody wouldn't turn up, and you'd

just end up getting in there and doing the

session.

But I was lucky as well because, again, an

amazing array of producers and engineers

would be coming through

Basing Street Studios. And

I did quite a lot of work with a guy

called Brian Humphries, who recorded a lot

of the Pink Floyd stuff and some bits of

The Who and so on and so forth.

And he

specialized in live recording.

He did the Umma Gumma album, for instance.

He recorded that.

So I

got to go out and do some live recordings

with him, which meant that your

role was rather more expanded under those

circumstances.

There wasn't a sort of a fierce

demarcation between the jobs that

everybody did.

One of the things that Frank Owen said to

me very early on after I'd started working

there was,

he said, "We all muck in here, and if

you're walking

past a pile of chairs that needs moving,

it doesn't matter whether you're the

assistant engineer or the studio manager,

then move the bloody things."

So

I was sort of used to,

or all of us were used to going backwards and

forwards between

the more menial tasks and

the more complicated ones.

And I guess back then, recording was more

about recording a performance and not

putting things together out of Lego bricks

as it is now.

[chuckles]

Yeah. It was capturing. Capturing that

performance was very much the order of the

day. And

quite often,

you

sort of learned things like put the

machine in to record straight away, don't

wait for somebody to start counting in.

And it was things like that that led

forwards to, for instance,

on the

Bob Marley

Catch a Fire album,

some of the bits and pieces that I caught

of Wayne Perkins' guitar playing was

simply because I'd just put the machine in

to record at the front of the

song, and he was noodling away, and he

noodled something that was particularly

good, and

I was able to lift that off the

multi-track, put it onto a quarter inch,

and then spin it in a little bit closer

into the song.

So there was a lot of magic in the sound

of the Bob Marley stuff, and it was a

really big bottom end.

Did you just mic up the

bass guitars, or did you DI them, or was

there any kind of magic involved?

Well, the bass end of those recordings is

obviously one of the most important

factors of the whole thing. And

I'd sort of got a little bit of an inkling

working on Catch a Fire because the bass

sound off tape was horrible.

It

sounded like a beach ball.

But once you put all of the

instrumentation in, especially the drums,

the sound flowed out from that.

And then when I came to record some of the

stuff on the Burning album, I said to

Bunny Wailer, "How do you record this

stuff in Jamaica? What's the key for

capturing the sound?" And he said, "Oh, we

put the drums in the middle of the room

and then point everything at him."

And the penny dropped fully at that point,

and I realized it was all about the bleed

of the bass

on all the other microphones. And

once you put all of those in, you had this

huge great bass sound that spread right

across the recording, and especially if

you were expanding the stereo a little

bit, then you were picking up lots of

low end from everywhere.

And I got the impression that later on in

your career, you managed to make spill

your friend rather than your enemy. You

exploited it.

Oh, very much so. That was the

clue that

led me on to

developing something, I call it ambient

glue.

A good recording is a series of events,

and it's a series of events being on

different instruments in different parts

of the room, and if you've got everybody

in the same room and you're able to record

some of the space between them as well,

then it's much easier to put them back

again and put them into that space.

Something that I called upon

when mixing "Highway to Hell"

that had been recorded in a very, very

dead studio, the Roundhouse Studios in

Chalk Farm and Mutt wanted a much more sort

of open,

British rock kind of sound. So we were

mixing it actually in Basing Street Studio

2, and I just put a couple of speakers up

in the

playing room,

and fed some of the drums through, a

little bit of guitar through there,

and used that instead of using reverb or

anything

more synthetic.

So that was effectively an ambience

chamber rather than a reverb chamber.

Yes. It was somewhere between a chamber

and a plate, really, [chuckles] I guess.

But it worked, and that's something you've

done subsequently, I believe.

I've done it a lot. Yeah.

Some of them, some particularly

magnificent ones are in...

There's a German industrial rock band

called Die Krupps,

and they wanted me to mix an album, and

all of their stuff was sampled and little

guitar sections sampled, and it was very

much pieced together with the drum

machine. But they wanted it to have a

stadium rock sound. And I was at

Galaxy Studios in Belgium, which has this

amazing hall, absolutely

wonderful building that was designed by

the

University of Leuven, have an acoustics

department there. And it was this precise,

it was so

incredible the

sound coming off the walls of the thing.

And I just put this massive PA up there

and

loads of microphones down at different

points down the wall.

And so just by picking up any of those

microphones, I could make it absolutely

enormous down to

quite

a lot smaller.

And

yeah,

it's been one of those things.

Certainly,

even recording individual instruments,

I'll quite often use a room microphone of

some description to elongate the sound a

little bit.

So if you're recording a traditional style

rock band, how would you mic the guitar

then? Would you have a close mic and

another one back in the room, or would you

come back later on and do the room sound

by some other artificial means?

No, I don't like coming back and doing it

with artificial means. This

tendency that people have of recording

guitars with a DI and then reamping

afterwards, it just isn't the same in any

way. There is another technique that I

developed. I realised that we were

theoretically mixing stereo, but we

weren't really mixing stereo, we were

mixing two-channel audio, two-channel mono

rather. And I wanted to expand the sounds

a little bit, and I'd started recording

guitars with two microphones,

especially on four by 12 cabinets, because

quite often you'd find that the speakers

on one side of the cabinet sounded a

little bit different from the speakers on

the other side of the cabinet.

So that gave me plenty of scope for

expanding the sound,

without having to double track or anything

like that. So I adopted that particular

thing, and then I quite often, I do it on

drums as well, I just put a mono,

preferably a ribbon microphone to get the

figure of eight

pattern from it.

And I put that a little ways in front of

the amp or a little ways in front of the

kit.

And then I can use that to move

the sounds forwards and backwards,

and slot them into the mix more easily.

And I think at one time you were recording

drums with fewer microphones than people

might expect. Is that something you still

adhere to?

No, not really. [laughs]

The advent of Pro Tools, of course, has

allowed much more. You can shove a load

more microphones up and you don't have to

use them, but they give you lots of

alternatives at the end of the day. So I'm

not

shy of doing that sort of thing. But

I was an assistant for Glyn Johns, and

that's a fortunate position to have

been in at some point along your career.

And that enabled me to see him recording

with the three-microphone technique. It's

a little bit more of the trying to get the

sound of the room at the same time as

getting the sound of the instrument, and

so you've then got context. The instrument

in the room

is a more important context than just the

instrument by itself.

So of all these rock sessions you did, and

most of the early ones do seem to be rock

bands,

were there any particularly memorable

ones?

Oh, gosh.

[laughs] Pretty much all of them actually.

For one reason or another. I suppose

erasing one of the edit pieces for the

intro to "Stairway to Heaven"

was one of the more memorable ones for all

the wrong reasons. But,

no,

working with Paul Kossoff, every session

with him was memorable, and John Martin as

well.

And then you've got bands like Sharks

coming along. It was

all very exciting.

I have to confess,

it sometimes brought about a little bit of

a blasé attitude.

And

I certainly in later years, I started

finding myself

a bit less

understanding of musicians that weren't

quite up to scratch.

[chuckles] When you've grown up with

musicians that are that good,

and you get somebody who neither knows nor

cares, you start to worry that

it's, something isn't going to be quite as

right as you want it to be.

I suspect that wasn't a problem when you

were doing Gary Moore because he was just

a wonderful player.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm on record and I'm on video talking

about his guitar sound, and I said,

[chuckles] I think the quote was something

along the lines of, "Yeah, well, he's

amazing. He

could make a plank of woods sustain

forever."

There's a solo on one of the versions of

"Still in Love with You," where there's

one note that he just holds for, oh, just

forever. Absolutely fantastic.

Then you've got Uriah Heep in there. I

remember those from back in the day.

[chuckles] What were they like to work

with?

I really liked them.

Nice bunch of guys. They were sort of

stuck in a strange place.

There are various bands that I've ended up

working with over the years that

it's a bit difficult, really. You take a

band like Samson, for instance, they had

the advantage of Bruce Dickinson and

all of

what went with it, but they had absolutely

appalling management, and it was just all

wasted. So

to the same extent, Uriah Heep were a

little bit like that. They weren't quite

sure where they were, whether they were--

They came along, they got a bit too

lightweight, a bit too poppy. They

should've stayed a bit more aggressive and

so on, but they didn't. They were

following the

slightly more glamorous,

late '80s

route, and I don't think it really helped

them too much.

I suppose the situation's rather got worse

because back in the day, as we call it,

bands used to write their material and

present it to the record company, and the

record company would either like it or

not. But now there's a lot of downward

pressure from record companies and A&R

people to outdo the last album and make it

even more commercial than the previous

one.

Well, I

think it was one of the, or it has been

one of the

biggest negative factors actually about

the music industry. What used to happen

and what was very evident at Island

Records and Island Studios,

the first thing was that the studio was a

building that was attached physically,

but also philosophically to the record

label.

And the more successful artists would be

subsidising the least successful artists.

So you've got all sorts of different

people. John Martin wasn't overly

successful at that point in time, and Nick

Drake

making beautiful albums, but selling about

four and a half copies.

Yeah.

But then bands like Mott the Hoople or

Free were making a lot more money, and so

the overall label was

able to exist on that basis.

And what record labels would do, they'd

allow a band to go

through the process of

making their first album, then maybe the

difficult second album, and they wouldn't

be putting pressure on them until it got

to the third album to come up with

something that was more commercially

viable.

But this changed over the years, and I can

remember noticing at a certain point

that record labels were expecting people

to turn out their third album in the first

album.

So that

started this whole thing of going back and

remixing things and remaking things and

so on and so forth.

And it's such an incredible pity that

a lot of these artists didn't get the

opportunity to develop properly and

evolve,

and allow their music to sort of

settle itself before releasing it.

With the transition from tape to Pro

Tools, we're on gear questions now.

Do you find that you work differently, or

do you still treat it like a tape

recorder?

I did for a little while. One of the

things I realised was that I was going to

need to kind of catch up. There were two

factions of people

as we moved from analogue to digital. There

were the naysayers,

the, "Oh, this is terrible, this thing."

Those people sort of ended up being

stuck right in the background of what was

going on.

And I realised that what I got to do is I

got to keep up with the technology, and I

realised I was in a

privileged position to being

able to catch up with the technology

and learn about it at the same time. So I

ended up having a very positive attitude

towards it. And the question

arose during that transitionary period,

the question arose on more than one

occasion

with a band coming in and saying, "Oh, we

want to record analogue, please."

And I'd say, "Why?" "Well, because it

sounds better." I'd say, "Okay, do you

want to qualify that?"

And they'd say all the usual things,

"Well, it's warmer, and the bass end

is..." All stuff that they'd probably read

in Sound on Sound, actually.

And then what I'd say was, "Okay, well,

let's just put a bit of realism into this.

If we're going to make a 10-song album,

we're likely to need eight to 10 reels of

tape. And eight to 10 reels of tape is

going to cost you about

100 pounds a reel. It's going to be, we're

going to use about a grand's worth of

tape at the end of the day.

And then we've got to make safety copies

of that, so there's another eight reels of

tape potentially on top of that. And you

take them through the whole thing, and you

say, "So

what you're going to ultimately do is

compromise

a lot of the other technology you might

want to access, just simply by being

pedantic about this."

Then the second thing is that whereabouts,

you have to ask yourself, whereabouts in

the recording chain does the analogue sound

come about? Yes, some of it comes about

from the limitations, actually, of an

analogue tape machine.

The way we lined up an analogue tape machine

was

not absolutely perfect. It was very

imperfect to get the best out of the tape.

And

can we not introduce that analogue influence

a little bit further down the line?

So that's what I started to look into more

than anything else was,

well, where can I put this analogue bit in

there? And I realised that one of the

places was going to be the summing end of

things.

I had to go back to this whole ridiculous

idea of, well, we'll record it

on the analogue tape machine, and then we'll

put it onto Pro Tools.

And you go, "Well,

that's really going a very long way

around.

We'll record it on Pro Tools, and then

what we'll do in the final part of the

chain, we'll introduce something that's

superbly analogue,

and will make some difference to the

overall final product."

And so that led me on, I had a dalliance

with Radar, which was, to my mind, one

of the better digital recording medium.

But

what I ended up with was creating the

analogue chain with everything in different

places. So I would be recording on Pro

Tools,

and then we would overdub using the Pro

Tools, and we had all the advantage of the

editing that you could use then, and

other bits and pieces of technological

wizardry that we could

incorporate.

And then when we get to the mixing point,

let's introduce the

analogue part of the chain in the summing at

that point. And then what that enabled me

to do, because I was coming out of the

digital, out of the Pro Tools, and going

into this

summing, that I could then record on a

separate Pro Tools rig.

So I could actually record at 96 for my

final masters,

and I'd have all of that going on. So that

was one of the first parts of it. The

other thing was taking this

attitude that there is so much of the

analogue chain that you're not quite sure

how much influence it's going to have at

the end of the day. And so,

committing yourself to that particular

directory isn't the best thing to do, I

think.

So what do you make of the approach where

some engineers will do everything on Pro

Tools and then mix it onto maybe a

two-track analogue machine just to give it

that flavour?

That's what I did first of all.

That was part of the journey that I had,

that I would be doing the

recording on Pro Tools, and I'd be mixing

it to half-inch at 15 inches per second

with Dolby SR.

And that gave me

all of the signal-to-noise ratio of a

digital recorder,

but with all of the analogue wonder that

the half-inch tape machine would give me.

See, the

other part of the philosophy for me is

that

so much of what we did during the analogue

era was to overcome the deficiencies of

the recording medium.

We were making up for that. And a lot of

that stuff that

people

refer to now, the younger people refer to

now, was us trying to get past

the deficiencies and overcome that. I

record differently onto Pro Tools than I

ever recorded onto an analogue machine. And

interestingly, I use less. One of the

things I noticed at one point was

all the recording that I was doing onto

Pro Tools,

I would very rarely use the equalisers on

the

recording side.

I'd be just choosing the right microphone,

putting the instrument in the right part

of the room, putting the microphone at the

right place

on the instrument, and then recording it

naturally. I didn't have to force the top

end because I know that I was going to

lose it in the

noise from the signal-to-noise ratio.

I didn't have to do that anymore. I could

record it, and I could get a perfect

recording of it and then do something with

it after.

What's your view now on the best plug-in

emulations of analogue gear and actually

using the original analogue gear? As a

friend of mine once said when he was

mixing records, "Will it affect sales?"

[laughs] Yes.

Well, that analogy's been used

plenty of times. Is it going to sell any

more records? Yeah.

Having been involved on the periphery of

making some plug-ins, with UAD and doing

the Marshall emulations,

I was very impressed with the way that

they went about it. And their plug-ins, I

think, they're not just algorithms.

They've

thought about it. They've engineered their

plug-ins in a certain way. And I think a

lot of other people have caught up now

with that particular philosophy.

One of the things I found quite remarkable

was when I got one of the plug-ins that

they sent me and, the Pultec

one. and one of the things with Pultecs,

when we had the real Pultecs,

was that we'd quite often use them. We'd

route something through the Pultec with it

in bypass

because the analogue sound the Pultec gave

just by putting it in and out

was quite extraordinary. And then I

discovered that they'd managed to engineer

that into the plug-in of the Pultec. You

could leave it in bypass, but you got a

definite difference in sound coming

through. But I think we

did a Music Producers Guild

sort of testing day

years and years ago to compare plug-ins

with the

hardware versions of them.

And

it was pretty obvious actually, we should

have worked it out before we went to all

the trouble of doing it.

They're two different devices.

An 1176, a

hardware 1176, no two of them are the

same.

Yes, so I've heard.

So

what is it that people are hanging on to?

I've met some people that go, "Oh, the

blue-faced 1176 is so much better than the

black one." You go, "No, some of the

blue-faced ones are better, and I've

actually come across some really bad

ones."

Yeah, and it's the same with the old

microphones, isn't it? People are trying

to model them-

Yeah

... but which one do you model?

Well, absolutely. And it's funny, I've got

this

TLM67 here

that I'm using at the moment, and I found

that quite by accident. I'd always loved

U67s,

and this is a modern equivalent of the

U67, and it sounds, it

has the same kind of feeling as the U67

had.

But it's a transformerless microphone, so

it's

a whole different philosophy behind it,

and they're two different microphones.

They have two different

personalities about them.

Later on in your career, you were starting

to work with a lot of different musical

styles, whereas early on it was quite a

focus in rock. What have you kind of

learned from that with all these jazz, a

bit of pop, bit of blues?

Yeah, I

just like working with lots of different

types of music. I've definitely used

techniques

from different styles on some of the

techniques from rock I've used on reggae

and vice versa, and

the same with jazz and blues.

It was one of those things,

very early on in my career, I noticed, and

it was sort of the trigger that

led me to leave Island,

Basing Street. I noticed that I'd got into

the habit of putting the same instrument

in the same part of the room and the same

microphone and

I thought, "No, that's not actually what I

want to do. I want to

be experimenting with different things."

And so,

the chance to record, for instance,

there's an album that I recorded on Island

at Basing Street that consists entirely

of Tibetan bells and bowls,

and it was a real challenge recording

something that is pure harmonics.

You can't use VU meters for a start off.

And finding out how to

record those sort of instruments then led

me to using little techniques

at certain points beyond.

And

yeah, I think

my wife would tell you she would prefer it

if I'd stuck to one musical style and

made more money. I think I've been really

very lucky to be able to work with so many

amazing musicians across so many

different

genres, and it's

come out in the wash in more than one way.

There's a band called The Bad Plus that I

worked with, a trio,

a sort of very

experimental jazz trio from the States.

And

a friend of mine had signed them to

CBS to Sony Jazz

and

introduced me to them. And

their drummer

got very excited and said, "Oh, you've got

to come and do an album with us," because

he loved the AC/DC albums. So here's this

eminent jazz musician who's hiring me

because of

my connection with AC/DC.

So,

you

don't get that happening every day.

So you still doing any musical work, or

has your wife talked you into staying at

home now?

[chuckles]

I'm working with a singer-songwriter from

Northern Ireland, and we're kind of

working on things together. He's sending

me bits, and we're writing songs and so

on. So that's quite nice.

I got this lovely studio here that, quite

frankly, I'd like to be using more than I

am. I prefer

to mix now. I really like mixing. I really

like mixing jazz as well.

So,

if there's anybody out there that doesn't

have a budget but who's got some decent

jazz recordings, then give us a shout.

That'd be brilliant, and I suppose we have

to end up with the ultimate

question is what are the benefits and

evils of AI in music?

I think the benefits and

dangers of AI, it's across the board.

I think the

thing is that I'm with the school of

thought

that the human intervention

is something that will always prevail. And

the synthesisers developed

into creative tools.

They moved away from being just an

arpeggiator into being something that's

more creative, and they managed to do that

without a huge amount of damage.

I haven't yet heard an AI recording that I

didn't spot.

But on the other side of the coin, there

are tools, you can get it to automate some

jobs. I guess there are applications in

audio restoration, and certainly myself,

I've used AI-assisted stem splitting to

take apart recordings that we did in the

late '70s onto a Tascam four-track and

then reassemble them and try to improve

them.

So it's a double-edged sword.

I'm not a great

fan of this remixing things or taking

the... You take "Back in Black," right?

When we recorded it, we recorded it a

certain way. When we mixed it, we mixed it

a certain way. When the guys played it,

they played it a certain way. And what we

did was we captured all of those elements.

You can't go back and recapture those

elements. It's basically nothing more than

the greed of record labels that drives

that forwards. And actually, if record

labels stop being such greedy bastards

and

became a little bit more understanding of

the creative process and how delicate and

how wonderful that creative process is,

we wouldn't be having the conversation

about AI because they'd be going, "Well,

actually, the product that you create

using AI isn't as good as the product you

can create using your own creative

talents."

Yes. So we stick to using it as tools

rather than as a replacement for

musicians.

I think that's the most succinct way you

could've put it, actually. That's exactly

it. It is a tool. It's

the same, we go back to talking about

plug-ins. Plug-ins are a tool,

and they can be used just the same way as

the hardware versions.

Well, I won't take up any more of your

time, Tony. That's been really generous of

you.

[laughs] Yes. Well, anytime. I

like this because it's like having a chat

with a mate.

Oh, thanks, Tony.

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