Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about electronic music and all things synth.  I'm Rob Puricelli and in this episode I talk to programmer, producer and engineer J. J. Yengzalik. 

As part of Trevor Horn's team of technological wizards in the 1980s, J. J. emerged as the preeminent Fairlight programmer of the day, primarily as one fifth of the art pop collective Art of Noise. but also in projects ranging from ABC and Dollar to Yes and Malcolm McLaren.  Describing himself as not a keyboard player, JJ brought his programming skills and talent to bear on a wide range of successful and ground breaking recordings that were at the vanguard of how cutting edge technology shaped not just the sound of pop music, but how pop music itself was made. 

I wanted to find out how JJ stumbled into an industry at a time of huge innovation. And how he ended up working on some of the most significant and important recordings of the day. Many of which are still cited as influential. by many current musicians and producers. 

Friends who I knew moved to London and they  were chatting on the phone and they said, why don't you come down to London? So I moved. Down  into their house in Highgate, right next to the archway tube station. And they were big live music fans. And they used to go down to  A pub, and I think it was down in Muswell Hill or somewhere called Stapleton Tavern,  and  there was a band there called Landscape.

And  that was really the first time they got into seeing a band on a regular basis and getting into the music and knowing what they were doing differently and listening and really, really getting into it. So  I was, uh,  fairly unemployed at that time. I think.  And we decided that it would be great if we could book them for our own little sort of venture at the,  um, community hall in Archway Road, which I think is still there.

And then we booked the place. And I sold all my tickets and basically nominally made a bit of profit.  Um, meanwhile, going around putting up posters, and we had a great gig.  And I helped them load in, load out, and I thought, this is quite ingenious. So, one thing led to another,  and I started working for them on the road.

And Richard James Burgess was the drummer  and I started pumping his gear around for him and also Andy Pask, who now plays with Hans Zimmer.  Um, and they were very, very busy session guys.  And  Richard said to me, doesn't matter what you do, JJ, but just always arrive early. That was his credo.  And he'd be doing two or three sessions a day and I had a van, one or two drum kits. 

Be setting one up, go around to the next studio, set up the B kit, go back to the other studio, shut down the A kit, go and move that. It was phenomenal. Anyway, found my way around all the, all the jingle studios in London  and then came across Geoff and Trevor when Richard was drumming for some of the tracks, uh, Age of Plastic. 

And I think that, I'm not sure whether he drummed on  Video Killed the Radio Star or whether that was someone else. It might have been Paul Robinson. Anyway.  One thing led to another, and I took Richard's drum kit to Top of the Pops,  and Geoff and Trevor had this guy who was looking after their gear, Norman Lee. 

And he drove off and left one of Jeff's keyboards, which I picked up and took with me and phoned him up and said, your guy left a keyboard behind. I've got it. And they phoned me up the next day and offered me a job.  So I obviously couldn't say no.  And before I knew it,  when they were sort of rehearsing,  they ended up, uh, in redone rehearsal studios.

Somewhere in Bayswater, I think. Terrible place. Only because it was small and damp.  With these guys from this band called Yes. And I wasn't into Yes. I didn't know who they were, really. They were jammed in this room  and next thing I know Jeff's going need to build a keyboard rig. We're doing an album and so  Spent vast amounts of money building his huge keyboard rig which must have had 12 13 keyboards in it I think a massive analog Pedal board that Pete Cornish built that was essentially guitar effects  with a multi core in and multi core out into a mixing console.

Uh, custom built monitors, custom amps, you know, big  setup. And so I kind of got in charge of that, not knowing terribly much, and he bought a Fairlight. And so he and I used to go to  all the  promo stuff they did in the evenings, because no one really knew what they were doing at all.  Everybody was there and everybody was just milling about, scratching their heads going, great.

It's fantastic. What the hell do you do with it? You know?  And so that's how I kind of came across, uh, Jeff and Trevor. So initially I was working for Jeff.  Then did the drama album, went on tour, toured America with Yes, and I came back  and I can't remember the timeline exactly, but Trevor Rabin came along,  Jeff got into forming Asia,  Trevor Rabin was playing guitar in Asia for a while,  and Hal Whetton  and the double drum kit maestro, man. 

And whilst they were rehearsing, I was taking Jeff's Fairlight, which he wasn't using in rehearsals,  by agreement to go and earn a bit of money. So I was going out, charging for his Fairlight, charging for my time.  That was going along quite nicely. Until one day, I was at Air Studios with, uh,  Maka and George Martin, and, uh, there was a torrential downpour, which we know about nowadays, but back then was quite unusual.

And I think in Air Studios, which is at the top of the building at Oxford Circus. The glass void between the control room and the live room filled with water and everything got shut down and I had a call saying  Jeff's rehearsal gear is getting rained on you better go and sort it out So I had to leave  and I explained anyway got back  and Macca very kindly said sorry judge Hey, you know, we need someone here all the time and I went okay.

Yeah, it's fair enough said  You know, thanks to the gig. And that was that. So at that point, I realized that I had to sort of make a decision. And I couldn't do both things.  And I decided to go freelance  and use Jeff's machine when he had it and others as and when I could. And then Gary, with whom I shared a house at the time, Gary Langan, said, Trevor's thinking of buying a Synclavier, we've got to put him off.

He said it'd be a disaster. I'll talk to him.  You need to come and have a chat. So I got a call from Trevor and I went and had a chat  and he basically bought the Fairlight on the back of what I'd said to him and he said, uh, here you are,  take it away and, uh, get into it. I'll call you, give you a couple of days notice. 

And, uh, get out there and do stuff. And so after that,  I ended up in a house in Highgate in a room with a Reevox A77 quarter inch,  and I was out recording absolutely everything I could.  That was fairly hi fi.  Uh, but I was also using my recording Sony Walkman as well, which I actually preferred the sound of  because it had, if you remember stereo mics on it  and they had these monster auto compressors on them,  which kind of just did the most amazing things and you couldn't control at all.

I mean, it was just madness. And got some really cool sounds on that, and just filled the Fairlight with stuff.  Looping back to Mecca,  he had a sample of a trombone. And this is the other pivotal moment, apart from me being fired from the gig prior to that. He, uh, recorded this, uh, trombone. He said, let's sample it.

We put it in. I looped it all up. Pretty horrible, I can tell you. And he starts playing with these big fat chords on it. He said, it doesn't sound much like a horn section. Does it JJ? And I was going, well, no, it's not. It's a trombone. And to be honest, it sounds like a bit of a hoover on acid. And it was at that point I realized.

That,  uh, A, I had no future working for Macca, and B, sampling musical instruments was a dead end.  Just suddenly that moment, I thought, this is the wrong way to go, because there are lots of people out there who can play these things and play beautifully and everything, so I'm gonna go and find stuff that...

interest me. So  thereafter, everywhere I used to go, I was just recording, recording, recording, and spent days and days and days in my little room editing and sampling and editing and sampling and editing and 

sampling. So, um, we're, we're, we're in the early 1980s. Um, 82,  um, was, uh, ABC's Lexicon of Love, which you were involved with.

And then following that, um, or around that time came the Malcolm McLaren gig. Can I, 

can I just interrupt you there?  ABC. This is a very significant album for many reasons. And one of them is that it was the first time really that Anne Gary and I started to kind of work together and. It was one of those moments where,  for example, Gary would magic up these delays and reverbs and compression and magical engineering stuff. 

And Anne would play a couple of things and suddenly this,  as if it were magic happened. We'd done a little bit before with Dollar,  Give Me Back My Heart and records like that. And, uh, one of the, it was fraught with problems because I'd be going out doing sessions, often using the same sounds. It And they'd sound terrible. 

The engineer'd go, Uh, producer'd go, That doesn't sound like, Duh duh duh duh duh, If they'd heard something. And I'm going, Yeah, no, it's the same sound, But I don't understand. And it was basically, What was playing played, Who played it, And what the engineer was doing, What Gary was doing to it, Which kind of,  Brought it all to life.

And it took me a while To figure that out.  You know, he was doing delays with drums. He was using a lot of compression, made everything sound really loud.  And it became very apparent that quite a lot of engineers, he didn't really know how to bring the Fairlight to life. That was the sort of sound that Gary was able to manipulate and, and do things with that made it sort of magic. 

So going on 

to the ABC thing was that was my first recorded keyboard performance as a player. Um, where we sampled Julian  Mendelsohn, the engineer, going speak no evil. And I did the speak no, speak no, speak no evil. I just played it live and that was it. And I, guys said, well, I recorded that. And I went, well, I'm not keeping all of this.

It's fine. I'll just do this, fiddle with it. And that was it. It was done.  Uh, but that's how it was in many respects. We kind of throw things around and because he was always recording and always tweaking things and making them sound really interesting. Everything came to life, really. 

So, how do you remember the, the Malcolm McLaren, uh, phase?  How did you get involved with that? Was it Trevor that came to you and said, I've just had this guy come up to me with this proposition of making this album? Or were you involved at an earlier stage? How did that all come about? 

Gary and Trevor and Malcolm went off around the world. 

They were in South Africa. They were in  the Appalachians. They were in New York recording  all this stuff. And they came back.  And I got called in. Trevor said these guys are doing this thing called scratching and I went, oh, what's that? We said, well, they're here. Come and watch.  Uh, and there they had their decks.

There's two guys, two black guys from the Bronx, I think. They were extraordinary. Uh, the supreme teeth. I think they took a whole  bag full of cash and were never seen again when the session's finished. Basically, that was it. But essentially, Gary recorded what they were doing and we, we fired a lot of it into the Fairlight so we could manipulate it. 

Uh, and I would come and go and do the odd session and backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards. And so there's Little bits of the Fairlight, most of the album, and more often than not, Trevor would have created the backing track, got the overall shape,  and Anne would be in there playing those wonderful drills and chords and beautifying.

Everything and then I'd get called into crazy all up. Let's see what JJ's got, put things in, turn them sideways, chop things up, put them upside down and then they'd start spinning around in the echo. And if we go, Whoa, what's that  took on a whole new life. And so I was in and out of those sessions all the time, but not, not certainly not in the, in the kind of. 

The backing track creation stage. What was 

Malcolm's, uh, view of the fair like? Did he get involved in any of that? I mean, or was he more, um, you know, that kind of,  uh, Svengali type, you know, just ordering people around to do, you know, his bidding? 

Well, Malcolm was one of the reasons why the Art of Noise got together,  I think, for me, because it was his attitude. 

And his attitude was, why not?  Why can't you do that? Is it that Gary quotes him and saying, as you can't do it or you won't do it, he'd say, can't we put the middle of that song in the middle of this Trevor and Trevor will go, or we need to bring in another 24 track machine and sync them all together. And  he was always pushing and pushing and pushing because he wasn't really bit like me, I guess, wasn't  musically trained and you go, well, why, why can't you do that? 

And I suppose in some ways that rubbed off, I was going, well, why can't you do that? Why can't you put a sound of a bell in there? Why can't you put a car crash in there? Why not? Who says you can't.  Invested all this money, Trevor, kind of. Went, oh, okay. All right. That sounds interesting. Meanwhile, Gary's putting things in reverb and flying around and Anne's playing his tunes and Trevor finds a home for it.

So  Malcolm's was really just bouncing around and going, oh, great. And, and, and to use the old expression, vibing everything up,  he was very positive and.  Enjoyed it and lots of positive energy and it was good fun. It was 

good fun. Did you learn anything from those sessions, you know, either from, you know, working with Trevor or Malcolm that that really kind of turned you because the reason I asked that is you listen to some of the tracks on Duck Rock and some of the beats that are clearly Fairlight beats.

They are very similar to what would appear a year or so later with. into battle and, and then of course, who's afraid a little, little while later. Was it, was that a big kind of learning curve in terms of how you compile things like drum tracks or use the Fairlight as, as a tool overall? 

Yeah, very much so. 

I think that's an interesting link that you've made between Duck Rock and, and the Art of Noise material early on.  Is that what do you ask the question early on? What did I learn? I learned a couple of things. One is to stay quiet  and  often in sessions at the back of the room, you'd sit there and you go, this is shaping up to be interesting  and  timing one's suggestion. 

Is something that I learned was key, not in a, in a sinister or cynical way at all,  but I kind of, I think I quite, Steve Lipson once said of me many years later, when I, he saw my name on a, on a call sheet, he said, I knew we were in trouble as soon as I saw JJ's name on the call sheet and I went, Oh, thanks Steve.

But that's what kind of happened. I think I kind of got called into these things when they got into a bit of a corner  and  I'd start throwing this stuff around, but it was always.  You could tell very quickly whether  something was a go or not.  And so sitting at the back and kind of picking out what was going on,  never thinking this is A minor seventh, I've dropped just the sound.

It was, well, what about this? What about that?  Going through things pretty quickly. Uh,  and I suppose that, that was one of the key things. The other thing, you've identified a bit about the beats. And I hadn't done any programming, didn't know anything about programming. Richard Burgess said to me, don't be a drummer, be a programmer.

So that was another key point.  I think from the Malcolm sessions,  we just used to throw these tracks together and because we were looping them and  creating atmospheres, really vibes. We used to call them vibes back in the days. Is it happening? Is it got a vibe?  And if it has a vibe, you follow it. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of, uh, the link between the two, certainly I would say that having worked with Matt Langer on a Billy Ocean track, I think I was doing some drum programming for him and he, he went, what have you done?

And I said, what do you mean? What have I done? He said, well, if I was a drummer.  I wouldn't put a hi hat there,  which elicited the obvious response.  The Trevor was very absorbing of the stuff that I would throw at him. There are lots of other people that I was working with who were going, why are you doing that? 

Well, that's a bit weird or other things. That's not like a drummer  or that's, you know, to quote Macca, that's not a horn section. And so when we recognized these issues quite early on with people, I remember working with John Parr album, sadly, not Elmo's fire, but everything else over in Miami and they get, well, do you play?

And I went, no, I just basically, let's, I create these things and you just do it. And they're okay. Fine. All right. Someone else would go, Oh, well, we really want you to play. And I'll go, I'm not a player. But I say it's programmer. yes The Call around 82, 

83 or maybe a little bit later you uh, uh called in by Trevor again to, to work with um Yes on the 9. 0125 album Trevor having obviously come off the back of  Uh, slightly successful, mildly disastrous gig with Yes on the drama tour. And then he comes back to produce this album and brings you guys in, obviously because you've been doing great work previously.

So, you've gone from Malcolm McLaren, now you, now you're with prog super giants Yes. How different was that experience? Where 

to start?  Um, I'm not, I'm not being silly here, but that's a really good question. 

And... I imagine the dynamic is really different. You've come from Malcolm, who is completely. Just like let's just let's just do it because why not to an established band of exceptionally talented  Musicians who clearly have a democracy in a hierarchy I guess and there are some with greater say than others and that must have been a more rigid experience.

I  

guess That's very well observed. It was  chalk and cheese between Malcolm and yes And apart from the obvious technical situation one found oneself in, as you've identified, Malcolm's very sort of  enthusiastic. He's a one man band, if you like.  And then the yes situation was interesting because I'd worked with them before, obviously as Jeff Tech, as we're now known.

And so they regarded me, I think, with a slight amount of  Not suspicion,  but the other crew were kind of going, what's JJ doing here? Oh, he's got this thing. Oh, what's that? And then kind of going, Oh, so he's doing something different. I'm not looking after keyboards anymore.  And, um, so there was that dynamic.

The guys I used to work with the kind of going, Oh, okay, what are you doing here? Well, I'm programming this thing now. Okay, blah, blah, blah.  So then  I would often get called into those sessions,  probably again, in the, in the lips and lineup situation of.  We've got ourselves into a bit of a cul de sac that's called JJ,  and this is with the benefit of hindsight, I would say.

And so more often than not, I'd get booked in and I'd be down in the studio for a couple of days, and the backing track in some form would have been recorded. There might be a guide vocal.  The band may or may not have been there.  Chris Squire would be late.  As in starting at 11 in the morning, he'd be there at 11 in the evening. 

By which time everybody's tearing their hair out and want to go home. So, that was very, very, very different. And  overall, it was often down to me. Trevor said, we need to do something here, what about this?  I went, why don't we, for example, sample these drums and bits and pieces like that? And Gary turned on the, the Juice.

They started to sound amazing.  And we'd start overdubbing.  And I remember being in at least two or three studios during that period. There was one story where they sent Steve Howell to do some guitar overdubs with a slave, a mix on the 24 track.  And when it got back, it was all out of tune because the, the analog tapes weren't running at the same speed.

And so there was a lot, there was a lot of.  Technical stuff, and it was time to get a cup of tea, a lot of sitting around, a lot of trying to figure out what was going on. The difference came when Trevor Rabin started playing keyboards  and he started playing the Fairlight and he's a demon keyboard player. 

So a lot of the keyboard parts that he played with the sounds are Trevor Rabin. And he got this, he got what I was doing completely.  And so I'd sample a bit of a voice, take a bit of the front off, change the ADSR, pitch it down a bit, double a dur, Gary'd spry it up, and Trevor'd start playing. And he understood completely what it was and what it was doing.

And they said, Gary, can you do this? Can you do that? Play the track and off you go. And he was there. So, that little trio,  Rabin, me and Langan, worked very well on that because Trevor understood how it might all work together.  

So, some of the tracks on that album, 90125, um, are almost kind of showcases for what the Fairlight was capable of doing.

For example, you know, the, the, the lead single owner of a lonely heart has orchestra stabs. It has those drum fills. It has all of these little embellishments  that took, you know, what is, you know, on its own a great song, but it gave it this, this edge to not, you know, use a yes pun there. Um, But it, it kind of gave it this, this different thing, and, and then also, um, um, leave it.

Leave it. So, you know, all of those do do do do's at the beginning, for want of a better way of describing it, was that all, you know, how, how did that happen, and, and was that difficult to, to put together? Not 

really.  Thinking about Owner of a Lonely Heart. The cassette appeared  and Trevor said,  there's this drum fill I want you to sample.

So I've sampled that, put it into two bits and I went, play the tape again. And I went, that sound is much more interesting. And that was the stat.  And I went, let me just try it. And he'd go, okay. And he'd disappear and come back and Gary would get the verbs going. We'd start mucking around  and go,  right. We need to find a place for that.

Cause that's tremendous. And Chris Squire came in and by this time we got the idea, we got the sound, we got the balance, we got the reverb.  And Chris Squire came in and just went, Oh, record Gary. I've just started playing.  And he played that live,  the middle section.  And it has this kind of weird timing to it.

And I said, I can tighten the sign, the sound up, Chris. He went, no, no, no, no, no. Don't touch it. It's fine. It's fine. It has this kind of pushy pulley thing. And it, and that was, but that's his bass playing in effect. And, um, you, you wouldn't program it like that and it would be pretty dull if you did, but it had this dynamic change in it.

And that was because the way he played it, it was, it was because Gary recorded it. And so that is like, okay, so we need a bit of, we're going to use that gag. We need to reference it a bit earlier on what about the intro, you know? And so the normal iteration  of a song, bit of an intro, put it back to this, all the stuff that you do in it.

Used to do in a song,  uh, took over having found the first bit for it. Okay. It lives there. Let's allude to it somewhere else. Let's make another joke out of it, and then let's have a bit of a laugh at the end. But I've gotta say that we're all just giggling, like mad because we thought it's hilarious. 

I was, I was under the misconception, obviously that, um, yes.

We're, you know, the traditionalists and you guys came in with. All of those cool ideas and yet you've, you've basically said that, you know, Chris and Trevor Rabin were really, you know, exploiting the technology and, and kind of grasping it for what it was and, and, you know, using this new stuff to, to great effect.

Absolutely. And 

I think that there would have been combinations of. Yes, who  with different members wouldn't have done that. I  mean, Alan White  played some of the drum overdubs on the, on the Fairlight.  And he went, Oh, could you swap the bass drum and the snare over? Cause my hands don't play it like that.

Well, sure.  I had a bass drum snare and he went, no, I want the other way around. I went, okay, fine. But he grabbed it and he went, this is what I can do with it. This is great. Bit more reverb, Gary.  You know, and everybody goes, whoa.  Lots of panning, mad stereo, let me do this, let me do that, poof, great idea. And so,  like all, I think  if you look back over, yes, I'm not sure what other technological advances there were, but they were certainly using as many as they could and, you know, track wise and effects and... 

I don't think they were ever sort of, um, not forthcoming in, in trying things out.  The 

legend has it that in between the yes sessions, Gary obtained some of the tapes of Alan's drumming  and you sampled those and started to build what would become early Art of Noise recordings or the inspiration maybe for some of those recordings.

Can you confirm or deny that and maybe elaborate on that process? 

Absolutely. Very happy to.  Gary, uh, was recording a  band, I think they may have been Air or Townhouse.  Um, the fashion in those days was very big  snare sounds. Hugh Padron was a big guy now and it was as if the engineers were having a fight, who can get the biggest snare. 

I think he was at, uh, Hall and Oates, you know, big bang crash now, big bang boom. They, they, they, they were just thinking it was hilarious. All this nonsense. It was very eighties, huge snares. Anyway, as I remember it, Gary had got. Alan playing a track on his own and he just so just happened to be listening to the talkback mic  in the live room where he was playing  and realized that this was a bit of an awesome sound  because it wasn't normally used for recording and it was a microphone hanging in the top of the stone room and, um, like all good engineers, he patches it in and starts recording. 

And I think he got Alan down to bass drum and a snare drum,  and said, don't play cymbals, don't play hi hat,  and ended up with  a kind of track, which is basically snare drum,  bass drum, and, because Alan was a drummer, the occasional fill, because he couldn't not play. do that  trauma doesn't sit there and go boom, check, boom, check, boom, check forever.

They have to do something, you know, eight bars, you've got to do something.  16 bars, a bigger thing. You know, that's, that's how it works. So it's in bread and it was a Friday.  Chris Squire had been and gone and it was very late and we'd had a long week and I was bouncing in and out these sessions and I'd been there for a couple of days and I was just exhausted. 

And Gary said, I've got this idea now, I  gotta go home. But no, no, no, you really got to stick around. So he persuaded me to stick around and he played this tape.  And it was basically bass drum snare drum of Alan White playing live. And I went through the talkback mic, fire a half inch, I think. Anyway, he said, let's sample it.

And I went, okay, fine. And remember, I've got 1. 2 seconds,  um, groundbreaking at the time. And, um, I wasn't paying attention because there are other things going on. And I recorded at the start of the sample, not on the downbeat, which had its own merits, actually. So we ended up calling the sample TAC Boom Boom because I started the sample on the snare beat.

Which meant that when you put it  into the downbeat of the bar, when you're watching Paige and I go by, going 1, it was going 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4,  which,  when Anne came in, she kind of looked at the screen and went,  why is it doing that? And I went, I don't know. But it works because we had this groove and Gary and I just slammed a whole load of stuff on it overnight,  including us going money, which is backwards, which is enum, uh, screaming, going, yeah,  turning that backwards and  other things that we've found.

And we just went a bit mental for a few hours. Uh, and I think we did. That was the foundation of beatbox.  Gary did a rough mix and played it to Trevor on Monday and he went bloody hell.  What have you done? I think he said, what have you done? And he said, you need to get Anne in to put some tunes on it.  So Anne comes in  and we play the track and she's going, what the hell is going on here?

And basically sitting at the piano trying to go,  what do I do? Where do I go? What do I do?  And ends up playing over the outro  where the beautiful, beautiful piano comes in. Bosendorfer at the, uh, in Sarnie's and we couldn't help nicking her going, Oh no, I don't believe it. And dropping that into the beginning of the track with the ba ba bum and off it goes because Gary and I, legend had it with kind of naughty school boys and she's the head mistress.

And so we were again, having a laugh.  And off it goes. So that's how that started. We created, uh, we created beatbox basically.  We've got 

a groove,  doubled it up, changed the outro fill a bit. Put that aside, got another four bars, got another eight bars, change that, put that aside. And then basically, because we've been doing it a lot with Malcolm, mapped out a song. And, and, and listening to it, I remember, actually, we were working on eight bars and eight bars.

Okay, that's a great groove, okay, part that, and then let's start something else. And we'd start afresh. And then we'd just jam all these, these sections together. And we go, wow, listen to that, I forgot about that bit, did that two hours ago, forgot about that. And we just play it, and then Gary recorded it all.

And, and it ended up on tape, and that was how it, how it happened. Man comes in and plays, you know, piano. How did 

you go from that, to recording...  Into battle, which was, you know, the first kind of, the first release on, on the ZTT label, which I guess was being formed around that same time, because again, legend would have it that, um, Chris Blackwell from Ireland heard this and allegedly took it to New York and played out in a club.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I can't vouch for that bit of the story, but I do remember I was shopping in Windsor. who lived near Windsor, got into the car and turned on Paul Gambaccini, who had the American Charts on.  And my girlfriend at the time, Helen, said, That's your track, isn't it?  I turned it up and went, Good grief, it's beatbox.

And then it goes, you know, number five in the black urban dance charts in America. I go, What?  Had no idea. And they basically then realized they'd better have signed us up for a deal. Um, and then they said, uh, we need more stuff.  So Gary was going, Well, I've got a half an hour tomorrow. Come down and we'll, we would work in, in, in the, um, tape editing room on a, on a two track. 

A four track desk and a two track.  Just looping stuff together, put a bit of reverbs on them.  And, uh, if something had merit, we'd build it up and get Ann in. If it was not good, we'd just put a 30 second excerpt on, go, that's a bit of a laugh, let's do that. So it was just pretty chaotic, actually. 

And as you say, you were very busy at the time, not just with...

What you were doing with, with art of noise, but all of the other stuff that was going on at ZTT and beyond that you were being involved with, such as Frankie goes to Hollywood and so on.  How did you find, I mean, that time to kind of,  on the one hand, you're, you're a, you're a pop star. You're in a hit band with hit singles and hit albums.

And at the other, on the other side of the coin, you are. Uh, very much in demand programmer and engineer and producer and you're being called to do all this stuff. Was it as busy as it sounds? And did you enjoy that? Did you get a chance to enjoy it? 

Uh, it was mental.  Did I enjoy it? No.  Um, did I have good advice about what I should do?

No.  Would I have followed good advice about what I should have done? No. Um, and I think that I was, I would say during that period I was fairly out of my depth.  And  didn't quite appreciate that producing was not so much about the music as the personalities.  And I blew my gig with Zig Zig Sputnik when they came to interview, you know, to have a chat with me. 

Debbie Collins, Pete Collins, Matt Rife was managing this later on. And one of them...  lit a cigarette and set fire to his hair. And, um, they said to me, well, what's your role in the studio, JJ? And I said, well, the first thing to do is make sure no one sets fire to themselves.  So which Debbie kicked me hard under the table and they kind of got up and left, you know, and, but I, I,  I kind of realized too late in the day that I didn't have the temperament. 

And although I'd spent many hours in studios and many hours with top producers and all, I, I just,  uh, I would rather be the off the wall guy in, in, in the back of the room. 

Did you enjoy being a 

faceless band? Oh, much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Faceless is cool because I'll tell you why. Because having sat through all that, worked on all that Frankie stuff and seen them being mobbed and seen quite by chance the taxi bills after a few months. 

And where all that money came from,  uh,  to be able to walk into the studio and take a blind bit of notice of who you were was fantastic.  And the thing about being someone in the broadest possible sense, and I think that the social media of the world, people who embark on that haven't got this yet, which is when you are someone,  you end up being not someone. 

And that takes many forms and  I have seen it in several bands and people that I've worked with over the years. It's very hard to handle.  So being faceless, wonderful.  Best thing we did. 

Who's Afraid was the first full album and it was, it was more of a formed piece than into battle. It, there, there were, you know. The highlights such as moments in love. Um, and it's often cited, um, as hugely influential by so many, you know, different people for for different reasons and compositions and performances were  inspirational.

Your creative use of the sampler was inspirational. Gary's production or engineering and Trevor's production were inspirational. How do you feel? Um, all this time on that even to this day that album is still cited as not only just inspirational but also like a pivotal moment in pop music. 

I feel humbled  actually and  have been able to  access some of the stripped out audio  and have been listening to some of that. 

And some of the things Gary got up to, for example, moments of love, absolutely extraordinary.  So for example,  he would have probably, unbeknownst to me at the time,  I've been able to listen back to this stuff, say four delays and reverbs and combinations thereof,  which as the Fairlight was playing the track, because we put the Fairlight, we get the arrangement, we put the Fairlight down, and then they would dub in real time. 

But whilst we were putting it down, he was recording two tracks of stereo effects that he was muting and playing as it went along.  Unbelievable.  Unbelievable. And the work he was doing on the snare alone in Moments of Love. It's extraordinary. There are, I can think of at least four different styles of reverb on  there, and he's playing them,  and he gets it wrong sometimes, and it's hilarious, because I now know, you know, I listen to it,  and he just went for it.

And so,  during that time,  it's this additive process I'm talking about, that we mentioned earlier.  He was just adding  to that, uh, without really certainly me not being aware of what he was doing, but the fact that it turned around and  going, Oh, this is, this has got the vibe because he created something and recorded it, balanced it and put it back.

And suddenly this. new shape and this new form appeared. And over, over that track, we said, uh, what are we going to do with this? And I said, well, let's, let's make it the most boring track we can. Let's do it for at least 10 minutes. We got to about nine minutes and gave up and we never managed to get it any shorter than that.

It just doesn't work.  And.  That was the premise. Let's make it really boring. Let's make it really long. And no notion at the time of music concrete or any of that  post rationalized stuff at all. Uh, it was let's just drag this out. And I came up with the idea of turning everything into a nine bar loop. 

Which is because you have the counts of four.  And you have the weird bits, and it was a stroke of genius, I think, if I may. Ha ha ha. Because, because it was an unusual form anyway. We had the, the, the pulse.  And we needed something to, Trevor would call it a gag. We needed a gag to kind of reset, drop, and rebuild.

And I went, let's put a bar of nothing in. And then we started filling the bars of nothing in with counts and noises and all that sort of stuff. It basically meant that you could stop three, four, and rebuild. And this meant that the whole tune had many opportunities to reformulate itself because there were these breaks.

And that, that was by chance, really, I guess.  It was by virtue of the fact that, you know, the, the, the, what happened with that is another, another cassette sample. Anne said to me, I've got this, uh, sample on a cassette that might be quite good. Gave it to me on the Friday. I said, well, I'll take it home and I'll put it in. 

And I sampled it and it's the Ork. Melody for moments of love and we got to the studio and we'd set up and stole. How did you get on with that sample? And I because I've been playing with it and dialing it and shaping it and just fiddling with it Perfecting it over over the weekend. I'd worked out this sort of thing, which I didn't appreciate was a melody at all  And I went, Oh, it goes bump, bump, bump, bump.

And she went brilliant.  And because he's got perfect actions, he can remember stuff. She goes, right, Gary, roll the tape. Here we go.  Off she went. And she played what I played  perfectly again. And that became the motif. And I said, well, what should we do now? She said, what about, why don't we do some pulses?

What about Teresa? Let's do this. And  that was it. And off we went. And then we went, right, let's slow it down. Let's make it long. Let's make it slow. Let's make it nine bars. Let's have a bit of a laugh.  And then.  Paul Morley came in, and he listened to the cassette, and he did a go, Call it Moments in Love, because we didn't have a title. 

And Rosie said to me, what did Paul Morley do? I went, that alone,  because we had no title.  Call it Moments in Love.  And the first vocal that went on it was Anne.  She went home, recorded a cassette with Roger.  Multitrack yourself up and dropped it in and we ended up using Camilla Pilkington and you know, lots of other people along the way But that's that's how that started but in terms of pivotal moments the name  Everything flowed from that,  you know The mad cybersex all that's weird stuff that we threw in there was just because of the name  and so it was it was again A very, very additive process.

And I'll talk about that, and this is, this is something I've been thinking about.  Uh, close to the edit, we had the loop going, Tap, boom, boom, tap, boom, boom, tap, boom, boom, And started playing quite a legato bass, Dun, dun, Gary came over and started putting, said, Put it in record, give me another track, And put in all these other notes. 

And we go, Oh, wow. And I have listened to that back and  the timing is all over the place. The tuning is all over the place by virtue of the fact that it was sequenced,  you know, the starts are good, but all the note durations of miles off, you wouldn't nowadays, you wouldn't let that go. But again, Because it got copied and pasted, copied and pasted, that shape that I didn't bother to fiddle with,  some a bit long, some a bit short, some a bit long, some a bit short, but as played, gave it that, that shape.

Now you'd sit there and go, I'm gonna make them all 244 344 489  and make it all perfect. And it sounds dire, dead.  

There is an organic quality to, you know, that art of noise stuff. Um, and it does feel  ironically, given the fact that you're using what was cutting edge technology at the time, it feels very human.

Well, that's 

because we, we, we had eight tracks on the Fairlight, as you know. And  I was thinking about this, talking to someone the other day about it. I think generally speaking, we used about five.  And we put it on tape,  and then we'd overdub it.  So there's real percussion, there's real drums, there's real piano, there's real keyboards, and that... 

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, you had this thing that's chundering along, doing its thing with Gary's reverbs, and...  The thing about his delays are that he used to count them manually,  and so he didn't dial them in into a kind of, give me a crotic quaver, duh duh duh duh duh, he used to count them on a stopwatch.

And so they're not perfect.  Which means you get this role  because they're not perfect.  And so with all your duels you put in your perfect quantized repeats. Ugh, dull. And then Anne will come and play.  And because it's thundering along underneath,  then as a keyboard player, you've got that  ability, who has that ability like Anne, is to slide across the top and give it this feel,  which you wouldn't and can't do if you're going to program it. 

And again, didn't know that at the time, but that's what made it. Really really cool to listen to I think  I want to 

just touch on more recent things if I may  Just this year the first I guess official art of noise live album was released From from 90 back in 1986 live in Tokyo and what I wanted to know and something I've always been fascinated with because there were live performances of that early incarnation of art of noise and  At the ambassadors and there's been some of those recordings have been captured and put out, but then by  86, you know, art of noise is blown up and is a really big, well known global band with hit singles coming out of your ears.

Essentially, and you're taking this project, which is essentially a studio project, and you're taking that out live, and you're using this cutting edge technology in a live situation, which  must have been quite scary, but I just wanted to kind of understand how you pulled that off in, you know, in such, such a great way back then, when it was, you know, you didn't have laptops with, you know, just Yeah.

Press go and it all happens.  

Thank goodness for the laptops and the press go button. That's all I can say.  We touched on several significant issues here.  And it took us a while to come across Paul Robinson, who's drumming. And he was using a Simmons kit. And Anne listened and  annotated musically.  The drum tracks,  for example, beatbox, I have seen  scored them. 

And so I'm going into the rehearsals and I'm thinking, wow, that sounds amazing. Right. And it's Paul and he's got his Simmons and Roger Douglas put in all the sounds and he's reading.  And he's playing and it's unbelievable  and he's playing live for real and no click track  and it was extraordinary. I went, Whoa, this is going to be good. 

So he did all that and he had the pads with all different sounds on,  we ended up in Japan. So we're doing no sun, no moon and no stars. And we had someone put the Japanese voice in. So when he hit it hard, it was in Japanese. When he hit it soft, it was in English and loved all that. Um, so he was doing that.

We had.  Two consoles out front of house, Roger Dudley was on that with another guy, can't remember his name, but they had two Akai  samplers. So they're running one track with the samples loaded. Meanwhile, Roger's assistant was loading up the next one for the next tune, that is Switch Sides,  um, and we had a traffic light system on the side of the stage. 

So when they were ready,  they, uh, hit the green light and, and I were talking and we go, the light's gone green, let's go. And then Paul goes, clickety clickety click. We go, Oh, no,  nothing happened. Anyway, that's another story. Um, so we had a great drummer and he was playing live and Dave bronze. He plays bass with Clapton now and Tom Jones and another great bass player. 

Rita had a sampling base. I can't remember which one it was, a boss, I think, or something like that. And he had all his samples and he was playing live. So we had a proper rhythm section  and then there was Simon doing percussion.  There were the Noisettes doing the vocals. There was Anne playing piano and there was me pressing the odd key. 

Anne said, I said, I don't know what I'm going to do. I said, look, just do what you think you can do and don't worry about it. And don't do anything you can't do. And I went, great.  And even I managed to get that wrong. And I got, I got frowned on, you know, sorry, not paying attention. But in terms of technology.

So, so there are many myths. And on, on the live, on the tube thing, I thought, we've gotta go large here. So I got,  Anne had a slave keyboard. I had two keyboards, and I had two monitors  and a, and a box in the middle. That was the, the sinking box.  Simply 

friendship. SS r c, that's the 

one. What a great box. That changed the world. 

That changed the world unless. People who didn't know how those things worked started the track pretty much at the head of the tape and left you no room for wiggling. Go, let's put a little bit of a delay in and we can catch it up in a bar. I've been there. Oh, God. Anyway, um, but I only had one fairlight. 

But I had multiple screens because I thought I needed to make it, make it look big. So likewise on tour, Anne had the slave people.  I had the A frame, I had the Friendship SRC, I had two monitors, and I may have had one keyboard, I can't remember, and I had the processor here,  and I had a guy who looked after me, and, um, quite a lot of the time when I was talking, there was me popping a disk and sticking a new disk in, you know, disks to go in, disks out, disks in, disks out, and, uh, I famously, uh, went, okay, I'm ready to go, and I went, plink, plink, uh oh, no problem.

So I'm looking around, and it goes not loaded, and I'm going, okay, this is not good, this is not good. So, Tech jumps up, he's looking, he's looking, and he pops the second right hand drive out, okay, which you'd appreciate. Nothing comes out, right?  And I'm going, what's going on?  And then, he's pointing, right, because there's a bit of noise going on elsewhere.

And I had put  the song disk between the two disk drives.  Oh, 

right.  

Because I wasn't paying attention. Story of my life.  And, uh, I just sort of went What the...  Stupid, what do we do? Do we have to power down? Are we going to wait 20 minutes while it boots back up? I'm going, what do we do, what do we do? And he got a, he got an insulated screwdriver.

Feel it thing. Pop the system disk.  And flip the data disk out. And I'm going, oh god, really? Anyway, put the system disk back in, put the disk in and go in. Loading and we go, thank god for that.  Oh my god. So I was always living in fear that it was going to stop working. And... You know, it was, it was amazing that it, in the main, apart from human error, it worked fine.

The assumption would be that the technology would fail,  but it was, it was a human error. 

Not paying attention. 

Problem in chair, not in computer. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. 

Yeah, quite. But you know, we were in Japan, we were in Canada, we were in America, we were in the UK, and with Fairlight, bless its cotton socks.

rock solid. I mean, I, I just thought every gig I'm going to turn it on and it's not going to work. 

Kind of brings me on to the, the, my final question really is that in recent years you have been playing live again, uh, under various variations of the, the name of the band. Um,  And I just wanted to kind of know how much easier it is to, to do this stuff using, you know, laptops essentially, rather than, you know, that old tech and is it, is it as much fun to do?

We have Donal Hodgson.  Donal's a bit of a whiz. And, um, he has two Macs synced together via some box. So if the primary one goes, the other one takes over without anyone noticing.  I've yet to hear this, but it, that's the theory.  So he does all that side of it, and essentially Anne had her sounds, Gary has his sounds, and I have my sounds, and, and we, we join in.

I remember that performance on the tube, and you and Anne are, you know, leaning over various wonderful bits of technology, and Gary's there playing his instrument, which is the mixer. And that's still true to this day when when you guys perform live that he is he's playing his mix  Well, he's got samples now as well jj.

It's it's been a fascinating journey going through, you know those Seminal years and those albums and thank you for your wonderful insights and and stories. It's much appreciated 

Thank you so much. 

Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Before you go, make sure you visit the Sand on Sand podcastPage@sandonsand.com slash podcasts where you can explore all the other great content playing across the other channels. 

I'm Rob Puricelli, and this has been a failed Muso production for Sound On Sound.