Charted out?

Yeah. Completely. Like this one song, there’s an eight bar introduction on it, okay, which was really great, like we went, “Uh huh, so this is what he just does.” You know, like Tony never did that. We had never done that on our singles, obviously. And John was very pro. It was the underground weird band with the slightly commercial producer, and somehow we made him sound interesting and he made us sound better than we were in a way. It was a nice marriage.

You enjoyed working with him?

On that album, yeah.

You worked with him after that too.

On the next album.

Was that Spring Hill Fair?

Yeah. It was not so... we couldn’t decide, and had a larger budget and John went back to his old ways, we were suddenly in SSL, huge big studio-land. He was like, “Now we’re going to make a proper record.” and I was like, “Our last record was very proper and was very great”. It had worked out the first time and then we went down and then we spent a week of him trying to gate the drums and set click tracks. The first and second albums, there’s no clicks. It was just really natural, this is why this record stands up, you know, it’s all Hammond organs, acoustic guitars, real drums and it’s really super, it’s really tight but it’s a hundred percent natural and it just comes out of it.

It’s a standard, real sound.

He must have started to smell the Top 40 and he sort of gets back to his Virgin
background more.

Was that a struggle?

Yeah, huge.

How was Lindy [Morrison, the band’s long-time drummer] with that sort of thing? Was she hating having to play with the clicks?

Yes, she was. It was just John and us at the studio and we spent the first week just messing around with drums. Now that I look back on it, we almost just told him to go away, but we were down in the south of France. we were down there in the south of France where John had booked this studio. The studio was owned by a guy named Jacque Lucier who is very famous in Europe. He made these contemporary versions of Bach that sold by the truckload and he built the studio down in Provence, down in southern France. He’d built a studio in his chateau and he had his own vineyard.

He owned his own wine and so we’re down there drinking his wine but it kind of went into a storm. There was a breakdown, there would be John on the phone to London with the manuals out, and we’re sitting there going, “We should be recording...”. There was a French guy who was co-engineering and we should have just told John to go away and just work with the French guy.

It feels like such a drastic move, at that stage of the game. I’m sure that’s hard.

Between those records we recorded some demos. We went into a small studio in London in 1983 and we did some demos because we thought we were going to do the next record on Rough Trade. We went to a studio called Pathway, which is where Elvis Costello did his first album, and it’s a very, very funky 8-track in London. Great little 8-track and we met Richard Preston who was the house engineer and these demos sounded really good. After the fiasco with John, on Spring Hill Fair,we just went, “Let’s go back to Richard” who we really enjoyed working with and so for our next album we wanted to go back to basics and none of this bullshit.

Like click tracks?

Yeah. All of that, we just decided to just skip.

I just thought that was funny because when I first started buying all of your records I always thought that maybe Spring Hill Fair was a later record than it was, because of the sound of it. When I figured out the chronology of it I thought that was curious and now it totally makes sense.

We sort of went back to a more smaller, funkier studio in London. We went back to acoustic guitars, vibraphones, piano, accordions. This was in late 1985.

Do you feel that, in any way, instrumentation-wise and in the way that you were looking at it that it was a reaction to any other stuff that was going on at the time... or was it more your instinct that made records like what you had listened to?

It was more instinct. It wasn’t “Everyone is making synthetic, bing boingy records” that we had to do, we were just following our instincts and we were following the things that we loved.

You think of records that you always liked.

Yeah. And I can’t begin to tell you what we would have been listening to.

I always thought of things like, you were saying, that it was possibly Television.

Ah, shit yeah.

Or your voice was the first I had ever heard that reminded me of that.

Yeah.

Or even in some ways things like, you know, Dylan or The Band and stuff like that kind of stuff.

That’s exactly what we we’re listening to.

Just some things that had a natural feel. You listened to The Band and those guys wouldn’t blast it and they sound great.

Yeah, definitely.