Larry: I take notes for ideas on my track sheets on effects ideas or mutes but sometimes I forget to look at the notes. I always worry that with the recall boards that we’re gonna lose some of the spontaneity by working in this fashion. When you do come back to work on a song where you’ve saved the mix you’re gonna still be working in the same mindset. You might not have an accidental fader up that might sound good.

Phill: That’s one of the main problems with digital gear. They’re bringing out a new range of it now which is more analog with pots and things that you really change. I think that doing a mix on the old manual desks in the `70’s - you definitely work in a different way. Things happen which you’d never recreate. We’re into an era, the `80’s more so than now, where perfection is something they’re after. Perfect timing, perfect tuning.

Chris: Over the period of time that you’ve been recording have you seen people’s sense of rhythm, or the concept of what a rhythmically happening track is, change?

Phill: If you look back to the kind of drumming style of the `60’s, since `79 onwards the drummers I’ve worked with are tighter. They’re learning against click tracks and computers and I think everything, like it is in all of life, is just geared up a few notches from what it was in the `60’s. Back then everyone was starting to open up but now it’s much more efficient really.

Larry: But not necessarily better.

Phill: Well no. When something’s perfectly in time or perfectly in tune... there’s something about a record where the drums speed up for the choruses and slow down for the verses that still feels quite natural.

Larry: It worries me that over the years music is losing it’s feeling in many cases.

Phill: Sometimes you stumble across some guy playing in a bar and appreciate what music is all about.

Chris: It becomes a context thing. It seems there are some kinds of music where that really works. To have this very regimented beat. Like Faithless or Massive Attack. You don’t want it to feel loose.

Larry: I see popular music as becoming way too sterile but maybe that’s been the case in one way or another over the years. I think all of us have worked on many things that haven’t become popular though.

Phill: We just won this Grammy [best album in Norway for the recent Midnight Choir album that Chris and Phill produced] but in `72 I won this award in England from NME for best engineered record of the year. In that year I’d worked on Nilsson’s “Without You” and I immediately thought, “It’s gotta be that.” I thought that was one of the best things I’d done at that point in time. I got the award for this little pop record by Sweet which was this little glam record...

Larry: Which song was it?

Phill: “Co-Co”. Not one of their best. In perspective you kind of go, “Well, what are awards? What do they mean?” “Did it sell more?”

Chris: One thing about spontaneity. I think a lot of people have this perception that if you’re gonna go to 48 tracks and use a lot of reels that what you’re doing is making a Def Leppard record. Like you’re working everything to this fine, fine point. I’ve noticed with you, that you use the slave reels, like in the Talk Talk sessions, to open it up to more spontaneous creation. You’re not having to distill a track down to the essence of what it is. Instead it’s like, “Let’s track seven takes of the harmonica” and in the end we’ll go back and compile something very odd out of it.

Phill: I think once you get past 48 that should be everybody’s reason for using that many tracks. It’s a sketchpad to try out stuff. Also, it’s that mentality of every time you put the tape machine into record you get a potential master, something that you could use. We all got screwed up in demos, things that we never could recreate, and it was after Colour of Spring that Mark said, “Never will I make another demo.” Part of that thing is that you can always be in record. It eats up a lot of tracks that way.

Chris: How were the tape decks set up for those records?

Phill: Everything was recorded to analog, 24 track Studer, but once we had all the backing tracks down we made up Mitsubishi 32 track digital masters. Everything was slaved up and you could take it from wherever you wanted to take it Anything that we really wanted to keep was on the Mitsubishi. Then we always recorded onto analog. We would do eight tracks of whoever came in and then bounce it to the Mitsubishi. We had five slaves per song but it was really to give us that amount of freedom.

Larry: But you wouldn’t have all five decks running at once.

Phill: No, but we would have the “Mitsi” and two Studers so we’d have the 32 track and 48 analog. That’s around 70 or 80 tracks. It’s a lot of channels. That’s the other brilliant thing. If you’d walked in on any of the Spirit of Eden or Laughing Stock sessions and looked at the SSL, you’d see 50 reels of 2” and all the slaves are going and all the monitor faders would be up but you’d have just two mics up for days. We were using drum mics 20 feet away. Everything was very distant. You’d have just one mic up but at the desk you’d be changing all these different slaves.

Chris: The interesting thing is that on those records, as detailed as the sound is, the records sound very simple and open.

Phill: Yeah.

Chris: Like a band playing in a room. That’s why I brought this up, because I get really tired of this knee-jerk reaction that if you’re gonna use multiple machines and lots of tracks that somehow you’re making this completely absurd “Celine Dion” record.

Larry: “Pour Some Sugar on Me”.

Chris: I just think that’s bullshit. It’s just how you use the tools. The other thing, about how you overdubbed those records, people wouldn’t hear lots of the other stuff that was on them. You would build these disjunctive creations.

It is tricky. Part of the problem is that when you describe some of the ways we did the Talk Talk albums people just think, “Well that’s bullshit.” “800 tracks.” Like it’s crazy arrogance. But the band often didn’t even meet the musician and the musician didn’t even get into the control room. They’d be kind of shown into the studio. We worked in total darkness so they were really out of their element. We had oil projector lights going and strobes, there was no normal lighting. We could send them anything in their cans [headphones] like the shaker and an organ. We might say, “Play to this.” Of course no one knows what the structure is since there’s no melody or lyrics. We would just piece together those kind of performances. Sometimes note by note. The record ends up sounding like five guys running through the tunes in the studio. It almost sounds like it’s five or six mics just capturing these five guys. On a lot of the tracks that sound like that we used 80 or 90 tracks for background atmospherics. Drums on one track, bass on one track. When people hear that it was a year in the studio with 80 or 90 tracks they immediately think it must be...

Larry: ...complete overkill.

Phill: It can be.

Chris: But can you make a record like that... I’ve had these discussions with Al from Midnight Choir, the band that we worked with, I argued with him that you can’t make a record like that in a standard kind of four week block.

Phill: No, no.

Chris: Maybe a year is too much...

Phill: I think you could probably do it, in the right environment, in three or four months. But the whole nature of working that way... you’re almost saying you have no time limits on it.

Larry: You just need the time to experiment, really.

Phill: To record that amount of things and not have fixed ideas and really work out which things you want to keep. Sometimes compiling can take a while. With a lot of stuff we would record things in two or three hours; eight takes of whoever it was, on a track. It might take us two days to sort and choose and actually put together what we want to use. On “After the Flood” we had Danny Thompson come in and play bass and we gave him eight tracks, top to bottom, and we went through and sifted his bass we kept three bass notes. They weren’t even together! We then brought in Joni Mitchell’s ex-husband, Larry Klein, and he played. Loads of bass players came in and they were all playing different instruments. Some upright bass, some guitarron. The bass track on that, the feel is great, and it was made up some four different basses. In theory you think it wouldn’t work. I think you could do those kind of records in, maybe, three or four months if you’re not quite as much of perfectionist as Mark.

Larry: It seems a lot of the creative process becomes initial conception and then sorting.

Phill: We wanted to do those along the lines of chance or accidents but not coincidence because I don’t believe in coincidence. But whatever it is, that just happened. It’s a fairly unique way of approaching it.

Larry: What was your initial impetus for working this way?