Phill: For Spirit of Eden, when I first met Mark we were talking about my background and I was talking about Olympic in the `60’s and working with Traffic and Spooky Tooth. He’d left and I didn’t know at that point whether I’d be working with him and as we left I dropped him off at the tube station. As he got out of the car he said, “What sums up Olympic in the `60’s for you?” I said, “It’s got to be one o’clock in the morning, November 1967.” It was a Traffic session I did. I was 17 years old and it was a new job. That particular night we were doing “Mr. Fantasy” and there was just this fantastic atmosphere with low lights and people were a bit out, wasted. I mentioned this to Mark and he said, “Oh, cool.” After a few weeks I got a phone call saying he’d like to get involved. And we met up and went into the studio Mark said, “Let’s set this up as if it’s one o’clock in the morning, November 1967!” So we then used only equipment that was around prior to 1967. We didn’t use Dolby or anything, apart from the Mitsubishi. We actually bypassed the SSL and just used it as a monitor. We went through Neve units and some things were plugged straight into the tape machine. That was, in a way, how that kind of got started. When EMI remixed some of the tracks from Colour of Spring it was deemed that the only way you could stop the record company from remixing your track was if all you put on there were things that were so decisive that they couldn’t make any changes. That was really why the drums ended up being one track. If we just had one track of drums the record company can’t remix the bloody thing. That’s kind of the mentality behind it.

Chris: That’s one of the best drum sounds I’d ever heard and I was a bit disappointed when I heard that it was one mic.

Phill: Well, truthfully it is two mics because there is a bit of bass drum mic in there. But that caused problems as well. Once we ended up with this one mic, thirty feet away from the kit, but there’s this 20 millisecond delay from when he plays to what we hear so you can’t feed him that in the cans. So you’ve got to close mic to feed him but for all the musicians playing with Lee [Harris], we had to delay 20 ms to put them in time with the drums. So the whole thing that initially seems so simple... But with Laughing Stock, there was no verbal, “Let’s set it up like this.” It definitely metamorphed into that way of working from the drum sounds.

Chris: Initially didn’t you like their sort of pop records?

Phill: Well we’ve just gone full circle. I loved Colour of Spring. I saw a gig in `86 at the Hammersmith Odeon. As it turned out it was the last Talk Talk gig, but it was one of the best gigs I’d seen. I was really bored at the time. I was working on things I didn’t particularly want to do. I saw them and I said, “That’s the band I want to be working with.” Literally a few weeks later I bumped into Tim Friese-Greene in a studio and I congratulated him on this album and he was totally shocked that anyone would say this was a great album. Even Mark, as difficult as Mark is, he doesn’t have that ego. “Well I’m good.” Two months later Tim called me up and said,”Are you serious? Come out and meet Mark.” And I just mixed that gig that I saw in `86 as a live album. It’s kind of full circle. A 14 year period.

Larry: You mentioned the record label remixing stuff from the Colour of Spring. Did they remix the album?

Phill: Quite a few things were taken off that and given to different producers. The album came out as it should have been. Then we did the Spirit of Eden album and that’s where it all started to go wrong. We did it, the record company hated it, and they sued the band and me for “Technical Incompetence” because it wasn’t commercial. It got thrown out of court. The judge was wonderful. But they changed the British production contract. It now says you must deliver masters that are “commercially satisfactory.” I think that’s even worse. The good thing might be that they couldn’t sue you until a year after it came out! It’s such a dubious clause. It’s bullshit. Mark’s attitude to the music business changed drastically after that.

Chris: After that you did the Mark Hollis solo album.

Phill: When we came to do Mark’s album, he actually wanted it to sound like a `50’s jazz album. I was sure that they basically used one mic in those eras. That’s what we wanted to create. We just updated it to stereo. We set up a pair of Neumann M49’s, old valve mics, cross cardiod, head high in a good sounding room. We brought the whole band in, all the people we were gonna use, which was a whole woodwinds section, percussionist and drummer. brought everybody in and played around with everybody’s position. We eventually came up with a piano on the right, harmonium on the left, and marked everyone’s positions and they all went home and we did everybody one at a time so we had control; well, we did the woodwinds as a section actually. But these mics were not touched; no level or EQ, they were just left there. Everything we recorded went down as a stereo pair. That ate tracks, obviously. The drawback is that, because they’re valves they’re not the quietest of mics. If you had everybody in there [live] and two hissy mics with nine people the hiss to volume ratio would be a lot better. We just built up a lot of valve noise.

Chris: Don’t you start that album with 17 seconds of tape hiss?

Phill: The same thing with Spirit of Eden. It had so much background noise that we actually had to put in a hiss level.

Larry: For continuity...

Phill: Laughing Stock was pretty quiet. we used SR Dolby on that. Mark’s album, we didn’t use Dolby. We compiled stereo pairs. You do ten vocal tracks and then you start to compile. That’s why I bought those headphones, to check that the vocal was in the middle. Things like that slowed us down. We lived in headphones a lot. That’s where we lost time on that album.

Larry: Do you feel like that worked really well?

Phill: Yeah. It’s interesting. It was designed, also, to play at a really quiet level. We tried loads of things. We wanted the record to always sound quiet...

Larry: You are running the opposite of the record industry!

Phill: We spent two or three days trying to find ways to make it stay quiet.

Chris: What techniques were you trying?

Phill: By making it incredibly mellow. No spikes; no leaps of dynamics. We came up with something that was actually quite good but we played it on another set of speakers and it was crap `cause it was so extreme. We came up with the conclusion, in the end,that was either put on it, “Please play quietly” or, as I tried to point out to Mark, that you’ve got to leave people to their own resources. If you play it at a low level and sit about ten feet back it feels like they’re in the room. It feels real to me now. It’s all acoustic instruments. On all these albums we didn’t use any effects as such. There’s an EMT plate echo if we needed any and a DDL [digital delay line]. That’s all we’ve ever used on those three albums. All the weirdness is created in the room at the source.

Chris: Is that fairly typical?

Phill: It’s typical of the way I work. I use effects for an effect but I don’t like things being in there all the time just taking up space. If you’re making like a real pop record you can get away with ten different types of reverb and effects. We’re working with a vast amount of air and space anyway. You don’t need to put it in a space. One trap we found is that reverb added on a room sound never sounds right. It sounds kind of odd. The whole room is trailing off. You set up a different type of atmosphere. I think it’s kind of more a real vibe.

Chris: One thing that it requires is that you need a good room.

Phill: That is very important. It’s amazing how well a drum kit will balance in a good room. When you move the mics in closer and separate the kit into nine tracks that’s usually when all the problems start. Then it doesn’t sound anything like a real drum kit.

Chris: The thing with room micing, when you’re really relying on it, is that the drummer really has to mix themselves. The burden is on the player. We can’t fix it
in the mix.

Phill: The other way, close mic’d, you can cheat more. You can even drop things in. If you go back to records made in the late `50’s and `60’s they had no effects back then. They had plates and chambers and spring reverbs but there were no other boxes around. Abbey Road built the first ADT [automatic double tracking]. They were always building little boxes then that had two knobs on it. “Try this out.” They built little Leslie speakers to put things through. This way of working is moving backwards in a way. It’s too easy to dial up these digital effects. I’m not a great lover of digital reverbs because it never goes off right. Digital ones always fragment to me when they get to the end of a fade. Tape loops, they’re just fantastic. I’d forgotten that anyone would actually put something like that together. I remember in the `70’s standing there with a pen.

Larry: When you’re doing a loop for a long delay.

Chris: Why’d you do that?

Phill: There was no other way. I did a lot of things with Eno, after Roxy Music, which were all done with loops and he’d bring in one’s that would just go around the capstan and the playback head. Other’s would be huge things...

Larry: What record was that?

Phill: It was a whole mix of things. I worked on Here Come The Warm Jets and side projects of Eno’s in `73. He was so experimental after leaving Roxy.

Chris: What is the mic you travel with and why do you bring it?

Phill: It’s not as if it’s the greatest mic in the world, but I have a Sony C48 which I bought about 15 years ago. I just love the mic for acoustic instruments, room mic, overheads. It’s kind of a remake of the Sony C37. I just really like the mic. It has a quality to it that really works, especially for distant micing. I’m surprised that more studios don’t have them. Most studios have the same collection of boring mics.

Chris: Tell us about the John Martyn guitar sound you got on One World.

Phill: Chris Blackwell has this house in England that’s surrounded by this big gravel pit out west of London and we did the John Martyn album out there in `76. He has these converted stables which are little flats. We set John Martyn up in one of these with his guitar pedals and amps and everything with splits all the way through there after every gadget and the guitar. We had seven or eight feeds of choice of his guitar. We then got a large PA system and we pumped the guitar out across this lake, this old gravel pit, and then mic’d up the lake basically.

Chris: And you close mic’d him too. It’s this very bizarre sound. You get this very direct sound but then there’s this... It’s very unsettling.

Phill: I’ve always described it as coming from another universe. This was 4 o’clock in the morning and the lake would go almost silent. We got birds and lapping water. One of the tracks, “Small Hours,” is just one guitar with a few lines of vocals but it’s such a full sound.

If you’re looking for the Talk Talk albums or the Mark Hollis solo record, try ordering them through your local record store (they’re only available as imports) or try Amazon.com. They’re highly recommended.