An Illuminating Interview from May 2005… but still relevant!

What firstly attracted you to a career in music and how did you turn that into a job?

I was already playing in bands and writing music at 16 and I was determined to leave school at 16 and not do A levels and my careers advice person at school didn’t have a clue how to get anything to do with music so I decided it would be a good idea to get a job in a recording studio.

The careers officer couldn’t help with that but he sent me across to some other places in West London and one of them was right next to the Marquis Studios and they felt through the interview that I wouldn’t be right for the job they had going but they’d heard there was a job going in the studios next door so they gave me the phone number, I got an interview the next day. I was the 20th person to be interviewed and I got the job! So I came from being a musician that was playing in a band, looking to progress what I was doing as a performer.

What was your first interviewer looking for?

I was just about to do the standard thing of writing a letter with a CV to all the studios (I don’t know if I had a listing at that time, someone may have given me one) when this opportunity came up that I was talking about. So that was in fact my third interview I suppose, the actual studio. I had one interview at a little video filming place, which was quite unusual in those days talking about 1973, which would have been quite interesting but either I didn’t like it or I didn’t get the job, I can’t remember which!

The second one both myself and the other people agreed it wasn’t what I was looking for and the third one, much to my surprise, I was the last person interviewed and got the job. I later found out that the only reason I really got the job was, as is typical in the media industry, the studio manager that was interviewing me was gay and thought he had a good chance!

In your words what does a producer do and how does it differ from a sound engineer?

In layman’s terms, the producer is the boss in the studio in as much as in a typical scenario, you’ve got an artist whatever genre of music be it a band, solo artist or pop or rock or dance you’ve generally got an engineer and you’ve generally got a producer between the two.

The producers role is very similar to that of a film director, so you’re directing operations, you’re getting the best you can artistically out of the musicians and performers and you’re translating what you need from those artistic performances technically to the engineer. It took me four years to train as an engineer and possibly five to ten years after that before I was full time producing. That was my progression.

That’s how the producer differs from the engineer. Producers can be artistic and know nothing about engineering and rely totally on their engineer for everything that’s going on technically or some producers could have come from an engineering background like myself, it varies, and a lot of producers work is teams now. When I ended up working with Ian Curnow we were very much a production team with me taking care of the engineering role and Ian taking care of a lot of the programming and music.

You’ve often been referred to as Phil “Mix Master” Harding, what do you think of the re-mixing of today - how does it compare with the early dance music and is it done for the same reason?

That’s a good question, you come up with these questions yourself? Bloody hell, well, the thing is when I was mixing and re-mixing it was kind of a new art form almost, once we got the technology to sample quite large chunks, there was a machine called the Publison which was bought by Pete Waterman and we were one of the first to have it, where you could get higher quality than you can get in the Akai something like 20–30 seconds of the stereo signal which meant that suddenly we could fly in chunks of backing vocals, whole sections of vocals without singers having to re do them, that’s when we first started to do all that.

Then came the realisation that if I’ve got Mel and Kim’s hooky vocals there for a 5 second clip and I’m doing a Bananarama re-mix, cos you could also tune things on this Publison and play it from a midi keyboard as well.

It was like what’s stopping me from putting that into the Bananarama mix because PWL owns the rights to both records and for me that’s where it started and we did that really for Pete Tong who was not only working for London records but was a DJ at that time as well and he was blown away with the fact that we could put a current club vocal hook onto his next Bananarama remix and almost do the DJ job for the DJ but obviously the DJ didn’t necessarily have that particular hook acapalla to mix in so to put it simply, for me it started there and of course technology has gone way, way beyond that and what you can achieve now is way more than we could achieve then so at the time we started doing it it was new and exciting.

Now it’s quite different, there’s a lot people doing it and a lot more you can do and I think more importantly now than then you’ve really got to be a DJ or a DJ has got to be part of your re-mix team I think to do successful club re-mixes. Myself and Ian got away with it back then because Waterman was around and we were working for people like Pete Tong but we didn’t have a DJ directing us.

So you didn’t really know what they wanted to play in the clubs?

We weren’t really sure, we’d go out to see what was going on in the clubs and our most successful period was when we got friendly with Paul Oakenfold when we used to go down to his club in Charing Cross at the time of the Ibiza movement, Oakenfold was one of the drivers of it. We would go down there and get inspired by what we heard and put it into our next re-mix.

Now I don’t really re-mix although I have done a few collaborations with a young programmer who to be honest is not a DJ but his mate is a DJ and he can do a mix and go straight to a club and test it out so I thought I’d trust what he’s doing and that he knows what’s going on. I think that re-mixes of today, the biggest difference is that it’s vital that you have a DJ in the team or around you and that you are ahead of the technology and you’re out listening to what’s going on.

Would you say it’s less a case of doing it because it’s something new and artistic to do or just because it’s covering more of the market by having more different styles to a record, you can cover more people?

Big records like the next Madonna record has a bunch of re-mixes for it, she’s supposedly always using the most forward thinking people and the latest people, always looking for something different which is good. I think there’s definitely less money to be made out of the dance scene as there was, you went from an explosion of DJ’s and re-mixers to the ones who are getting the work now are the best ones because there’s not as much work around as there was. I know people who have had to get out of the game because they can’t compete. Competitively it’s tougher now so if that’s the case then what you’re doing artistically has probably got to be better than what I was doing back in the 80’s.

So you could say there’s less chance of having an actually career because it’s a very short-lived time when you’re hot and then you’re not?

Yeah, I think so. And the people that are successful now, because they’re so dance and DJ orientated, I think they struggle now to go to the next level, which is song writing and production. I can’t think of too many re-mixers in the last 5 plus years who have come on the scene as a re-mixer and have gone on to be a successful producer, writer or artist.

Would you say the middleman has been cut out and the DJ is now doing what the producer used to do?

Largely yes.

Is that due to the technology?

And also I think DJ’s playing those records that have been plated in the studio are probably smarter and fussier than they used to be. The scene’s a lot different to what it was when I was doing it and I couldn’t imagine trying to get in there and do it now myself, I’ve helped this young guy, he’s good and I’ve managed to get him a few paying gigs but he’s had some releases on dance labels of his own mixes and then not got paid. He knows he’s sold records and he’s found that tough to deal with.

Because he didn’t take an upfront fee or was promised royalties and they never came through?

He was promised royalties and signed a contract that meant nothing, there’s still a lot of crooks out there.

Are you saying they don’t offer upfront advances now and try to get you to sign to some kind of royalty deal that doesn’t come through?

These are his first things but from what I can see, a lot of dance labels around, certainly in the UK at the moment, are trying to get people to do something for no money upfront and a contract that means nothing and the label pockets all the money, I’m not talking about big hits or massive sellers.

Small indie labels?

Yeah, and that’s the start point for everyone so if you get treated like that at the start point you’re not exactly inspired to continue.

Producers and re-mixers are often asked to provide a show reel, what should a good show reel consist of?

My view on that, and it’s recently been proved to me, is you want a CD that can have up to 6 tracks on it but you should be able to offer people that want to hear your show reel one minute edited versions which means 6 cuts only takes 6 minutes to have a quick listen to, and only send them the full 3 or 5 minute versions if they actually ask for it.

I’ve proved to myself that that’s successful in as much as I’ve sent the same material to the same person and got a better reaction when I sent the one-minute versions. Which means they were prepared to listen to that and come back with comments as opposed to the full versions. So that would be my recommendation, no more than 6 tracks, one minute in length. If they want to hear more they are always going to come back and ask to hear more.

What kind of rates should an up and coming producer be charging per track and re-mixes or is it more of a case of take what you can get?

It’s more a case of get what you can I should think or take what’s offered.

It seems to be a big question amongst people I speak to because they never know what to say yes to because they don’t know if they’re being done, they need to have a ballpark figure to say that’s ok.

I think if someone definitely wants to pay you and they are being professional and fair and honest about it I think in your mind your start point has to be breaking it down to what you need per day to survive and if you think that by getting enough work for yourself you could survive on £100 per day then that’s it and if you figure the production’s going to take 5 days then £500 is your minimum for doing it, £1000 for 10 days. When I started producing I was prepared to work for a 1% royalty and whatever fee I could get.

These days to get into the game you have to be prepared to work for nothing but if you get to that next stage where someone is prepared to pay you then to a lot of people £100 a day is pretty reasonable yet these days to a lot of people it’s nothing and nowhere near enough to survive on in an inner city! If you manage to get 7 days work, £700 per week times 4, most people would find a way to live on that.

I must say on some recent sessions that I did I was questioning the assistant engineers what they were getting paid because I knew we were getting charged by the studio either £75 or £100 a day for the assistant and later down the pub I quizzed the assistant as to how much of that that the client was paying was actually getting passed into their hands and it was only £50.

In all the London studios I know, as soon as a person is beyond being a runner or tea boy, and is actually left on a session with a client, they push the assistant to go freelance so they are no longer worry about them being on the books, PAYE and National Insurance etc, so if the going rate is £50 upwards you can see how tough that is for an assistant to survive in London or any inner city.

So you’d be looking at trying to supplement that somehow and trying to minimise the time spent at that rate to get yourself up to the next rate of engineering and you’ve got to remember that there’s two rates of engineering, generally the freelance recording engineer gets paid less than the freelance mix engineer because mixings a bit more specialised and you’d hope that maybe starting at £50 as an assistant engineer you’d be up to more like £200 as a recording engineer – but I know recording engineers who work for less than that, £100 per day.

Could that be driven by the fact that there are so many people trying to get into this sort of thing, so many students coming out of so many courses?

That is exactly the reason, there are so many people clamouring to get the job that the studios can almost treat them with contempt but obviously for the astute studio owner or studio manager it’s not in their interests to hire people for minimum wages who are useless, they do want to get good people.

But what separates the good from the bad when they are all going for the same job? How would they know who’s good?

They don’t know until they’ve hired them.

But because they are so dispensable and disposable they could go through them at a rate of knots, which for the client isn’t a good thing because they are not getting the service that they are paying for?

Yeah but when kids start off in places like the Strongroom where I was based they aren’t initially put on sessions they are literally runners and teaboys and if they don’t prove themselves to have the right enthusiasm and attitude and some common sense they won’t even get into the studio, they might only last a month.

Which begs the question that if you have run up £7000 worth of debt going through college or university how can you survive as a tea boy?

Being a tea boy, you’ve got to treat it as though you are still at university, you’ve got to be subsidised somehow. Even before I saw that sort of system at the Strongroom where you’re a generally office dogsbody until you prove that you’ve got enthusiasm and common sense, way before that Sarm (Trevor Horn's studio) used to start their assistants on reception, as assistants to the receptionist before they were let anywhere near the studio!

So say you’ve got an exceptional student with talent that comes off one of these courses with a degree or whatever qualification, gets given that job and tries their best to stand it, knowing full well he can do much better, surely there must be a lot of individuals who just disappear off the scene when there could have been someone exceptional?

Absolutely, but as one of the big time managers that was on one of the sound advice tours said at one of the panels, survival for anyone in the music industry is 50% talent and 50% willpower and if you ain’t got the willpower to hack the bad times no matter how talented you are, you ain’t going to succeed. That goes from the tea boy and office runner through to artists and songwriters.

With music technology changing and becoming more affordable and user friendly, what does the future hold for the big studios?

(Laughs) Diversifying to survive, I mean Whitfield Street is a good example, (Editor’s note: Unfortunately, now closed!) the only big major studio where you can record an orchestra, record a band, you can mix a high quality album, whatever you want to do in each studio, still in the West End, in W1. When I started back in the 70’s everyone was in the West end in W1, I was at the Marquee behind the Marquee Club, this probably existed at that time, there was Trident, everyone was central.

Gradually everyone has moved out of W1 because the rental is so expensive and even a major corporation like Sony who ended up owning Whitfield Street, decided it was uneconomical to still have a studio complex in the West End and the ex chairman of MPG and Repro, Robin Miller has taken it over and although he’s managing to keep it ticking over with all sorts of work he’s having to diversify stronger into multi media, post production etc to make it work. (Editor’s note: As before, unfortunately, now closed!)

Diversification for the big studios is the first key, adding on lots of small rooms and production suites like the Strongroom did is a good source of income and those sorts of places have moved into, in as much as you might have a room a quarter the size of this, when you consider that’s a good programming suite and you could record vocals there, there’s a lot of people using that size of room or smaller with a little 5.1 system in there and doing all the altering and preparation for DVD which has, because it’s taken off at consumer level, a demand for more DVD audio work has given a little bit of a boost to those studios who have got room to bolt it on.

The two other things that have given a boost is that live bands and rock music is back in a big way and not many of those bands want to use the traditional studios, a lot of them like Rockfield or going out into a studio in the countryside but at least the work is there again where it wasn’t there for a while. And then you’ve got orchestral work, which is a large thing that goes on in Whitfield Street Studios for film, and people doing orchestral overdubs onto pop records because in 1996 or 97 the BPI and MU changed the ruling about TV repayments for musicians which meant that if Polydor where looking at Boyzone having an orchestra on their record for instance, every time Boyzone went on TOTP the situation was, pre 96/97, that all those musicians that had played in the orchestra (say a 30 piece string orchestra) all have to get another payment every time Boyzone appeared which could be for the duration of a pop record 10 or 20 times.

That was why so many people used samples of orchestras to save that cost so when the MU and BPI agreed that instead of a repayment every time, musicians would get their first payment and then will get one more payment if they’ve played on a track that’s going to be rotated on video and performed on TV. Suddenly it became more viable for Polydor to say yes, we can have a live orchestra on it. Now you only have pay say three times, once for the video buy out, once for the performance buy out and once for the session. Which is better than ten or twenty times. So big studios that can take orchestras are busier than they use to be.