Phill Brown 1978 Interview

Recording engineer Richard Elen extracts some useful information from well-known recordist Phill Brown

For some reasons, engineers tend to be regarded as mere backroom boys: They never seem to become household names at the listening end of the business in the same way that producers and artists do. Yet the engineer is at least as important as everyone else involved in the record business.

Phill Brown is undeniably one of the top engineers in Britain. He has a huge string of artists to his credit, and a good many hits behind him. Starting as a tape-op in London's Olympic Studios, after sitting in on sessions while his brother was assisting at the old Olympic studio in Baker Street, he stayed for a year, working on such albums as Ogden's Nut Gone Flake and Beggar's Banquet. He did virtually no engineering there at all, and left to set up a studio in Canada with brother Terry. This was the first 24-track studio in Canada, and Phill spent six months building it, and several more working there. Then he came back to England and got a job engineering at Island's Basing Street complex, which is where he gained most of his engineering experience. He was with Island for about six years, leaving in '76 to go freelance.

Since then he's worked in a number of studios in Britain and the US, but it was back at Basing Street where I tracked him down, in a break during sessions with Eddie Baird, late of Amazing Blondel, for Island Records. The basic tracks with Eddie were done at Sawmills studio in Cornwall, a studio we both know well, and he'd just returned from there to London to finish off overdubs and mixing when I caught up with him. He'd been at Sawmills in 1975 with Paul Kossoff, immediately before I'd been there myself with Gryphon. Steve Smith was producing the Kossoff sessions — Phill and Steve have worked together on a number of projects, not least with Robert Palmer. We swopped anecdotes about the sound possibilities at Sawmills, which is situated in a valley creek off the River Fowey.

Did you make much use of the 'echo-off-the-vallley'?

Yes, there's a fantastic echo in the valley there. We put Kossoff's amp outside, screwed it up and got a good effect.

Yes, I cursed myself for not being the first to do it; we set up an Eliminator pointing through the door and put synth solos through it.

Synthesisers work well like that: that's something we did recently. We put a Moog out there — quite amazing; more impressive, in a sense, than guitar, because the guitar was a more predictable type of effect. It was astounding some of the synth notes that came back from the distant valley, as well.

Yes, we got people saying they could hear it in the village.

But the most experimental recording I've done outside was on the John Martyn One World album last summer. We recorded that out at Theale, surrounded by water on three sides. Depending on what time of day or night that we were recording the sound was totally different. The best time was about three to six in the morning, and we got some fantastic results — in a way better than the Sawmills thing — it was a much dreamier, slower thing and the water and everything that was around, it was a whole different sound. That's used on that album to a point. Although, after all the overdubs, some of it's lost, you get a certain 'size' and power of some things that come across. You can always tell when something's done outdoors.

Did you do any vocals outdoors?

Not on that album, the only time it's worked for me was on the Sneakin' Sally album — and there's about three tracks on Pressure Drop that were done outdoors. Sneakin' Sally was done outside a church in Kent, a place called Addington, we just happened to turn up there — I knew the vicar; so we set up... We used the church wall — there was a fantastic crispness and liveness coming back off the wall, so we did some of it there, and some at my house. Did a lot of percussion there, and stuff. Then on Pressure Drop we were out at Theale again. We used the idea of a wall again, but it was a totally different kind of effect. It's Chris Blackwell's house as a matter of fact; it used to be an old gravel pit, but now it's all surrounded by water — an old house out in the middle.

But Basing Street's where you've done the bulk of your work.

Yes, overall, but the bulk of what I've done in recent years, like with Robert Palmer, was done in LA. But all over the States as well: with Little Feat in Washington, we cut some tracks, and down in Muscle Shoals. That was interesting: I'd wanted to get to Muscle Shoals for a while. I'd heard a lot of records I really liked that were done there, so that was good fun. But those have been, really, specific projects. Robert's things were always totally different to everything else that we were working on.

Island Records' Basing Street Studios (1972)

How do you find the contrast between American and British studios and techniques?

When I was first going out to the States to work, I thought they'd be totally different, they'd be super space-age, they'd have every gadget you could think of. But I found that the ones I really enjoyed working in were the really funky old rooms; this place we worked at in Washington was the ITI parametric people, who had a studio at the back of their factory, on an industrial estate, so it was a strange place to actually go to work. We were working in their experimental studio in the back which had a good room, and the desk was all ITI parametric. Great, it was fun. Then we went from that extreme to Nashville West, in LA, which was the old Motown studio, and that was a miniaturised desk, with basic top, middle and bass, and very little choice of frequencies — bare leads and things hanging out of walls, and things that were connected at various times.
 

But the room there was probably one of the best I've ever worked in: it was just incredible. Whoever put it together was lucky, I guess; there seems to be a certain amount of luck involved in putting a studio together. It was a live room, but the leakage was controllable, it had all those kinds of benefits. There was a live section and a dead section, and you could move people around within the room. I recorded the whole of Little Feat and a live vocal, a lot of which was used in the end, and the leakage was just... controllable. Good leakage, that made everything live. In the control room we were listening to a very inferior sound. It was safe, but I wasn't really listening to something I liked. Then we'd go back to the hotel and listen to cassettes and were very surprised how the sound was coming over on a cassette machine. It may sound a crazy way of working, but sometimes extremes... And that was good. We never mixed there; in fact the only place I've mixed in the States was Clover, in LA, where we did the Some People Can Do What They Like Robert Palmer album.

(...)

Richard Elen (Sound International - Sept. 1978)

Voir aussi:

• Are We Still Rolling? - Phill Brown (2011)