Mitchell Froom On FALL AT YOUR FEET by Crowded House (1991)

Mitchell Froom produced the first three Crowded House records, as well as Richard Thompson's Rumor And Sigh, Elvis Costello's Spike and Paul McCartney's Flowers In The Dirt. He has worked with Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Ron Sexsmith and his ex-wife Suzanne Vega and is currently producing Randy Newman's new album.

Woodface was the third album I produced with Crowded House. I remember listening to the first batch of demos and there was this piece of music that started nicely but it was very vague sounding, very spacey. Then the chorus came in and it just completely knocked me over. It was so beautiful – the lyric and the melody and the chords were all there, but the rest of the song didn't do that service. I called Neil and said, "That may be the best thing you have but you need to raise the bar on the verses. It needs to be more direct."

He wrote something else for it and when we got together for pre-production we decided we'd got it. But when we went into rehearsal with the band it was underwhelming. It was much more uptempo because they felt they should be as rocky as they were onstage. When we went to Los Angeles to cut the basic tracks we thought we had it. We went to do overdubs in Australia and started to work on each song, but when we put a vocal on Fall At Your Feet it just wasn't good. The problem with making records is that oftentimes you fall in love with the good things and forget about the other stuff. It can get really confusing. The chorus was such a beautiful piece of music, and it was so depressing to hear this rock version. The emotion just wasn't there.

We were all getting a little stressed out, and so this idea came up of just having a very free day at the studio. I don't want to get real specific about it, but anyone could show up in any kind of drink or drug state, do whatever they wanted. The day started kind of late and wild and immediately everyone got on different instruments. Neil was playing drums a lot and Paul Hester, who unfortunately is no longer with us, had some hysterically funny stream-of-consciousness rants. It was a tragic musical day but it was really fun. We needed to clear the air. We spent six or seven hours goofing around, and right before we left the studio Neil started playing something. I was like, "What is that? It's really beautiful." And he said, "Oh, that's something I wrote when I was 17." I started thinking about it and said, "Is it possible that that would go with the chorus of Fall At Your Feet?"

So the next day we tried it and all of sudden it was the easiest thing in the world. It just sounded inevitable. The feel of the verse was the perfect feel for the chorus. We did it as simply as possible. I think Neil kept some of the words from the 17-year-old kid's song, and on the spot made up the beautiful bridge, and pretty much the whole song was done in a day. Tim [Finn] was in the studio next door, so he came in and sang that high part on the bridge, just screamed it out – that was another "wow" moment. Suddenly everything was all happening at once, and I was so happy!
For a song that sounds so simple, it was as if this curse was hanging over it. Usually you're best off bailing out. Fortunately, it was one of the rare ones where all that perseverance paid off.

John Leckie On BLUE by The Verve (1993)

John Leckie began his career at Abbey Road as an in-house engineer, working with Pink Floyd and all four Beatles individually. He has since produced XTC, The Fall, Radiohead, Simple Minds, The Verve and Dr John, as well as The Stone Roses' landmark debut album. He produced Public Image Ltd's first single, Public Image, and Positivity by Suede.

Going digital doesn't just change the sound of music, it changes the way you work. It takes a lot of that experimental spirit away, because with digital you have no limitations – except time and brainpower. It doesn't force you to think laterally. When you were running on tape and you were desperate for ideas, if you turned the tape over the song would play backwards and it sounded great. I mean, The Beatles did it!

In 1980 I worked on Andy Partridge's solo album, Take Away/ The Lure Of Salvage, and every day we plundered the XTC back catalogue. We took the multi-tracks and picked a song, sometimes playing the tape backwards, or at double speed. We might cut all the drums out, or just leave in the tom rolls, so every eight bars you have a tom roll. Then we'd add to that – make the bass drum sound like a conker, or like Japanese traffic. We did 14 tracks. A limited audience!

Then I introduced the backwards thing to The Stone Roses, on the version of Don't Stop on their first album. It's actually the previous track played backwards, with forward drums and vocals overdubbed – and they made a new song out of it. What Ian Brown did was pick out words that you think you can hear, and then turned them into phrases sung forwards. They loved it. For a while with the Roses, everything was backwards!

I used a similar technique later with The Verve. We were at Sawmill Studios in Cornwall doing the first album, and one of the things on the brief when recording The Verve was to try to cut down the jams that they played live. The Verve had their basic tracks but they all went on for about 20 minutes! I had to make sure the songs were all shorter.

Blue was a section of a long jam that we didn't use. We played the tape backwards and there were these great sucking noises. The attitude was: "Let's see where this take us – it's another creative avenue." In the studio, you're always stuffed for ideas up to a point: you don't have great ideas ten, twelve hours of every day, and it's fun to do something like this. Bands aren't always up for it, there is a danger you can waste time on it, but The Verve weren't that kind of band.

Someone started working out the chords. The riff was made up out of the chord structure of the original song running backwards, and the band then played over it. I send the backwards track to them in their headphones and they played with the surge of it, creating something new out of it. They don't know what's going to happen, they don't know what's coming next, so there's a big element of surprise and spontaneity. Then Richard started singing. He always sang different words each time. I wouldn't say he made them up as he went along; they just kind of fell down from heaven on him – I was amazed at how he did it. He'd never write them down.

The original backwards track is there all the way through. For instance, there is a backwards bassline, and the forward bassline is constructed in such a way to leave space for the backwards one to come through! Over a period of about three or four days the whole thing became Blue. We put backing vocals on, tidied it up with a verse and a chorus, and I think it's really successful. It was a single here and in America, and it gave a really good impression of what The Verve were about at that time.

Mike Hedges On PEEK-A-BOO by Siouxsie & The Banshees (1988)

Mike Hedges started his career as a tape operator at Morgan Studios in the late '70s. He has gone on to produce several albums by The Cure and Siouxsie & The Banshees as well as working with U2, Texas, Travis and Dido. He produced The Associates' Party Fears Two and the Manic Street Preachers' Everything Must Go.

"It all started a year or so before, when the Banshees made an album of cover versions called Through The Looking Glass. On that album they'd recorded a version of a John Cale song called Gun, and when we were recording it I turned it over – which you can do on analogue tape – and it sounded amazing. I think at the time I turned over pretty much everything, just in case there was something that sounded great going backwards which you could then record and add to the existing song.

So a bit later, when we were working on the next album, Peepshow, we said, "Remember that track that sounded really good backwards? Could we possibly make it into another song? Gun was recorded in a typical punk style – it had the real aggressive feel of the Banshees – but the main problem I had with it was that the first verse was slightly slower than the chorus, and then the second verse slowed down again, and as it got towards the end it got faster and faster.

So when we turned it over, of course, the song started fast and got progressively slower! It was all on two-inch analogue tape, so I actually physically edited it, taking out slivers of tape as it slowed down. I'd take out a sixteenth of an inch to speed up a particular beat, and as it got slower I'd be taking out a quarter or even half an inch of tape to pull it all up to the same speed. I then copied that tape across to another multi-track and that was the basis of the new song, in tempo and backwards.

Then we started overdubbing. We recorded forward drums over the backwards track – crunchy and loopy, kind of hip-hoppy. Then we added accordion and bass, although there's only one piece of bass on the entire track. It was all very quick. From turning the tape over it probably took the best part of a day and a half to finish the song. Siouxsie always came up with ideas very fast, and once the backing track was done she created the melody and lyrics incredibly quickly. She's very spontaneous. So Peek A Boo was originally a John Cale song! I'm not sure what the copyright is on that, but although it was based on somebody else's song, it's completely different. It was one of the most experimental things I did at the time that actually worked.

The Banshees were very, very experimental, and at that time in the music business you could be experimental. There was no pressure to do anything in a straight style, which isn't really the case any more. Peek-A-Boo was obviously a single for them, simply because it was one song that really was completely messed with. The unusual was expected of them.

To read the first part of Graeme Thomson' piece on music producers, featuring songs from Elvis Costello, The Beatles, Blur, Blondie, U2 and Was Not Was, buy the June 2008 issue of The Word.