Entertainment For Lively Minds
Production
Posted by illuminatus on 7 August 2009 - 12:11am.
I just happened to be listening to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' on the iPod earlier on as it appeared on a trawl around the darker corners of my music collection.
Now, the song itself is very good indeed. But, I got around to thinking, without the Trevor Horn production job it would never have become one of the defining songs of the 1980's in the way it clearly has.
So the question is: what good or very good songs have been bumped up to greatness as a result of the magic knob-twiddling of the man in the control room?
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That group again....and their friend George
A Day In The Life
Strawberry Fields Forever
I Am The Walrus
...add your own
Also, Transmission, Shadowplay, She's Lost Control, Atmosphere etc etc - Joy Division/Martin Hannett
What you hear on...
..."A Day In The Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" is pretty much exactly what The Beatles asked for; George and his team just pressed the right buttons to order.
What Trevor Horn did with FGTH was totally different, and they were probably as surprised with the end product as we were. It's not even important anyway, because the pop moment is what matters, and - if you'll pardon my Parsonsesque metaphor - Frankie were very much the grit from whence the pearl came.
I'm sure George
will be chuffed at his new job description of "button pressing operative".
Your remit was great songs made greater by the production. I think that the early versions of certain songs as heard on 'Anthology' demonstrate the contribution George (and Geoff) made to the final cut; without their skills we might have the songs, but not the records, we know and love.
I think George WOULD be chuffed...
...as it was a testament to the work he'd done with Lennon that a rough-arsed greaser from Liverpool that he'd taken in hand just five years earlier was now stretching HIS capabilities as a studio technician.
If you listen to the construction of 'Strawberry Fields Forever', from home recording to end product and read "Revolution In The Head" it's clear that Martin wasn't acting as A&R for anybody by this stage; he was, when the group and Lennon was at its most focussed, a particularly gifted engineer and musician that was facilitating aspirations which were beyond him as a creative individual. Hidebound as he was by both his formal musical training and his overfamiliarity with EMI recording protocols, Martin himself would never have been capable of such acts of wanton creativity.
It was Lennon who gave the piece its complex time structure, and who insisted on the seemingly impossible varispeeding and editing of the two different takes of the song which Martin was happy to sign off. There was only one auteur here, and it wasn't George - let's just say that John was Martin Scorsese to George Martin's Thelma Schoonmaker
Similarly, it was Lennon and McCartney ALONE who determined the structure and arrangement of 'A Day In The Life'.
Without Martin, The Beatles may never have grown, but without The Beatles to stretch him, he may well have spent the rest of his working life producing comedy records.
See also Instinction
Spandau Ballet's best record by a country mile - a real Trevor Horn silk purse sow's ear masterpiece. Check (if you can face it) the Richard Burgess produced original on their Diamond LP - flat as a pancake.
Less spectacular
but no less impressive, imho, was his production of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress. No bells and whistles, but a considerable step up from their previously 'feyer than thou' indie-ness. A great pop record.
Absolutely
fantastic isn't it (the Horn version)? Just played it on Spotify. That said, I feel you are being somewhat harsh on the Spands. The gloopy True era might have obscured the early stuff, like Chant No. 1, which was a great record. And Gold is still surely the greatest Bond theme that never was?
Also just played Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart. Still sounds amazing - I never tire of those spatial intrumental breaks!
And I'd forgotten Ian McShane reading an Ian Penman piece at the start of one of his masterwork albums - Grace Jones' Slave to the Rhythm. Epic.
River Deep
Mountain High
You may quibble
with this inclusion, but Horn's work on the three FGTH singles from 1984 (a year stolen from them by Band Aid) is, to my mind, unsurpassable. And they'd've been cack without the Video Killed The Radio Star hitmaker.
I personally agree, but...
... m'learned friends didn't, IIRC. I thought Holly Johnson took Horn & ZTT to court for claiming songwriting credits, and the court (on hearing Frankie's original Horn-less demos) decided that the production didn't contribute "substantially" to the finished recordings.
As I say, I disagree myself, love Horn's kitchen-sink productions, and shamelessly admit to still playing the whole "Welcome To The Pleasuredome" album quite often, it's a 'perfect storm' of its time.
Most obvious
No John Leckie - No Stone Roses
Agreed
And...
no Dukes of Stratosphere, no Stone Roses. John Leckie on both.
The Doors
without Paul Rothchild? He produced the first 5 albums and I suspect had a great deal to do with the final sound.
Madness - One Step Beyond
Was originally an instrumental lasting 1 minute and ten seconds.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun06/articles/classictracks_0606.htm#10
(see the bit headed "Beyond Harmony")
Also the complete output of Girls Aloud, etc.
Jimmy Miller
Whatever he did with the Stones from 68 to 73 has been missing since.
Him
and Mick Taylor
Quince is not the only fruit
Wot no mention of MJ as just a morally depraved crocth-grabbing squeak puppet with skin bleaching issues and it was all the work of QJ.
And RT, of course. No, not that RT. For once
Always thought Def Leppard
were as much about Mutt Lange as anything else. And Cornershop's one hit was due to Fatboy Slim breathing on it.
Massive Attack
Wouldn't be half the band they are without some incredible production. A special word for Jonny Dollar, who co-produced Blue Lines, and died only last month.
good
shout
Queen & David Bowie - 'Under Pressure'...
No real fireworks in the production department, but a song doesn't always require that. It's got a clean and crisp sound, a great hook in John Deacon's simple bass part, a brilliant arrangement and fabulous performances from the two vocalists. It sounds amazing.
properly listened
to that for the first time in the longest time - great record.
I love the way Bowie can impart such gravitas...
to anything he sings: "Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn" - brilliant!
See also: "and tremble like a flower" in 'Let's Dance'.
And
his contribution to the BBC cover of 'Perfect Day'
"...Bowie can impart such gravitas to anything he sings..."
Laughing Gnome, Patrick?
But! But! But!
It was a gnome that laughed with gravitas.
No-one
can impart gravitas to Time. The lyric is laughably inept.
It is a low point
- and you can sense Bowie's sudden realisation of its bathos in his near comedic delivery at certain points in the song - yet, he is enough of a professional to sing it well throughout - and on the line "his trick is you and me, boy" he hints at the gravitas Mr Crowther suggests
This isn't to say one should take him seriously...
it's just that he tries to make even the most ham-fisted lines sound like the words of a prophet!
Indeed
Just like those barking mad, alcohol sozzled prophets that used to hang around Waterloo station.
Magic dust
again sprinkled by Trevor Horn on Grace Jone's work of that era, notably 'pull up to the bumper' and 'slave to the rythmn'.
Jeff Lynne.. or maybe not..
Conversation was had elsewhere regarding Mr ELO's production skills and I was wondering if anyone would find his name worthy of inclusion in this thread.
I wouldn't.
And does anyone remember the excellent WORD article about the importance of the mastering process?
And how about the studio engineer? Would Abbey Road and Dark Side Of The Moon have sounded the way they did without Alan Parsons doing a bit of twiddling here and there?
I'm a big JL fan
but I agree with you for a different reason. The best ELO albums had songs in which the production was an integral part of the whole experience. Having the songs without it would be unthinkable (Mr Blue Sky, for example), so it wouldn't really fall into the category I was originally asking about.
Alan Parsons is a good call, as I think is Norman Smith for what he did with Piper At The Gates of Dawn. He makes Lucifer Sam and Bike, for example, sound fantastic
Jam & Lewis
surely?
Like this:
also their production of the Human League's 'Human'. Of its time, but still eminently listenable.
http://open.spotify.com/track/7qm1JpihtROAIU1XpvqYHS
Spector..........
Buffed up great songs to true genius. Can also be applied to Brian Wilson but this one is the motherload......
Kenny Everett.
I mean it. Compilations of his Capital Radio work crop up on BBC Radio 7 on a regular basis. There's some fantastic sound engineering going on - and all done on tape, single-handed. Clive James calls him a genius in "North Face of Soho" and he knows a lot more than I do. In the course of an everyday radio show, Everett made long-forgotten album tracks by 70s balladeers, played-to-death 60s hits and bits of classical music sound divine. One show included a version of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town" I'd never heard before. Then I realised that Everett must have extended the intro. So he invented the 12" remix too.
It takes real talent to play the exact same disc of plastic as everyone else and turn it into essential listening.
Are not the best producers
those who bring out the best in an artist whilst remaining anonymous? So many big name producers feel it necessary to leave their own very obvious mark which years later dates the record badly. Mitchell Froom is an example of this in my opinion. It could also be argued that Daniel Lanois's work with Dylan is another - as much as I like his own stuff.
I agree with you here...
I think Daniel Lanois' trademark sound has really dated badly. And all that clanking percussion on the late 80s / early 90s RT albums produced by Froom sounds dreadful now.