Danny K with Trevor Horn; St John’s Church, Hampstead, London NW3
Trevor Horn; absolute studio and musical hero of mine. It was a real pleasure to meet him and discover that I have a near neighbour (and great sound engineer) friend in common who he had worked with.
Trevor’s recording studio Sarm West is where some of the greatest music, certainly of the eighties and nineties was produced. For example, it is where the stars gathered for Band Aid to record Do They Know Its Christmas. He produced ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Art Of Noise, Seal and many many more. His own Buggles classic Video Killed The Radio Star was the first video to be played on MTV.
Jamie, now with over 1.2m Facebook and 575,000 Instragram followers, is still considered the most influential and important dance music producer / DJ working in the world today.
And believe me, he deserves it. I should know.
Jamie Jones and Lee Foss
I showed and played Jamie basic harmony, chord voicings as well as some structural songwriting techniques during our period working together.
Following our first session, I could tell he had an exceptional talent for melody, writing riffs on the fly, arrangement skills for building texture. This despite the fact that his keyboard technique was at a very rudimentary level.
I have long wanted dance music, or EDM as it is now known, to adopt a more musical, melodic and interesting harmonic structure rather than the robotic grooves that so often dominate. I poured this aspiration into our sessions.
It was an intensive learning curve for Jamie I’m sure. More techniques than I’ve ever crammed into regular hour long sessions. And no doubt an eye-opening cornucopia of creative possibilities was opening up for Jamie, which he’s later confirmed with me.
Essentially it was a crash course in music theory and music making; based around keyboard and synths but covering arrangement, harmonic progression, riff-making, bassline construction etc.
Following this, we had intermittent sessions as Jamie was abroad touring, such was his draw. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that house and techno have become more musical in recent years. And all critics praise Jamie’s melodic and harmonic invention.
During all of our sessions, he was like a sponge, soaking up ideas. Better still, he had a receptive, modest and mature attitude. This, despite the fact that he was already enjoying major success even before our sessions.
That is VERY unusual, as in most cases, success goes to artists’ heads and they behave in an arrogant, ‘know-it-all’ manner.
Jamie and I are still in touch and text occasionally. These days he’s based between Ibiza and LA, and has told me he misses London.
He told me recently that if he comes round, he’d like another session or two.
Do you think maybe we could again nudge EDM into becoming just that bit more musical? Or at least get the music critics to notice it again? Listening to his music now and comparing it to how it sounded before we met, I know I have played some part in his work sounding more arranged and flowing. Lee Foss, his DJ compadre, even confirmed this to me in an Instagram post later! Quite how much part is debatable, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. Dance music has been nudged forward both more melodically and harmonically. And that’s all that matters.
Here is Jamie Jones live, doing what he does best. Overlaying parts, synth and drum. And slowly working his savvy crowd up, taking them to whatever place the music dictates.
Kevin McKay owns and has developed Glasgow Underground Records, a hugely influential dance music label which has produced many successful dance musicians, DJs and producers, the most notable being Mylo and Grum, both top and in-demand global dance stars.
In the ultra-competitive world of dance music, Kevin McKay is both a taste-maker and a trend setter; a rare combination.
I taught Kevin performance and keyboard skills. Both Kevin and I think his remixes, original work and production on his labels’ famous dance musicians work have all improved no end.
Like the world’s top DJ, and most successful Danny client of all, Jamie Jones, Kevin acknowledged early on that without keyboard, melody and harmony skills, his work would always be a pale imitation of his real potential. And that’s in my view why Kevin, like Jamie, is successful. He’s humble enough to acknowledge openly where his limitations are – and then to work on them
Tastemaker, record company founder, major underground dance music player, accomplished producer and now new dad. Much respect Kevin.
Below, he discusses digital formats in his capacity as a record company boss. And it’s in The Sun newspaper!
The Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle far left. Pete Shelley, second from right.
The year was 1996. It was in a Gospel Oak terrace, not far from Hampstead Heath in North London. Britpop was in full force, where me and a flatmate would be mastering, mixing or generally tweaking our ’kit’ or cool studio gear that we’d covet. Vaguely, these days we’d be known as Gear Sluts (www.gearslutz.com) on account of us doing anything to get, swap, buy or barter for synths, drum machines, samplers, mixing desks, not to mention microphones. Even our floppy disk sample library (orchestral sounds, bass and vocal samples etc) were in demand and advertised in Sound On Sound. (See my Bernard Butler / Suede post #3 Danny’s Brush With…). The samples would be loaded onto my Akai S900. These days, the equivalent are just plugins installed into one’s DAW.
It was here that I met Steve Diggle, The Buzzcocks’ (www.buzzcocks.com) lead guitarist who wanted to remaster their Live In Paris album with my flatmate. Pete Shelley, who sadly passed away, was the lead singer and main songwriter and their hit was ’Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With’.
Anyway, we hit it off immediately with our similar music tastes. They were really a seminal punk band. They helped define the punk ethos too, plus they put Birmingham on the musical map.
Steve Diggle: what a talented guy and guitarist, not to mention great musical taste. We smoked and drank a lot well into the night. I was mildly surprised to learn that he didn’t have the passion for punk style music that I’d anticipated. He was heavily into classical electronic music. This is complex music with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varese (musique concrete) and Pierre Boulez amongst those brilliant mid 20th century composers. The Buzzcocks experienced some pretty cool and funny escapades which Diggle enjoyed telling me about.
Suede, circa 1994: Bernard Butler, left. Lead singer Brett Anderson, right.
This is the tale of an unexpected visitor, my Akai S900 sampler (see post) – and two floppy disks. It happened in 1994 during my days living in Gospel Oak, a part of North London just bordering on Hampstead Heath. Britpop hadn’t really arrived yet and it was about two years before the world got to know Oasis and The Spice Girls. Anyway, the guy I was sharing with had his own recording studio on the top floor. It had state of the art ProTools audio mastering facilities so occasionally bands, mainly dance music acts but occasionally name bands, would turn up (see my Buzzcocks post)
I also had some ‘kit’ (the term for audio and studio equipment), but my audio software couldn’t match that of my flatmate. Yet I DID own an Akai S-900 sampler. The Akai had a certain credibility because one could use 8-bit crunched up early digital sounds (think the early Super Mario Bros gaming soundtracks). This could easily be switched to 16-bit for a sleeker and more accurate digital sound. It was simple to use and also looked very very cool. The slightly younger musicians certainly wanted a piece of it.
So the Akai S-900 was cool, but my unique selling point turned out to be my sample library, a set of real recorded (not synthesised) sounds that could be loaded into the sampler. The analog equivalent of the early samplers would be the Mellotron consisting of many strips of tape of musicians actually playing. It was famously used by The Beatles and George Martin in Abbey Road studios, also in North London and fairly near Gospel Oak. You can hear the Mellotron in the famous haunting intro to The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever. Paul McCartney (or George Martin?) are effectively playing ten flautists simultaneously. It is not synthetic and neither were the early samplers, except that they were digital and not analog.
My treasured Akai S-900 sampler, one of the first imported into the UK. They year was 1983 and I was thirteen. It was bought for me by my father from Turnkey, when it was still based in Hendon
Anyway I had studiously assembled my sample library and was very proud of it. I had several orchestras, horn sections, drum kits, bass sounds etc etc. Yet each floppy disk would only contain several samples, maybe only four or five sounds because each disk could only store about 5Mb – inconceivable now in the age of terabytes. To put it into context, a simple piece of music software now contains hundreds of thousands of samples (not four or five). Yes, music technology really HAS moved along that quickly. In magazines like Loot, musicians would exchange disks, copy them and then use them on their recordings. Like jazz scores, there was common agreement that money shouldn’t exchange hands as this was creative and consensual sharing. There were exceptions, but this was the accepted wisdom.
So back to the anecdote. One day, a very thin, very pale, long-haired twenty something knocks on the door and ambles up to my room hardly making any eye contact with me. He appeared to be dead set on a serious mission – and as far as I was concerned, it was a sound mission (excuse the pun) for authentic orchestral samples according to his reply to me via Loot. I ask him if wants a drink (although a very large Big Mac and fries would probably have done him more good). He doesn’t want a drink. He then proceeds to approach my Akai S-900 and starts to flick reverently through my floppy disks as if they were the lost holy grail of audio. I ask him:
‘So you’re a musician then? Keeping the wolf from the door?
‘I need strings. You got anything like that?’
Well at least there were two sentences there, albeit short ones.
‘Are you a musician?’ I ask.
He replies: ‘Well actually I’m in a band.’ And I reply: ‘Cool, done any local gigs?’
‘A few’, he mutters, still staring down at his shoes. But I did notice him glimpsing furtively at the two floppies marked ‘Orchestral Stabs’ and ‘String Sections’. I was amused.
‘So what’s the name of your band?’ I ask.
‘Sueeaaaaayyyyyyyyyde’ he says, staring at me, possibly stoned out of his gourd, who can tell? The word lasted a long time. Then he looked at me as if I’d arrived from outer-space and I was his first human encounter. Now I was not so much puzzled as impressed, or a combination thereof. If I’m honest, my heart had stopped for a split second… Suede were a very big and very influential band at the time; many (including me) say a major influence on the likes of Blur, Pulp; Britpop in general. In fact Suede had already enjoyed mainstream success, critical acclaim in fact – and they were on to their second album. Of course I didn’t let on I knew much about them. Plus there was also the fact that I felt just a little bit sorry for this bedraggled urban waistrel. So I thought for a moment:
‘Oh yeh, I think I’ve heard of them.’ I said.
No response. I looked at him again, and realised that the tables had been turned. Now it was I who regarded him as the alien. He looked vaguely surprised that I hadn’t reacted to him with more reverence, but it was barely a flicker. This man was clearly on a mission. His eyes were deadset on his second album, and he clearly wanted to throw a few orchestras into the mix.
I now saw him for who he was – and I was puzzled no more. Bernard Butler was a bedraggled guitar wielding young rockstar – the real deal, yet seemingly unhappy and tortured-looking. I may have been wrong but that was certainly my impression.
I looked back at him and said goodbye. Again, zero eye contact. Finally, without much more ado, he shuffled back downstairs armed with his two floppies: ‘Orchestral Stabs’ and ‘String Section’ and stumbled past the door. Looking back I do believe that he’d forgotten to close it.
Such was the pre-Britpop scene, Gospel Oak/Belsize Park, North London, 1994.
Jamie’s compadres Lee Foss and Richy Ahmed both later contacted me for keyboard/harmony/session help à la Jamie, before being waylaid by a blizzard of international festival and Ibiza club offers. They are all now at the top of the global dance music production tree. And there are connections there with Scarlett Etienne, with whom I’ve now worked on and off for over seven years.
Lee Foss and friend
They are all part of ‘Hot Creations‘, the label that Jamie started, which has set the standard for the modern Superstar DJ brand. The label is an enormous success now. Jamie’s weekly event in Ibiza, ‘Paradise’ is a go-to event in the dance music world.
And Jamie still tops the bill, see below, even a full six years on from his initial breakthrough.
Boy, is it a lucrative business.
Without doubt, the money to be made in the music biz these days is certainly in the dance music production festival and elite club circuit (and not in the pop or rock star realm, which may surprise many).
Cast your minds back to Summer 1986. It’s the control room of the legendary Spaceward Studios in Cambridge www.spaceward.co.uk. I’d just turned seventeen and I was up there to record audio overdubs for my Mum’s animation film ‘Snow Magic’ for which I had composed the soundtrack. She knew Gary Lucas, one of the key producers and founders of the studio itself. I was a very brief intern there, but oh my G-d, what a place, what an atmosphere, what talent everywhere I looked. Just being there had a big impact on me. It was a creative hub – and these people were both serious and talented yet seemed to maintain a matey confidence that was just beyond cool for my teenage mind. I’d been in studios before. Through my parents’ encouragement for my passion, I had already developed my own decent studio next to my mother’s animation editing room. I had a Fostex 1/4in A8 reel to reel multitrack and new Akai S900 sampler. I’d recorded a few local bands at my studio, but what I was witnessing was the real deal – on quite another level. Everyone from The Stranglers to Iron Maiden to Teardrop Explodes to assorted new wave acts that I worshipped seemed to be drifting in and out, full of cool easy breezy banter. These were rock titans, of that there was no debate. Even the likes of Gary Numan and The Damned had been in recently and recorded there. Right in front of me were bona fide artists (and not the usual blaggers) recording exciting vocal and backing vocal overdubs, instrumental takes and creatively arranged parts, not to mention the original live takes. Was I wide-eyed? Yes. Did I want to let on? NO! As an Assistant Tape Op, I was hardly noticed anyway. Here’s a great anecdote from that period:
I wasn’t at the session, but the producer and assistant producer/sound engineer Gary Lucas had told me that there was a worrying issue festering. Apparently while Julian Cope was recording World Shut Your Mouth, he’d been smoking so much dope that the vents started emanating the sweet smell of refined marijuana which permeated all the grounds around the studio complex. The studio manager and staff began to worry about the ramifications and possible imminent police presence! While I was there I had the laborious task of shooting 100Hz, 1kHz and 10kHz sine wave signals through each of the 24 tracks into the giant reel to reel multitrack machine. It’s called calibrating and basically ensures that what you hear in playback is as close as possible to the audio going in being recorded live. This slowly spooling tape was two inches wide compared to the measly and hissy 1/4in tape in my home studio. It was basically like lasagne compared to my spaghetti. I only ended up interning for four visits, mainly because I was London-based and it was a shlep. Plus I had A-levels to think about in the Autumn. My brief job title? Assistant Tape Operator. Only four visits, but what a creative revelation…
Very excited that Sadie and I will be opening at The Pigalle Club in Piccadilly on Friday 5th April at around 7.45pm. Check out this amusing link: The Beatles played there in 1963 (not to mention Dusty Springfield etc.
