TRACK: Darklands
ARTIST: Jesus and Mary Chain
CLIENTS: WEA
STUDIO: Wessex
PRODUCERS: Bill Price, Jesus and Mary Chain
ENGINEERS: Bill Price

'This album has a different sound from their previous records, which were geared towards the chaotic,' says Bill Price of The Jesus and Mary Chain's latest release, Darklands. 'The reason I worked on the new record was because they didn't want that same kind of chaotic sound, where you could not exactly hear the lyrics or other little details like that!

'The object this time is that you can hear a rhythm section, the chord sequence and the vocals, rather than just everything together through a wail of feedback guitars.'

If the Jesus and Mary Chain's two members — the Reed brothers Jim and William — were looking to work with someone with considerable depth of experience in recording, they certainly made a good choice.

Anyone who started their career assisting on records such as Twist and Shout by Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, and Tell Me When by the Apple jacks, before eventually progressing to coproduction work such as the Never Mind the Bollocks... album by the Sex Pistols, must have a fairly broad knowledge and outlook.

Such is the work record of Bill Price. After starting at the now defunct Decca Studios in West Hampstead, North London, in the early Sixties, he worked with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdink, and Kathy Kirby and The Bachelors.

The second half of the decade saw something of an about-turn in clients as he became involved with the Moody Blues, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chicken Shack and various other blues acts.

In 1970 Price joined the newly formed AIR Studios as Chief Engineer and worked with regular artists Paul McCartney, The Hollies and Cilla Black before Chrysalis bought AIR and Wessex Studios in North London, and made him Manager at Wessex.

In 1982 he was made Managing Director.

Apart from the Sex Pistols' work (for which the credits on the album cover attributed production to Chris Thomas or Bill Price), he has also worked with Elton John, Pete Townshend, Motorhead, The Clash, The Cult, The Pretenders and The Jesus and Mary Chain.

The Darklands album was recorded and mixed on SSL at Wessex, using 32-track digital and 24-track analogue reels. William and Jim Reed played all the parts: William plays guitars, Jim plays bass and performs vocals, 'except for the times when William does a bit of bass playing and Jim does a bit of guitar playing!

'We've done overdubs with all three of us sitting at the desk, with the guitar remoted to a big row of amplifiers out in the ambient studio next door, and five times during the course of the overdub the guitar's changed hands and we've dropped in. So it's impossible to say who's guitar track it is, before and after drop-in!'

For the track Darklands the demo comprised a session recorded for Janice Long's Radio 1 programme, and this provided the rough sketch for Bill to work from.

'The track — like all the others — started life with a Roland 707 drum machine, and the first thing we had to do was to find a key and a tempo. That's easier said than done! It depends on who's going to sing it; Jim's got a much lower voice than William, and we can spend quite a lot of the time purely deciding on a key and tempo.

'Normally the only instrumentation is guitar. On Darklands we experimented with putting some strings on, using session musicians, so the song differed from the others.

'What the process of getting a key and tempo means in practice is that you guess a tempo, put down a bit of drum machine, guess a key, put down a rough guitar, try singing against it, try putting a bass on it, and at some stage decide whether that's the right key and tempo.

'So we actually get the song right in a rough form, almost getting a 24-track demo, until we're happy with it, and then start replacing everything with the sort of sound we want on the finished thing.

'Getting to that stage of demo'ing a song normally takes about a day. William usually had portastudio cassettes of all the songs, which had a preliminary idea of the drum pattern if not the actual full routine of the song.

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'We would refer to that, and William would sit down and just sing and play the song on acoustic guitar, and we'd very carefully note the natural tempo. It's very easy to get misled when you've only got a drum machine with a knob that goes from nothing to infinity, it's very hard to pick what seems a comfortable tempo for a song.

'We make quite a few mistakes, and in fact with Darklands we got quite a long way with a recording which was two semi-tones lower.'

The Roland 707, having been used for the triggers, is not audible on that record, but clearly evident are the benefits of the Lexicon 480 stereo sampler, although Bill readily admits that he is not overly keen on working with sampling devices.

'The 480 provides a six-second sample in true stereo, and he therefore greatly appreciated the facility to hit a drum in the studio and record it with stereo ambience.' The TC2290 sampler, manufactured in Denmark, has also managed to capture his imagination.

'It gets around a lot of the problems of digital equipment by using an absolutely ridiculously high clock-rate — 1 mHz, or something like that.

'So rather than going to 18 kHz, or whatever an AMS goes to, and then going wham with an enormous filter that puts a lot of ripple into the response, it just slowly filters it off from 20k up to about 40 or 50k, which is well outside the audible range. What that means is that you get the advantages of digital equipment without some of the disadvantages. It really sounds analogue but noiseless, and it's quite an amazing compromise.'

A Steinberger and a Fender Jazz bass were played at the desk, having fed their signals through a splitter box into a selection of amplifiers, a DI and various pedals.

'We'd have a situation where William's guitar would be coming out of a 50W Marshall lead amp direct, but it would also be coming up on the board as well.

'We would construct a guitar sound for the part we were looking for from all of the available sources.'

Having recorded the 24-track demo and settled on key, tempo and routine, any amendments would be programmed into the drum machine. This would be recorded twice, once as a monitor and once as a pre-trigger to make sampling easier.

'Those samplers aren't capable of actually triggering out their sample instantly. There is a delay between triggering a sample and getting an output, and on this particular session rather than using a midi-programmable sampler we were working direct from the acoustic triggers of a drum machine.

'That was the simplest way of going about it as it was William's drum machine and he sat at home working out the programme. There are more hi-tech ways of doing it these days, but this is as quick as any.

'When it got round to redoing the parts, we started with the rhythm guitar. We had a rough vocal, so we knew the parts of the song where the dynamics of the rhythm guitar would change, and we'd have to go about getting a sound that would suit the song; breaking down William's basic guitar part into bits which would be done on different tracks, bits underlaid by the rhythm guitar and bits where arguably it would be better if it sounded like something flying off the rhythm guitar track with two guitars happening there.'

A lyrically correct rough vocal, sung in correct time, would have been laid down for the demo, before the polished version was recorded after much of the backing track had been completed.

'Vocals were recorded variously in studios one and two, with the small room in studio two used for the song Darklands. Guitars were recorded in the large rooms of studio one which easily accommodated the numerous amplifiers, DI and microphones.

'In that way, depending on the heaviness of the sound, I could choose a really heavy ambience on another pair of faders. So we more or less had a case of what was coming out of William's guitar lead was driving a lot of things, and we would choose and tailor them to get the sort of sound we wanted.

'In terms of the vocals they've both got quite light voices, and they were all recorded close-miked using an AKG 414 and the time honoured pair of tights!

'There were no particular ambient vocal tricks or anything of that nature involved really. Neither of them are big screamers who would benefit from that sort of thing.'

The backing track and vocals having been recorded, David Bedford composed a string arrangement for an eight-piece section, jarring noticeably with the song's downbeat mood. Recorded in studio one, the section comprised four viola and four cellos, with an AB pair of omni-directional AKG 414s.

The players sat in a semi-circle around the arranger, close-miked, and one mix was made with their contribution included and one without.

Each of the tracks were worked on separately from beginning to end, and each took between four and five days to record. 'We would normally start on a track, attempt to get it finished, at some stage towards the end of the process at least go for a vocal, and then either we'd finish the vocal or we'd come back to it.

'Bar vocals, however, we finished each track before going on to the next. Jim and William are not the world's most natural vocalists, their strength is in their imagery and in their songwriting, and their imagery is something which they put together themselves and which they project.

'Mixing is pretty hard with them, because that's when the truth comes out. Because I've been engineering so long people may have been surprised that the mix I got together really didn't sound very different from what they heard when I put the vocal on.

'I normally try to work with the finished record in mind, and if I think I know what something's going to sound like on the finished record I attempt to make it sound that way on tape.

'You've got to get it down to something that's going to come out of a small loudspeaker, so you've got to try to refine all of the things that you've been doing throughout.

'On quite a few songs, if the guys had particular elements which I couldn't bring out any more, the easiest way to bring out an element would be to overdub it.

'So quite often during the mix we would overdub an extra little guitar part with, say, some heavy chords, on particular spots in the song where the band wanted things to sound heavier.

'In terms of effects, in addition to the Lexicon 480 I had one set of the studio's beautiful EMT 140 valve plates, close to the vocals, set on 1.8 seconds.

'I also had an SPX90, a PCM60 on a short ambience, an Eventide 949 harmoniser to turn mono signals into stereo, and of course the TC2290 providing a single repeat, a dotted quaver.

'There were a couple of UA 1176 compressors in use, adding a little bit more than the desk compressors, and an Orban de-esser, and that was about it, really.

'It was great fun working with Jim and William, they write really good songs. I suppose they thought I could get them a measure of audibility, so to speak, on everything that they were doing, while still retaining the power and guts of it.

'For instance, when making one of their old-style records William would have said, "I want the most powerful guitar in the world! How do I go about this? Where is the guitar fader? Let me push it up!"

'So they would produce a guitar sound that obliterated everything, and of course made it a powerful guitar sound.

'I think what they wanted to try and do on this record was to gain audibility on everything including the lyric, without compromising on any of the things they'd succeeded in before.'