Producer/engineer Stephen Street has the good fortune to work with a band he respects and likes, The Smiths. Chris Maillard talks to this charming man

It's often said of bands that you either love them or hate them. Usually this is because no one can muster up enough enthusiasm to make up their minds. There is one group, however, that actually deserve that overused phrase. When I mention their name half the people reading this will groan as though tortured and the rest will let out a muffled cheer.

The Smiths. See? Told you so. But whether you think Morrissey's men are endowed with godlike genius or are just a bunch of moaning bores, you have to admit that their records always sound distinctively different and clean without being clinical. Jokes about the crisp Smiths may not be too far wide of the mark.

This is partly due to their simple instrumental format — live-sounding guitar played over non-synth bass and real-time drums stands out a mile in these multisampled SMPTE-locked days — and Morrissey's instantly recognisable voice. But a large part of the sonic credit must go to their long-serving and hard-working engineer Stephen Street.

Stephen is a pleasant chap in his middle twenties who looks uncannily like a blend of the two major Smiths: he allies Morrissey's flat-top haircut with Johnny Marr's fresh-faced handsomeness. He looks the sort of young man every mother dreams of her daughter bringing home for tea.

Not long ago — April, in fact — he finished the Smiths' latest album, and their last for the Rough Trade label before the heavily discussed move to EMI. Titled Strangeways Here We Come, it'll be preceded any day now by the equally eccentric single Girlfriend In A Coma. Both single and album have the definite Smiths stamp allied to almost psychedelic arrangements, which break new ground for the band. Stephen is pleased with his six weeks' work, and equally pleased with being so closely allied to one of the Eighties' few original bands.

He should be pleased, too; he has had the incredible luck to end up in every engineer's ideal situation. 'I really can't think of anybody I'd rather work with,' he admitted. 'The Smiths are my favourite band, and I'm absolutely delighted that I've had the chance to do so much recording with them.

'Some people go through their entire career hoping to end up working with a certain artist or group and it never happens. I just struck lucky very early on. If they never did anything with me again I'd still have the satisfaction of knowing I'd done three albums with them.'

The lucky break that started him off on his ideal assignment wasn't, of course, instant. Like everyone else, Stephen served an apprenticeship — or, in his case, two.

'I was originally playing in groups, in the late Seventies and so on. Nobody famous. Eventually it was getting to the point where the group I was then in had been around for a while and wasn't really getting anywhere, so I thought "OK, what do I want to do?" Then in the last year we were together, 1980, that group made an album with producer Laurie Latham.

'In fact I think we may have been one of his first production jobs. It was when he was engineering at the Workhouse, where I believe he still does a lot of his own stuff.

'While working on this album, I became very interested in the techniques involved in recording. There's always one nosy bastard from the band who likes to poke his head in and see what goes on at the desk, and that was me. I remember helping Laurie out a few times, just doing cuts and things on the old Harrison desk, which I believe he still likes using.

'So I became aware of the engineering side of things and that sort of inspired me — I thought, "right, this is what I want to do". Then I wrote to all the studios asking for a job and, just like usual, didn't hear anything back. But a few months later, by word of mouth, I heard of a job going at Island Studios, went along and got it.

'I started working as an assistant, but because I had been in studios before and had a little experience they didn't treat me as just a teaboy and I was able to get straight in and do some creative assisting, which was marvellous. I learned under two main guys there, Godwin Logie and Paul 'Groucho' Smykle who were very creative and who were helpful in letting me get my hands on the desk and so on. It was very intensive training — because I was the only assistant there, most of the time I was busy.

'It was the time of Grace Jones' Nightclubbing album and the Tom Tom Club LP, and a lot of good things were coming out of Compass Point, like Alex Sadkin's stuff. Much of that passed through Island to be remixed for 12-inches. The calibre of stuff we were working with was extremely high. It wasn't just demos that would never see the light of day, it was very hip dance music that was mixed one day, sent off to be pressed up the next, and would be out within the month.

'That was all done on the MCI 500 desk which I enjoyed using very much — and still enjoy using, in fact, because it's now at The Point studios in Victoria [see feature on page 16]. But this was without automation and some of those mixes were purely done with edits and having several pairs of hands on the desk so we could do cuts and fly-in effects and so on. It was interesting, working right over on the dub side of things like that, because it gave me ideas which could be assimilated into more normal production.

'From there I went on to engineering, still at Island, and one of my first breaks was when the Smiths came in to record Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now with John Porter producing, which was about 1983, I think. I engineered that session and got on well with the guys, and six months later I got a phone call saying "do you want to record the next album with the Smiths?" That album was Meat Is Murder and since then the relationship has carried on.

'Sometimes they do things without John and sometimes without me, which I quite like because it kind of keeps us on our toes. You can't just sit back and say "I know they're going to use me", because they might not.

'But we have a very friendly relationship in the studio; we're all about the same age — I'm 27, Morrissey is 27 or 28 and Johnny is just a few years younger — so we all have much the same interests. Everybody thinks they must be really miserable, but far from it. We have a wonderful time, we end up actually crying with laughter sometimes.

'The way they work in the studio as a rule goes like this: In the early stages Johnny (Marr — guitarist and co-writer) will be bashing out an idea with Mike (Joyce — drummer) and Andy (Rourke — bassist). They'll play it at different speeds and in different keys to try and find which is the best key for Morrissey to sing in. That's very important, because sometimes in their early days I think they recorded things that weren't quite correct for Morrissey and nowadays they're very particular about that.

'While the guys are playing through the rough backing track ideas, Morrissey and I will be sitting in the control room listening, and Johnny will be asking "is this tempo OK?" or "what about this key?". It can be difficult, because sometimes neither the band nor myself have any idea what Morrissey has got prepared and only he can tell what tempo he wants to sing at.

'As far as setting up the basic sound goes, the engineering side of it, Johnny leaves all that entirely to me to come up with sounds and ideas for effects and so on. Johnny likes to hear effects straight away on his guitar, he likes to get inspired by them.

'Often I like to get him in the control room so he can hear the reverbs and delays and so on. For the last album we used radio mic systems for the guitar, so it was much easier to do that. And I'll often record the effects with the guitar, sometimes on a separate track, but often together.

'It's all very well saying "we'll add it on later in the mix" but sometimes you can't get that sound again. If we know definitely that's the sound we want we'll put it down completely with effects. Normally the first ideas that come into our heads work out well.

'When it comes to the mix, they leave me alone for a while to get the basics done and they come in at the end. I always mix on SSL because it can remember all the cuts and things that I've already done, so in the final stages I can do all the fine adjustments that Morrissey might want to do in the vocal, or whatever else, and not to have to worry about the basics.

'There are some studios I like working at if I can — depending, of course, on the budget involved. I like The Point because it's not a very expensive studio but it's got that MCI and I really like the EQ on those desks. I am of the school of thought that says recording on SSL and mixing on SSL doesn't quite work. Having said that, the latest Smiths album was recorded on SSL, down at The Wool Hall. But sometimes I do wish that I'd recorded it on something else. It's the bottom-end EQ, really, I prefer the MCI one.

'I'm still very attached to The Fallout Shelter, which is Island Records' studio. I always feel comfortable down there. They have Urei 813 monitors, which are still my favourite large monitors. The Wool Hall was very good, I enjoyed it down there. When we first turned up we thought "oh dear, the playing area's quite small — will we be able to get anything decent down?" As it turned out we got a very interesting room sound which we used on one of the tracks on the new LP, just by using two PZM mics, one miles away from the drumkit and one right in front.

'The TV link between the control room and the studio is a bit weird at first, but we got used to it very quickly. And it's nice to work in natural daylight as well — The Wool Hall has got huge windows either side of the desk. For that reason RAK's SSL room is very good, they've got daylight there. I also like the Power Plant, their mixing room downstairs is good. And I like the people there as well, Robin Millar is a very nice guy and I think he's picked good people to work under him.

'One special feature about The Wool Hall, though, was the food. The Smith's are a very hard band to please in terms of eating and the chef did a marvellous job in keeping us very happy for the six weeks.

'Six weeks is very quick to record an album; most bands of that calibre would take months and months but The Smiths tend to crack on with it and get it down pretty quickly.

'That six weeks included recording and mixing, which I was pretty pleased with. We hadn't done any demos apart from Johnny's home demos which he does in the basement of his house in Manchester and which he gives to Morrissey to put lyrics over. But in fact this time Morrissey hadn't heard a good deal of the songs either until we went into the studio.

'He had to return to London for a week at one point with tapes of the songs we'd worked on so he could do the lyrics.

'Six weeks is a very short time — but then again I don't know how people can spend years working on a project. I'd get bored. I get bored with things anyway, I generally hate them the following week. It's not until about six months later that I can start appreciating them.

'I've just recorded an LP with Durutti Column in 11 days and it doesn't sound cheap at all — we did some of it at Strawberry in Manchester and some at Peter Hook from New Order's place, Suite Sixteen. Mind you, I used Dolby SR cards when I was mastering and that was brilliant. I couldn't hear any noise coming off tape at all. I'm very interested in working Dolby SR on multitrack now, I was totally knocked out by it.

'I've worked digital as well. A few tracks on The Queen Is Dead were recorded down at Jacobs on Mitsubishi 32-track. I must admit we did have one problem, a complete dropout lasting about one second which we never managed to get back again, so we had to start recording all over again on that song which was a real headache. And there were clicks happening here and there as well which we never managed to track down. Various people were called in from Mitsubishi and Ampex and accusations were thrown about but I never found out totally what the answer was.

'But that was recording on two machines, one of which was an old X-80, one of the first ones in the country. I've worked 32-track since and have had no problems whatsoever, although I still don't think the editing works as well as could be. However, I do like working 32-track, those extra eight tracks plus the timecode tracks make it very useful, and the sound is great. When you record a drumkit and listen back to the first take, it sounds just the same, unlike analogue which definitely does change. If the budget allowed I'd work digital all the time.

'Unfortunately I didn't have the money to work digital on the Durutti Column project, and when I listen to that I can hear the hiss on the 24-track. But on the other hand, I prefer to work with someone like that — Vini Reilly is an extremely original guitar player and brilliant in a totally different way to everyone else — than to go for some big boring band who have a huge budget but are a pain to work with.

'I'd rather go for people who are new and enthusiastic and exciting. I did the Mighty Lemon Drops album last year which was a bit rushed but good fun, and it's apparently getting a lot of play on the American college radio circuit. And I'm working with a new EMI signing called A Pair Of Blue Eyes who are different again; they're a very modern pop band.

'I have also been keeping my hand in at doing 12-inch mixes of dance stuff. I did the 12-inch of C'Est La Vie by Robbie Nevil and I did two mixes of a song by Skipworth and Turner for Island, which was very successful in the clubs.

'But the thing I like about working with The Smiths is that there are no restrictions. We don't have to worry about making sure that it's to a dance beat or making sure that it's got a nice contemporary Fairlight sound all over it. We take each track as it comes and do what we like with it. I think people will be surprised when the new album comes out with just how different it sounds. And I like that element of unpredictability. The Smiths are like the Beatles in that they could get away with anything from rock to soul to light pop to heavy psychedelic stuff and still sound unmistakably like themselves.

'There are loads of people who are dying to work with say U2 and they'll never get the chance. I'm really pleased that I'm working with The Smiths. I couldn't ask for anything more.'

Funny how a band so often called glum can make someone so happy. Heaven knows, Stephen Street is definitely not miserable now.