PRODUCERS: Everything But The Girl & Mike Hedges
BAND: Everything But The Girl
TRACKS: Come On Home

Like Father, like son, as the saying goes. It's rare in the Pop world for anything to last two years, yet alone two generations, but a worthy addition to the ranks of the paternally influenced is Ben Watt, the instrumentally inclined half of EBTG.

Their latest single, Come On Home, and indeed the album from which it comes, Baby The Stars Shine Bright, are a throwback to the techniques of his pa, orchestral arranger Tommy Watt.

Throughout the LP, lush string sections and horn parts are used to create a grand ballad style that wouldn't sound out of place wrapped around the smarmy vocal chords of Tony Bennett or Shirley Bassey; vaguely Vegas, slightly Sixties (circa Dusty Springfield or the Walker Brothers) and altogether a voyage into unknown territory for both band and fans.

"I had a very definite idea how I wanted the songs to sound," said Ben Watt. "The main thing was that we wanted a really big sound, so we got in Mike Hedges. Because he's a really big bloke. He's six foot five or so.

"Actually, Robin Millar recommended him. He had that maverick streak, that enthusiasm, that we needed.

"So, anyway, we recorded it at Abbey Road, in the old Beatles studio there, number two. We originally wanted to do it all completely live but we couldn't afford it; it kept going wrong and we didn't have the money to hire the musicians for very long, so we did it in two halves.

"First, we put the standard band down; bass, drums, guitar and piano. We recorded them in a very old-fashioned way: a stereo pair of mikes over the drum kit and one in the bass drum, then one mike about 25 feet away picking up anything else that decided to go down it. We were all playing in the same room together, so the sound was swimming about and going down everybody else's mikes but that didn't matter.

"Robert Peters, our drummer, was using his Slingerland kit, which is an old American Jazz kit. Mickey Harris, our bassist, was using an Ampeg Portaflex, the little 1 x 15" combo; we managed to pick up a good one of those which gives off a good warm studio sound. I like bass when it starts floating around the room a bit and getting into other people's mikes. I'm not a big fan of DI'd bass. Cara Tivey, our piano player, used a Steinway which we got in.

"My guitar was a Fender Jaguar which I played through an old Fender Bandmaster amp. That was recorded completely dry, because there's no reverb on a Bandmaster, then later treated with a massive detuned reverb from a Lexicon and eq'd to fatten it up even more, so that's how we got that huge fat guitar sound that sits underneath the track.

"We were quite painstaking, we went for it again and again until we were certain that that was the one. I think we got Come On Home in eight or nine, which was pretty good. One of the other tracks, Cross My Heart, took 54 takes of the backing track before we were happy with it.

"So we ended up with the basic backing track, on top of which we had to put the strings and brass and so on. I'd written out all the parts beforehand at home, and then got in Nick Ingman, who is a professional arranger, to book the musicians, check over my arrangements, and generally act as my guardian angel. Surprisingly, only about 10 percent of the stuff needed changes, which I was amazed at because I hadn't had any previous experience at all. Maybe it's in the blood or something. The main problem was that I'd taken instruments outside their ranges, like I'd taken trumpets too high or whatever.

"The string section — 18-piece on Come on Home — was led by Gavyn Wright, who has a pick-up string section who are very good indeed. Almost every track was one or two takes, absolutely perfectly.

"We had the room split with screens, and we had the strings in one half of the room and the horns and brass in the other. The violins, violas and cellos were all close-miked as groups and then there were stereo ambient mikes over the lot. That was pretty standard string miking, and was in fact set up by John Kurlander, one of Abbey Road's top orchestral engineers. Obviously Mike could have done it himself, but I thought it might be nice to get a real expert in.

"The brass were pretty standard as well, in fact we miked them simply in stereo from above, no close miking at all. This did cause us a few problems; one track on the album, Careless, has a break where the brass comes in and all you hear are the flugels, which is a shame as there's a really nice French horn part behind them. But that's the price you pay for spontaneity, and the sound overall was wonderful so we kept it.

"The horns and brass absolutely piled down the string mikes of course, even with the screens, but you can't help that and it doesn't really matter to the overall sound.

"A lot of our judgement was based on whether we were thrilled by it or not, which was a very new way of working for us. Robin Millar, our previous producer, has always been painstaking and this was very much a matter of feel, just keeping the takes that had the best feel to them.

"In a way that was a by product of having very definite time limits; there was no question of spending four or five hours in there running it through. We knew that they could all play it in 15 minutes flat and anyway we could only afford to have them for two hours, so we were forced to just do it and make the best of it.

"The strings were in and out in five sessions — for the whole LP. And in fact it only took five weeks overall to record and mix, which is very fast indeed.

"We mixed at Abbey Road as well, which we weren't completely sure about because of the old monitors there, a pair of really ancient JBLs which they've now changed. But as it happened, I decided that we ought to mix the whole thing on hi fi speakers, so we did it all on a pair of Yamaha NS10s. I thought that if we could make it sound massive on those, we wouldn't have to worry about what it would sound like on the big ones. And I think it worked.

"If you listen to something like the Walker Brothers' The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore on a pair of big Urei monitors some of the frequencies on there will blow your ears off, it's just so huge. I'm a sucker for that sort of operatic melodrama in Pop so that was what we aimed for, and it was very different from anything we'd done before. It was nice to have the resources to be able to do it, and also Tracey's voce has matured sufficiently to be able to handle that sort of backing.

"The way we got that huge effect was to tell Mike to be as reckless as he wanted with the eq and the reverb. If we said we wanted a bit more bottom end on something, he'd put on 18dB instead of four and it would sound great because of the style of song it was. When I said I wanted a long reverb, it would be 10 seconds rather than three; reverb from the chorus would still be going through half the middle eight. Again, I think it works, it gives what you might call a 'tidal' effect.

"One of the reasons we used Abbey Road was because of the effects; they have an old Altec compressor and some Pultec eqs and we got in the new SSL Pultec sound alikes for the desk; that is the only way you can get that real rich bottom end and the spread of sound to give the power in the low end without using synths or anything — there are none on the record at all.

"I've got this old Bush radio that used to belong to my grandmother, and the single sounds great through that — the bottom end sounds marvellous through valves!"