Behind the platinum discs that have transformed indie rock into a multi-million pound industry is producer Stephen Street. Currently working on the new Blur album at Maison Rouge studios, he talks to Pat Reid about fame, success, Morrissey and the DA88.

"I'm doing the new Blur album," says Stephen Street in a matter-of-fact tone. "As you can imagine, there's a certain amount of pressure, following Parklife. It's still in the top five as we speak..."

Street's production of the bestselling, award-winning Parklife may sound like something of an achievement — it is, after all, the album which tied with Pink Floyd's Division Bell as EMI's UK smash hit of 1994, an unprecedented critical and commercial success for these hitherto underachievers. But a glance at the weekly album charts tops even this. Sure, Parklife's in there, but so are both of the albums Street produced for The Cranberries. A new Smiths compilation featuring much of his work is also riding high; a clutch of reissued Smiths classics crop up further down. Bright-eyed chart newcomers Sleeper also benefited from a Street remix. In short, the chart is absolutely infested with Stephen Street's output. And having helped steer indie rock from the underground to the mass market, Street's first impulse is to get back to work. He has no illusions; having had a run of good fortune, he reckons he's due for a couple of flops. However, his fourth album with Blur is already looking good.

"We've done 15 tracks so far, so they're as prolific and as varied as ever. In as much as Parklife varied between waltzes, sub-disco and some punk things, Blur can turn their hand to anything. It's always been their great strength."

Recording at Maison Rouge, just round the corner from Chelsea football ground, the Street/Blur partnership seems set for further glories. It's ironic that four years ago, Street was virtually alone in recognising the band's potential.

"I always had faith in them," he comments. "I always thought Graham was a great guitar player, Damon's got incredible ideas for the construction of songs, and so on. I saw a strength that I hadn't really seen since I'd worked with The Smiths. And that was before they had the real low period — Suede came along, and everyone was saying Blur had had it. A lesser band would have gone under. They've got a lot of determination, and they are without a doubt the hardest working band I've ever worked with."

Although he has a reputation as a guitar band's producer, Street has worked with a range of individual and unconventional vocalists, from Blur's Damon Albarn to Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries. Then, of course, there's Morrissey, for whom Street produced and co-wrote 1988's number one album Viva Hate. How does he deal with such artists, both technically and temperamentally?

"An interesting voice is the main thing that gets me drawn into a project. If I haven't worked with the singer before, I will try a few mics. I don't presume straight away that the mic I always use is the right mic. Once you've found that, then generally you can safely say that's the mic for you to use for the rest of the session, hopefully. The way I work with most singers, is to let them bash out a track all the way through, take four or five takes, and comp up the best of those takes. You might have a few little black spots in the song, and you just have to concentrate on dropping in on that particular line. And then it's on to the backing vocals. With Dolores and Blur there's lots of backing vocals, whereas with The Smiths and Morrissey, there was less. Once you had the lead vocal down, apart from a little bit of double tracking here and there and perhaps an alternate melody line, there wasn't much else to do vocally, on Smiths stuff.

"Blur, on the other hand, with Damon and Graham being very good at supplying backing vocals, it's a case of them working on their harmony ideas and so on. And it's the same with Dolores; she'll get the lead vocal down and then start experimenting. My job is to say 'that's going great', or, 'that's not so good', and just help them through forming that background of sound with their voices."

And what mics does he use?

"I tend to use the trusty old (Neumann) U87. I like the 47 as well, I often use that on vocals. I sometimes use a (AKG) 414, but for some reason it doesn't seem to work for me so much. There's been a couple of times when we're going for a lo-fi type of thing, when we'd get away with using a (Shure) 58 hand held mic, but in general I tend to use the 87 and the 47."

On a typical Blur track, if there's any such thing, Stephen might choose to double track Damon's vocal, leaving it dry and naturally chorused with itself.

"With a little bit of reverb, a little bit of slapback — delay — and sometimes, if the track can take it, a bit of harmoniser on the vocal. Sometimes, on backing vocals I might put a bit of stereo chorus on, to give it a bit more stereo spread. Other times I'll use a very close delay, if it's a track where you don't want the voice to be so lush, a bit more in yer face."

How would the producer compare and contrast the voices of Irish siren Dolores and faux-cockney Damon?

"Damon knows how to project and push his voice. If you listen to the first album, Leisure, it was very soft, very light and double-tracked all the time, and slightly hazy, whereas now he's got a bit more grit to his voice. It's much like how Bowie managed to learn how to use his voice in different ways. Damon's learning that now as well.

"Dolores is great. She needs to warm up though, as much as anybody else does. She's not always note-perfect. Sometimes I say, 'that note sounds a little bit strange', and she says, 'it's meant to be bending between those two notes' — it's that Gaelic thing. And sometimes she's right. Sometimes I have to say, 'No, it's bent too far, let's get it more on the button'. But she's got a great voice. When she's in a good mood, and singing well, she's really very, very talented."

"I'd rather have a happy band that are not getting uptight and too tense, by doing the same backing track all day long because it isn't quite perfect"

Moving from vocalists to drummers, Street has said in the past that he always pays special attention to recording live drums, because the public has become so accustomed to metronomic precision. He explains:

"About 80% of what you hear in the charts is programmed or heavily doctored drums, where the drums have been cut around or edited in some form or another. I listen to some records that I really love, and if I listen purely to the drums, I can tell there's little fluffs, but it never got in the way of my enjoyment of the song. I've taken exactly that approach with Blur on Parklife, and on The Cranberries albums. If you listen to the drum tracks really, really closely you'll notice a slightly early snare, a slightly late bass drum. But life's too short to get hung up about things like that, and I'd rather get on with the track. By the time you've done a few overdubs and so on, those things have disappeared again, you don't really notice them. I'd rather have a happy band that are not getting uptight and too tense, by doing the same backing track all day long in the studio, because it isn't quite perfect."

Having said that, Street is interested in adopting the process of recording drums digitally, and editing together the best parts of given tracks.

"I can see that would be useful for me, 'cos I could have a really good live drum take, but if there was a serious cock-up in bar four of the first verse, I could copy across the equivalent part in verse two. That would be a very useful production tool."

So how does Stephen rate the drummers of Blur and The Cranberries respectively?

"Dave's very supportive. He doesn't overplay, you can always call him to do something interesting. Feargal from The Cranberries thinks very hard about the part he's playing. He's not the most technically minded of drummers, in the sense of being bang-on accurate, but as far as imagination and thinking of the overall picture goes, he's very, very good."

And what of that chiming Rickenbacker that characterised the Smiths' mid-80s output, and won Street his reputation as a guitar expert? How does his classic work with Johnny Marr compare to more recent recordings with Blur's Graham Coxon?

"It's a very close call between Johnny Marr and Graham," says Stephen after some consideration. "Johnny is a great rhythm player with a fantastic touch, but Graham is a little bit more experimental with sounds, and I think for me, that just about puts him in pole position. The way he uses vibrato from his pedal, the way he uses vibrato with his fingers, he bends notes up and down, it's beautiful to watch him."

As a successful songwriter in his own right, having co-written Morrissey's biggest solo hits, does Street ever feel the urge to interfere with the structures of the songs he works on?

"What I'm there for, is to say, 'can we try something slightly different', if it's just verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I don't feel I have to put my mark on it if it's perfect. The fact that I used to write songs does mean that bands give you the benefit of the doubt, and at least try your suggestion."

Well known for his work with new bands like Marion and Kingmaker, Street is, however, not averse to repeat engagements, working extensively with major artists. He's into his fourth album with Blur, having done three with The Smiths, along with Morrissey's debut solo album, and most of the hit singles that made up the Bona Drag compilation. In addition, there have been two hugely successful collaborations with The Cranberries.

"I like to think when a band's working with me I become a friend," he says. "I don't want them to be too uptight in the studio. I want them to be comfortable, productive, creative."

Street recently scooped a prestigious Q Magazine award for best producer (old chum Morrissey got Best Songwriter), and although he missed out on a well-deserved Brit Award, Blur swept the boards with an unprecedented four awards. It was a personal triumph, and a very public vindication of a style of music which many had given up for dead.

"Alternative is no longer small." he states firmly. "It's actually taken the success of two alternative American bands to show that, but it's now come back over here. When Nirvana and REM broke big in America it proved that just because you were alternative, you didn't have to be in a little ghetto as far as record sales were concerned. With REM — who I was supporting, because when I was working with The Smiths they were like our American counterpart — I thought it was great, about time it happened.

"I think it's fantastic that the really cool bands that are making it big are alternative, and the bands that were big before like U2 are trying to sound more alternative. It's great, it's healthy. The music scene in this country for the last two years has been very strong."

Interestingly enough, Street thinks that the catalyst for the UK alternative scene was Suede, a band he's long admired. Of course the media have long since stoked up a full-scale feud between Damon and Suede's Brett Anderson, picking up on the fact that Damon's girlfriend Justine (from recent album chart-toppers Elastica) used to go out with Brett, when she was a member of Suede. At any rate, the feud hasn't touched Stephen.

"I think Suede helped, initially," he says. "I know their second album didn't get such a great reception as the first, but that was good, it gave them a big kick up the arse. And then Blur came back and said, 'We're gonna do better than these guys'. It started coming away from America, and coming back over here..."