Chris Maillard finds The Cars now driving in automatic

In 1979, while the relics of Punk were still rocketing around the charts, the Yanks returned to show they could still produce good Pop bands — Blondie, The Knack and Talking Heads were three, and another classic example of that particular boom were the Cars.

They never attained the short-lived heights of Blondie or the pseudy appeal of David Byrne's intellectual bop, but since the singles that broke them in the UK — My Best Friend's Girl and Just What I Needed — their disappearance from the public eye here has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in status Stateside.

In other words, they are now one of the biggest bands the other side of the Atlantic. Foreigner, Journey, REO Speedwagon and their ilk may continue in their Rock'n'Roll ruts, but The Cars have found a niche that marries the hit parade's hooks with the underground's undercurrents.

Their main man and songwriter is the tall and spiny Ric Ocasek, a man who treats music as an exercise in intellectual stimulation and gives that edge of difference that stops them from becoming yet another straight-line Pop outfit like millions of others. But behind him stand a quartet of very capable musicians who add their own touches to make the Cars sound what it is.

I got involved with the Cars' motion when they came to London just after the release of the Heartbeat City album, their fifth, and indulged in a little talk about the making of said artefact. Present (at the Savoy Hotel, no less, as befits their status as a mega buck band) were the backbone of the band, bassist and drummer Ben Orr and David Robinson. Surely, boys, with your American success it must be ages since you were last in England?

"Well, no, actually," intoned David lugubriously. "We were here for ages recently. This is where we made the album, in fact."

Why choose London?

"We didn't actually. Robert John "Mutt" Lange, our producer, wanted to use Battery Studios over here, because he likes the desk and so everybody came over for about seven months or thereabouts. We weren't all over at the same time, but most of the band were here at any given time."

What effect did his production have on the Cars' sound, then?

"Lots. For a start, there's loads of Fairlight on this album. All the keyboards, all the drums and quite a few other things are Fairlight."

"All the keyboards, all the drums and quite a few other things are Fairlight"

Why?

"It just gives a much better, cleaner, more controllable sound. The keyboards, actually, didn't make that much difference — Greg (Hawkes, keyboard player) likes, quite obviously synthesizer sounds, and those sort of sounds were put on the Fairlight for the sake of convenience and flexibility rather than because of any fantastic sampling techniques we wanted to try.

"The drums, mind you, were quite unusual in that every drum beat on the whole thing is Fairlight. I didn't actually get in with my sticks and play the rhythms at all."

Sounds like voluntary redundancy to me.

"Oh, not at all. For a start it's all my sounds — I spent ages in the studio with my old Slingerland kit and my Ludwig steel shell snare just bashing away one drum at a time and sampling the sounds. Secondly, I programmed all the rhythms myself, and that, I think, is where my experience as a drummer came in handy."

It doesn't sound particularly complicated to me.

"Yes, that's absolutely true. And that's the whole idea, you see; it isn't anything complicated but at the same time it's a lot of little fills and pushes and frills that a drummer would do but a drum machine programme wouldn't. It doesn't sound like a machine playing; it sounds like me, and I made sure that everything that is on the album I can play live.

"I did start with a drum machine pattern, actually. We did the whole thing in reverse for this LP, in that we put guitar, vocals and keyboards down first and then the drums and bass. But to keep everything in time we laid down a very simple Linndrum beat which I based my patterns around later on."

So if it's all so natural and true-to-life, why use the Fairlight at all?

"It just sounds fantastic... every drum sound on the whole album is clean and crisp, just the right attack, everything... it's a great sound. But it's still me. I can listen to it and not think 'oh, that's not me playing'; to all intents and purposes it is me sitting there and bashing it out, but more consistently and with a better sound than I could ever achieve normally."

"The thing about the Precision bass is that it really sounds like a bass guitar"

So the drum half of the Cars' engine opts for the synthetic approach. What about the bassist Ben?

"I just seemed to spend all my time staying out of the way of the synthesizers."

Surely you were getting involved in low-octave high-tech yourself? For instance, what was the masterpiece of 21st century bass building you used — was it headless? Neckless? Carbon graphite? Epoxy resin? Cyanoacrylate?

"No, none of these. It was a Fender Precision. Absolutely standard, nothing done to it at all. Not a very old one, either, just one that we hired in over here. Somehow it was just exactly the right sound to slot in to the mix. We tried about five or so, and this was the best."

You must have been looking for a pretty exact sound.

"Oh yes, or rather Mutt was. The thing about the P-bass is that it really sounds like a bass guitar, you know, strings, fingers, all that sort of thing. A lot of the newer basses sound a bit artificial, synthetic or whatever, and that just blends in with all the low end of the synthesizers.

"To stand out from all that you've got to play really simply, and as punchy as possible. It just gives a song that push, that lift. Synths are all very well, but a real rhythm section just sort of defines a song and makes it more human."

What about effects? Does the one-man-one-bass approach go that far?

"Pretty much, yeah. I used to use an octaver, about the time of Moving in Stereo (from the first LP) and I tried Mutron auto-wah which seemed alright, but in general I haven't dabbled that much in effects. The album's got a little doubling on the bass, to thicken the sound up, but not much more."

It's just what the Cars needed — to coin a phrase — and indeed it's all they needed to produce five massively successful albums. They should be touring early this year — let's see if the UK falls for the simple but powerful motor of the Cars' driving beat...