"In order to go forward into the digital era I feel strongly that there is a case for going back to the disciplines of four and eight track recording."

Pip Williams addresses the Industry. It's end-of-term time 1984 and in the cosy confines of his manager's Curzon Street offices Pip Williams has started his Christmas a little early with a can or two of Pilsner lager. He blinks behind his shades, chuckles through his beard and warns me that he'll quite happily 'bunny on for hours' if I don't stop him. Stop him? I don't see the point. When a man of Williams' wealth of experience chooses to spill a few beans and share a few notions there's nothing much else to do except break out the batteries and keep the fresh cassettes coming. Especially when he's talking digital.

"I was sold the very first time I heard a digital playback. I was in Frank Farian's studio in Frankfurt and he had a 32 track 3M and a brand new Studer A800. The 3M system had only just been installed and we were expecting problems with it so I suggested we do a rough take of a backing track onto both machines. When we compared them afterwards I couldn't believe it. The difference in quality was like listening to a master and then a cassette copy! Normally you accept what you get back off tape when you're using an MCI or a Soundcraft or a Studer tape recorder. After all, they're the best and you never doubt them. But when you get the chance to do an A and B comparison with a digital machine you suddenly realise just how much you lose! From then on I decided I'd try wherever possible to work with acts who would benefit from digital and CD sound. And who will also be up for using real instruments. Because in my experience — and I've now built up an extensive collection of CD albums — electronic sounds don't fare half so well on compact as do the real thing. You can get some wonderful live room settings with a Lexicon 224X but on digital and CD an acoustic guitar recorded dry and then treated with the Lexicon doesn't sound anything like as dynamic as it would do if it was played in a reasonably tiled live room with a mike three feet away. Which to all intents and purposes has the same reverb time as the Lexicon."

"That whole area of natural sound and perspective is something I really want to experiment with. Most record company A&R people are reluctant to take the risk though. They seem to feel that it will cost them a quarter of million pounds to do a digital album. Even though in terms of sound quality alone that record will be vastly superior. Yet at the same time they're quite prepared to let groups go into studios with half finished songs and half finished arrangements and spend months and months making an album which is unlikely ever to recoup its recording costs.

"So when I talk about going back to the disciplines of four and eight track recordings I certainly don't mean old-fashioned sounds and old-fashioned miking techniques — although I might add that I've been working with a couple of young groups recently like Jimmy The Hoover and a new band from Middlesborough called Raid the North who have been blown away by what are actually very old engineering tricks, but which they thought were radically new and exciting.

"I mean getting back into extensive pre-production in a rehearsal studio which costs £50 a day rather than a recording studio which costs a £1,000 a day. Making sure the rhythm section can play the song through from beginning to end and planning all the overdubs as much as possible before you start recording. Even going so far as to score out the strings and have them played by a small orchestra rather than spend days and days banking up keyboards to get the same effect. That way you can spend all your money on the sounds and not on sifting the ideas."

Pip Williams has a tendency to wax authoritative given half a chance. And never more so than when he turns his attention to digital recording and the Compact disc. His commitment to the technological future is total. And over the last couple of years, he has won international industry acclaim to go with well over a decade's worth of gold, silver, and platinum discs which adorn his official wall. Admittedly these latest plaudits came for doing albums like Ring Of Changes and Victims Of Circumstances, Long Distance Voyager and The Present by bands like Barclay James Harvest and The Moody Blues who are so unhip here that their continuingly phenomenal success (and startling sales figures) in Europe and North America hardly merit the attention of the British media.

But does that make Pip Williams any the less proud of his achievements? Of course it doesn't. He knows that he's not Flavour of the Month — and he claims he has never sought to be either — preferring to be known as a man who can do most things well and maintaining that if a producer is sufficiently experienced in all aspects of recording then no style of music should ever prove a problem to him.

So he's Jack of all trades? Well, maybe. But a Master of some of them for sure. Quality of workmanship and not quirkiness of designs is what we're on about here. Don't forget that we're talking to a man who cleaned up as a Soul session guitar player in the late Sixties ("I was the only man in London who could really play bottleneck and read"), chucked it all in to read for a university degree in Harmony and Counterpoint before studying film scoring techniques under the legendary Hollywood music editor Irma E Levin.

Then came the Seventies and with them Pip Williams' name was associated with a string of more than substantial chart successes both at home and abroad. First as an arranger and then as a producer in his own right. With acts as diverse as Bloodstone and the Bay City Rollers. Sweet, Mud and Geordie (featuring one Brian 'AC/DC' Johnson). Kiki Dee and Catherine Howe, Leo Sayer and Graham Bonnet before he joined Rainbow. And that's only skimming the surface and ignoring the recent blockbusters with Barclay James and the Moodies. It's also forgetting about Status Quo entirely, the boogie band close to Lady Di's heart with whom Pip Williams recorded three classic albums: Rockin' All Over The World, Can't Stand The Heat and Whatever You Want before teaming up with them again in 1984 to re-cut Dion and the Belmonts' rousing The Wanderer.

"People often wonder why I work with bands like the Moodies or the Barclays or even the Quo, bands which have been around for years and years and aren't doing anything particularly new or innovative. Apart from the fact that my tastes naturally veer towards well-made, 'musical' Rock, I also like the challenge of working with artists who have set very high standards in the past and whose more recent albums haven't quite gelled properly. I like the chance to try to pull a group back together again when maybe they've grown a little stale.

"As for The Wanderer — I wanted to do that with Quo six years ago. And I only agreed to work with them again on condition that we have a go at it. We did Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch at the same time. I set the band up in the big live room at RAK with the kit at one end and a bass rig the size of a house, the piano and two guitars all going full bore. Surprisingly enough the spill was negligible. After we'd spent all day on Cadillac Ranch I got them to bash out a quick verson of The Wanderer so we could have something to work to in the morning. I said 'Don't bother with an arrangement. You know the chords — just do it the way Quo would do it!' Would you believe it took us the next day and a half to get another take which had the feel of that first rough one! But that's one of the things with Quo. The time isn't taken up with the niceties. They're the only act I'm not in the control room for. I'm always on the studio floor with a guitar round my neck and I sing the guide vocals too because those little words of encouragement shouted down the mike as they're playing work wonders with them. Francis and Rick are a great rhythm machine but you have to warm them up. It's like waiting for a London bus to come along. You do take after take and then something magical happens and even as they're playing it they all know they've got it right."

Unashamedly old-school perhaps, but Status Quo's version of The Wanderer had Hit Record stamped all over it from the beginning. The same could be said of Scots singer Jim Diamond who followed up his 1982 smash I Won't Let You Down under the PhD moniker with another haunting ballad I Should Have Known Better. Which went from nowhere to Number One in little more than three weeks during November of last year. That was another Pip Williams production. Or at least half of it was.

"Let's just say I couldn't enjoy the success of that record as much as I might have wanted, because I was unhappy with the mix. But I would hasten to add that I can take no credit for its success either because it's such a great song. Even the demo would have been a hit — it was that good. And Jim Diamond is a great singer who has worked his arse off to get where he is now. It was his voice which commanded the attention. "

It seems that, having marshalled the talents of musicians like former Free and Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke, legendary organist and bon viveur Zoot Money, bass player Jon McKenzie and the enigmatically named Wix on synthesizers, Pip Williams had built up a tentative and sensitive backing track which threw Diamond's anguished vocal into high relief. An old-fashioned mood to fit an old-fashioned song.

Unfortunately Diamond's record company didn't see it quite that way and recruited Eric Thorngren to remix both single and the rest of the album. Behind Williams' back. And with triggered Linn drums and added electronic effects. The whole affair left a bad taste in his mouth.

"I do believe that the first representation of a track should be what the original producer had in mind. And nobody is better qualified to do the first remix if the A&R man is capable of explaining exactly what it is he wants. Don't get me wrong. I have no axe to grind with Eric. Other mixes on the album are extremely good. And I respect the opinion of the record company too if they feel they got the better record. But I disagree. I think they lost the charm and some of the magic of the original and with the drums so far upfront I think the track comes over too hard and lumpy.

"This re-mix business has become too much of a good thing recently. And I know other producers who feel the same way. In dance music it has a valid place. I still play Arif Mardin's mix of Scritti's Wood Beez and it blows me away. I'm doing an album with Jimmy The Hoover at the moment for MCA and if they felt Arif or Arthur Baker or Jellybean Benitez should mix any of it I would be hugely flattered. Because they go to discos all the time and they know what breakdancers want to hear. But when it comes to more introspective styles of Pop music, where sensitivity is called for in the arrangements to really put that song across, and the producer and the musicians have planned and routined certain aspects of the record, then you can't dismiss all that out of hand simply to give the song a dancebeat, can you?"