It's Thursday morning 10am and we're off to Alaska. Turn right outside Waterloo Station and there it is, underneath the arches and through a hole in the wall. You'd better hold your nose because the damp is as bad as ever and so the place still smells dodgier than a roadie's armpit after a long loadout. In that respect little has changed since the punk Seventies when Alaska was the home of a clutch of cheap rehearsal studios, an enterprising four-track studio and a rumble every time the railway trains passed overhead. I suppose the rumble must remain, if you listen hard enough through the new surrounding. But it's rare these days that it ever gets to tape, not now that Alaska Studios houses two extremely well-equipped twenty-four-track rooms (courtesy of Soundcraft and Don Larking) and offers the latest facilities at a price hardly higher than you'd expect to pay for a bald sixteen track.

But we're not venturing into the depths of SE1 to do a deal on studio time. We're here to prise out Pat Collier, Alaska's proud owner, studio manager, head engineer, maintenance man and probably a few more things besides if his skeleton staff were allowed a say. We're here to talk to him about a production career that has made his name and his engineering skills a watchword for a certain kind of quality and dependability on the independent scene over the last four or five years, if it hasn't figured his face too often in the Top 30 proper. Until, that is, Walking On Sunshine by Katrina and The Waves brought him overnight success both sides of the Atlantic. "Overnight success!", he chortles, "it took us three years of chiselling away to get that hit. It's a wonderful story. Do you want to hear it?"

And in his characteristically world weary North London drawl Pat Collier told me the saga of the final collapse of Cambridge cult psychedelicists Robyn Hitchcock and The Soft Boys (whose 1981 classic LP 'Black Snake Diamond Role' he had produced on a shoestring for Armageddon Records) and how subsequently guitarist Kimberley Rew had pulled himself up by his B strings to form Katrina and the Waves in 1983, hawk a Collier-recorded demo album round Midem to secure an independent label deal with Attic in Canada which in turn led to The Bangles covering and racing up the US charts with Rew's Powerpop masterpiece Going Down To Liverpool. With little or nothing happening for them in this country following the collapse of IDS, Attic's UK licensees, and the subsequent failure of a Radio One supported singled Que Te Quiero to make the charts, Katrina and the Waves accepted an invitation to do some dates in Canada and went across the Atlantic to find major record companies waving chequebooks under their noses. Capitol made them the sort of offer nobody could refuse... and the rest is history. Well, almost.

"By then Attic had paid for us to record a second album and so Capitol decided they'd take the best ten tracks overall and remix them for the United States. I was scheduled to go over to New York in January 1985 and remix them at the Power Station with Scott Litt. But before that the band and I spent the best part of two weeks all over Christmas in Alaska re-recording every song just to make sure we couldn't actually do them better. In the end I think we used four of the new recordings. I know that Going Down To Liverpool and Red Wine And Whiskey were new. But we couldn't improve on the original version of Walking On Sunshine. Although I say original version I think I must have recorded that song first with Kimberley and then with the Waves probably ten times over the years!

"It makes me laugh when I remember that everything I took over to the States was a copy master. We kept the original multitracks here. Makes you think doesn't it? Recorded at Alaska and then copied for mixing in America!"

At 33 Pat Collier seems to have aged little from when he started out as a tape op on Mantovani sessions in the old Decca studios in West Hampstead in 1973. In many respects he's a walking embodiment of the state of London grassroots Rock over the last decade, while Alaska itself has long been many a Metropolitan movement's spiritual home. As a bass player he shared pub bands like Bazooka Joe and Cafe Racers with soon-to-be-megastars Adam Ant and Mark Knopfler before crowning his musical career signing first to CBS with punk pioneers The Vibrators and then to United Artists with The Boyfriends, one of the first of the ill-fated Powerpop breed. So he may own Alaska and another East London 24 track, Greenhouse Studios, besides, but he certainly doesn't ooze aftershave, smoke cigars and wear Gucci shoes. Far from it in fact. Pat Collier looks every inch the working man: tall and pale, facial features as thin as his fingers, and with the gaunt look of a man suffering from too much responsibility and not enough money to buy himself time to sleep. Of course, I suggested, once the royalties roll in from the Waves' American sales Pat Collier should be able to rest easier in his bed. But it appears he doesn't expect to receive a penny for his pains.

"Most definitely not. And I'm not particularly upset because I think a band that worked as hard for their success as The Waves deserve everything they can get. And anyway, most of that album was mixed from what started off as demo sessions done two or three years ago. When a band comes in to do demos there's no way if you're engineering the session that you can say 'Oh, by the way chaps, I want a couple of points for this'. Besides Kimberley always knew exactly what he wanted right from the beginning so it wasn't as if I had to come up with any real musical ideas. Kimberley's an incredible purist. He has a tremendous grounding in old records and how to play like them. So he'll never doubletrack anything. Simply because it doesn't sound good to him and it was never done on his favourite records anyway. So I've sat in the studio with him for two or three hours to do one rhythm guitar part. And long past the point where I can't tell the difference any longer he's saying 'It's almost getting there, let me do it again'. He's such a stickler for feel and detail. And, to be honest, I prefer to work with people who know exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it. I hate working with synthesizer duos who have half an idea and want the producer to virtually put a band around them."

Collier freely admits to being something of a purist himself. Or rather that he invariably excels himself working in traditional formats with traditional guitar, bass and drum combos. A quick look at some of his more recent clients like The Sound, The Sensible Jerseys, King Kurt, new Mod Contenders Makin Time, the Bluegrassing Skiff Skats and the Blubbery Hellbellies bears that out. If you want a hard bottom end, cymbals that ring rather than sizzle and a thuddy tubby snare sound, more Beatles than Brzezicki, then Pat's the man. And if you want to work quickly... well, just ask The Hellbellies. In the summer Pat Collier recorded and mixed the whole of their Flabbergasted album in two nights and one day!

"We did it in the small studio with about seven of them all playing live in a room that's about eight foot by ten. You couldn't move for mikes. I don't feel I had any real problems with the separation because we put most of the amps in corridors and doorways and we locked the string bass player away in a cupboard. The kit was easy. I just close miked everything except the cymbals with dynamics. I always use condensers on cymbals, but otherwise dynamic microphones are really good if you're worried about separation. I put Sennheiser 421s on the bass drum and the toms and a Shure 57 on the snare. I try to avoid too much gating but I always think that getting to tape is a bit of an iffy business because you can guarantee that once in every two or three songs the gate won't open properly and then you're knackered. And I never commit reverb to tape."

Some may smirk at what is essentially a rudimentary, even, old-fashioned approach to drum sounds in this Lillywhite and Collins influenced age. But proof of this pudding lies in Alex Cooper's exhilarating drumming on tracks from the Katrina and The Waves album. Especially on Going Down To Liverpool with its piledriving tom tom crossbeat and Mexico with the autopanner at work on a hi-hat that is so clearly recorded it's virtually transparent. The perfect Pop drum sound? Ask the Jesus and Mary Chain with whom Pat Collier spent an iconoclastic all night session engineering their first single Upside Down for Creation Records.

"We've always done a lot of work for Creation at Alaska and none of my other engineers were available so I had to do the job. It was a typical Creation job, starting at midnight with a borrowed drumkit with a broken skin which I had to mend by gaffering a piece of hardboard across it. The bass player only had two strings on his bass and the guitar player turned up without an amp but with a cheap digital delay line which he wanted to plug straight into the desk. I thought 'This is going to be a disaster', but it sounded fantastic. Really distorted and fuzzy, but brilliant. So we wacked the thing down with a couple of guitar tracks, the voice, two or three tracks of feedback and everything in sight triggered off the Linn. But when we came to mix it I set up the sounds and what I thought was a good balance for what sounded like a good little pop song. They hated it. They wanted more and more of the feedback guitars until the faders were pushed up to the top and they had me winding up the inputs! We knocked out a quick B side too, which was a version of Syd Barrett's Vegetable Man. That was weird because I did the song with The Soft Boys years ago and Barrett's original only exists on a bootleg recording of a John Peel live session. I feel I bent over backwards to accommodate the band on everything. After I'd put my point of view I sat down and said 'You'll have to tell me what you want because I'm not sure that I understand'. But that hasn't stopped them slagging me off in interviews and complaining about engineers who don't do what they want them to do.

"On the whole I don't think young groups know very much more about working in recording studios now than they did five or six years ago. Of course, there's so much more equipment and knowledge available to them nowadays and most groups seem to own their own digital delay line, for example, whereas a few years ago they cost the earth. Of course, you still get the guys who throw wobblers because the guitars don't sound 'red' or 'demonic' enough for them. But then personally I don't see how anybody can walk into a studio and state categorically that they want a 50 millisecond delay on the vocals and 30 milliseconds on the snare and so on. You have to fiddle around a bit. I can provide them with that sort of thing if that's what they want. Of course there are always a few people who come in trying to psych you out by talking technical gibberish: 'Oh, it sounds like your 18k is out of phase with your inbar tiddle bom'. But I had a very thorough training when I was at Decca so I can handle all that sort of thing."

Both the studios at Alaska are pretty well laid out with Soundcraft desks, sending to permanently installed racks of AMS, Lexicon, and Ursa Major digital reverb units, Bel and Yamaha delay lines, AMS and Eventide Harmonizers as well as the usual selection of gates and compressors. In Studio Two Pat Collier pointed with pride to a new pair of bookshelf-sized Yamaha NS10 speakers, which he had bought in the United States after hearing them in use at the Power Station.

"They're a great size to work on. We used them almost exclusively when we were mixing the Waves album. They're so much better than having big speakers blaring away at you. And better than Auratones which I must admit I find a little misleading. They're okay for transistor radio mixes but these days you do need to cater for a higher fi market than you did when the Auratone became fashionable.

"It's funny really. I went over to New York imagining I'd discover what I'd been doing wrong all these years. And instead I come back with a new set of loudspeakers! It came as a bit of a surprise to find that the engineers and producers over there approach things in exactly the same way as we do. The only immediate difference is that they have American radio to listen to all the time. But it was still very exciting to sit there and listen to tracks which I knew inside out, every sound, every cue and every drop in, take shape into a great album. The Power Station is a very exciting place. They have three studios, each with an identically designed control room, and although most of the outboard gear is hired in they had 24 Pultec valve equalisers normalled between the multitrack machine and the desk. You can punch them in and out of circuit at will. That and the NS10s struck me as very unusual.

"And naturally there's a constant ebb and flow of rock stars through the place. It breathes success and breeds confidence. I'm used to something like that at Alaska because for years now we've always had several records in the independent charts every week of the year. You feel assured that you're doing something right. But I wasn't really prepared for the Power Station where they've always got something in the US Top 30 and people like Bryan Ferry, Bob Clearmountain and Nile Rodgers treat the place like home. While we were there The Power Station were recording their album and the guy from EMI/Capitol brought John Taylor down and introduced us. He said 'Pat Collier'? Of the Vibrators? I went to see you at the Birmingham Odeon in 1977. You were great!' I felt like I'd made it".

Pat Collier... this is your life.