In the beginning there was a Teac 3340 tape machine. One of the original open-reel multi tracks available for the home recording market. Dave Goodman had one of the first in the country, and with it he helped ring changes in popular music which still reverberate today, echoing down the years. That Teac still sits there in the corner of his basement, oddly archaic beside the Yamaha computer and the digital drum machine, bearing silent witness to everything Dave Goodman has to say.

Ten years ago next month Dave Goodman took that four tracker down to a dingy little rehearsal room in London's Denmark Street and immortalised on quarter inch, kicking and screaming, one of the most exciting rock bands that ever trod boards or was pressed on to plastic. The Sex Pistols was their name and with them Dave Goodman wrote himself a small chapter in the Rock'n'Roll history books. And found himself set up for life as King of the Garage Bands and Tyrant of Trash Rock.

Already, of course, I can hear those with the longest memories among IM's most knowledgeable readers snorting with indignation. And yes, it's true. As any fool knows it was Chris Thomas who produced 'Anarchy In The UK', 'God Save The Queen', 'Pretty Vacant' and the rest of that 'Bollocks'. But the fact of the matter is that Goodman was there first, months ahead, laying the groundwork and giving the Rotten crew the early studio experience without which they would have got nowhere. So Goodman might have been rowed out at the last minute because the powers-that-be at EMI didn't feel he knew how to cut a good single. But as any self-respecting aficionado of British punk will tell you, Goodman produced 'Spunk' — the 'official' Pistols' bootleg album — which includes different titled versions of 'Anarchy', 'Pretty Vacant' and 'Submission' all of which more properly captured the spirit of that anarchic age and its sheer raw energy than anything EMI or Virgin ever released.

"A lot of people think that 'Spunk' is a lot better than 'Never Mind The Bollocks', which is very gratifying even though my name is down as P. Dickerson on the label. I don't know to this day who bootlegged it. Only Malcolm McLaren and me had copies of the tape and he says it wasn't him. But it's sold all round the world although I've never seen any money from it."

Since then he's earned his bread and butter as the oil rag behind a whole generation of post-punk garage bands with weird and wonderful names like The Cannibals, The Huns, The Jackals, Turkey Bones and The Wild Dogs, The Sid Presley Experience, Dave Goodman seems to prefer working in small studios to immersing himself in state of the art 24 track establishments favoured by today's pop pacemakers. This is partly because the majority of his clients, true to the garage band ethos, can't afford massive studio bills and wouldn't want to sound like Wham even if they could. But listening to him speak, squatting on the floor in the basement music room of his South London flat, you get the distinct impression that Dave Goodman suffers from a similar perverse integrity. And a Luddite love of Sixties beat groups and their practices.

"The frantic feel is so important. Pop music to strict tempo doesn't leave any room for natural expression. I equate music with the rhythm of walking. The bass drum and the snare are like the two feet stepping and it's what happens in between which dictates the feel. A drum pattern played by a human being will always feel more natural than a programmed one. There's no surprise in programmed music. You know exactly when the next beat is coming.

"It's certainly true of classical music. I can actually score for orchestras and sometimes, just to keep me fluent, I get some Brahms manuscripts out of the library and program them into the computer. It's not until you put in all the instructions the composer gave the musicians that the music sounds human. That's why orchestras have conductors, they feel the tension and build it up and bring it down by altering the speed.

"That's what garage music does. If a song speeds up or goes out of time it doesn't necessarily hurt. A good example is a track on the Nuggets album 'Psychotic Reaction' by the Count Five. There's a two bar passage where the whole band falls apart. It had to be a mistake at the time but they kept it because the rest of the track was ok. Now I hear bands trying to copy that mistake exactly...

"What has always intrigued me about the early Beatles records, for instance, is just how much louder all the instruments sound than anything you get nowadays. Of course, I've read the George Martin book, and a lot of the drums were just one mike over the kit and one on the bass drum, that old technique. The amp's not particularly close miked and not particularly loud either. But it sounds just so much louder and stranger. I've always been struggling to get that sort of sound. Partly, I think it was down to the amount of signal you could physically get on to a band of tape. It's easier to saturate a 1" eight track tape and get it to hold the bulk of the signal without breaking up. But my other theory is that in the old days all the amps, the studio Quad amps and the Vox guitar amps, they all had push-pull valve output circuits, with two valves working against one another. If you put a sine wave through an amp like that, as you turn it up the push-pull circuitry has the effect of splitting the frequencies up and peaking all the harmonics. Look at it on an oscilloscope and you'll see it behaves exactly like an Aural Exciter."

Back in that blisteringly hot summer of 1976 however, Dave Goodman wasn't worrying about such technicalities. He had his Teac 3340 and an Allen and Heath 16-2 PA mixer wired up in Steve Jones' Denmark Street bedroom with a multicore trailing down to the rehearsal room a floor below.

He was busy recording the drums, bass and guitar straight on to stereo and then using the remaining two tracks for overdubs and vocals. With no other effects available except a small phase pedal and a bit of tape echo. He'd already spent a good couple of months sorting their live sound out as a result of a chance booking as a PA engineer at an early Nashville date. The band had instantly impressed him by their sheer cheek and by the fact that, as a gigging musician himself, Goodman sensed that there was something musically important struggling to get out of the on-stage chaos. Similarly he instantly ingratiated himself with the band by providing them, for the first time in their short career with a coherent foldback. He soon became their regular sound engineer but was only invited to record them after an initial demo session with Chris Spedding at Majestic in Clapham turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

"I told Malcolm I could do better on my four track and he took me at my word. It wasn't exactly easy. To begin with Malcolm insisted that live the band should be extremely loud. So Steve and Glen Matlock were turned full up so that was their 'sound' and what had to be down on tape. Steve's gear then was a Les Paul and a Fender twin which wound all the way up was pretty loud! So we had problems from the outset. You know how it goes. You get a band in studio pounding away and it feels great to them. But once you listen back in the control room it sounds weedy and suppressed because you can't monitor at the volume they played it. Well, I'd learned at college that the best way to reproduce a sound on the monitors was to listen to it at the same volume level the mike sees it at. Then it'll sound the same. So you move the mike away from the amp until you get the relative levels right. But then you pick up all the ambience, don't you? I tried all sorts of things but ended up miking the amp fairly close with a Shure Unidyne which could really handle a full wack of air pressure against its diaphragm. I put a flightcase in front of the amp so that there was a nice hard surface deflecting the sound and another mike about ten feet away facing the flightcase to catch the deflection. The positioning was quite critical, a few inches one way or another could throw the whole lot out of phase. But when it was right I'd split those two signals in the mix and the guitar would sound really big.

"Once I got Steve into the idea of overdubs the music began to come out of the band. Which surprised the record companies because those tapes showed that the band could play which wasn't always apparent from the gigs. And to this day I think Malcolm still believes they should have been the album. As it was I went round with him to the early record company meetings as the prospective producer."

And Dave Goodman had his shot at it too. EMI put the Pistols into Wessex Studios for a fortnight with Tim Friese Green engineering and the resultant versions of 'Anarchy', 'Substitute', 'No Lip', 'Stepping Stone', 'What You Gonna Do Bout It', 'No Fun' and 'Wanna Be Me' can be heard on the 'Rock'n'Roll Swindle' soundtrack album. EMI rejected Goodman's 'Anarchy' because the vocal was too hoarse and Chris Thomas stepped in to pick up the pieces.

"At the time he was quoted as saying my demos were releasable. If I'm honest I think some of the sounds on his 'Never Mind The Bollocks' were better. But the arrangements and structures were all things I'd worked out with Steve and musically it wasn't as good because Glen soon left the band and Steve had to do a lot of the bass parts since Sid Vicious couldn't play at all. They were a bit dumdumdumdum rather than the old walking lines which were really good. I wasn't too proud to go back and work some more with them but at the time I thought 'Traitors'."

But this was the late Seventies, remember, at the beginning of the independent label boom, and Goodman was already in there signing up Punk and New Wave bands like Eater, The Cash Pussies and The Users to his own company The Label, and selling records by the lorry load. It wasn't to last but at least Goodman came out of the era with his health and his sanity roughly intact. Which is sadly more than can be said for many of his contemporaries. Since then he has concentrated on the garage scene although he has enjoyed the odd hit single in the UK with things like The Mobiles' 'Drowning In Berlin' and 'Will He Kiss Me Tonight' by, of all people, Lena Zavaroni.

"A friend of mine runs a promotion company which was hired to work on Lena. But he said there wasn't a hope unless Lena was made a little more contemporary and called herself Lena and the Love Bugs. They put me forward as a Punk producer and we did a couple of Dolly Mixtures songs in Phil Spector style. It sounded really big even though we did it in a cheap sixteen track in Southall and there were only three of us on it: me, a drummer and a guy who programmed the string synthesizer. Lena herself was really great. Her vocal harmonies were spot on and we triple tracked her so she sounded really Sixties. The record was beginning to happen too, because Lena was featuring it on her TV show. Then the News Of The World rang up and told her manager, who's an old show-biz type, that not only had I worked with the Sex Pistols, but I'd been a member of the Moors Murderers too. It wasn't true but it didn't stop them withdrawing the record in case it would spoil Lena's family image!"