Dave Gregory from XTC

0:12Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Monocle Weekly. I'm Monocle's studio director, Christy O 'Grady, and for today's show, I will be speaking with Dave Gregory, the guitarist of English rock band XTC. Despite enjoying numerous accolades from critics in the 1980s with highly experimental concept albums, the group stopped touring and never managed to translate their artistic success into a financial one. They have, however, retained an incredibly loyal fan base Most notably, music creator Stephen Wilson Who has gone on to produce several remasters of their albums His latest project is a fully immersive, spatial mix of their 1984 album The Big Express I was lucky enough to be invited to a special listening session run by Pitch Black Playback at the L Acoustics 18.1.12 Sound System studio in Highgate, the exact room the mix was designed for.

1:18Dave and I sat down afterwards to discuss his thoughts on the new mix, and he began by telling me the circumstances surrounding the original recording in 1983. We were in a state of limbo, really, with the band, because Andy Partridge had kind of retired from live performance. so the band was off the road and lost a sort of well what little public access that people had to the band was gone and we were up against it the record company wanted a hit record and they wanted us to you know start selling taking it to the bank as they like to put it and so pressure was on for another single we were following an album called mama which we'd recorded the previous year and hadn't sold well and hadn't produced any hit singles and this was a bit of a problem for the record company as you can understand but Andy and Colin between them both came up with plenty of really good new songs there was never a problem with the inspiration behind the music and so we had maybe another 20 or so songs to choose from went to the record company and they booked us into a studio that was not far from where we lived because basically we were spending way too much money on recording costs so we found this little place called Crescent Studios where Andy had worked the previous year in fact we'd all worked on a single there a Christmas single called Thanks for Christmas by the Three Wise Men which came out just before Christmas of 1983 so we knew the studio we knew the people who worked there and the producer David Lord who'd done the Christmas single, we thought he'd be great to do the new album.

3:02Particularly he had some success with Peter Gabriel. And he had this little studio in Bath, tiny little cottage, literally a cottage industry. We drove down from Swindon every day for about three months recording all this stuff and there was an awful lot of it to record. We were able to secure the services of Peter Phipps, the drummer from the previous album who we liked very much and he agreed to join us for yet another album and share duties in fact with Andy's latest acquisition which was this Lynn drum sequencer which was all the go in the mid 80s so he had to split his time between playing live drums and doing battle with this drum machine and it kind of worked you know but it took a long long time because again in typical XTC style we didn't have an obvious hit song and virgin kept sending us back into the studio eventually david lord had to leave here he was booked on another project so we went to rack studios in london and worked with an engineer called phil thornally who'd helped mix a few songs for the previous album and he completed the job and that took us all the way through the summer of 1984 right through to September when the album was finally delivered.

4:26So it was in a long gestation period if you like and as you can imagine a lot of work was done. If you listen to this big surround mix that Stephen Wilson has done you can hear how much work went into it but of course at the time reduced to a stereo picture there was really too much information there for everything to be appreciated fully and again the record didn't do very much in sales. I was gonna say so you mentioned the the Lynn drum of course that wasn't the only experimental instrumentation you used you borrowed quite a lot of different keyboards and drum machines a lot went into the album and I guess because you guys knew that you weren't going to be touring again so you could do that which meant that the mix had to be I don't know carefully made and I believe your favorite track is Small Town?

5:24That's one of them yes the everyday story of Small Town it's called and I thought it was brilliant brilliantly written song in that kind of Ray Davis style of storytelling in just a little folk story about life in a small town but it had tempo changes it had a lot of musical detail in there there were two or three guitar tracks there was a piano track there was a 12 string guitar there were kazoos I remember we all had to stand around a microphone with a kazoo to play this chorus line a lot of information to figure out and for me on the original album it never quite reached the potential that I thought it could have achieved Stephen has brought that out thank goodness and he's done a magnificent job I think I read a quote from you which was you said it was twatted by lazy mixing.

6:18That was a bit unfair, yes. I might have said that at one time, yes. A little unfair on the engineer and those involved. I've learnt a lot about engineering and mixing since I made that remark and it isn't an easy job. So I was a bit flippant and I apologise if I offended anybody. but yeah it needed a proper mix and the one on the original pressing didn't do it for me for you it's quite an emotional thing you've put so much work into it and a lot of love for the work that you do so you want the best for it and I actually I listened to the original album well a 2001 remaster earlier today and you know having since heard the new remix that Steve has done it it does seem so flat and a lot of things are lost.

7:06So how did you feel? I mean, I believe you haven't heard the album for about 20 years. How did you feel that this remix was happening? What were your thoughts? I was overjoyed because, of course, the master of the multi-track tapes had been lost. They'd gone missing for years and years and years. A number of attempts had been made to trace them, but without success. and then Stephen Wilson met this fellow I think in a club in London who professed himself to be this huge XDC fan and he was working in the archive division of Universal Music he was such a fan and Stephen mentioned to him that we'd lost the multitracks to Mumma and a whole list of stuff that's gone missing over the years this fellow immediately went to work scoured the archives for these lost masters and he was able to find a complete multi-track of the entire album and the B-sides which was a eureka moment for all of us really because finally we can bring this into the 21st century and do the job properly with all the information and the knowledge and the equipment and all the rest of the things that have been gained since its original release.

8:25And the fact that Stephen wanted to do it well our problems were solved. There are people probably out there who just oh I just like the original thing that blew me away I don't want anyone messing with that blah blah that happens all the time. But for this guy I couldn't be happier. And did you have urges to contact Steve and give him advice on how you thought the new mix should be done or did you just trust him implicitly to do what was right? Well since everything that he's done for XTC has been absolutely top-notch and didn't disappoint in any way. In fact, it was surprisingly... a surprising improvement on what we already had.

9:06No, I didn't have a moment's doubt that Stephen would do it justice, full justice. For example, I always held the album non-such up to be our best recorded, best mixed album. I considered that it couldn't be improved. So when Andy told me that Stephen was going to be remixing and remastering it for 5.1 I thought oh well okay but I'll stick with my original copy but goodness me yes he did improve it so from that point forward that was one of the first ones he did for us so I never doubted Stephen's ability or his skill or his ears that's the most important thing his ears and his experience and the fact that he loves his work he loves working on our staff.

9:51This is just incredible. How lucky are we? This is the first of your albums that Stephen has done in spatial audio. Is there another one that you would like him to tackle next if the multi-tracks can be acquired? I know Stephen would love to get his hands on Skylarking and I'd be interested to hear what he did with that too because I think that's got a sort of psychedelic edge to it that would lend itself very nicely to you know these wide pannings and spatial effects the thing about the dolby atmos is that so comparatively few people will be able to experience it that's the drawback so you have to spend a lot of money on something that may not necessarily return the investment at least not for some time until people have you know home cinemas with I don't know I mean this is more than 5.1 isn't it the Dolby Atmos thing is way more than 5.1 and I think even the best equipped home cinema would be hard pressed to match it for quality and the listening experience.

10:58And finally I know that XTC has been a huge influence for many bands especially those emerging in the in the 90s you've got a real loyal fan base but obviously you know I guess we can say that you didn't quite reach the commercial successes say the Beatles at the time however I do believe one reviewer from the Spectator at the time of the Big Express's release said that in the year 2084 you will be talked about in the same vein as the Beatles do you think after listening to this today that that could possibly be true? who knows if you told me in 1984 that in 2023 we would be immersing ourselves in a darkened room listening to music that is almost like a sort of music in liquid form washing over you and that we'd be taken on a journey into oral space I would have said well yeah that's the stuff of dreams And, you know, besides, I probably won't be here in 2023.

12:05I definitely won't be here in 2084. So I don't really care. That was Dave Gregory of XTC. My thanks to him and the team at Earl Acoustics. Stephen Wilson's immersive remix of The Big Express will be available on physical formats from September. This episode was produced and edited by myself. I'm Christia Grady. Thank you for listening.

12:32Thank you.