Experiential Evocation

Innerviews

Anil Prasad

2020

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Stephen W Tayler's contributions as a mixer, engineer and producer are a fundamental part of 20th century musical history. A soft-spoken, calm and contemplative presence, in contrast to the sometimes mercurial personalities he's had to manage across his career.

> **Copyright © 2020 Anil Prasad.** Published on _Innerviews_. Preserved on stephentayler.com with permission of the source and the interviewee. Stephen W Tayler is a one-man beehive of activity in his working environment at Real World Studios in the village of Box, Wiltshire in England. The producer, mixer, engineer, composer, and visual artist is working on many simultaneous projects. He's creating new stereo and surround mixes of the Be-Bop Deluxe catalog for a series of box sets. A new solo album, multimedia and performance project titled _Da Capo_ is brewing. At the time of _Innerviews'_ visit to Real World, he was also creating ambitious visuals for Howard Jones' _Transform_ tour. In fact, Jones had just stopped by a few days earlier to film video segments for it. While Real World is mostly associated with Peter Gabriel and countless recording projects, Tayler is currently its most ubiquitous artist. His studio space has been based there for seven years, which he shares with his partner Sadia Sadia, a renowned visual and installation artist. The large space was acquired from singer-songwriter Clark Datchler of Johnny Hates Jazz, who had worked with Tayler on a mixing project. When Datchler moved out of the area, he offered it to Tayler and Sadia, and they can now be found working there most days of the year. The Real World complex is located in a serene, rural area full of natural beauty. It's surrounded by lush gardens and water, with the Bybrook River running right through the former water mill converted to house some of its facilities. Tayler's studio is located across the water from the main campus. It's a neat, organized space dominated by computers, large computer and audio monitors, and hard drives. There's a film backdrop set up as well. Shelves of books, Blu-rays and DVDs abound next to a small kitchen and storage area. While Tayler is focused on the here and now, his history mixing and engineering hundreds of the most well-known and revered rock and pop albums of the 20th century is stunning to contemplate. A small snapshot of the key artists and bands he's worked with include Tommy Bolin, Brand X, Bill Bruford, Phil Collins, The Fixx, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Gong, Jethro Tull, Stevie Nicks, Noa, Rush, Thompson Twins, Tina Turner, Suzanne Vega, and The Waterboys. Tayler also has a long-standing working relationship with Kate Bush. He mixed the majority of 2010's _Director's Cut_, Bush's project that reimagined and revisited earlier material. Bush also had Tayler mix the entirety of her 2011 recording _50 Words for Snow_, which found him also capturing contributions from Elton John, Steve Gadd and Stephen Fry. In 2014, Tayler contributed to Bush's historic 22-show residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, which was her first series of gigs in 35 years. He was responsible for controlling Bush's vocal sound, processing and effects. Tayler subsequently mixed and handled post-production for the 2016 _KT Fellowship Presents Before the Dawn_ live album. He's a soft-spoken, calm and contemplative presence, in contrast to the sometimes mercurial personalities he's had to manage across his career. During a five-hour conversation at Real World, in addition to many follow-up exchanges, he explored the expanse of his career from its humble beginnings to his ascension as one of the world's most sought-after recording experts. The conversation touches on dozens of his projects, as well as his emergence as a solo artist, which began with 2012's _Ostinato_. The meticulously-sculpted instrumental release channels Tayler's varied musical interests and experiences, with a focus on minimalist and ambient realms. **How did your journey into the world of engineering, mixing and production begin and evolve?** I was a child musician and a chorister at New College Chapel in Oxford, which introduced me to the world of classical music. It was quite a prolific choir, which did recordings broadcast on the BBC. So, I think my fascination with recording and the behind-the-scenes aspect of music started there. Next, I got a music scholarship to Shrewsbury School. I was playing clarinet and organ. Following on from that, I wound up as a student at the Royal College of Music in London. I was focused on clarinet and organ there, but my older brothers and sisters were big Beatles, Beach Boys and Who fans, so I heard all of that growing up. I ended up picking up electric guitar and saxophone. I became a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one particular thing. At the age of 16, my first band at school started by playing covers, rehearsing in the school's sports pavilion. At first it was two guitars, with me on lead guitar and vocals, and bass and drums. We played songs by the Beatles, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and Cream. And when I acquired my Farfisa Compact organ, we started to play songs by The Nice, The Doors, Deep Purple, and Iron Butterfly. We played a few school dances, but I don't remember anyone dancing when we played. We called ourselves Prometheus Unbound, which seemed a little pretentious, although it made a bit more sense when we were joined by a sax and flute player and started writing our own somewhat eclectic, quirky material. We thought we were going to be the next Soft Machine or Pink Floyd. We had a lot of fun, but nothing came of it. I bought a tape recorder back then in the late '60s, so a lot of interests were gelling together. When I finished music college, I decided I wanted to move into the behind-the-glass aspect of music production. My start in the industry was first as a tea boy, then assistant engineer, and then I became an engineer and mixer. The latter two are what most people know me for and where the majority of my career has been focused. I also formed close relationships with producers and musicians that enabled me to go beyond the technical role of getting the sounds and into getting involved in the concept of what the musicians wanted people to hear. I've also been involved in a lot of projects as producer or co-producer. For much of my career, I didn't really let on I was a musician. I preferred people not to think I was a frustrated musician, because it changes their perception of you. But in the last 20 years, that part of my identity has emerged and I've been involved in some co-writing, culminating in my own solo music projects. Twenty years ago, this began partly in combination with Sadia Sadia. When we met, her focus was as a record producer, based in Canada. That's how we first worked together. Eventually, we started collaborating as songwriters, first on a project called _Equa_, in which we had access to a load of world music recordings we wanted to fuse together with our own writing. The idea was to introduce as many elements as possible from different parts of the world, and find rhythms, harmonies, chorus lines, and chord structures that would make everything fit together. Sadia's career then moved into the world of being an experimental filmmaker and installation artist. So, we began to write music that accompanied these films. That naturally led me into concentrating on my own recording projects under my own name, beginning with my first solo album _Ostinato_. **Provide a snapshot of what you do as an engineer and mixer.** There are actually quite a few different levels to how this works. The basic starting point is the capturing of sound onto recording devices, whether that's tape or, these days, hard drives and other devices. But it's really about being the link in the chain to ensuring what needs to be captured is captured professionally, documented and then reproduced in ways that require it to be delivered for, whether it's for broadcast or for albums. So, this means setting up microphones, instruments and connecting electronic instruments, and capturing the sound of those as perfectly as you can. This can just be a very technical exercise, but with the whole process of record-making, it allows you creative ways of expressing how you want people to hear things. There are so many different ways you can manipulate sound, and this is where, if you like, the individual's personality or character comes into it, because you can influence the tonal quality or the dynamic quality, or you can limit the dynamic quality, in order to make things either sound interesting, characterful, or at least understandable. But then as you get deeper into looking at how you present music, the initial idea of recording was to try and recreate the sound of an orchestra you go see in a concert hall. Originally, capturing that to put it on record was to try and recreate the sound that you heard in the room, which is actually quite difficult because it depends on the equipment you play it back on. I think what happened with the development of the whole recording industry was, suddenly, being able to add character to these recordings, particularly in pop efforts. But if you think back to the sound of Elvis or the Beatles, people were really starting to manipulate what you heard by changing the tonal quality and changing the levels at which you hear things. So, even though typically a recording sounded like the drummer was at the back of the room behind the band, you could make the drummer sound like they're right in front of you, with the singer in the back. You can really play with all of that to create the sound you want people to hear. So, that has developed into all kinds of different styles of music making and record production. Depending on who you're working with, you're either given a lot of control, or you're fed information on how people want you to make it sound. I'd say from my point of view these days, I have quite a lot of influence on what people want to hear from me. I can introduce ideas and concepts into how things should sound. **How did you get involved so quickly at the start of your career in the mid-'70s working with such major musicians?** I was very lucky to literally walk in off the street into a studio looking for a part-time or temporary job. When I left music college, I actually had already arranged to go for training at the BBC. I'd been through a whole process of auditions because I thought maybe I should do it the proper way. And I was accepted for that, but what happened was that I finished music college at the end of July 1974 and the BBC said "You can start your training in January." So, the first Monday after I finished college — at that time I lived in a bedsit in Knightsbridge — I just thought, "I'll go up and see if I can find a studio and see if they can give me a part-time job." I jumped on the Tube, went up to Soho, which seemed like the center of the film and music industries back then. I just happened to turn down this alleyway and I saw a sign that said Trident Studios. I recognized that name from a couple of albums I had. I didn't really know much more about it than that. I just knew it from the credits. I walked in and said to the receptionist "Do you know if there are any vacancies going? I'm looking for a temporary job." And she said, "Hang on," and she called up to the studio manager and he said, "Send him up." I went up and had a chat with him and, I found out about this later, but somebody had actually been sacked that morning, meaning there was a vacancy. Trident was a down-to-earth company with very London people running it. I don't know if I sound slightly posh or not but I told him about myself and history, and he said "Well, you're too old, you're overqualified, and you're way too posh for us." Then he said, "But I've got a feeling about you. Can you start tomorrow?" I said "Sure." And I did. I started as a tea boy the next day, which was hell for six months — a trial by fire. Trident had a reputation at that time for being where quite a lot of the Beatles' "White Album" was done, as well all the early David Bowie and Elton John work. Queen was still managed by Trident then and were being developed. I seemed to come in at a moment when really interesting artists were appearing at Trident. Among them were Return to Forever, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Shakti. There's a chain of events here. Ken Scott was originally one of the staff producers and engineers at Trident, and he mentored an engineer called Dennis MacKay. Ken Scott moved on, but he had worked with Dennis on some of these jazz-rock albums. Dennis inherited engineering and co-producing some of these projects. I was lucky enough to be his assistant on some of the projects that he engineered. A really fast sort of promotional ladder was happening. People were moving on like crazy. Dennis then starting producing and wanted to relinquish the engineer's role, and we'd become quite close working together. So, I became his engineer. Suddenly, I found myself working as an assistant on Brand X's first album _Unorthodox Behaviour_. By the time it came to make their second album _Moroccan Roll_, Dennis was now producing and didn't want to touch any of the controls. So, I became the engineer for that. **What period of time did this transition occur?** Well, I was tea boy for six months, then the promotional ladder kept moving as people moved on. There were four engineers, four assistants and three tea boys at any given moment. So, if one left, then everybody else moved up the ladder. **What was involved in being tea boy for Trident?** I'd bring tea! I'd also sit at reception all night, fetch takeaway food and even cook from time-to-time. When I first started, there were only two of us and they made us both work 24 hours on, 24 hours off. That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Again, it was trial by fire. It's to see what you're made of. There were six months of doing that before my first assistant engineer tape op role. The second period lasted 18 months. So, two years almost to the day from when I joined Trident, I had my first session. My first one was a bit of an accident. What happened was, we were a very busy studio and had sessions during the day and sessions during the night with change-overs every 12 hours for our recording and mix rooms. One day, one of the engineers got sick. He'd been working for 36 hours straight and was supposed to do another session. He got sent home and I got pulled in at the last minute and was told "You're gonna have to engineer this session. But don't worry, this is one of those three-hour re-recording sessions for a song for _Top of the Pops_." _Top of the Pops_ during that period insisted bands re-record the backing tracks. I was told "Don't worry, because what we always do is, the band comes in, they bring a copy of the backing track of their original single, we make a copy of that, we sit around for three hours and drink tea, and everybody gets paid. Job done." I thought, "Oh, that's a relief, I'm not being thrown in at the deep end." Except, once in a blue moon, a representative of the Musician's Union would come along to make sure that things were done properly. And they did for this session, and I found myself actually having to record and mix a track in three hours for _Top of the Pops_. It was for a band called Stretch and the song was "Why Did You Do It?" It turned out okay. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough and it was used on _Top of the Pops_ the next day. That was trial by fire again and I think that gave them the confidence to say, "Right, you can become one of our engineers now." **Backtracking a bit, what was it like for you to be in the presence of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti and Return to Forever during their heyday? You were witnessing jazz-rock history in the making.** I was a big fan of a lot of jazz-rock and prog-rock when I joined Trident. Some of my favorite albums were by Yes, Genesis and Mahavishnu Orchestra. I saw all kinds of gigs. When I started as a tea boy at Trident, during my first week, I was making tea for Queen, Supertramp and Ace, who all had big hit singles and albums on the go. I was a fan of all of them, but I had to pinch myself and realize "Well, they're just people who are talented." I had to get used to that and not act strangely amongst them, but being in the presence of these really famous musicians was kind of mind-blowing. With Return to Forever, I was very much on the periphery of a mix session, so there wasn't really a lot to witness other than tapes being played, mixed and recorded. But when I was an assistant engineer working on say, a Shakti session, I found myself understanding the music with my background as a musician and being able to sort of follow what was going on. Now, as a tape op back then, you were required to operate the tape machine on behalf of the engineer. They had no remote controls. So if you wanted to start recording in the middle of a recording at a specific point, he would have to instruct you when to press the record button. And so, this was a trust you had to develop with your engineer or producer. Some of this music was really complex. And when they said, "Well, after the seventh bar which is in 15/8, we require you to drop in on the third beat of the following bar," I understood that, which was useful for everyone. So, yes it was fascinating to be amongst these people. Shakti was one of the most magical sessions to have been involved with because I was witnessing live, off-the-studio-floor performances with these incredible musicians like Zakir Hussain performing on tabla and Vikku Vinayakram on ghatam. It was fascinating to experience because a feeling you don't always get in the recording studio is that you're witnessing a completely live event. Increasingly, over the years, it has become a much more processed, step-by-step controlled environment. But in the mid-'70s, a lot of this stuff was live in the studio and to be in that environment and part of that, sitting on the edge of my seat, was truly amazing. John McLaughlin was a lot of fun to work with. There was both a very spiritual, yet very reverent side to him. He also had a wicked sense of humor. Even though the music was very serious and hallowed, the Shakti musicians were just wonderful people to be around. That sort of reverence isn't something I got to witness on many projects. Some recording sessions can even be quite confrontational. It's always a different experience depending on the personalities involved. **What's an example of a confrontation you witnessed?** One of the toughest ones I'd say was during the making of the first album by U.K. from 1978 with Bill Bruford, Eddie Jobson, John Wetton, and Allan Holdsworth. I remember Bill coming in to record with U.K. which was a real eye-opener, because I'd been following Yes. He had obviously left Yes, but it was a real privilege to work with him. The band had four musicians with two each from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, which made for a really fascinating blend of music and sound. There was no producer for that. It was produced by the band, so I did feel in that situation, my role as engineer actually became even more influential and crucial. I wasn't responding to a producer who's particularly concentrating on the recording process, but working with the musicians directly. And there were lovely people in the band, but there were two very different schools of thought. You had the jazzers and the rockers. They even referred to themselves that way at the time. Bill is very methodical, prepared and prefers very structured things. Holdsworth was a bit more from the improvisational and free-style school. They formed the jazz-rock end of the band. Then you had John who, with his legacy of playing with some of the most amazing rock bands ever, brought a melodic songwriting and rock-solid end to things. Then we had Eddie who comes from somewhere between the worlds of glam rock and the extremism of Frank Zappa. He played with Roxy Music as well. John and Eddie were at the spectacular, opposite end of what the band was trying to do with their very impressive progressive leanings. This made for a wonderful musical experience, but there were confrontations and arguments. One of the main things that made the sessions so difficult was that Allan and Bill were used to having all the musicians performing live in the studio together at once. Eddie and John wanted to get a backing track down and then lay on all the keyboards and guitars. That frustrated Allan quite a lot and he was never really happy with what he was doing. But thank goodness we got through it and made such a great album. It's a shame they broke up after that album, but reformed quite shortly after that with a different lineup. **Elaborate on your role on the U.K. album.** It's not as though I got a production credit for it, but I had quite a lot of influence in the techniques and methods used to capture the sound, particularly on the keyboard end of it. I had worked with Bill on a previous solo album, and Allan as well. With Bill, we had started to open up the idea of how to record drums. Previously, almost all bands recorded the drummer in a booth for separation of sound, so they didn't spill into the other instruments, but that gave the drums a very tight, enclosed sound. I was beginning to have influence by being able to say "Let's move the drums out into the main studio floor and put more microphones on them. Let's get the sound of the room, rather than the sound of the drums in a cupboard." When it came to mixing the record, I felt like I had to have quite a lot of control. We had four separate musicians all kind of looking out for their own parts. This is back in the days before automation or faders. You actually had to have people controlling the faders to balance things out the way you wanted to hear them. The danger was the guitarist would get hold of the guitar faders and the drummer would be on the drum faders. This would lead to something called "fader fighting" where gradually everything gets louder and louder and louder. So, I had to exert some kind of influence on the band, which is normally what the producer's role is. I did feel like my role in that album was quite crucial in keeping it all focused and together. There was a blurred line on it between engineering, mixing and production for me. **Describe how you evolved into the role of mixing albums.** The first couple of albums I mixed from start to finish weren't recorded by me. They were recorded by Dennis MacKay as producer, but when he brought them in to be mixed, he sat back and let me take control of the console. The albums were Gong's _Gazeuse!_ and Tommy Bolin's _Private Eyes_, both from 1976. They each have a very particular sound, partly because of the way Dennis had recorded them, and partly because of the console we were mixing them on, which was at that time the 20-channel Sound Techniques desk in Trident's mix room. It was a wonderful desk. Only 19 of the channels worked. It had bass and treble controls. There were no middle frequencies. It was very simple and straightforward. You could position things left, center, right, half-left, half-right, or you had one pan pot in which you could make things move if you wanted. It was very interesting for me to interpret how somebody else's recording could sound. And we're using very basic equipment like 16-track recorders. We had a few graphic equalizers, limiters, phasers, delays, compressors, classic valve equipment, and several stereo tape machines. The one thing that wasn't in the room but was in another part of the building was a plate echo in which you fed sound into it, have it reverberate around on a large metal plate, and then it comes back sounding like the ambience in a large space. Some guitarists had toys and pedals they could put their instruments through, but at that time we didn't have many things like those in the studio. We had to be very inventive with these limited resources. The techniques you could play with were basically about tonality and dynamics. Time manipulation through reverberation — which is basically a time effect — or delay by feeding sound into a tape machine and having it recorded on the record head and played back on the playback head, was something else we'd do. The speed of the machine would determine the length of the delay, so it could either be a very quick slap-back, or it could be a long repeat echo. As I mentioned, the first project in which I was recording and mixing engineer from start to finish was Brand X's _Moroccan Roll_ in 1977, which we recorded downstairs in the main Trident studio. While we were recording that, I was able to start incorporating my ideas on how to capture sounds, where to put microphones and what microphones to use. By the time it came to mixing it, we were supposed to have had a new mixer installed in the mix room — a Trident mixer rather than the Sound Techniques one, and it was going be a big one. But the building of this room had got way behind schedule so it wasn't ready. Suddenly, the first album that I was going to mix that I had recorded had to be mixed in a completely different studio somewhere else in London with a mixing console I'd never used before. This was a bit of a shock. We wound up at Morgan Studios in North London on a Cadac mixing console which I'd never seen before or since. There was a steep learning curve. Fortunately, the technology wasn't that hugely complicated back then. The biggest thing was listening on a different pair of loudspeakers which was difficult to get used to. I always find it quite weird that my first full production as the engineer of an album for Trident Studios wound up being mixed at Morgan. But it still turned out really well, so I'm very happy about that. **By 1979, you chose to move on from Trident. Tell me about the fork in the road you contemplated and the impact of the decision you made.** I had three possible ways of moving forward. I was being offered management by Hit & Run Music, which was associated with people I'd worked with such as Brand X, Peter Gabriel and Genesis. They were starting to manage producers and engineers. That kind of looked like the obvious route. It would have been logical because I was friends with people from Hit & Run and their whole crowd. But there was a real friction in my personal life in terms of my work hours and being away from home. So, I was looking for other opportunities to make a fresh start. I went off to the United States and went to Chicago and Los Angeles to see what the scene was like out there. Long story short, I made that decision, partly encouraged by my now ex-wife. It was a new start, with new opportunities. I thought it would take me away from the circumstances that were causing conflict in my life. I made a massive decision. I sold my house and we emigrated to America with two small children. We went to Chicago. But it didn't work out. The studio owner had been a complete liar. His clients and staff had kind of gone by the time I arrived. It was absolutely a rather low point in my life. But I bit my lip and said, "I'm going to go and contact Hit & Run again." A few months earlier I'd been talking about doing more solo projects with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. I'd lost all that. They both had moved on and I think Hugh Padgham ended up doing all those recordings. I ended up being represented by Hit & Run. They had a small roster of engineers and producers, one of whom was a chap I'd met a few years ago in the corridors at Trident named Rupert Hine, based in Buckinghamshire. I had to actually move back in with my parents with my wife and kids at the start when I came back. We eventually found a house in Buckinghamshire and it just happened to be down the road from the studio where Rupert was a partner — Farmyard Studios. I got a call from the manager at Hit & Run who said, "Listen, Rupert's starting a new solo album, and he's been working with this other engineer for a while, but I've got a feeling that the two of you together would make a really interesting team." He put me and Rupert in the studio together at Farmyard to start some work on Rupert's album _Immunity_ which came out in 1981. And that was the start of a relationship in 1980 that has continued ever since. **Expand on why _Immunity_ was such a turning point for you.** I'd known Rupert a little bit, but I hadn't worked with him previously in a significant way. Rupert had some ideas about this solo album he was planning. At the top of his list — and something he asked me if I would be happy to go along with — was "Forget everything you've ever learned. Throw away all your ideas and devices. Let's start from scratch." This actually led to the concept of pretty much all of _Immunity_ starting off with him writing songs on a piano using the wonderful, rather obscure and deep lyrics from his partner at the time, Jeannette Obstoj. She didn't write love songs. These were about religion, politics, belief systems, paranoia, spies, and espionage. What Rupert wanted to do was then take away the piano parts and replace each note individually using unusual instruments or techniques. For instance, some songs started with a guitarist playing slightly damped chords. They were playing things like octaves and fifths with a dampened right hand. Rupert's idea was "Right, we won't use a guitar, we'll use a piano. So, reach inside the piano, and dampen the two individual strings I'm going to play." We used monophonic synthesizers. We engaged in strange sampling techniques before samplers had emerged, such as just using tape to play things. We took single hits off tape or edited things together on tape. So, we would have an explosion sound that we would queue up and press on a particular beat so that it would hit the downbeat of the bar. We also had a gadget called a Harmonizer, which was the first pitch-shifting device invented by a company called Eventide. It was rather crude-sounding, but it allowed you to take the pitch of a sound either an octave up or an octave down in varying steps. But you could also, through some really complex electronic method, control it with a keyboard. So, you could feed a sound into this and then play it as an instrument. _Immunity_ wasn't a huge commercial success, but there are some real fans of it out there. What it did was act as a flagship for ideas and techniques. A surprising number of productions came into being after people heard the kind of things we were doing on that record. _Immunity_ was a very important moment for us. **How did you first begin working with Kate Bush?** My first involvement with Kate was in 1987 working with Rupert and Bob Geldof on the VHS release of _The Secret Policeman's Third Ball_. Bob originally wanted his contribution and the rest of the show to be mixed by us. For some reason, we only mixed Bob's tracks and Kate's version of "Running Up That Hill" that she did with David Gilmour. We didn't do anything else. I recall Rupert collecting Kate from her home and bringing her down to Farmyard Studios. Rupert spent all the time hanging out with Kate while I worked on the mix. I remember her being charming, delightful, tiny, and not quite what I was expecting. She just seemed so very calm, polite and lovely. So, that was my first introduction. Then in 2010, I got a call from a good friend who used to be Rupert's manager many years ago, who wound up representing Bob, Underworld and Kate. He said "Are you free next week?" I said "Well, I could be. What's it for?" He replied "I can't tell you, but I just wanted to find out if you're free." I asked "Well, yeah, but who is it for?" A couple of days later he calls me back and said "Hi Steve, it's for Kate Bush." I'm going "Oh wow, I wasn't expecting that at all." He arranged for me to go meet her at her home, where she also had a studio. Kate asked me about my background and played me a track she was interesting in me having a go at mixing. As I was leaving after the discussion, I said "I don't know if you remember, but I worked on your track for _The Secret Policeman's Third Ball_." She said, yes. I left thinking "Well, that was a nice meeting. I'm sure I'm up against some stiff competition here." Then I got a call saying "Kate would like you to come down and mix something next week." I said, "Yes, absolutely." And the project was _Director's Cut_, her reimagined versions of earlier works that had been partially re-recorded. Some keys had changed to accommodate her more mature voice. I'll never know the reason she was looking for somebody new to bring into her fold. I don't know if I was in competition with anyone else. But it was lovely. We got on like a house on fire and spent a few days mixing the first track, which was either "Lily" or "Never Be Mine." I then got a call back saying "Would you like to come and do the rest of the tracks?" That's how I wound up mixing eight songs from that record. One had already been mixed by James Guthrie. Two others had been mixed by Del Palmer. I did the majority of them. Kate was dissatisfied with some of the recordings from _The Red Shoes_ and _The Sensual World_. She used digital technology to record a lot of them and she felt there was a lack of sonic texture. Her earlier albums were made in the analog world and moved into the digital realm during the '80s. We were discussing how things were in such a state of change, technologically. She wanted to revisit some of the material using traditional methods and techniques. She also wanted some of the songs to have a different rhythm feel, so she used Steve Gadd, instead of the original drummer. She added some bass parts and changed some guitar parts. It was her vision and I'd work with her to achieve the balance she was looking for. I went away thinking it was a lovely experience with a dedicated, very serious producer, performer and artist. She also had one of the best senses of humor I've come across. Frankly, half the time was spent in stitches just having a ball. **Shortly after _Director's Cut_ came out, Bush asked you to work on _50 Words for Snow_. Tell me the story of how that opportunity emerged.** After we wrapped up _Director's Cut_, I went away thinking "Gosh, I was lucky. I'd love to do something else with Kate, but she's well known for taking her time between projects." Well, blow me down, as it was just a matter of days later that I got a call announcing she had this other album almost finished, which was of course, _50 Words for Snow_. For _50 Words_, I wasn't part of the main recording, although I did record some of Steve Gadd's drums, as well as the contributions from Elton John and Stephen Fry. But I was responsible for all of the mixing on the record. Kate wanted to bring the atmosphere of snow and winter into the album. She gave me a lot of ideas about how to sonically represent that. Those are tricks I can't divulge. But it had something to do with a subconscious undertone approach. We were trying to imagine the feeling when you walk out on a dark night and the snow is falling. There's a very different kind of silence in the air. It feels very dead, yet at some time, there's still a presence you feel. How do you personify that in sound? It was about making people experience a sonic texture, dimension or depth. It sounds abstract, but these were the kinds of discussions I had with Kate. She wanted to make people feel something specific when they heard it, instead of just how they respond to the lyrics or playing. Sonically, how does it make you feel? That was the big question and what we were trying to accomplish. **Describe how you became involved with Bush's _Before the Dawn_ 2014 residency at the Hammersmith Apollo.** After all the work I'd done with her on the recordings we've discussed, I didn't expect to hear anything from her for quite a while. I was as shocked as the rest of the world when I saw in the news that Kate had announced she was going to do 15 dates at the Hammersmith Apollo. Tickets went on sale and they had to add an extra seven dates because there was so much demand. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Kate and she said "What are you up to?" I said "I'm in the middle of two mixing projects." Then Kate said "Well, are you free?" I said "When?" She said "Now." I asked "What is it for?" She explained that after chatting with people doing the sound and production, it was decided it would be a really good idea to have somebody focused completely on the sound and presentation of her voice for the show. She said "Are you interested?" I replied "Well, absolutely." Kate gave me the title "Kate Vocal Navigator" in the program. My role was specifically to handle the sound of her voice. I controlled the effects that were used extensively throughout all the changing scenarios of the show. I handled her vocals and fed them to the front of the house. I was on stage, not out front. I never heard how the show sounded upfront. My main focus was to control the individual sound for every song. I would be hearing in my in-ear monitors exactly what Kate was hearing. I was controlling not just what the audience heard, but what Kate heard herself. It was about giving her the right sonic environment to suit her performance. I came away from the experience really enjoying the environment and the danger of live performance, which I'd never been involved in, previously. **Tell me about the pub session with Hugh Padgham that helped you develop your overall philosophy as a producer, engineer and mixer.** During the initial days of working at Farmyard Studios in the early '80s, a few of us, including Hugh, gathered in a pub in a village nearby. We knew each other from childhood. When we were both in public school, he had a school band he played bass in. He moved on and I wound up playing bass for the same band. So, we're sitting around the table at the pub and Hugh said "Remember, this isn't all about making great recordings. This is about making great records." For some reason, that was like being slapped in the face. We were all recording engineers at this table. What Hugh said made what we do so clear. Way back in the early days of recording, engineers used to wear lab coats. They were technicians. They had titles like mix engineer and balance engineer. Back then it was all about capturing a good recording. But everyone at this table had grown up during the '60s, during which a shift occurred and things became more about making great records. The goal was to make the record an experience. I still like referring to them as records because it means you're trying to present something cohesive to people. I don't want people to sit down and listen to something I work on and think "Ooh, that's a very nice, clean recording. It has a lovely snare sound. What mics did you use on it?" What I want is to know they enjoyed the overall sonic experience of the record itself and got something meaningful out of it. That's the goal of what I do. --- _This is a preserved editorial excerpt of the full interview by Anil Prasad, published on Innerviews.org (© 2020 Anil Prasad). For the complete conversation — including sections not reproduced here — please [read the full interview at Innerviews.org](https://www.innerviews.org/inner/stephen-w-tayler)._