What a production

Few record producers are known by name, let alone by sight. There is Sir George Martin — because of the Beatles. There is Phil Spector — still, despite his Wall of Sound 1960s hits, he is now probably best known for his baroque hair styles and killing a woman. And that is it, really.

Yet there are any number of men whose name appears, if at all, well below the artist’s on a record’s credits, but whose impact and influence on pop is impossible to understate.

Producers help turn songs into records. But what do they actually do? What kind of people are they? Who would be driven to spend their working hours — which are often others’ sleep hours — buried in air-conned rooms working on the same small slivers of music over and over again. Then again. And again.

What are the ‘skill sets’ needed — musical, technical, psychological? It’s a question raised by Soundbreaking, an inelegantly named talking heads documentary series.

Producing is a strange, indistinct role. Simon Boswell began as a songwriter and performer — he made his debut album while still at Cambridge. When I first met him, he was in a band, Advertising, who made ironical pop — too ironical for the public, sadly. A skilled musician and talented arranger, he turned producer, then graduated to writing film music — for Jodorowsky’s Santa Sange, Danny Boyle’s break-through movie Shallow Grave and many others, including a BAFTA nomination for the TV series The Lakes.

Yet, somehow, I’ve always thought of him as a producer. I was wrong. ‘I was usually deeply unhappy as a record producer,’ he told me. ‘Either because the artist was so bad that I could really do better myself, or so good that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there.’

There weren’t always record producers. Once there were only A&R men. They would pick the song, write — or, more likely, oversee — the arrangement and select the musicians. Often, the artist would often not have heard the song till they turned up for the session.

Then things changed – at first in the US, which underwent a shift in thought and potential driven by technological advances — in particular, the advent of multi-track tape. Previously, recording had been about capturing a performance, a moment. Now that moment could be created. Voices could be laid on top of each other. Sounds could be manipulated. Tape could be cut and spliced. Solos could be played again and again till they were right. A singer’s performance could be constructed out of the tiniest vocal fragments. Any given moment could be a universe of other moments, each distant in space as well as time. And all that before sequencers, synthesisers and sampling hip-hopped along.

In Soundbreaking, Eno describes this early period as the arrival of people who understood how recording worked. ‘Here’s this whole set of new possibilities,’ they thought. ‘We’re going to find out what they can do.’ Enter the producer.

In the US, the change was driven from the early 1950s onwards by small label entrepreneurs. Sam Phillips set up Sun in Memphis and made Elvis Presley’s first records, using crude and cheap technology to give them a distinctive original sound. He had taken those new possibilities of the studio and used them to create something new, fresh. He always said, ‘If you’re not doing something different, you’re not doing anything.’

In Britain, the change was led and driven by five people: John, George, Paul, Ringo and George — the man who would become the most famous of all producers, the justly renowned Sir George Martin. He transmuted base but disruptively original northern songs into global, epochal soundscapes.

I have spent a good deal of time in recording studios — in London, New York, Monmouth and other wild spots. Sessions in Abbey Road, the Record Plant and smaller studios, here, there and all over the place. Home studios, too — some of which have produced more hits and great records than far grander and more famous places.

I was there as a music journalist, allowed — sometimes, even welcomed — into the sanctums where, hopefully, there was magic in the moment and hits would be made.

The first time I was excited. That didn’t last. Studios are rarely glamorous places. People work there, you know – even producers – and it was a producer, I think, who first told me this joke. What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.

I have sat and waited as a band spent days trying to get a drum sound. I have seen the sun set and then rise — well, I could have done if there had been any windows. I have spent hours playing pool, on tables ringed with cigarette burns and half-emptied cans of Red Stripe. I have seen messengers arrive with eagerly awaited midnight deliveries of flowers and chocolates — as music business expense claims routinely list chemical enliveners. All time I will never get back.

Mostly, I was just very, very, very bored. The recording studio is not a place for amateurs and outsiders. Watching musicians make a record is like watching a novelist type, only louder. Painfully louder. I never did like that bit. (Unlike some I know, I still have my hearing.) I never really understood what was going on. Even when I saw and heard hits being made, I didn’t even realise what I had seen and heard.

I came to like record producers, though — more than musicians, by and large. They were, simply, more fun, more interesting. They were smart, knowledgable and charming — mostly. They need to be. There has never been a job spec written for ‘record producer’ but if there were, ‘people skills’ would be a major, major component. A producer is the crunch point between musicians, technicians, label bosses and record company employees — all of wildly varying quality, intelligence and honesty.

Producers spend their working life in a room of the perpetually teenage — singers, drummers, violinists, bassoon players. As Quincy Jones (Michael Jackson) says, a producer must be able to tell a performer: ‘That’s a perfect, perfect take.’ Breath, pause. ‘One more time.’ American producer Don Was talks of creating a vibe of safety in the studio, so the performer can go out on a limb, ‘not afraid to fail’.

They also have to deal with record label people — who can themselves be something of handful. Of a producer’s qualities, George Martin said, ‘He should have tact. He should have diplomacy.’ They are there to make judgments and decisions, too. Roger Armstrong is co-owner of Ace, the world’s leading reissue company. When I first knew him, he was producing records himself — including the very first one made by the Clash’s Joe Strummer. ‘In many ways the producer is the audience that is missing in the studio,’ he said. ‘He is there to give the artist someone to play to.’ Rick Rubin (DMC, late Johnny Cash) describes the producer as ‘an impartial jury’. But, he adds, ‘There is no right or wrong way to do this.’

It’s not surprising then that producers come in all kinds. There are record company bosses, like Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic. There are musicians and arrangers like such soul wizards as Arif Mardin and Leon Huff. There are those who graduated from other, less elevated, less powerful jobs in the studio. These are known as ‘tape op producers’, a phrase minted by Steve Lillywhite (U2, Rolling Stones) — who was himself one of the first tape op producers.

There are non-technicians like Eno, who established himself as a producer by using a set of strategy cards with bands to make decisions. The fact that he is a talented musician and composer doesn’t negate the fact that Eno’s unique production tool is not his ears but his analytic brain.

There are those who, whatever their background, find their home with one group and stick there for the rest of their life —Nigel Godrich with Radiohead, for example. Very much a tape-op producer, he graduated from pop-hitmaker Mickie Most’s RAK studios and began working with the band at the very start of his career.

More than two decades later, he is still with them. Endless waves of technological change has meant that most recording is now done completely electronically, often on cheap even home equipment. Unusually, Radiohead have their own, fully functioning, almost traditional studio.

What does Godrich bring to producing? He talked about the talents mix needed — ‘technical, musical, psychological manipulation skills’. Not being in command of the technical stuff would be an ‘obstacle to creativity’. At times, he added, the personal can be as much as eighty per cent of his input. Musically, he says, it’s important that he is ‘a player’. He makes his own music — and he contributes to Radiohead’s. The vocal scrubbing on Everything In Its Right Place, for example, was his idea.

He says he’s often asked the question I posed: what do record producers do? ‘I say it’s like being film director.’ A matter of having the various, different skills needed to make something happen. ‘From the thinking to the process to making sure someone doesn’t mess it up.’

‘Soundbreaking’ is on Sky Arts on 21 June at 9pm