Bedroom ears: an expert listens

There's one golden rule that applies to all pop music analysis: blame the Beatles. Sure enough, between 1966 and 1967, the Fab Four spent almost five and a half months constructing Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band - just enough time to tune up by today's standards, but endless by those of the period. Until then, fans could expect a couple of new albums a year from their heroes, as bands raced each other feverishly and instantly snapped up new influences. Post Sergeant Pepper, the making of an album has tended to be long and laborious. The Beatles opened vistas of sonic possibility and put together a pretty decent album, to boot, but they imposed the Tyranny of the Studio on us all.

Musicians no longer make do with the time-honoured songwriting tools of a notebook, an acoustic guitar and the contents of the hotel mini-bar. They go to the studio to write, which means decamping to a country house or a Jamaican beach hut piled high with technology: studios have their own bedrooms, rather than vice versa. Kilometres of tape are filled with ideas and snippets until, a few months later, someone has the job of picking out the best bits. It's a method of working designed to take the band as far away from real life and inspiration as possible - and it shows.

Back with the Beatles, the weak points of their last albums are those where John or Paul came into the studio with fragments of music and let their producer glue them together. The strong points are where they had worked out more or less an entire song before they knocked on the door of Abbey Road. The rock musician's beloved notion of "using the studio as another instrument" is all very well, but when you start using the studio as another songwriter, you're in trouble.

Not that this is a defence of the heinous cult of "lo-fi": those bands who take pride in the crackles and the mistakes preserved on their rush- job albums aren't fooling anyone. After all, White Town's "Your Woman" may have been recorded on a mere eight-track recorder, but the supremely "hi-fi" Sergeant Pepper was recorded using a four-track. So, there's no excuse for sounding amateurish, and there's less excuse for moving into your studio and hoping that the machines will do your writing for you. Overthrowing the Tyranny of the Studio might be advantageous not only for the people who make records, but for the people who listen to them, too.