How do you cope being different and creative within the rock world continually?
It’s a good question but the answer is quite easy really which is that I think that the main reason that I am able to I suppose, be creative within the industry is that I don’t have any considerations other than entertaining myself and that seems like a very selfish way to go about making music but I do actually believe that is the only way to go about making music and to call yourself, you know, an artist, in that sense. I think there is a very important difference between being an artist and being an entertainer. An entertainer is someone who tries to please their fan base whereas an artist is someone who primarily tires to please themselves and then if there are fans as a result of that, then that is great. But that is not the primary motivation. My primary motivation has always been, if the music doesn’t interest me then why would I do it. If it doesn’t excite me then I’m not going to make that music. So that, in a way, having that attitude, kind of liberates you and makes you very free to be creative and to express yourself in a very distinctive way because you are not trying to fit in. you’re not trying to entertain or to appeal to an existing market. You’re simply trying to interest yourself. I listen to a lot of very interesting forms of music and I try to combine all of those things and combine it with my own personality to create something that is hopefully quite fresh and unique.
So I suppose that is where the influence of Trent Reznor or Meshuggah is clear?
Yeah, those artists are mavericks. They are people who really seem to do something that … they seem to be driven to do something unique with no kind of regard for the rest of, well, certainly the music industry and the way that the music industry is set up. It doesn’t encourage musicians to be unique, in fact, it is quite the opposite. It usually tend to encourage musicians to be very generic so they are easy to sell and easy to get onto the radio and get into the press. If you have musicians like Trent Reznor, who is a great example, he is someone who is completely out on their own and really has created their own world. I admire those kind of people and I suppose I try to be, in my own way, in a similar position.
Hmm, Fair enough there. I certainly imagine that with your engineering and studio skills, bits of gear must, like an Eventide Harmonizer must seem dated sound-wise yet creativity doesn’t ever date things.
Yeah, it’s funny as it works both ways, doesn’t it. The 70’s or 60’s recording technology has become so fashionable in the last few years. Everyone wants to use vintage recording equipment, whether it is valve, valve pre-amps, valve guitar amps, 70s compressors or 70s outboard gear. There is a lot of that sense of trying to get back to a more organic and naturalistic sound on records. Whether You listen to those old records from the 70s whether it is a Neil Young album or a Pink Floyd album or even an Abba album, there is a certain sound that musicians and producers had in the 70s that has dated a lot better or a lot less than most of the music that was made in the 80s and perhaps even in the 90s which…and there is an irony there of course. But it is all down to the fact that, erm, a lot of the technology that came through in the 80s with the early generation of digital based technology, now sounds incredibly plastic and incredibly cold. But the classic vintage stuff from the 60s and 70s still sounds so open and so warm and so, kind of golden sond, um, you know…I’m the first to admit that some of the first records that I made in the early 90s and even the late 80s, the production and the sounds, they’re horrible and un-listenable. So, there is always a sense of trying to create something which…I think a lot of the battle of producing is trying to create something which will be timeless. That will somehow stand outside of the time of which it was created in and will still sound good within a hundred years time.
So is that frustrating for you trying to get a vision in your head translated to tape of digital format?
It is in a way but not in another because I must say that there are certain things that I love about the digital recoding technology revolution. I absolutely love recording on hard disk – the ability to be able to move musical information around and create your piece literally by copying and pasting and structuring arrangements on the computer so you are no longer tied to a kind of linear form of recording where everything has to be based on whatever your backing track was when you cut it right at the beginning of the session. You can go in now and you can completely restructure your track right until the moment that you decide that it is finished – you can be moving choruses and verses and instrumental sections around, moving vocals from one section to another, structuring textures and sound design and, you know, you’ve mentioned Trent and he is a classic example of a post digital age producer. This is a guy that could only have made the music that he makes with digital technology. Although he is definitely coming from that tradition of great sonic architects, coming back to people like the Beatles, Pink Floyd and King Crimson, he is from that tradition in the ambition of his music but his records could only have been made with digital technology and hard disk recording. Certainly the recent records could only have been made with hard disk recording and, you know, I love that. I think that digital recording has reached a point now where it has pretty much come into it’s own. It is really powerful now and we’ve lost a lot of those plastic elements of digital recording. Now there is a wonderful fusion between digital technology and the classic vintage, kind of analogue approach. Trent is someone that kind of exemplifies that better than anyone else maybe.
Oh look, his experimentation is amazing and no one can touch it. The thing is that studio time is expensive but now you can get a Pro Tools student version or whatever and away you go. That didn’t exist twenty years ago.
No and it’s no coincidence that the music in the 80s was, relatively speaking, so poor because, that’s, you just pointed out something…if you wanted to make records in the 80s you were talking about huge budgets. When you have huge budgets and when you have huge expectations, you have a lot or pressure to be commercial, top make music that will sell in order to recoup some of that enormous investment. Now of course we are completely liberated from that and can make experimental music at an incredibly high level and it doesn’t cost anything. That is great for musicians and great for creativity because it liberates you from that whole thing of, ‘well the record company are expecting to sell at least half a million copies of this otherwise they won’t make their money back’ and you know, someone like myself could not have existed in that musical climate. I just could not have made music with that kind of pressure.
I understand that. That brings us to the aspect of live performance. That is flipping it on it’s head really and you know, the experimentation is minimal by comparison in that you can be restricted.
Well, you are and you aren’t – I mean, again it’s a very different discipline. Going out and playing live is a very different discipline where you have the ability to do, for want of a better expression, be surreal with the way that you make music and create sounds that could never actually be created by a live musician and when you get into the live situation of course you don’t have that luxury. You’re limited by the sound that a musician can make with their instrument. I think, you know, with Porcupine Tree, I haven’t felt the pressure to go out and re-create note for note, the albums because what would be the point anyway? Who wants to go and see a live show and feel like they could have just as easily sat at home and listened to the CD? There is no point so it becomes a different discipline and with the live show we’ve tried to compensate slightly for the lack of studio sophistication with other elements. For example, our live shows have a lot of multi media and a lot film and video that goes with the music. So we try to create a similarly textured feel to take the listener on a similar experience or musical journey by using other elements, I guess, to fill with other things that we can’t reproduce from the studio. But having said that I think we do a pretty good job of reproducing 90% of the texture and sophistication that you hear on the studio records. We found ways to present something, if not completely but equally sophisticated at least, mostly there.
We haven’t seen you live yet but something to look forward to and it must be a staggering process trying to cull bits of equipment. Can’t take this rack or a particular amp along.
That is very true and I have to say that we’re the kind of band that don’t want to play unless we can have 100% of our concert experience there. Coming to Australia for the first time is a great case in point. When we knew we were coming to Aust for the first time, we felt that we wanted to present 100% of the experience of nothing. To come to Aust and put on a show for the first time ever and put on a show that was 70 or 80% there just wasn’t an option for us because we wanted to come down there and blow people away with the Procupine Tree mutli-media experience. So, we have the same philosophy wherever we go and don’t want to do the show unless it is 100%, unless it is the complete experience. In that sense we are not the easiest band to move around. There is five musicians with an awful lot of equipment – films, projectors, screens an all that is expensive to move around. That is one of the reasons that it has taken us so long to come to Aust because we simply haven’t had the kind of offers to make it financially possible for us to bring the whole Port Tree show to Aust before. So, I’m really happy that we’re bringing the full monty as it were.
When your recording, going from being an engineer to a producer to a songwriter and musician, how do you change hats?
I think these days, we’ve already talked about the digital recording era, and the fact that everyone can get a Pro Tools system set up in their bedrooms and make an album. I think becaue of that, the definition between those roles has become so blurred now that it almost doesn’t exist. The musician has had to become an engineer. Any musician that works with hard disk recording and computer recording has had to learn how to become and engineer almost. They have also had to learn how to become a producer as well. I think it is a great myth about the producer and musician divide. I think that all musicians, by definition, are also at least partly producers. Any musician that has an idea for a song – it is one thing to go and write a song on an acoustic guitar with the singing and an acoustic guitar, okay, there is your song, but most musicians will have ideas beyond that. They’ll have at least an idea for, you know, I want this sound, rhythm of kind of had this idea to start the song and that is basically being a producer. So, I think all musicians to an extent are also producers. They may not necessarily be engineers and I think that a lot of recordings I hear by bands that are starting out, demos and stuff, they are usually let down not by the ideas and the production but by the poor quality of the engineering or the poor quality of the mixing. I do think a lot of that is just a learning curve. I made some terrible records at the beginning of my career. They sound horrible but over the years I’ve learnt how to make records that sound good, at least to my ears anyway and I’ve kind of learnt by necessity. So these days I am really not aware of that divide between being a producer, an engineer and a musician. For me, it is just simply being someone who makes records and all of those things are a part of that process.
Final question : Guitars you’re using are PRS or Gibson?
Live I am using Paul Reed Smiths exclusively because I think they are the most flexible guitars I have ever played. In that sense you can make them sound like a Les Paul or a Strat and can then get an incredible range of tones from them. They look good, they feel good and they play beautifully. In the studio…I just bought myself a Telecaster, for example, for my first solo album and of course that is a completely different guitar sound again. So in the studio I’m not averse to picking up whatever instrument I think can achieve the kind of colours that I want to create in the studio. But live I am committed to the PRS guitars.
Similarly with amps – Bad Cat amps?
Yeah, again, in the studio I will try other configurations but in terms of playing live it is such a good sounding amp. I mean I’ve got like four or five of them now in different continents and I would fell almost naked if I had to use anything else, let me put it that way.
Okay, we have to go. thanks for your time.
My pleasure, thanks a lot, bye now.