It’s been a while. Cyber-recluse that I am, there have been a few projects that I’ve been involved in over the past months that I’d like to draw attention to.

SPARROW AND THE WORKSHOP

One of the finest bands I’ve ever worked with, a 3-piece who together are even more than the sum of their potent parts. I produced their album in the countryside outside Bath – recorded and mixed in ten days. Thrilling, scary, charmed, and only one moment when we all got on each others nerves. This music is so rich in imagery and passion that producing it was really just a case of capturing the energy and then enhancing what each instrument and voice was striving for – mostly by double tracking unexpected parts of the percussion or the vocal, or opening up different room mics and effects in different sections to give the illusion of more instrumental parts than there actually were. They said the record ended up sounding just like it had been in their heads, which was the most satisfying thing I could have imagined. and they even cooked dinner every night too.

PAOLO NUTINI

I got asked to produce a track he’s contributing to a John Martyn tribute record. Many people warned me that he might not show up on time, but he did. The song was extremely odd melodically, necessitating more of a rewrite than a reinterpretation. Having already made the backing track the vocal process was: do a few takes, have a chat about something else; do a few more, have a drink; do some more, feel reassured it’s starting to come together, have another chat and a drink; do another one, relaxed by now. Then, after consistently improving over the course of a few hours, he suddenly hit stratospheric form and nailed the whole thing on one take. Sometimes you never really know how good even very successful people are until you get to watch them close up.

BRETT ANDERSON

The album that started last January as a 3-day session of improvisation has now been finished. I would defy anyone listening cold to guess that it started life the way it did, but every track is founded on the performances and ideas from those 3 days. I must admit I’m surprised therefore that it took this long to finish, but the work has been quite stop-start and Brett and I are still in no way bored of it, so that’s a good sign. Because I had a hand in writing the music I became quite proprietorial by the end, and sort of forgot that I wasn’t actually part of a band. It can be a fine line between caring deeply about a project and fighting your corner as a producer, and losing sight of the fact that you’ve been hired to deliver another artist’s vision. But no dramas in the end, and the record’s great.

CARL BARAT

There’s a new EP coming out so I remixed a few of the tracks that didn’t get quite finished during the main album sessions, and we did a new song from scratch. I tried playing guitar on it but it sounded better with Carl singing and playing on his own. I’ve actually hardly played an instrument in the last 3 months because most of the people I’ve been working haven’t needed me to, which is a new situation. It’s fun plugging other guitarists into my effects and hearing how they interpret the sounds differently, and brings back warm memories of when I was starting out as a session guitarist. Once I was on a session with a producer called Gil Norton who was a bit of a hero to me as he’d done The Pixies. I got set up but the guitar wouldn’t work. We checked everything from microphones to compressor to patch bay until finally he leaned over and turned the volume knob on my guitar up. I felt incredibly small and at the end of the day he said “You could be really good one day, if you remember to turn your fucking guitar on”.

KILL IT KID

The first fruits of my involvement with this band are already up on their site, although we’re only half way through the record. They make splendid use of very old field recordings of American bluesmen and play with an astonishing intensity. Considering the way they attack their instruments, I was surprised they didn’t batter the mixing desk in the studio which was so knackered that we had to stick paper clips into it to get the EQs to work. However, we did drive my poor 1961 Selmer amp so hard that the head fell off the cabinet, crashing into a vintage Neumann microphone on its way to the floor. Surprisingly, nothing broke.

THE MAGIC LANTERN

Beautiful, fragile, complex music that I was lucky enough to mix. They gave me almost comically meticulous mix notes that at times I didn’t even understand, but it all helped to frame the message of the music. Somehow they seemed to be after a certain anonymity to the instrumental performances which struck me as almost the opposite of what I would normally be trying to achieve, but I interpreted it to mean they wanted a sort of ‘egolessness’. This is much less about the mix than the performances of course, but I did discover some ways to make the sound flat and controlled without being clinical.

A FAMOUS BAND THAT I’M NOT ALLOWED TO NAME YET

Because of the utter shafted-ness of the music industry, even acts that have sold hundreds of thousands of records have to tread carefully when choosing a producer or presenting songs to their label. I have had to effectively ‘audition’ quite a bit recently, trying out tracks with bands or artists before they decide whether or not they want to go with me. It sounds potentially horrible, and sometimes when the stakes are high it can be, but I try and cultivate attitudes that take the edge off and make everyone more relaxed. The only way to do this is to focus on the only thing that really matters, which is the music. That way everyone in the room is pulling in the same direction, instead of wasting time analyzing everything.

KASIA KLIMKIEWICZ

Kasia is a fascinating new director who has asked me to score her new project. Early days, but I’ve been recording the sound of close-up circuitry from various kinds of machinery, editing it, and experimenting with very quiet, intimate improvisations over the top. The overall effect is like eavesdropping on something that is at once human and tactile, but also completely impersonal. It’s a compelling combination, but there aren’t many tunes.

There’s been a bunch of other stuff too, from the completion of a record for Real World’s Iarla O’Lionaird to a new artist on Universal called Luna Belle. As usual, what I’m really loving is all the variety, and helping such different artists bring their visions to fruition.

Lastly some videos – about 3 years ago Brian Eno and I spent a few minutes putting a soundtrack to a short video I made in Brisbane zoo of a koala scratching its arse. It was ignored but in the last week has amassed 110,000 views. I’m glad the little fellow is finally getting his moment in the spotlight.

Koala Punk

And here is some footage of Brian, Jon Hopkins and I improvising in the manner in which ‘Small Craft’ was made. Hope you enjoy.

Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea

Exciting day! This record, a collaboration between Brian Eno, myself and my old friend Jon Hopkins is out today in America! Lots of exciting related things to follow… but for now:

Brian’s Site
Interviews with Brian, Jon and I

Buy it on Amazon

A couple of days ago I was in Poland playing at a concert in a shipyard in fromt of 100,000 people celebrating 30 years of the Solidarity movement. Walesa was there, along with a load of different artists from Macy Gray to Philip Glass. A young Polish boy played a fiendishly difficult Chopin piece, with rain flitting across the keys and techinical walkie-talkie crap crackling through the speakers around him. He didn’t even flinch. And I watched a woman from a Brooklyn gospel choir play a tambourine with such wonderful commitment and passion that, atheist as I am, I knew you could only play a tambourine that way if it was for God.

The way I used to feel in The Miggs – like I didn’t really belong in my own band, and certainly not in some strange pub off the M1 in clothes that were too tight. It all came to a head when I got asked to go to LA for 2 months to do Oceans 12. The singer gave me an ulitmatum and I knew which side my bread was buttered. We’re still friends though. Or the time I accidentally set off a massively loud sample in the middle of a pin-drop quiet section of and Ed gig, prompting one audience member to say sarcastically, “oh, THANKS”. Ed left the stage in an icy fury and I thought I’d really, really screwed up. But he returned moments later having raided the props room of the theatre we were in, carrying two fencing swords. We did battle at the front of the stage, I let him kill me, the crowd cheered and all was forgiven.

I’m producing a record for Astrid Williamson at the moment, a lovely songwriter and singer on One Little Indian. Here’s my ‘to-do’ list for one of the songs:

blurry fax machine in V2

reverse rabbit in big sect

low mid out of minky?
rubber guitar only on the one
bounce downstairs breathing

Although I have always been very grateful for the kind comments of my modest readership, I must admit that maintaining the diary became somewhat self-serving – more a way to keep track of my scattered life than a contribution to anyone else’s understanding. A trail of breadcrumbs for those dark nights of the soul when I feel lost and need a way of tracing my journey. And a good way to keep my parents up to date with what I’ve been doing without actually having to tell them.

But last week I ran into a bit of bother. I wrote here that a new Brian Eno record was coming out on Warp – and I shouldn’t have done because the label hadn’t announced it yet. By tomorrow all this will be yesterday’s news, but unfortunately today’s news included a large feature in the Guardian quoting extensively from this blog – including information that, whilst not secret, I nevertheless feel very embarrassed about having been made so public. They even included bits that I’d hastily deleted (and the fact that I’d hastily deleted them).

Various words spring to mind re-reading that last paragraph, such as ‘naivete’, ‘confusion’, and ‘bugger’.

Warp have taken it all in very good humor, but I would like to apologise to them and to Brian’s managers for being careless, and for blithely underestimating the widely-known potential of the internet to disseminate information.

One of the consequences is that from now on, this diary is going to change a bit. No longer will it be a blow-by-blow account of what I’ve been doing each month. I hope that in the future it will be more reflective and honest, more open and revealing – but not in the wrong way.

Thanks for reading.

I returned to Marianne Faithfull’s welcoming bosom (figuratively speaking) for a show in Dublin, before throwing myself back into Brett Anderson’s record. We ended up recording most of the lead vocals over just a few sessions, which was in keeping with the spontaneous spirit of the whole project. But there were no compromises, and it sounds amazing.

There were a few guitar sessions interspersed, various things I said I’d do but never got around to. But really over the last month I’ve hardly played. So when a couple of days ago I found myself in a massive studio doing the guitars on the new Jack Black film, I realised with a sense of forboding that I wasn’t exactly match-fit. I think I got away with it, but felt like a bit of a flabby jogger. The highlight was playing a version of Sweet Child O Mine, which was the first song I ever played live, at the age of 14, surrounded by mysterious girls who were older than me and might as well have been from a different planet.

I went to Ireland to curate the opening concert at the Festival Of World Culture. This involved overseeing collaborations between Iarla O’Lionaird, the Norwegian group Adjagas, and the Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. The artists only met the day before the show, but there were warm feelings everywhere and somehow we managed to put together an hour and a half of extraordinary music with a very generous spirit, with seemingly no effort whatsoever. What had seemed obscure and risky turned out to be an unalloyed joy.

I’m in New York, at the mix of the Carl Barat record which has been recorded over the last month. The recording process was wonderful, cycling in to work every day, recording drums with Seb Rochford, writing new sections to songs spontaneously, doing strings and woodwind on 6 songs in 6 hours, and enjoying Carl’s scattershot but passionate approach to making music. I think that with this record, people are going to see what a truly fine writer and performer he is.

The mix, being done by Andrew Wyatt with input from myself, is involving a lot of dismantling and distorting of the material. I’m surprised and rather gratified at the ease with which I can let go of much of the work that has been painstakingly created over the last month. The only thing that matters is that the music sounds good. In a Brooklyn bookstore I happened upon the Collected Writings Of Morton Feldman (one of my favourite composers) and in a strange synchronicity, which I take to be an omen, many of his polemical observations are curiously apposite:

“Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in music we must pursue it”; “Everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it”; “Step aside in order to be in control… controls can be thought of as nothing more than accepted practise”; “For art to succeed, its creator must fail.”; “The great mistake lies in looking for experience in the object rather than in ourselves”

Earlier this month I dipped into modern classical music for real, playing a piece at Kammer Klang before doing an improvised set. It was rather terrifying and much more challenging that the Gavin Bryars stuff I did last year. The other musicians were very kind to me but I still felt like a dumb rock kid hanging out with professors. Then the following day I was playing guitar on the new Trevor Horn-produced Estelle single, trying to get my pop/R&B chops together. Trevor reminds me of a kind of benevolent monarch. He has a sort of effortlessly regal quality and yet is very fun-loving. I always look forward to seeing him.

Lastly, there was the Pure Scenius concert in Brighton with Brian Eno, Karl Hyde, Jon Hopkins and The Necks. As with the Australian concert, there were 3 90-minute improvised concerts in the course of the day. Most of the Necks had flown in from Australia, Jon had come from LA, and I had tonsilitis and was on a load of painkillers, so everyone was floating around a bit. But sometimes I find it’s better to be in a slightly distracted mood because it helps take the edge off the nerves. In the end it was a wonderfully fulfilling and relaxing day, less fraught than the Sydney shows and perhaps the better for it. The audience seemed subdued at first, but were on their feet 6 hours later.

Now back to work…

Most of the last week has been spent feverishly trying to finish projects off so that they don’t run into other ones that are about to start. I haven’t quite managed it. On the finished side are the Chris Difford album and Eno’s Pure Scenius project. Chris’s was quite straight forward – mostly a case of working hard to find the right vocal approach to each song, and backing vocals to illustrate lyrics which are by turns witty, moving and kaleidoscopic. One of the highlights for me was getting Green Gartside of Scritti Politti to sing on a track. Hearing that voice that i have listened to for 25 years coming out of my studio speakers was an incredible moment for me. The Scenius thing as been a more complicated journey, but after much to-ing and fro-ing I hope that we’ve hit on the final running order – a representative document of the Oprea House concerts that nevertheless works as an album in its own right. I think it has benefited from some last-minute ‘eureka’ moments from me in the dark art of mixing. It is one of the skills that seems to take the longest to develop confidence and fluidity in, full of often-unquantifiable value judgements arising from seemingly simply technical decisions. Then in the end someone goes and plays a low-res mp3 of the thing out of their iPod speakers.

Edging towards the finishing line but not quite over it yet is the Iarla O’Lionaird album. During this latest period of work, and not for the first time, his incredibly beautiful, honest and brave singing had me in tears at the mixing desk – which was a bit embarrassing for us both. Instrumentally a large part of the record involves strings, courtesy of The Geese (a very creative duo of violin and viola, whose part-planned improvisations I edited into arrangements that could never have been scored conventionally); and Oliver Coates, a quite staggeringly talented cellist whose understanding and application of influences from Xenakis to Nico Muhly made for one of the most electrifying and humbling days I’ve ever spent in a studio. Here is a man destined for greatness, if he’s not there already.

Unfinished but well on the way is the Brett Anderson record. We’ve spent some time writing songs over the edited improvisations recorded in January, and frankly both of us have that slightly naughty feeling you get when you’re trying not to be too pleased with yourself. It is going to be amazing, the songs are the most powerful and direct he’s written since Suede and the album has a sound all its own. There is a distinct drive and rawness at the heart of the record that will render overdub-stage dithering obsolete. Unfortunately I have to stop work on it now for a month or so, but I know Brett will be hard at work in my absence.

I did an improvised session for a show called ‘Late Junction’ on Radio 3 with Seb Rochford, the mbira player Chartwell Dutiro, and a young MC called Jyager. All the sounds seemed to bloom from the giant rattling, primal, joyful shell of the mbira, with Jyager managing to invent some new kind of genre which we are going to try and expand upon by making a record later in the year.

A few sessions scattered around – another great score by Alex Heffes for a film called ‘The First Grader’; a little more for KT Tunstall’s new and very different-sounding record; something with orchestra for a tv series called ‘Daughters’ during which i was not required for large swathes of time so effectively got paid to sit next door in Carluccio’s; a French artist called Lio; and even a day with Coldplay which was pretty bizarre and mostly consisted of me and Jonny geeking out over guitar effects. Lastly, Jon Hopkins and I had a day in the studio with Brian doing some more jams for an album.

Last night I played in ‘Songs In The Key Of London’ at the Barbican: a night of London-inspired songs performed by lots of different artists. I got to do the guitar solo in ‘Our House’ by Madness, which is something I used to sing along to even before I played the guitar. Elvis Costello turned up during the interval so there was an impromptu rehearsal of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in his dressing room, with Squeeze, Green Gartside, Robyn Hitchcock, Madness, The Blockheads and Andy Serkis (Gollum) all crammed in. Totally bizarre. When we played it onstage (for the first time), picking out that beautiful melody to a packed house was just a tingly experience.

There have been a couple of other multi-artist shows I’ve been involved with recently. In January there was a tribute to Nick Drake, which is going to be on the BBC soon. With all these things there is a 2-day rehearsal (for around 26 songs), and there’s always a few moments during the concert when you turn a page and see a chart that you’ve forgotten to make notes on, and have no idea what to do. On this occasion the calm precision of the music itself seemed to diffuse a lot of the potential tension and, with the exception of the night that was filmed, it was pretty relaxing.

We went straight from the last Drake show to Heathrow airport and headed to Sydney, to do Hal Wilner’s Rogues Gallery – a collection of sea shanties – in front of the Opera House. We arrived at the first all-day rehearsal almost insane with tiredness, and by the end of the second day everyone was pretty destroyed. Rehearsals continued through the soundcheck, with Tim Robbins, Peaches, Todd Rundgren, Pere Ubu and many others working through their piratical renditions. 30 minutes before the show, the sky heavy with rain and caffeine in my bloodstream battling with the galss of wine I’d tried to calm mu nerves with (bad idea), I went onstage to check my stuff, and realised I couldn’t see. So I went and had a lie down and was quickly surrounded by worried-looking faces, and a paramedic, and then it all got a bit needlessly dramatic. In the end Dr Adrenalin did the trick and, like hearty sailors, we all pulled together and guided the ship through the storm.

After that, it was off on tour round Australia with Marianne Faithfull. To stave off the madness that I feel descending every time I have to spend days waiting around in airports, I got to work editing the huge amounts of material amassed for Brett Anderson’s next album. I whittled 12 of the 30-minute improvised jams down into songs, and the result is, I think, one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with. There is a tangible excitement to using completely improvised performances in structured music. The only time those riffs have ever been played, at the ‘moment of conception’ as it were, become the final document. This process was so intense and satisfying that I got to really enjoy the release of doing a gig in the evenings. During the encore at the Opera House, when it’s just Marianne and I onstage, I remember she looked at me with the strangest expression – sort of triumphant and defiant and kind at the same time. We don’t talk about a great deal offstage, but at that moment I really understood what she was trying to tell me – that she may be a bit eccentric and have a gravelly voice (up to that point the Australian press had been vicious), but look at her now: playing to a packed Sydney Opera house, completely in her element, with the crowd eating out of her hand.

When I got back from Australia I was persuaded to go on tour again! This time round the UK for a week with Kathryn Williams. We recorded her album live last year and she wanted to take the same band out on the road. It was a really wonderful experience, being with lovely friends and playing music with extreme delicacy and awareness, which is demanded wordlessly by Kathryn’s own performance. So minimal, but so rich. Kathryn is extremely pregnant at the moment so it was rather gutsy of her to take on the strain of a tour. She even insisted on staying up with me til 1:30am doing backing vocals for the Chris Difford album.

That project is nearly finished now – just vocals to do. We had anoterh few days tracking instruments at Jools Holland’s extraordinary private studio in Greenwich. It’s like a miniature village from the 1930s, and features two hyperactive cats who are very friendly and like to destroy the soundproofing when you’re not looking. I did some strings with a wonderful violinist called Emma Smith and tried a new approach – instead of arranging like I usually do, I kept an idea in my mind of what it should be, and then worked with Emma to get close to it. In other words, lessening the amount of control. I found the results were a lot more interesting and unexpected – stuff you would never think of writing down. Plus it got me out of copying parts.

2010 has started with a really productive period of work. I always enjoy this time of year because it’s traditionally a fairly quiet time with most people still away on holiday – which provides an opportunity to get a lot done. Last week Brett Anderson and I started work on a new album. I proposed that we draw all the musical material from improvisations. He had never worked in this way before, and I was really delighted that he was willing to try it, and touched that he trusted me enough to go along with it. Along with two of my favourite musicians, Seb Rochford on drums and Leo Ross on guitar, we came up with 26 pieces in 3 days. It is now down to me to edit these into song structures for Brett to write over. This large-scale editing is something I love to do, and the improvisatory way of working allowed me to play guitar much more freely than I usually do as a producer, when I have so much else to think about. At this stage of the record, I feel like a sculptor about to start chiselling away at an extremely high-quality piece of stone.

The following week I stayed in to same studio, with Seb, to start producing the Chris Difford album that we’ve been writing for the last few months. It felt great to be working with someone who has made so many timeless records, and who is still open to trying new directions. One fantastic moment came when Chris brought in his earliest demos, on reel-to-reel tapes that had not been played since 1973. We all looked on in respectful silence as the engineer lined them up on the tape machine (a rare sight nowadays), and when the first song came through I realised it was in the same key as the one we were working on that day, which was about that period in Chris’s life. I sampled the tape and played it backwards through our track, creating a psychedelically nostalgic background. Being in that beautiful studio, 12 hours a day for 10 days, working on 41 different pieces of music with my friends, I really felt like producing is what I love doing the most. Some parts of it are quite geeky, for instance just having loads of guitars and amps and beautiful set out and ready to go; some parts of it are much deeper, as the best kind of focus comes when you are so deeply into the essence of the music that it hardly feels like work – until the end of the day when exhaustion comes crashing down.

Much of December was spent in solitary confinement in my studio, tweaking and refining mixes and edits of Brian Eno’s Pure Scenius project, and continuing to work on Iarla O’Lionaird’s album. There was also a session for a film score which demanded classical guitar only, which always freaks me out a bit as I’m not really trained on it, and my classical guitar isa 3/4 scale one intended for children. But I managed to get through, aided by the extra time afforded to me by various technical difficulties!

This December saw the second outing of Twisted Christmas at the Barbican, which gave me the rare opportunity to jam with a bagpiper, accompany Eliza Carthy singing a Chris De Burgh song, and play rhythm guitar to Richard Hawley’s lead. I made the most out of my new toy – a set of ‘blossum bells’, made by some eccentric guy in San Fransisco. They are 6 large metal cones on a stick, and you don’t know which notes they’ll be until they arrive. being restricted to 6 notes makes you come up with more interesting parts; I was reminded of it last week when I had to play a part on Farfisa in C, when none of the C’s worked.

I used the lull before Christmas to finish off a few of the things I’d promised to do for friends, but which I hadn’t yet found time for. I also did another session for Trevor Horn, for a South African tenor singer. I really enjoy working for Trevor because of the precision that’s required, combined with a very English sense of both humour and professionalism. He even took time to play me the original multi-tracks of ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, which was fascinating to dismantle and strip back to an absolutely killer 4-piece band live performance.

Finally, I went through quite a strange period with a project I was working on before Christmas, which dented my confidence. The immediately positive outcome of it was that I realised that for me, it’s important never to take confidence for granted, and often it’s helpful to deliberately undermine it. Feeling like there’s a long way to go, or being aware of a multitude of deficiencies can seem daunting or depressing, but it’s also a great catalyst to progress and improvement. That’s not to say it’s good to be insecure – that’s an impediment too. I just think it’s best to be as ‘transparent’ as possible, and never let a preconceived idea of right and wrong stifle creativity. I think it’s the musical equivalent of the scientific ‘double-blind’ test.