Photo: York Tillyer
After the success of So I had enough money to buy a property and build my own studio. Given the speed at which I work that was a sensible place for me to invest, so I could always have a place to record music in.
Up to that time, studios tended to be dark places with tiny control rooms with coloured lights that I found quite alienating. As the time came to close in on the design, I dreamt of creating the biggest control room in the world and setting its central views out over water, looking out at the wildlife instead of inward, looking at the musicians. We could see swans and ducks, and occasionally otters and a kingfisher, sometimes through the morning mist. We were no longer cut-off from the natural world.
Photo: York Tillyer
More and more of record making was happening in the control room which was often one of the smallest rooms in the studio. I was also thinking about the work we do with musicians from all over the world and wanted to break-down the barriers between the production team behind the glass and the performing animals, like me, working away on the other side. Our control room needed to be big enough to put everyone together in the same space. What I didn’t realise is that we were inadvertently creating a really useful little performing space in which live events could happen and be filmed and recorded in very controlled conditions. They could also sound great because of the acoustic treatment, unlike most live gigs. Consequently, we have had quite a few small shows in our big room with a few legendary names making their videos there.
I’d not really taken advantage of the big room as a performance space myself and when, in 2003, the opportunity came up, we grabbed it and offered the small number of seats to members of the Full Moon club. It was not part of a big tour so we weren’t as polished and rehearsed as we might have been while on tour, but it made for a more awake and edgy performance, as we were fully concentrating on what we were doing. There was no elaborate visual show, the whole focus was about making it sound good. I had pretty much forgotten how these songs sounded but listening back to these mixes I was pleasantly surprised how alive they were.
