The Accused – Memories from the team

Producer and Engineer remember the making of The Accused.

As part of our album of the month series, we have a few recollections from the team behind the production and recording/mixing of the album.

The album was produced by Colin and Martin Green.

Martin recalls:

The main things I remember are Rafe’s comedy German accent, and his stories about: Jan Garbarek’s beautiful trousers and Charles Gray (the two are unconnected).

It was funny (sort of) how we annoyed everyone at Tomato doing very loud feedback guitar, while they were all next door trying to be all grown up, cool and sophisticated in a meeting with Brian Eno. We had fun doing it, I think.

Rafe McKenna was brought in to mix the album. Rafe also worked on some mixes for both Water on Stone and The Given.

I got asked to mix 2 tunes for the album. If memory serves me well they were SLEEPER and STORM CLOUD KATHERINE.The mixing took place at Roundhouse Studio 3 where i was doing a lot of work at the time. I knew the room well and mixed both tunes in a 12 hour session. Colin liked what I was doing and booked a week to mix the album.We did 1 day of Strings with Sally Herbert and her players on a Saturday and started mixing the album the following Monday.
The rest of the mixing went very smoothly and was finished within about 6 days. I have to say everything was well recorded and well produced which made my job easier.
I normally don”t like to have the artist hanging around while im mixing but Colin was a lot of fun. When I wanted him to listen to an almost completed mix to get his feedback he would comment in a german accent “Ya it sounds good but it could be maybe 12% better”
We had a playback session and Gary Clarke who co wrote one of the songs came down with a case of fine wine and i believe we all got rather drunk.
I thoroughly enjoyed mixing The Accused and its also one of the few albums I’ve worked on I like listening to as an album.
Technical stuff: (The album was recorded on 24 track analogue tape and was locked up to Pro Tools with some additional tracks. I mixed down to 2 track half inch tape and DAT)

Rafe McKenna

In an interview around the time of the release of Any Colour You Like (which included two tracks from The Accused), Colin noted the difficulties in self-production:

It’s too hard. You’re constantly changing hats. A performer doesn’t think or listen the way a producer does. It’s asking quite a lot of one person. However, I occasionally find someone like Martin Green or Andy Patterson whom I’m happy to leave with something and step away and they seem to appreciate being left to their own devices and not having someone stand over them. They’ll do something and I’ll come back and then we’ll talk about it. Then we’ll tweak if necessary or re-do it if we have to.

CV

That’s it for now – we’ll be looking at some of the individual tracks in detail soon.

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