I loved the sound he could get on tape for my drums. In rock music, getting this right is still one of the great tests for
any engineer. Since the drum’s original use was to spur on troops to warfare, rather than winning over a maiden’s fair heart,
it is hardly surprising that many a battle has been fought over the drum sound.
The kit – virtually the only remaining acoustic instrument in a standard rock context – consists of a number of different
constituent parts which insist on vibrating and rattling through a remarkable range of sounds and surfaces. Worse, hitting
one element will set up a chain vibration in the others. In the days of four-track recording, the engineer needed to capture,
but keep separate, the firm impact of the bass drum and the hi-hat for
marking the time, the full fat sound of the snare drum, the tuned tones of the tom-toms and the sizzle or splash of the cymbals.
Setting up the mikes to capture this is one of the black arts of the business, and is a pretty good way of detecting the best
practitioners of them. Alan’s full range of engineering skills were self-evident as we began to piece the record together.
‘Speak To Me’ was conceived as an overture and was what we understood an overture should be – a taster of things to come.
This was constructed from cross-fades of all the other pieces on the album, which I put together roughly at home and then
finally assembled in the studios. Initially we had tried creating the heartbeat that opens the piece from hospital recordings
of real pulses, but all of them sounded far too stressful. We returned to the possibilities of musical instruments, and used
a very soft beater on a padded bass drum, which strangely sounded far more lifelike, although the average heartbeat rate of
72 bpm was too fast and we slowed it down to a level that would have caused any cardiologist some concern. An enormous piano
chord held for over a minute with the loud pedal firmly down was then run backwards underneath the piece to provide the build-up
into the next section.
‘Breathe’ represented the first half of an experiment in reusing the same melody for two songs, or more precisely inserting
two completely different sections in the middle of two verses, so that the song reprised after ‘On The Run’ and ‘Time’.
‘On the Run’ was a substantial rework of an instrumental bridge from the live version, and was in fact one of the last pieces
added since it was only at this point we had access to an EMS SynthiA, the successor to the VCS3. The VCS (the Voltage Controlled
Studio) was an English synthesizer that had been devised by Peter Zinovieff and a team from the BBC Radiophonics Workshop,
whose
Doctor Who
theme tune had helped bring purely electronic music to a wider audience, and we had used it on
some of the other
Dark Side
tracks. However, it lacked a keyboard. The SynthiA came with a keyboard on the lid of its carry case. For ‘On The Run’ this
meant the bubbling sound could be played very slowly and then electronically speeded up. For the track we also ran riot in
the EMI sound effects library, and had another excuse to go back into the echo chamber behind Studio 3 to record the footsteps.
That sound library certainly earned its keep while we were ensconced in the studios: there was always an element of procrastination
in heading off to explore its potential, and there were a number of sounds which we were always very fond of, but could never
use. ‘The Overstuffed Closet’ was a big favourite: the sound of someone opening a cupboard from which all kinds of paraphernalia
could be heard falling out. And we all liked ‘Gunga Din’, in which an irritating trumpet player was assailed by an increasingly
heavy arsenal of weapons trying to wipe him out. After each rifle shot, burst of heavy machine-gun fire or aerial bombardment
he would play on, each time enfeebled but persistent.
However, for the clocks that introduce ‘Time’, we used elements from a quad demonstration recording Alan had made a month
or two before the
Dark Side
recordings. He had gone to an antique clock shop and recorded a horologist’s delight of chimes, ticks and alarms. The main
intro for this song was devised because a set of roto-toms happened to be in the studio and we completed it in just a few
takes. The roto-toms consisted of drumheads stretched over a frame on a threaded spindle. By turning the head it could be
tuned just like a tympani drum, so that a controlled series of tones could be used.
‘Great Gig’ was a piece of Rick’s, with the vocal section soaring over the top. There were a number of suggestions about who
to use: mine was the avant-garde mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian (who I was listening to a lot at the time) but she might have
been a bit
radical, even for us. Clare Torry, who did the track in the end, was pursuing a career as a solo singer – Alan had worked
with her in the past and recommended her. We were looking for a more European sound than the soul singers we used for some
of the other backing tracks, and directed primarily by David and Rick, she delivered some terrific performances. She was embarrassed
by having let herself go so much during one of the takes and came into the control booth to apologise, only to find that everyone
was delighted. After our experience on
Atom Heart Mother,
it is surprising that we had ventured back into the realm of additional musicians, but we were well served by all of them:
Clare, the other singers – the late Doris Troy, Leslie Duncan, Liza Strike and Barry St John – and Dick Parry, a Cambridge
acquaintance of David, who added the rougher timbre of his tenor sax to ‘Us And Them’ and ‘Money’.
Roger and I constructed the tape loop for ‘Money’ in our home studios and then took it in to Abbey Road. I had drilled holes
in old pennies and then threaded them on to strings; they gave one sound on the loop of seven. Roger had recorded coins swirling
around in the mixing bowl Judy used for her pottery, the tearing paper effect was created very simply in front of a microphone
and the faithful sound library supplied the cash registers. Each sound was first measured out on the tape with a ruler before
being cut to the same length and then carefully spliced together.
‘Us And Them’ was a lyrical piece which had been created by Rick. There is a saying that music is ‘the space between the notes’
and Rick’s music on this particular track proves the point with some style. ‘Any Colour’ really provides a touch of relief
on a record so tightly arranged, contributing to the dynamic pacing, as a pause before ‘Brain Damage’. Although lead vocal
duties on the rest of the album were handled by David, the vocal on the verses of ‘Brain Damage’ is Roger’s, as it is on ‘Eclipse’,
and it shows how well Roger’s voice suited the songs he wrote.
The last track, ‘Eclipse’, was a piece that had benefited enormously from live performance prior to recording. The original
versions of this lacked any real dynamic, but with gradual development on stage – where we needed to end the piece on a grander
note – it acquired sufficient power to make a suitable finale.
The snippets of speech that punctuate the album were a late addition, recorded one night just before the final assembly of
the album. Roger suggested the idea of incorporating spoken words and in half an hour we had devised a way of generating this.
Roger drafted a series of questions about madness, violence and mortality – and I think I wrote them out on a set of cards.
These were placed, face down, on a music stand in Studio 3. We then invited into the studio whoever we could find around the
Abbey Road complex: our crew, the engineers, other musicians recording there – anyone other than ourselves. They were asked
to sit on a stool, read each card to themselves and then simply give their answers into a microphone.
This naturally induced a certain amount of paranoia, as a studio is a lonely place when everyone else is grouped in the control
room peering through the soundproof glass. As it happened, some of the professional performers were a lot more stilted than
the amateurs, who seemed quite happy to chat away at length. Paul and Linda McCartney, for example, were recording
Red Rose Speedway
with Wings, and took up our invitation. It was very brave of them to accept at all, and in hindsight unfair of us to expect
them to reveal their innermost psyches to a group of near strangers with a tape recorder set up. They were guarded, very reserved,
and we didn’t use any material from their session. We must have had a very clear idea of what we did want, since it would
have been unthinkable otherwise for us to turn down two such famous voices. In contrast, Paul’s guitarist Henry McCullough
(‘I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time’) and
his wife were frighteningly open: they went straight into a story of a recent and somewhat physically violent argument they
had had, like some particularly aggressive edition of a
Jerry Springer
show.
Among the other voices were Peter Watts’s wife Puddie and our road manager Chris Adamson, who was recognisable by his slightly
Northern accent. Roger the Hat, an itinerant roadie of the old school who had worked for us on a number of occasions, supplied
a memorable session. His particular segment would have made an album in its own right. One story, which he delivered with
all the deadpan precision of a constable in the witness box, concerned the day another driver had unwisely cut him up. ‘I
remonstrated with him,’ said Roger the Hat. ‘He was rude. He was very rude. But retribution was at hand…I ’it him.’
Some contenders were rejected for audio reasons: Robbie Williams, in his second week of work as a crew member for us, could
not be used because his mellifluous bass voice was too deep and theatrical. Others sadly couldn’t be fitted in, however good
the lines. But Gerry O’Driscoll, the Irish doorman at Abbey Road, was the undoubted star. He delivered a wild torrent of jokes
and homespun philosophy, tinged with a touch of melancholy. His voice closes the album in the fade-out at the end of ‘Eclipse’,
and his line ‘There is no dark side in the moon. Matter of fact, it’s all dark’ helped clinch the final title for the album.
After the recording came the cross-fades, and there were a lot of them. In a pre-digital age these sequences, where one piece
fades out as another fades up, were still a fairly serious manoeuvre. Giant tape machines would be trundled in from all parts
of the building and hooked up into the mixer. As the cross-fades usually involved seven- or eight-foot tape loops as well,
a forest of mike stands was required to provide temporary spindles to ensure that the loops did not get tangled. After a while
the whole room started to look like a deranged Heath Robinson contraption.
Even with Alan’s engineering expertise, he didn’t possess enough hands to manage all the necessary tasks, so starting points
would be carefully marked on the tape, and band members positioned with fingers poised on various buttons. The machines would
be stopped and restarted while trembling hands worked the faders. A single mistake would mean starting the whole process from
scratch. The importance of all this synchronised teamwork was to get the correct levels for one track finishing, another starting
and all the sound effects and dialogue fading up and down underneath. Once the transition had been successfully achieved it
was then spliced into the master tape.
Sadly, we lost the benefit of Alan’s skills when we invited him to engineer the next album, offering him a small amount of
money but pointing out how privileged he was. To our astonishment he turned us down. Pityingly we shook our heads and then
watched as he had an enormous hit record with
Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
as the Alan Parsons Project and launched his own career as a performer.
We had intended to oversee all the final production decisions ourselves, but in the end we brought in an outside producer
for the mix, right at the end of proceedings in February. Chris Thomas had a background in music rather than engineering,
and had written to George Martin asking if he could work as his assistant – eventually George gave him an opening in his production
company. Chris had been working on the Beatles’
White Album
at one point, when George had to head elsewhere, leaving Chris in charge for a short, alarming, but exciting period. Chris
had a number of links with Pink Floyd. He had seen us on many occasions – including the violent night at the Feathers at Ealing,
at UFO and performing
Dark Side
at the Rainbow in 1972. He knew Steve O’Rourke socially, and had produced Quiver’s second album, following in David’s footsteps.
There is, of course, more than one way to mix any given track. There is no definition of right and wrong. Some prefer a mix
that has an ensemble feel to it in the way a classical orchestra can produce a balanced sound in which no one instrument features
more than another. At other times it may benefit the piece to have one clear solo voice, instrument or sound riding above
everything else. On
Dark Side
this type of argument raged about vocals, sound effects, guitars and rhythm section. At times three separate mixes were done
by different individuals, a system which in the past had tended to resolve matters, as a consensus normally developed towards
a particular mix. But even this was not working.
These were the early warning signals of fundamental disagreements within the band. Lines were being drawn in the sand, indistinctly
and involuntarily, but being drawn nonetheless. At the risk of simplifying things too far, David and Rick felt more comfortable
with a purer musical solution. Roger and I were drawn towards experimenting with the balances, and making more of the non-musical
elements. David always preferred a certain amount of echo, Roger preferred the sound to be much drier.
Chris, having few preconceptions, simply did it the way he thought sounded right. However, he said he wanted input from us
all. What he remembers is that, at a time when release date deadlines were looming and things could have been rather fraught,
the atmosphere was good, efficient and – for the music business – extremely disciplined, allowing him to clock off at eleven
in the evening before heading off to work on a Procul Harum album for the rest of the night.