I’ll be in the pub if you need me
IN THE STUDIO, 1978
OUR SECOND STUDIO ALBUM, Breakfast at Sweethearts, was not all we wanted it to be, not because the songs weren’t good, but because we didn’t enjoy making it and didn’t really achieve what we were after.
The whole studio process was still foreign to us. We’d spent five years on the road, playing in front of audiences, changing songs as we went along, desperately trying to get some sort of reaction from the crowds. I’d be bouncing off the walls most nights. Normally by the end of a good night, the songs sounded nothing like the songs we had written or learned, somewhere way up in tempo and way beyond where the band was happy to play.
But in the studio things didn’t work that way. We had already found this out with the first record. We were asked to play the songs over and over, slower and slower until all the life had been wrung out of them. We would all be left looking at each other, worried, while the producer promised it would sound better when we let him mix it. The big lesson we eventually learned was that if something doesn’t sound good when you put it down, no amount of mixing is going to make it any better. Of course, we all know that now, but back then we were at the mercy of the people we let take control of our records. You live and learn.
We wanted to play new songs in our set and to do that we needed to get a bunch of them out there on a record. We needed the right studio and the right producer for our much-anticipated second record – when I say much anticipated, I mean much anticipated by us, the band – but we didn’t find them.
We wanted to rock more and get more of a live sound, so we decided to record at Alberts studios, which was turning out some great-sounding rock records – AC/DC, The Angels and Stevie Wright were a few – so off to Alberts we went. Now, everyone knows that it takes more than just the right studio to make a record, but I’m not sure we did.
No one told us that Alberts had more than one studio. Alberts Studio One was the room where all the great records were made. I had sat in Studio One with George Young and Harry Vanda, watching them record AC/DC. Young and Vanda had been the driving force behind The Easybeats, and were now entrenched at Alberts, writing and producing rock, pop and soul music. Everything they touched turned to gold. I knew how great that room felt.
Cold Chisel headed into Alberts only to find we were in Studio Two, which was a bit of a turkey. I’m not sure if the management booked it, the record company or the producer, but whoever did made a big mistake. Studio Two felt like you were in the dentist. Pulling good sounds in that room was a lot like pulling teeth, slow and painful.
WEA wanted us to have a producer, instead of a musician, make the record, and that would have been a good idea, had it been a good producer. They also wanted someone with a track record, someone who had produced hits, and Richard Batchens had been involved in a lot of Australian records. The one that caught our eye was Goodbye Tiger, an album by Richard Clapton, a fantastic songwriter we all respected. This record, we know now, resonated with us not because of the production but because of Richard Clapton’s great songs. It was a great record but not really a rock record. For some reason we thought using his producer might work for us. So when WEA suggested Richard Batchens we foolishly agreed.
I don’t know how he got his good reputation, because he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. You generally have to have some respect for the producer to place your career in his or her hands. I wanted to place his head in his hands. I would have felt sorry for him, but we had so much riding on the record and I didn’t think he did the songs justice.
I got to the point, when I was singing the final vocals for the record, that I would sing and then take off as quickly as I could, not even sticking around to see if he had got what was needed.
When it came to mixing the record, I remember we would all be in the studio, trying to make it work.
‘Hey Richard. Excuse me.’ I would start the day off with a nice tone.
‘What?’ He was so polite.
‘Do you think we could turn up the vocals a bit please?’
‘I wish you’d just shut up. I’m busy here.’
There was silence. Smoke was coming out of my ears as one of the band tried to calm me down.
‘Hey Don, can I talk to you? Outside,’ I snarled through my teeth. ‘Mate, I reckon this fucking guy hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. He’s fucking up our songs.’
‘I know. They’re my songs.’
‘What’ll we do?’
‘Let’s just give him a go and see if he pulls it together. He might be in the middle of something and we don’t know it.’
‘Yeah. All right.’
A few minutes later Don said, ‘Hey Richard, sorry to interrupt, but can you turn that organ up a little for me? Just to see if it works.’
‘Not without turning the floor tom up.’
‘Er, what do you mean?’
‘I’ve bounced some of the tracks together to make the mixing a bit easier. We do it all the time in the producing business.’
Don went pale. We all knew our baby, the new record, was fucked.
‘Hey Don, I’ll be in the pub if you need me. I can’t stay here any longer,’ I yelled across the room.
Don sat, not answering me for a while, the voice of Richard the producer still ringing in his head. ‘Yeah, ah, no. I think I’d better stay here.’
Richard leaned over the mixing console, talking to himself, and seemed to be out of his depth. To make things worse he seemed angry at us for asking him to be there. In my opinion, the guy couldn’t mix a cake never mind a record. The album was unlistenable to me.
Miraculously the record, released February 1979, was a hit and took the band one more step up the Australian music industry ladder. I think the album’s success was ultimately all down to a bunch of great songs that Don had written, and the hordes of punters who got drunk with us and listened to those songs every night.