The Bill Price Interview

The Bill Price Interview—PART 1
Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

There’s nothing intrinsically amusing about electronic repair, nothing at all. If you know a bit about electronics, it’s not difficult. The hardest part is to carry it out whilst you’re convincing the artist and the client that it’s “just routine. Everything’s going to be okay very soon.”

Were you involved in the score for Live and Let Die?
Absolutely. George Martin wrote the score for it and produced and conducted it in AIR Studio One. Paul McCartney did the main title music, which Wings played live with the orchestra. That was a session and a half, I tell you.

I did a certain amount of film work at AIR in the early ’70s, when AIR was very keen to branch out into the film business. Studio One was heavily equipped with the film technology of the time, which, unfortunately, was optical projectors and Albrecht 3-track recorders. That old technology required an army of skilled projectionists. What you’d do is use one set of tape machines for a take of a scene in the movie, whilst the other half of the crew were setting up a completely different set of tape machines for the next scene. Because it used to take so long to load them and cue them and everything, the session would take forever if you didn’t double up. Most of these skilled people had to be hired in—they weren’t on the AIR staff—and the combination of their unfamiliarity with the equipment and with each other obviously meant there were a few mistakes, so things didn’t go too well on some of those film sessions.

George Martin wanted me to do some of the film scores. The thing is, it was quite a few years since I’d recorded a big orchestra straight to stereo and I refused to relinquish the control that I had with 16-track. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time code in the UK at that time, but Dave Harries, who was the chief technical engineer, produced this little box. What it did was to start the 3M 16-track recorder, which had a sticky-tape mark on the tape positioned over the record head, at the same time as the projector. It was a pretty simple system. It took no account of the different run-up speeds of the two machines, but they were mains-synchronous, so on the principle of all things being equal, when you came to play the tape back, you positioned the mark on the playback head, and it played back in sync. Unfortunately, the film editors who were at the studio at the same time as the scoring were absolutely horrified. They didn’t think the system would work and went around heavily inspecting my ACTT membership card, which is the film union. In fact, on one occasion, they even insisted on running a 3-track as well. But it worked. It probably wasn’t in sync to the two frames you need for dialog, but it was close enough for music cues in film. Quite often the timing of a music cue is a matter of taste. You don’t actually want the squealing trumpets to start at exactly the same time as the face appears at the window. Sometimes you might want it a little before, a little after, whatever.

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I know you worked on the Nilsson Schmilsson album with Richard Perry. Did you mix that album?
I couldn’t tell you. It was one of the craziest albums. It was before synchronizers, and the big song we worked on was “Without You.” That had one 24-track that had rhythm section and brass on it and another 24-track that had strings on it. And a third 24-track that had Harry’s vocals on it. I remember we did the vocal for “Without You,” and all the harmonies in Studio 3. [AIR Studio 3 was a remix room, but was linked to a small overdub room that was shared with Studio 2.] Remember, the vocal booth was separated by a corridor, so Harry used to spend quite a lot of his time in that little room on the other side of the corridor, and quite often, the microphone would be turned off and we’d be doing something else. We wouldn’t see Harry for hours. He’d just be asleep in that little funny room across the corridor. He’d done a vocal two hours ago and nobody’d thought to speak to him. Good chap, though, Harry Nilsson.

That was just one of the craziest projects. I did loads of strings, vocals and Robin Cable did a lot on it, at Trident and at AIR, I think. I did mixes on it, I did this, that and the other, but I never put an album together. I don’t know when the album was put together and what I’d done on what.

The other great mystery, of course, is who did what on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols?You and Chris Thomas wound up with a joint credit, without it ever being clear who did what.
That’s absolutely true. It was totally down to [the group’s manager] Malcolm McLaren. The simple facts of the matter were that Chris was hired by Malcolm to do a series of singles for the Sex Pistols. I was hired by Malcolm to do a series of album tracks with the Sex Pistols. Life got slightly complicated, because I did a few album tracks that Chris remade as singles. Also, Chris started a couple of tracks, which got abandoned as singles, which I remade to be used as album tracks. On quite a large number of songs, when we’d finished the album, we had two versions of the song. We went to the cutting room at least three times with different running orders. I couldn’t quite understand why Malcolm kept chopping and changing between different versions of different songs. It slowly dawned on Chris and myself that Malcolm was trying to slip between two stools and not pay Chris or me. So we said, “I’ll tell you what, Malcolm. Whatever’s on the Sex Pistols’ album, it was either done by me or Chris, and you can pay us and we’ll divvy it out amongst our little selves.” Which is what we did. But it did force that very strange credit, simply because the sleeve was printed long before it was finally decided which version of each individual song was on the record. If we’d known, it would have said “produced by Bill Price” or “produced by Chris Thomas.” That’s how you ended up with that credit, “produced by Bill Price or Chris Thomas.” [Laughs.]

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