The Bill Price Interview

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

This spray can art piece measures about 10 feet square and was painted on the outside wall of Wessex by a graffiti artist named Futura, whom The Clash had befriended in New York.
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You recorded the Sex Pistols at Wessex Studios, which was very much your studio. You redesigned most of it at some time or another and did the bulk of the engineering work there for a significant period. Can you tell us something about its history?
Wessex was actually built by the Thompson family, who used to have a studio in Bournemouth, which was in [the Ancient English county of] Wessex. That’s where the name came from. It was subsequently taken over by Les Reed, the writer of Tom Jones’ “Green Grass of Home.” The studio had been designed to cope with the pop records of the ’60s, 4-track live sessions, possibly with rhythm sections, strings, brass, woodwind, choir, like a Tom Jones’ record. So it was a large, dead room. We used to talk about something called “separation” in those days, when we had to record all of these things at once. By 1975, with the development of 16-track, those sort of pop sessions weren’t done live. Although Mr. Thompson’s son Robbin actually engineered the first two King Crimson albums at Wessex, so the seeds were sown for it being a rock studio. I had worked at AIR London from 1970, and by 1975 I was chief engineer. In that year, Chrysalis had bought both AIR and Wessex studios.

Separately? They weren’t connected?
They were in no way connected. Chrysalis decided, “Let’s go out and buy some studios.” So they bought quite a lot. Wessex was a bit in the doldrums and about a year after they’d purchased it, the managing director of Chrysalis, Terry Connally, gave me the chance to turn it around and become studio manager. So I moved over to that from AIR, because it was a good opportunity to see what I could do.

But because the Thompson family had converted it—pretty much themselves—on a small budget in the ’60s, it wasn’t really what you’d consider up-to-date soundproofing. This meant that when they were recording bands, they had to stop recording at 10:30—which is, back in the ’70s, about when bands got going—because the neighbors used to complain. It also meant that you couldn’t record strings in the rain because of the pounding on the roof. That was one of the major things. We hired the great Ken Shearer . . .

Who had designed AIR.
Indeed. He was the original acoustic architect of Britain, if not the world. He designed a heavy concrete ceiling to go under the pitched Victorian roof, which is what was so leaky, soundwise. And this did the trick with the neighbors. But, unfortunately, it reduced the actual volume of the room by about 30 percent, which didn’t do much for the string sound. So we got Keith Slaughter, who used to be manager of AIR Studios, to re-jig the acoustic treatment. He managed to recover most of the RT60 that we’d lost. That was the main structural job we did on Wessex.

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You wore two hats at Wessex—chief engineer and studio manager. How did the two roles complement each other and when did they conflict?
Originally, when I took over at Wessex, they had a staff of engineers, which included Mike Thompson and Tim Friese-Green. Later in Wessex’s history, we had Gary Edwards and Jon Walls from AIR, Jeremy Green, Jeremy Alom, Mike Shipley, Mark Freeguard, Kevin Matthews and Stuart Storeman. Bookings were very good. But as the decade progressed, it became the era of the freelance engineer. It was very hard to get a band to work with a house engineer when they could go and hire their own. We had great difficulty attracting freelance engineers to Wessex, and I couldn’t quite understand why. So I had to act as a studio manager and hang about, lurking in the doorway on a few freelance engineers’ sessions. It didn’t take me long to discover what the problem was; it was the Cadac desks. Have you ever come across them?

I know you had them. The problem was that they were unfamiliar?
Yeah. I think Clive Green’s desks are the cleanest, best-sounding signal chain that’s ever been built. I don’t think they’ve been topped yet for actual sonic quality. But they were like no other desks in the world. Clive had a totally eclectic approach to layout and routing and logic and that sort of thing. The Cadacs bristled with several hundred miniature toggle switches, a random number of which were capable of producing totally silent loudspeakers. It was really very embarrassing. I was looking in to the control room, which was silent apart from the clicking of VU meters on their pegs, and there’s a freelance engineer in there groping for the right toggle switch. But he’s got to save face, and he’s not going to ask this smirking Wessex tape op in the corner of the room how to get out of the problem.

So it was really as simple as that, because when you’re a freelance engineer, you’ve got to look like you do know what you’re doing in front of the client. To turn round to the tape op and say, “Excuse me, I don’t seem to be able to get any sound out of the desk…” People just did not like to do that. That was what was stopping them. So I knew that we just had to get an SSL in there.

And that’s what you did?
In 1984, I think, give or take a year. And that was very successful. For quite some period after that we were literally booked 24 hours a day. The mix room was upgraded with an SSL a couple of years later.

We managed to get an interview with Chris Thomas last year [see Mix, January 1999], and Blair Jackson asked him a question about using a P.A. in Wessex, and he said, “Yeah, I had to do that because I wanted to get a live sound and they wouldn’t let me pull up the carpet. So I brought in a P.A. and put the drums through it.” That was presumably on sessions that you were engineering for The Pretenders.
There was quite a movement towards that. Wessex was a large, dead room. One of the things was that, because it had been a church hall, it was, for a young band doing gigs around the country in church halls, a very familiar acoustic. You could actually set a band up at one end of Wessex and it would sound very like the band on their previous gig wherever they’d been playing around the country. It somehow seemed to make the bands very comfortable. We did have a phase, which Chris instigated, where rather than screening them all off and giving them headphones, we set them up a little bit more like they would be set up onstage and put the vocals through a P.A. so everybody could hear without having to wear cans. It was to do with getting a vibe for the band, as well as livening up a carpeted room. Again, because it was a fairly dead room, suited for ’60s live recording, you could get away with setting the band up in that way and not screening them off in different booths. You could get reasonably good separation between them. So it worked quite well.

Because you entered the business in the early ’60s, you were a witness to the transition from live mixing to mono to multitrack recording and the much more complex and time-consuming mixing process that it necessitates. Are there any direct-to-tape mixes that you can think of that are better than painstaking mixdowns of comparable material?
I can’t answer that question. Even when we used to go straight to mono, we always wanted more control. We used to run two mono tape machines at Decca, and if there was something like a guitar that we didn’t think was very good, we could stop it going to machine B and get the guitarist to overdub it by doing a mono-to-mono copy. [Laughs.] So from when I started, I’ve always wanted more control over everything. I guess you could say now, what with Pro Tools and everything, we have absolute total control. I don’t know whether the results are superior or not. Sometimes fate just took the upper hand and you got happy accidents. You can’t have a happy accident now. That’s the downside, really. You’ve got so much control it’s hard to get flukes.

Next month: Price talks about Guns N' Roses, the Sex Pistols, Elton John and Pete Townshend.

Chris Michie was Bill Price’s tape op when AIR Studios officially opened for business in 1970.

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