Once
Howard Jones rode the crest of a British synth pop wave with phenomenal success
on a global scale, but as the Eighties ended so, unfortunately, did the hits.
Yet Jones never stopped writing and performing; now he’s back… backing the Sugababes!
JONATHAN MILLER joins Jones and co-producer Robbie Bronnimann in the songwriting
hotseat… But had Howard Jones not been accidentally sent two Moog Prodigy monosynths back in 1979 – having only ordered one – it could well have been a different story. “That was when I got the idea for a one-man band with different keyboards being triggered off each other with other parts played live,” confessed the classically trained keyboard virtuoso. ‘Honest Howard’ paid for the second Moog and, thanks to the tenacity of manager David Stopps, the famed one-man road to pop musical glory was eventually secured.
Between 1983 and 1986 Jones enjoyed a dizzying run of hit singles, scoring nine consecutive Top 20 chart entries in the UK – six breaching the all-important Top 10 – with four singles making the US Top 20, including the Phil Collins-produced ‘No One Is To Blame’ which reached number 4 in July 1986. The same song represented Jones’ last UK Top 20 entry, peaking at number 16 in March of that year, while ‘You Know I love You…Don’t You?’ made it to number 17 in the US at the close of 1986. Nonetheless, Jones had played some prestigious performances along the way, joining fellow keyboard luminaries Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby on stage in America for the 1985 Grammys, and performing an acoustic version of ‘Hide And Seek’ at London’s Wembley Arena as part of Live Aid that same year.
Thereafter, with four UK Top 10 albums under his belt – Dream Into Action also making it to number 10, Stateside – Jones’ ‘superstardom’ appeared to have run its natural course. He nevertheless fared well enough to build a well-stocked, SSL-endowed, 48-track studio (The Shed) at his Berkshire countryside home in time for recording Cross That Line in 1989, spawning US Top 30 hit ‘The Prisoner’ in the process. Similarly, his 1992 longplaying effort In The Running, later termed by one online reviewer as “Another star-turned-footnote from the electropop Eighties,” featured Jones’ US Top 30 epitaph, ‘Lift Me Up’.
Soon after, Jones found himself on his own in the big, bad music business world, but at least he still had The Shed to show for being dropped by WEA/Elektra: “At first I wanted to be able to do demos at home, then I thought, ‘Well, I want to go one step further and be able to really make records completely at home so I can always make records – even if I don’t have a record deal.’ It was really a kind of contingency plan for the future. I’m really glad that I did that, because I realised that if you’ve got the right gear, and you’ve got the right people to work with, you can make records on your own terms.”
Little did Jones know that one day he’d also be making records for other people on his own terms, assisting recently relaunched British girl group sensation the Sugababes by contributing a song to their new Angels With Dirty Faces album – with a little help from co-producing friend Robbie Bronnimann and an impressive virtual cast of revolutionary low-cost, high-performance, computer-based music technology…
Howard
Jones (HJ): That’s right. It’s been five years now
since I started the label, initially because my deal ended with East West/Warner
Bros; I’d done the five albums and they had no interest in continuing any further.
So I thought, “Well, I still want to make records, so why don’t I take this
opportunity to start my own label?” It started off with me making records and
gradually other people turned up in my life that I really wanted to help make
records with as well. I helped dba get their first album [Spectrum]
together; then it just evolved from the fact that we started working together
more. So now Robbie’s really involved in most things that I do. It’s great to
have somebody to bounce ideas off.
Robbie Bronnimann (RB): Howard was actually one of the first artists who got me interested in electronic music in the Eighties. In fact, I’m originally from Maidenhead, so it’s funny that he ended up living in my hometown. I used to send demos to him when I was about 12 years old; I used to post them through his door! By way of a weird coincidence, about five years ago I was back visiting my parents in Maidenhead and bumped into Howard on the street, just by chance. I went up and chatted to him, and he remembered me sending those demos. He invited me up to his house; then I ended up producing a single called ‘Angels And Lovers’ for him.
With the dba project, we co-wrote the first half of the first album together, to try and find our feet, really. It’s taken us two or three years to really gel. I’m still very much involved with dance music; Howard isn’t, really – although he’s very clued up about the latest things that are out there. He’s much more of a songwriter in the way that he works, but we’ve kind of got to a stage now where I know what he likes and doesn’t like, and vice versa, so we find a middle ground for the projects that we’re working on together.
RB: Howard’s very excited by what technology allows him to do, but he’s not too keen on the nitty-gritty of making sure everything’s updated, so I’m very much into taking care of the technology side of things, getting to know the ins and outs of every bit of gear so we can squeeze the very best out of it – anything that helps us get on creatively without wasting time, Howard goes for. He just wants to get on with the bare bones of getting a track together and move on to the next thing, so I kind of end up picking up the pieces and developing them. It is very much a co-production partnership.
RB: To be honest, virtually everything that we do starts with virtual instruments now. We’ve got no hardware instruments at all – even at the studio that we’re working in at Howard’s house. Actually, he’s got two studios – sort of like an informal one and a proper mix studio called The Shed at the top, which we affectionately call the “gear graveyard,” because there’s a massive Euphonix desk, a Mitsubishi digital multitrack which is about the size of an industrial washing machine, plus a few other bits and pieces, like keyboards that Howard won’t part with.
HJ: I’ve been clearing some things out, because there’s only so much space up there, although I’m not getting rid of the [Roland] Jupiter-8 or Juno-60! Eventually, the Euphonix will go; it will probably be replaced by a very accurate mixing environment with 5.1 surround sound – just a table and some nice furniture so people can bring in their computer and plug-ins and know that they’ve got totally accurate monitoring.
RB: We haven’t even been into The Shed for months! The way it works now is that Howard’s got a really nice workspace down at the other end of the house with his grand piano and a live area. So we’ve set up a G4 Mac in there with really good monitors, which is great for him because the computer’s down there with his grand piano. We do all of our work in there, totally in the virtual domain with [Emagic] Logic and lots of plug-ins. Then what tends to happen is that I bring stuff home to my place, The Pod, which has got exactly the same Mac set-up, in that we’ve got the same software, but I’ve developed it a little bit further with the Logic Control surface, so generally we finish tracks here at my place.
It’s so liberating, getting rid of mixing desks and just doing everything in the computer. I can take a mix straight over to Howard’s place with all the virtual instruments in a Logic folder, put it into his system, load it up, and it all comes back the same. And he can bring something over here and do exactly the same.
HJ: Yes, I did. And I talked about it back then, because in those early days I used to get a lot of stick just for using synthesizers. A few people actually said that I was putting people out of work, which was not true – I employed dozens of people! Secondly, I was told that synthesizers produced music that was cold, and had no emotions. These people were wrong on both counts, I’m afraid. And thirdly, everything was so expensive – a Jupiter-8 was four-grand [£4,000] or something, and a [Sequential Circuits, Inc.] T8 was even more, so people would say, “It’s really elitist; ordinary people can’t afford this stuff.” And I’d say, “Yeah, but what’s going to happen is that in the future people will benefit from us doing this kind of thing. They’ll have massive amounts of technology available to them, and they’ll be able to make amazing records at home in their front room.” So I really did think it would get to this level; it’s been a period of change, but I’ve always loved working with the Mac and like the idea of having everything in the computer in front of me.
RB: Howard’s
been a Mac user from start – ever since the little SE20. He was one of the first
Pro Tools users in the UK; he had the two-channel version and used to do demos
before anyone else had it. But every time we used his last Pro Tools system
I just thought that most of the plug-ins and stuff which you got with it were
boring – all kinds of high-end emulations, which are great for doing pro mixes,
but there’s very little off-the-wall stuff. Then the TC Works PowerCore came
out and I thought, “What do we really need Pro Tools for? If we bung a load
of PowerCores into the Mac, we’ve essentially got all of the high-end mixing
tools that we need.” All the TC [Works] plug-ins that we paid twice as much
for as [Pro Tools] TDM plug-ins just came with the [PowerCore] cards, and new
things, like the Sony Oxford EQ, are fantastic.
Then we were approached by Mackie who’ve got this other DSP-based card called the UAD-1 which compliments the PowerCore perfectly, because the PowerCore does all the high-end, corrective stuff, and the UAD has all the vintage emulation. As far as we’re concerned, it’s far better than anything we’ve ever heard as a TDM-plug-in. There’s more sonically interesting things that can be done on a computer, and we’re totally sold on the whole thing.
HJ: I don’t think that way of working would necessarily suit everyone, because a lot of people like to have lots of gear around them that they can grab. But I quite like the idea of having the room almost empty – I’ve just got the Mac, a microphone and my Steinway grand piano, which is my favourite instrument. Now it’s much more about ideas and writing, lyrics and structures. Then when you put everything in the Mac it becomes instantly recallable; it just seems to aid the flow of ideas – for me.
RB: What we’ve just done with the Sugababes certainly fell into that category – we got the girls in from the outset, but Howard and myself had already prepared some sort of skeleton track.
RB: Howard’s got another artist called Martin Grech, who’s signed to dtox. He’s got a worldwide deal through InterScope and that translates to the UK through Island Records, which is the Sugababes’ label.
HJ: Again, it was a case of something coming from something else. I was in London signing the licensing deal for Martin Grech; I got talking to his lawyer, who was also involved in putting together this Sugababes album, and she said, “I’d really like the Sugababes to come over to your place to do some stuff.” I always work with Robbie and my guitarist Robin Boult, so I said, “Well, let’s do this as a project where we all write and produce it together, because I think that’s a more contemporary way of thinking.” And that’s what we did. But I don’t actively go out looking for things, because there’s always more than enough work to do with the people that are around me [on dtox Records]; but if people ask me, I usually say yes – if I like their music!
RB: The Sugababes’ track [‘Blue’] was actually the first thing we’ve done that wasn’t to do with someone we knew. It was the first time that someone came to us and said, “Would you do this?”
What
can either of you tell us about how ‘Blue’ came
together at Howard’s studio? RB: We basically wanted to try and recreate a little bit of the vibe of the first big hit single [‘Overload’] that they had out from their last album [One Touch]; we were always big fans of that track.
HJ: We worked for quite a long time on getting it right before they came. I was really listening to their first album, just trying to draw out what they’re really about. And I noticed that a lot of their songs were really quite chromatic, so I tried to encourage that in the track that we did [‘Blue’].
RB: Basically, they came to the studio and we left them to their own devices for a few hours to write lyrics and get together the bare bones of the tune that they wanted.
HJ: They came up with all the melodies, vocal lines and the lyrics. They really are talented girls, so what you do with people like that, as a songwriter and producer, is set up an environment for them to have fun in. Thankfully, they really liked the stuff that we’d done, and in about two hours they had completely written this fantastic tune over the top – all the lyrics and a whole rap section. I was so impressed with that.
RB: They are vibe figures – you don’t have to gee them up to capture an attitude or anything. That’s why we enjoyed working with them so much; it wasn’t a case of thinking, “We’re going to have to try and go into every syllable afterwards to make it sound better.” It was funny, because when they found out what Howard had actually done, they were really embarrassed, saying, “We’re going to go out and buy your albums.”
HJ: You’ve got to remember that they’re only 16 or 17, so they weren’t even born when I had my first album out. Anyway, that’s good, isn’t it? They had no preconceptions.
HJ: I always thought the music business was this sort of compromise between something that was cultural and something that made money. There’s a cultural impact from people who have actually affected society – people like John Lennon and, in America, Bruce Springsteen. They make money, but there’s a balancing act to be had between the two. Within the record industry of today it feels like it’s all about making money, and I think that’s a very dangerous point to get to. At the same time, I believe there are lots of young musicians and bands out there doing amazing new things, and they’re not getting through so that we can all benefit from it. That’s one of the reasons why I set up dtox – I was fed up with moaning about it and wanted to actually do something constructive instead.
HJ: I’ve got plans to do quite a lot of records myself. The one I’m working on now is an album of piano solos; then the next thing I’m going to do will be a very electronic album, and I’ll work with Robbie on that. I’m probably doing more stuff now than ever.
© Jonathan Miller (October 2002)
THE
POD • SELECTED HARDWARE
