Dance Hall Days
Wang Chung's Jack Hues talks about how drum machines helped create his group's signature hits, his love of prog rock, and his great lost solo album
It was four decades ago this summer that Jack Hues got what you might call an American drum machine education.
Hues’s band Wang Chung had been signed to Geffen Records, and was enjoying a breakthrough hit: a re-recorded version of their song “Dance Hall Days,” which topped the US Dance charts, lodged inside the Top 20, and was inescapable on MTV.
Now the band was looking ahead to its next single and video. One contender was a jittery number called “Wait,” which Hues recalls was “very much a drum machine track. Because the tempo of the track is faster than a real drummer could at that time really play accurately. And so it was deliberately sort of pushed into a realm where only a drum machine could play it.”
It was the Golden Age of synthpop, and Hues felt it was the right time to play up the drummer-less sound of the song—even though Wang Chung was a still a trio that featured drummer Darren Costin and multi-instrumentalist Nick Feldman.
The group’s A&R man, John Kalodner, quickly squashed that idea.
“I can recall saying to John, you know, ‘I think that we should make something of that.’” And, basically, it was always kinda like, no. You gotta have a real drummer.
Kalodner, a legendary A&R man who became famous for helping rehabiltate the career of Aerosmith, advised Hues, “[I]f you're gonna do a video, it's no good having a drum machine. American audiences won't get that. They'll think you're cheating. They'll think that you're whatever. You gotta have the real kit, even if it's all completely programmed.”
In the end, the funky “Don’t Be My Enemy” became the followup to “Dance Hall Days”—complete with a clip that featured Costin playing a standup kit with a couple of Simmons electronic drum pads. Meanwhile, “Wait”—which was released as the album’s fourth single—was never immortalized on video.
“John Kalodner was very much a kind of rock-and-roll guy,” Hues muses. But even today, he contends, “I don't think record companies have ever got over that. They still want the drummer,” he says with a laugh.
This summer, Hues is touring America once again, on two different package tours: the Abducted by the ‘80s Tour (named after a Wang Chung song), featuring Naked Eyes and The Motels, and the Totally Tubular Festival, with Thomas Dolby, Tom Bailey of The Thompson Twins, Modern English, Tommy Tutone, and Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow. (And yes, the Wang Chung lineup features a drummer.)
The interview that follows took place late in 2020, while much of the US and UK remained locked down. Hues—the nom de pop of Jeremy Ryder; “Jack Hues” is a pun on the French word “J’accuse”—took questions about his use of drum machines throughout his career, of course. But he also waxed eloquent on a variety of topics, including his time at the Royal Academy of Music, working with Tony Banks of Genesis, and his great lost album of the early Nineties.
One of the first things that I've been asking everybody—and I'm really interested in the diversity of answers—is, do you remember the first time that you ever heard or saw a drum machine, whether it was on somebody's record or part of somebody's home organ setup or in a music shop somewhere? And that includes the more primitive ones, the push button-kind of rhythm boxes. Do you remember the first time you ran across one?
That's an interesting question. If I'd really thought about this interview, I would have considered this. But I suppose my one of my earliest memories—a sort of fascination with that, [is] when you talk about the kind of drum box that you would get with, like, an an organ-type thing.
Or I'm also thinking of that kind of other, square Roland box. I forget what it's called. I'm always hopeless with the numbers. But they would basically do like a sort of samba, and they'd have, like, different preset rhythms. And there’s one of my favorites—still one of my favorite albums—is Todd Rundgren's double album, Todd. There's a track on that. I'm gonna struggle to remember the title of it. I can hear it in my head, but it starts off—it basically goes around the cycle of quite beautiful complex chords, and it starts off with this drum machine, in a rather exaggeratedly slow tempo. It's an instrumental track, and it's somewhere on that on that one. I have to look it up. (Editor’s note: It’s most likely “Sidewalk Cafe,” on which Rundgren used a push-button machine—possibly the Roland TR-77, which debuted in 1972.)
So I particularly love that track. But I guess in terms of working with bands—I mean, I've been in bands since I was 12 years old, really. And I kind of agree with Ginger Baker that the drummer is in a way kinda 70 percent of the sound of a band. You know? The feel, the kind of way they hit the drums, and whether they can play in time or not.
And that's not just keeping time—it’s like sort of feeling time, if you know what I mean. And I've been fortunate enough to work with some of the best drummers in the world. A drummer like Vinnie Colaiuta or Dony Wynn, they feel time, and can work with it. But your average guy that you're working within those bands you just got together, they may excel in certain things, but quite often one of them isn't time.
So I suppose the drum machine had this allure of kind of fixing that problem, albeit in a rather mechanical way. But I remember Nick and I had a thing called a Dr. Rhythm. So it's like a rectangular box, very sort of simple looking. I'm really not sure what kind of interconnectivity it had. (Editor’s note: The Dr. Rhythm was one of the earliest programmable drum machines, but it came out in the late Seventies, well before the advent of MIDI.)
But we were sort of using that in some of our early kind of Huang Chung demos and stuff. And, I think, we had a little 4-track Fostex kinda set up. And the Dr. Rhythm would quite often be on one track.
And I kinda loved it in a way. I loved the fact that these drum machines would just set up and go, not do fills, and that you kinda had to work with them in a way—to almost trick them into sort of doing any kind of time changes or stuff like that.
I'm just curious, since you mentioned having that Dr. Rhythm. Did that date back to something like your early band, 57 Men? (Editor’s note: a group which also included future Heaven 17 vocalist Glenn Gregory, and soon-to-be Adam and the Ants bassist Leigh Gorman, who went on to appear in Bow Wow Wow.)
Yeah. I think it would. I mean, when I first met Nick, we worked with a drummer called Paul Hammond, who used to be the drummer in Atomic Rooster—no longer with us, sadly. But he was an awesome drummer. Like, one of the best, and he had time. I remember he could open a can of Carlsberg Special Brew and still keep a kind of four-on-the-floor type of rhythm going in there. (Laughs) And, he was great. (Editor’s note: This was in the punk-era band The Intellektuals.)
And then we worked with Darren Costin. Darren was in a sort of jazz-rock fusion band when we first met him. So he was really into the kind of Earth, Wind, and Fire, very tricksy kind of thing. And Darren was so super-cool in that respect, you know. Sorry. I've drifted off from what you're questioning.
That's okay. That's one of the other nice things about this topic, is there's a lot of room to drift in it! In fact, that sort of anticipates another question I was gonna ask, but I wanted to backtrack for just a second.
As you say, you played music pretty much all through the Seventies, so you saw the early evolution of these machines. And one of the things that’s certainly true of some of the other people I've talked to—and they've made no bones about it—is that the drum machine, and a lot of this technology, was very democratic. It allowed people to come into music who maybe didn't have a lot of native ability, but it gave them an avenue that that they might not otherwise have had.
But you're coming to this though from a really a different perspective. You studied at the Royal College of Music. And you must have experienced a lot of the attitudes, I'm assuming, that people had about these machines, especially in the early days, which is: They’re toys. These are not real instruments. This is not something that belongs on a record.
Sure.
Do you remember that?
Well, it's interesting that you talk about the Royal College, because I studied electronic music at the Royal College of Music. But that didn't involve drum machines, because the kind of style that you were encouraged to write in was a sort of—it wasn't even “post-” because he was still alive—but Stockhausen [style]. Pretty freeform, you know, using sound as color. And the idea of putting a drum machine playing straight through something was, well—just unheard of. It would be considered outrageous.
But the thing is in these early drum machines, obviously, they were using sounds that were electronically created. And those sounds were available, using a [EMS] VCS 3, which was the main synthesizer that I was using.
But, of course, VCS 3 synths had no keyboard. So the idea, again, that you would even think about wanting to tune a sort of electronic sound to make a kind of Kraftwerk record—that, to me, felt a little childish in a way. What was more interesting was using these kind of sounds, some of which were percussive sounds, you know, to create these sort of Stockhausen-type soundscapes and stuff.
The thing was, it was incredibly difficult to get these machines to play [in] something that sounded like time, and play something that sounded in tune as well. At that stage, it was an incredibly meticulous process to try and get them to play a chord or something like that, or to play a cogent rhythm.
I guess I should ask just for the sake of clarity: were you involved in any of that sort of thing? Did you actually try to to do what you were just talking about while you were at the Royal College?
No. I guess when I was at the Royal College, I was sort of torn between a sort of total fascination with this sort of European avant-garde, and a sort of awareness that punk was also really interesting. I could sort of understand the language of punk really well. And the language of the avant-garde felt a lot more like I was gonna have to fake a lot more, somehow. I could fake punk more easily.
I think I just sort of—the sort of issues around class and music were very interesting as I encountered them at the Royal College of Music. And so—I probably don't seem like it now, but in those days, I was very much a sort of working-class kid. I didn't know anything about the sort of middle-class infrastructure of classical music, and how you had to be a part of that really to make it work for you.
So I found it much easier to work in pop music and punk because I knew people, and I could write in that sort of genre, and get my work performed. You know?
I went back and listened to the first Huang Chung record to get a sense of this. So that record— including the early singles and the B-sides and stuff—I'm assuming that's all Darren.
Yep. And I think that Huang Chung album was our live set kind of put in the recording studio. And Darren had to work hard on that record, because we we were pretty exacting. So getting the tracks to have time and to be in time and stuff. And I'm not just talking about metrically. That took a long time to achieve.
The lure of drum machines at that time was very strong, but we weren't using them. I'm just trying to think if there's a sort of slow, ballady kind of track that has a drum machine, but I don't think there is on that record.
If there is, I must have missed it. But what you're describing—the exactitude of wanting a drummer to do certain things—is certainly what led a group like Steely Dan to essentially get their engineer to invent a drum machine before there really was something like that available.
It was definitely in the air somehow, that you could kind of—I’ve often said this about working in the Eighties: because of the arrival of drum machines in particular, but all of the synthesizer technology and especially the Fairlight, the promise was that you could make the perfect pop record. You know? And, of course, I'm old enough now to know that there's not a perfect anything, let alone a perfect pop record.
But there was this sense that you could control all the parameters. And that was the other thing with the drum machine. You could work on the snare sound and work on the bass drum sound and work on the hi-hat sound individually, as opposed to having to have a kit where everything is kind of spilling over onto everything else.
There was the sense that you could get all those different things in a sort of perfect place. And therefore, by a process of logic, you would arrive at a perfect outcome. Not true, of course. It’s not that way.
Along those lines, I also was listening to the first version of “Dance Hall Days,” which was produced by Tim Friese-Greene. I guess that would have been a little bit before he worked with Talk Talk on It’s My Life, but he’s a guy who who certainly incorporated electronic percussion into his productions. But even then, the first version of that song also sounds mostly like a live drummer. So I wonder if you remember what the setup was for that version of this song?
Well, there's a track called “Ornamental Elephant.” And that is a demo, and that has a Dr. Rhythm drum machine sort of still in place. You know, we didn't have time, or maybe didn't have the money, to go into a studio and rerecord the drums. Plus, I think I kinda liked that sort of robotic drum machine sort of feel. And that track is very synthesizer-oriented. I don't think there's any guitars on “Ornamental Elephant.” So yeah, that was definitely a sort of a possible flavor that we were moving towards. (Editor’s note: “Ornamental Elephant” was the B-side to the 1984 single “Don’t Let Go.” Here it here. It sounds like some Simmons tom overdubs were added to the mix at some stage.)
But what's interesting about “Dance Hall Days”—and I'm trying to think how Tim Friese-Greene adopted it or approached it—the fact is that it's in 12/8. It's a shuffle thing.
So to get a drum machine to go—to get the snare beats to sort of shuffle with it was incredibly difficult, because they just won't do that. They can't mathematically think in threes. So then they can be thinking 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, but they can't think in 3, 9, 12. You know?
So you had to sort of, like, defeat the machine slightly, in programming. I'm not sure whether Tim gets the drum machine to have that sort of shuffle feel. But I remember that working with Chris [Hughes] on “Dance Hall Days” was a whole different ballgame. Because he fully took on the fascination of trying to get a LinnDrum to shuffle.
How did you do it on the demo? Were you able to “defeat the machine,” making the demo, or did you just skip the machine altogether?
Well, how we did the demo…I can't recall how the demo sounds. I should've researched this a bit before I spoke to you. But I think we sort of managed it somehow, or maybe we just were using the one and the kind of downbeats, as it were, based on the snare. And Darren played the hi-hat shuffle, and certainly played the toms and all of that stuff.
But one of the reasons we worked with Chris was because he'd used that rhythm in some of the Adam and the Ants stuff—the kind of Burundi drums that he was using on those early Ants records. That influence was something that I was very interested in through, again, the Royal College of Music experience of looking at what we now call world music. But in those days, it was just studying the music from other cultures, and looking at how that could be sort of incorporated into Western pop music—given that, obviously, Western pop music is already founded on the blues to a large extent. So it's kinda got a certain amount of that in it anyway.
Chris described, from the very first meeting, that there was kind of this instant chemistry between you guys, and that it was pretty much decided almost on the spot that you were gonna work together on Points on the Curve.
Yeah.
And you just mentioned one of the things that was appealing about it. But by this point, I guess it's 1981, maybe early in in 1982, something like that. Technology has evolved to the point that the first Linn drum machine has been out for a while. The second is on the way.
There are also some competitors, so there's definitely stuff you can do with machines that you couldn't do as recently as a year or two ago. Was it the thought from the get-go that—for lack of a better way to say it—“This is going to be a drum machine record”?
Well, certainly Chris's total fascination with the state-of-the art technology—you know, he had an LM-1, which was a big machine in those days, and an expensive machine as well. And I thought it sounded incredible. So Chris's fascination with technology was part of the great promise of what this album could be, that we would be able to embrace the technology.
But I think I was also mindful of the fact that we were signed to an American label—we were signed to Geffen Records. For America, the A&R guy was John Kalodner.
John Kalodner was very much a kind of rock-and-roll guy. Do you know what I mean? I think he'd later signed Aerosmith [to Geffen]; he made them huge and stuff. But they were his sort of dream band in a sense. So I can recall, when we had did have tracks like—we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves now—but “Wait” on on that album was very much a drum machine track. Because the tempo of the track is faster than a real drummer could at that time really play accurately. And so it was deliberately sort of pushed into a realm [where] only a drum machine could play it.
And I can recall saying to John, you know, “I think that we should make something of that.” And, basically, it was always kinda like, no. You gotta have a real drummer.
If you're gonna do a video, it's no good having a drum machine. American audiences won't get that. They'll think you're cheating. They'll think that you're whatever. You gotta have the real kit, even if it's all completely programmed.
That's such an interesting thing to hear you say, because that was actually one of the very next things I wanted to ask about. That’s an attitude that I think persisted fairly late in the game, at least in America. Maybe there's a difference between the us and the UK, but the idea that if there's not a real drummer there, if we don't have a drum kit set up on stage, it's cheating—
Yeah. And it was always very interesting, because the Eighties in a sense plays around with this. Think of a band like ZZ Top, who had such a rock-and-roll kind of feel and look. And yet, you know, that album, Eliminator, is all drum machine.
That's actually in this book as well!
And I can imagine that that's a pivotal kind of thing. But you would never see them with an LM-1 on that stage.
And obviously, they were embracing TV as well, and all of that stuff. So there’s that whole level of how you present a band, and how you conceal the technology—which was also going on in the Sixties as well. I mean, it's very much part of what I think puts a lot of—what should we say?—“real” musicians off of pop music, because there's so much smoke and mirrors going on at any given time. But I found that all totally fascinating.
Since we're talking about the role of the drummer: one way potentially, at this time, to split the difference is to use a Simmons kit or some other variation of an electronic kit. Some of the stuff on Points on the Curve does sound like Simmons sounds, whether they're being played or triggered from something else. I wonder if you could speak to the role of the drummer on that record.
Darren had a Simmons kit, and he played that. He played it live as well. I think he kinda liked the look of the whole electronic thing. But he was certainly using Simmons sounds. And every opportunity he could, he wanted to play, you know.
And I think the experience for most drummers—probably most drummers on most records—is actually a phenomenal amount of sitting around and waiting for all the other stuff to get done,. But I think on Points on the Curve, a lot of it is a drum machine, and he then would trigger his sounds or stuff like that. Or he'd sort of do a pass doing some fills, and we would then meticulously recreate the fills, using machines. So there's always this sort of, like, give and take between the real drummer, if you like, and the machine. But the machine is definitely what's holding that record together.
Maybe this is jumping ahead a bit, but, you know, after that record and after the tour, Darren leaves and does his own thing. And I have to wonder if what we just talked about—which involves a lot of sitting around, and now it involves a lot of sitting around and then your stuff kinda gets programmed anyway—was the reason?
Well, what you just said, in other words. Yeah.
I think it's—even when the drummer would normally be actually playing, his part is being done by a machine at that point. So he's still sitting around. His involvement with it is much more kind of down the line, in a sort of overdub kind of area.
I mean, as you say, on the Huang Chung album, he's actually playing on that. And on Points on the Curve, we did play together in the studio on occasion. I mean, everything was recorded separately in a very meticulous kind of way. I can remember Darren saying like, “Yeah, it's got my personality on it, because of the fills and stuff.” Which it does—when you listen to the way the fills work in. They’re all his things, you know?
This is the sort of situation that created a lot of drama in some bands—in ZZ Top, in Journey, for example. So was Darren leaving an amicable thing, or did he say, look, you guys don't need me anymore because of this machine?
It was essentially amicable. I mean, it's quite interesting, the whole thing about duos in the Eighties. You know, why were there all these sort of duos in the Eighties? And I think it was that the record company essentially saw—as they'd always seen—that the core of any band was the writers. And the writers were encouraged in all sorts of ways—mainly financially, through the publishing and stuff like that. So the bands increasingly became redundant, in a sense.
And then when you get the machines taking over the drum part, then it's a pretty amazing drummer who can hold off a machine in a studio situation. Because when you're listening to a track literally hundreds of times, you start to hear all the little anomalies of live playing, you know? And in that [Eighties] aesthetic as well—which was all about producing this very kinda shiny, finished product. It wasn't aesthetically a thing to have a sloppy drum film like it is now. Or to have something that sort of pokes out in some sort of way.
So yeah. The drummer's role was highly questionable. And it did come down to the record companies encouraging the writers. And so I think Tears For Fears and us and all sorts of bands, the duo thing was the logical outcome, really.
Something people tend to forget is that drum machines were really adopted quickly—that we go from a period in in the late Seventies where these things are considered to be toys, to the mid- Eighties, where everybody has pretty much adopted fully this idea. So when does the record company back off and say, “Hey, we don't need a drum kit in the video anymore to show that there are drums? Everybody kinda gets it now.”
I don't think record companies have ever got over that. They still want the drummer. (Laughs) So unless you're Kraftwerk or The Human League or someone like that—aesthetically, it’s always gonna be some guy playing drums.
From talking to Chris, on Points on the Curve, he mentioned that there there was some Fairlight on there as well.
Yep.
And he mentioned using Page R as an interface between the Fairlight and the LinDrum. So I assume that a similar kind of thing was in place for the soundtrack to To Live and Die in LA?
Well, I think the process of working with Page R was excruciating. Kind of synchronization problems, and not only getting the Fairlight to talk to the LinnDrum, but getting all of it to talk to tape and run in sync with it. Well, it was just a nightmare.
So in many ways, To Live and Die in LA was just a LinnDrum, recorded onto tape. And Darren had left by that time, so we didn't have to pretend that…it was just brutally kind of LinnDrum. And, of course, the main soundtrack stuff—this kind of 15, 16-minute proggy kind of track, “City of the Angels”—is very much derived from “Wait,” and running at this kind of slightly-faster-than-natural tempo.
So basically there was no Fairlight on To Live and Die in LA. It was all, LM-1 or [LinnDrum] playing the drum parts. And then we had a PPG Wave for a lot of the keyboard sounds. I think we used an Emulator for some of the string sounds. And, so it was all quite—relatively, I mean; these machines are still phenomenally expensive—but it was much more kind of, what what's the word? You know, sort of downmarket.
I mean, we had a week to do that soundtrack, and we took, like, nearly a year to record Points on the Curve. So, massive difference in approach. And I was thinking of the… elasticity that we got in the feel of “City of the Angels” using the LM-1, and then having Nick play bass live along with the drum machine. I mean, Nick is a really great bass player. Really knows how to play in time. So the feel of that track is great because he plays along with it and sits in a certain place with the Linn that makes it sound kinda real.
And we also had a great engineer as well, who got a very dirty sort of sound out of the drums by distorting it a bit and pushing the kind of analog components of it to to a degree.
I was talking just a couple days ago to Prince's engineer Susan Rogers about the fact that he would use these guitar stomp boxes—including some distortion boxes—for the LM-1.
I mean, I don't recall it, but I'm sure we didn't put it through guitar stomp boxes. We weren't that kind of dirty. (Laughs) But I think we drove the studio gear pretty hard, . And there was a sense, that—I guess it is a problem with a thing like the LM-1, is that on its own, it does sound incredibly clinical, and it sounds like what it is.
It's a very simple bit of a mathematical thing going on—processing. So, yeah, driving it was always the thing. But I think we probably used the more traditional—just driving compressors and tape distortion and stuff like that. We were recording to analog tape on that album.
I'm assuming that just for songwriting use, at some point, you upgraded from the Dr. Rhythm. I was wondering at at what point you owned a machine or machines just for your own use.
Interesting. Yeah. I've never had an LM-1. I think the Dr. Rhythm actually persisted for quite a long time. We were very cheap. (Laughs) The little Fostex, I think we upgraded to an 8-track at some point. But the Dr. Rhythm hung around for quite a while. I can't remember what else we used. I must have had something. Nick would remember.
When you start working with Peter Wolf on Mosaic, in 1985, 1986, there’s a lot of stuff that has changed. Obviously, you guys are now working as a duo, as you said. But just within the industry, and just talking about drum machines in particular, sampling is is becoming much more of a thing. So I'm wondering what the setup was on that record.
Well, Peter used a Synclavier, and he would program drums on that, basically. And that was a great-sounding machine, you know. Because another thing about the Fairlight was, not only was it excruciating to program, it didn't sound very good either.
So the Synclavier was a huge upgrade in terms of the sound. I think it's still considered to be one of the best samplers, really. I mean, I'm not sure what technology they were using for sampling, but it was big, so the drum sounds on “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” they’re pretty good. But again, I think because we were recording in L.A. quite a lot of the time, the American aesthetic of it's like—where it's gotta sound like a real drummer.
And if it sounds like a machine, that's not gonna wash well. So you were constantly avoiding the machine aspects of it, other than just the consistency of it.
So Peter's way of approaching it was—what’s the track? “The Flat Horizon,” on Mosaic, before the final chorus, there's this insane drum fill. The, drummers now, I think, can play it because they're used to doing this stuff. But I remember Peter’s sort of glee when he put this, like, 32-note triplet fill across three toms into this thing. He just loved it. (Editor’s note: You can hear it at 3:28 of “The Flat Horizon.”) So it was about kinda creating virtuosic effects with the Synclavier, rather than letting it be a drum machine.
Since you mentioned that, was it Peter who did the lion's share of the programming on that record, or was it more of a collaborative thing, depending on the track?
It was collaborative in the sense that I would be sitting there, kind of tutting and wanting it to sound less flash, if you know what I mean. But Peter was pretty much—he won't mind me saying this—a sort of control freak when it came to what actually went down on the tape.
And if it was a keyboard part, he wanted to play it. If it was a drum program, he wanted to program it. So that sort of required quite a lot of give and take between us. And I think it produced good results, even though it was a little uphill in a—a few fights along the way.
I think on the following album, The Warmer Side of Cool, Peter sort of backed off a bit and kinda let things be a little more, sort of English, in a way. But I remember him being—that sort of that surf beat, I think it's called. You know, where the snare sort of skips along. He hated that.
And he hated that sort of feel, that kind of slightly amateurish drummer thing—which I sort of loved, paradoxically (laughs), even though I was as obsessed as anybody at having things locked. But there was one track where I wanted that sort of thing, and he just would have none of it. He was like, “Jeff Porcaro would never play that sort of thing!” (Laughs)
I hope I'm not sounding negative about it because, you know, Nick and I, a couple of English guys—I mean, we could sort of play, but we couldn't play, like, on a Steely Dan record. We aspired to a kind of clarity and a precision, to a certain extent. But Peter was the real deal. He could really do it. Played with Zappa.
But the thing is, players—when Darren plays a take and says it's got my personality on it, he's right, in a sense. When I play a guitar solo or a rhythm part, it's flawed, and the flaws are your personality, for want of a better way of putting it. So that is an important ingredient.
So Peter is the channel through which everything has to go to get on the tape. It gets transfused by the way he approaches things, which is good. And in this way, the record company are paying him a fortune to do exactly that. They don't want me to half-ass, play a couple of notes and go, “Well, that's the solo. That's how I want it.”
This is not so much a drum machine question, but you made a record in the early Nineties [The Anatomy Lesson] that didn't come out. I'm just curious about what the reasons for that were?
I think in my particular case, there was a lot of politics involved. Essentially, when Wang Chung split, Nick signed to Epic Records, where our manager, David Massey, was working at the time. And I signed to Columbia, where David wasn't working at the time. And so there was nobody there really fighting in my corner. And I think, actually, there were people at Columbia who were really pissed that David decided to work for Epic and not for them.
And it wasn't like I was made an example of, exactly, but there was nobody there who was particularly interested in what I was doing. They kind of—I had no support. And I didn't realize that at the time, of course. You know?
I just thought, naively, that I'd make a great record and, of course, they’d put it out and get behind it because it's a great record. But that's not how the music business works.
As far as I'm aware, this is a thing that has never managed to find its way into even the dark corners of the Internet. So what kind of record is it?
Well, I suppose it's—in a way, it's the record I was trying to make in Wang Chung, which is a sort of slightly prog record. It's, I guess—it's a pretty highly polished record. It's got a lot of complicated textures. There's brass and keyboards and strings, and Steve Ferrone played on it. So the drums are great. It's a sort of good record in many ways, but an ambitious record, I would say. Yeah. (Laughs) Good’s meaningless, isn't it? But it's an ambitious record. You know, some of it works, and some of it doesn't. At some point, I'll probably just let it out there.
But I guess it was quite a painful experience for me. If I'm honest about it, it was a terrible experience for me, to spend a lot of time and effort on something that didn't see the light of day. It was my first—I had a pretty good experience in the record business, I think, up to that time. I was indulged in a way that an artist needs to be. But I hit a wall with that, and there was only me to blame. So that was a tough place to be. But it was a good learning curve, you know, and through all these things, you come out the other side of it a better human being.
Who produced it?
Nick Davis produced it, who was working with Genesis a lot at the time, and it was off the back of—no, I met Nick first, actually. I was gonna say, I then went on to work with Tony Banks. (Editor’s note: on the 1995 album Strictly Inc.)
So that's the connection that led to that collaboration.
Exactly.
I'm assuming that Sony still owns The Anatomy Lesson.
Yeah. Columbia. Yeah, I'm not sure what the status would be.
I did have a manager at the time who shall remain nameless, you know. But if he was more on the ball, he'd have got me out of that deal. And I think there were clauses to get me paid off and stuff. But I just was—I guess I'd never had to deal with that side of the business before on myself.
I was very—David was a friend, and I was very cushioned from all of that stuff. So in a rather English way, I never kind of deigned to look at the small print. So I'm not quite sure what the status is with Columbia owning it.
Well, by that point—by the early Nineties, I guess, just to to bring things back to the drum machine part of things—the standalone drum machine has largely been swallowed up by samplers, by the standalone workstation, and by computer recording.
So at what point did you leave the standalone machine behind? Was it while making that record?
No. I mean, that that record, I think, Steve Ferrone played a lot of the drums on it. And he's just one of the greatest drummers. I mean, I think I still had the stuff I’d learned subliminally in L.A., which was you want the real thing. You don't want a drum machine, really. You know? Unless you want that specific kind of sound.
So I guess there was drum machines kind of underpinning on the demos and stuff, but I didn't use a drum machine. And I'm trying to think what I was using then. It was probably an Emulator…but it's been a long time. So I sort of blanked it all out of my mind, really.
But I do know that when I started hearing, like, the Portiishead album, or the Fat Boy Slim records, or those sort of earlier Nineties Massive Attack records, that were using sampled bits of playing in a slightly—they were using it in a way where you could tell it wasn't real playing, that it was looped. I found that absolutely fascinating. Absolutely loved the way that sounded. And to me, that was a massive breath of fresh air from the strictures of of real drum machines, where you had to program everything. And we're constantly trying to defeat the machines' metronomic tendencies. You know?
If I remember this right, there was a record, after you and Nick got back together, where I remember reading an interview that was like, hey, we’re actually gonna go back to the machines. We're gonna go back to the programmed part of things.
Yeah. So that would be Tazer Up!, which is an album that we made, in 2011, 2012. I think I was working on that album on and off for three or four years, actually, with a guy called Adam Wren. So Adam was one of the engineers on the Leftfield albums, and still works with those guys, goes out on tour with them and stuff.
Adam's a really great engineer. Very English, in a good way. In the sense that he's really into things sounding broken and dirty and messed up and stuff. But he's meticulous in the way that he works.
So I think Nick’s and my experience was that we sort of got back together for various sorts of business reasons, really, and got some offers to do some touring, which we took up. And I quickly sort of thought, well, we should have an album out, because there's something to sell. Which means there's a reason to do radio interviews, TV interviews. There's something to talk about.
The media could care less that you're out on tour, really. You know? But when there's some sort of focus for it, then everything sort of clicks into place. Plus, I write songs. I mean, my writing rate has massively increased over the last few years, actually.
But even in those days, I'd write a couple of songs a year that I kinda liked. So these songs were lying around. And we had a discussion about, okay, what would Wang Chung be like in in the 21st century? What were those records we made? They were drum box, a bit of synthesizer, and guitars, and vocals, of course.
But the combination of drum box and guitars was something that that we liked, as opposed to thinking of the drum box always being like a synth band. And so Tazer Up! was rooted in that aesthetic, that we wouldn't use loops and such. I mean, we did, actually. But most of the time, the approach was a drum box.
The classic example is “Stargazing,” on that album, which is one of my usual six, seven-minute prog epic sort of things. And I initially did the demo using a loop from a DJ Shadow record, which is a very sloppy kind of big loop. But we got rid of that and programmed some sort of TR-808 samples, basically, to provide the drum parts. Which gives it a very curious feel, because I sort of still prefer the DJ Shadow loop. But I do get that it's a much more stylish, slightly self-contradictory thing, you know, to have the drum machine playing this epic stadium-rock piece.
There's quite a bit of divide in the way that people perceive what I guess you could call the hardware versus software question.
There are some people who will say, “Look, there’s nothing that beats the tactile feel of working with the box. And the box, especially in cases like the LM-1, kinda has its own time. And the time that you get from from using a computer just doesn’t match up like the machine.”
But on the other side, there are people saying, “You can get any plug-in you want. You can get any sound you want. And I got rid of all that hardware junk because it was just gathering dust in my place!” I wonder, especially talking about a record like Tazer Up!, where you come down on that hardware-versus-software question.
Yeah. It's an interesting question. I'm remembering now that I used an MPC 60, I think it was. I used that for years during—from 2000 roughly, I think, through then. So, Tazer Up! was all done using the MPC 60 in the initial phases.
I think I'm not doctrinaire about the machine, is the thing. You know? I think I always found them a bit of a pain in the ass for me. And I'd much prefer the way things are now, the way you can use the sounds.
I do get that there are certain—like, when I was working with Tony. I’d say the album that I did with him is pretty close to some of the sort of later Gabriel Genesis records, you know, the sort of Selling England by the Pound-type thing, which I loved. Foxtrot, as well, was an album that got me through my teens in many ways.
And I do remember saying to Tony—well, actually, one of the road crew said to me, because I was [asking] what was it like, using the Mellotron live and all that stuff? And one of them said to me, you know, all that stuff's in the barn. We could set it all up if you wanted. If you wanted to mess around with it.
And I said to Tony, why don't we do that? Why don't we do that? And he was like—he sort of went slightly pale. Just kinda like, don’t. No.
He said, “I’m just really happy with this machine.” He had this lovely sort of Yamaha keyboard to deal with anything he wanted on it. And I was going, “Yeah, but it's not the same. You're not gonna react the same to playing.”
And he goes, “No, I don't wanna react like that, and I don't wanna be reminded of what a nightmare it was dealing with all that stuff.” So I think there's a certain romance around the technology. But the reality of it—especially if you're the one who's dealing with it—is that just being able to have it all in one place is kind of preferable. I've found that especially among younger people—[they’re] the ones who do seem to be more romantic about it.
Like recording—recording to tape, I mean—I have friends who love the idea. “Oh, there's this studio in Ramsgate where we can record to tape.” It's like, it doesn't mean it's going to just magically sound great because you're recording on tape. On the contrary: it will sound bloody awful, unless you really know how to set the machine up, and you can compress the fuck out of everything.
So Tazer Up!, then, is really more like a computer record using those vintage drum machine sounds.
Yeah. We we didn't use real drummers on that record, I don't think. Everything is sort of programmed, but it's with Adam sort of using loops and bits of loops and stuff, and the kind of sounds he had access to. He's got a sort of Leftfield sense of how to make a drum box sound huge.
That was fun to work with, and I kinda like that process. But my more recent, stuff, like the solo album [Primitif] that I released at the beginning of this year—
Which I really love, by the way. I've been listening to that over the last couple weeks. It's unfortunately like everything else today: “Oh, I didn't know that this record came out!” But now I do.
And the problem with getting people to be aware of these things, is as hard as it ever was.
Well, I really have enjoyed it a lot.
I appreciate you saying that. Yeah. I'm very proud of it.
But what I've enjoyed with that record was, having live playing, which really appeals to me. You know, that you can—you can have this sort of best-of-both-worlds kind of situation. So it's not like I just press a button and it locks it all into place and that's that. It's like, well, you do do that at some point, but you then kinda get rid of a lot of the kind of divisions that it's making to have a slightly looser kind of feel.
And I'm just sort of finishing up another album, which I've been working on through this lockdown time, because frankly, it was a great way to spend the time. And Josh McGill [of Syd Arthur] again played on it. And, again, I've really enjoyed leaving some tracks of just his playing. I'm in the space now with some tracks I work on, and I don't have a kinda click track as such. I just play and then work around that, you know.
And there are tracks on Primitif like that as well, like the track “A Long Time.” There's no click track on that because there are these indeterminate pauses and stuff. You know? So I guess my career has largely been a matter of there always being a click track somewhere in the background, even if it's a real drummer actually playing with it at some point. The actual release from the strictures of click tracks and tempo is something that I've managed to shake off, and have tracks that are in a slightly different tempo by the end and stuff.
I always remember Leonard Bernstein, actually. [I’m] a big fan of classical music and the kind of the disciplines around all that. You know, he was given a Synclavier when they first came out. Because obviously, he's a great composer and amazing conductor. And it's not that he didn't like it. He just simply couldn't understand the idea that it couldn't deal with rubato, as they call it, in classical music. The whole slowing down, speeding up, and the sort of expressive aspects of playing. The Synclavier would basically calculate the rubato as metronomic time. So [it would make] these very, very tight little 64th note kinda divisions. He just thought it was a complete joke. He thought that the Synclavier was a toy, you know. So it's all a matter of perspective, I think.
This is a pretty subjective question—I’m sure it depends a lot on the kind of genre that you're talking about particularly. But I wonder, who's the best drum programmer you've ever seen, heard, or worked with?
I'd say DJ Shadow, actually. I think the drum programming on …Endtroducing and The Private Press are just absolutely stunning. I love what he does.
So, him. I mean, there's lots of other people who are great as well. Geoff Barrow was great on those Portishead records. And Adam's great. He's a really good programmer.
But I've also worked a lot of jazz musicians who—again, jazz drummers, drum machines are the devil to them.
It's funny, actually working with Josh on this most recent album that I'm doing, there’s a track on it where it's just sort of solo trumpet. It's very kind of Miles-inspired.
And so the drums don't come in until, like, the last third of the track. And when they do, I deliberately have played it so that it's not clear where the one is, because I sort of wanted to create this—obviously, it's an illusion because I…well, actually, is it an illusion? No. It's not really. I sort of never figured out where the one was.
So I just like this idea that the musicians are all sort of watching each other, waiting for somebody to go boof. So Josh was playing along on this track, you know—he was sort of inventing the part, really. And he started doing this kind of slightly out-of-time, falling over himself stuff, which I ended up using. But when we were recording, I said, “Don't do that. Don't do that kind of jazz drama thing. You’re supposed to be just holding time and pulling everything together.”
He then did, like, 10 takes of doing that, which I never used. I [used] all his falling over himself stuff because it sounded right. But we were talking about Mark Holub, who's a drummer I've worked with a lot on my jazz stuff, who's in a band called Led Bib. And Led Bib are a kind of—they won a Mercury Prize a few years ago, but their thing is kinda, like, a post-Ornette Coleman free jazz thing.
And Mark is so filigreed in his playing. It's insane. Do you know what I mean? He never would just hold down a beat. I mean, he will do that. I've made him do that on occasions, and he does it beautifully.
But his natural sort of state of mind is just this kind of hazy of kind of detail that he's obsessed with all the time. I mean, you might wanna talk to him about drum machines, if you want the sort of, like—the polar opposite of me and Nick sitting there going on the Dr. Rhythm. (laughs) I think that I would be interesting. There probably should be a little bit of a competing viewpoint.
It's a fascinating subject, drum machines. When Chris was talking to me about it, I thought, wow, what a great thing to write about. As I said at the beginning, the feel of the drums and the record is—whether it's Ringo or Steve Gadd or whether it’s whoever programmed the Dare album by the Human League. That feel, you know, is such a big part of what you're getting from the music. It's maybe the first bit that kinda touches you. And the way those drum machines are part of that feel—it’s very interesting.
Tune in for more exclusive interviews about drum machines and electronic percussion, coming soon! (Really this time :) Meanwhile, follow me on Twitter (@danleroy) and Instagram (@danleroysbonusbeats), and check out my website: danleroy.com. And be sure to visit the official Wang Chung website, where you can get tickets for the band’s summer tour of the U.S.!
Dancing to the Drum Machine is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle/eBook from Bloomsbury, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers.