Making 'What Noise'
George Stewart provides some reminiscences on the re-release of What Noise in April 2018:
Were we actually at Willesden during the making of What Noise? I remember the photograph that was used for the Last Film single cover being taken there. (Fun fact: we'd just been watching an animal rights program, which kicked off a short period of me being into that, but I'm afraid I couldn't sustain the vegetarianism.) Were we really starting on What Noise roundabout the same time that The Last Film was released? I suppose we must have been - the album did have a long gestation. I remember at least the beginnings of some of the What Noise tracks being done in Willesden, because for the first time we had our own little demo studio set up in the living room. Let me see - drum machines, yes, that was it. The drum pattern on Greenham started off as a drum pattern on a Boss Dr Rhythm drum machine, also used on Footsteps. And then half-way through making the album we got a Roland TR-808, which shows up on Each Day in Nine.I actually became the tech head I've been for the past couple of decades relatively late, and I rather wish I'd gotten more deeply into some of the more esoteric tech at the time, because What Noise was being finished just as MIDI was becoming popular, but before affordable hardware samplers and sequencers came on the market, so sequencing at that time was done by something called "control voltage;" but a cv sequencer was a bit beyond our means at the time (or rather, we had other priorities, like the Simmons drum kit). John Walters, the first producer we chewed through on What Noise was familiar with cv sequencing, but because it wasn't something we'd had the leisure to play around with, we weren't really able to get anything musically good out of it on our own, which has always been a wistful regret for me. (A lot of things that sound "sequenced" on Naked and What Noise, apart from bits of internal sequenced segments from the ARP Odyssey that we occasionally used, and some actual cv sequencing on Radio On, and maybe a couple of other tracks, is just our music college skills of being able to play reasonably well - Jon's imitation of a sequencer on the Naked track Frightened in France, in particular, was a tour de force.) We did get to play around with one of the earliest samplers though, an absurdly expensive Fairlight, lent to us by the Bee Gees' keyboard player, which shows up in Radio On. But again, a fair number of things that sound sampled on What Noise were done more organically - Jon had a recording Walkman and was passionate about found sounds at the time, so we overdubbed lots of odd bits of sound and voice on many of the tracks on the album.
It's true that was also a fairly intense period of politics. I've moved so far away from the Left now it's hard to remember, but yeah it was Marxism, Feminism, Animal Rights, Greenham, anti-Thatcher/Reagan, the whole nine yards - while at the same time we were driving our neighbour mad and not caring a toss for that living human being next door to us, being naturally more enamoured of the arty display of plastic heads in our garden. He was a pleb, we were aristocrats of the spirit, with our minds set on higher things. We didn't even care very well for the house cat - I'm pretty sure we let her kitten die of neglect, or at the very least it fucked off because we weren't feeding it regularly any more. So much for animal rights.
But in our heads? Ah! It was a wonderful time. We were riding a wave of success, scampering up and down the country touring, doing tv appearances. Musical ideas were pouring out, we had high hopes for the next album, we were exploring new technology, doing residences in expensive country recording studio mansions, meeting cool new people, having wild parties, hoovering up drugs. We were exuberant, loud, we laughed a lot, we argued passionately about music, art, philosophy, politics, anything and everything, just for the sake of it. Relationship dramas were always bouncing around. Jon got stiffed by a two-bit con artist, but the guy had written a song, his one song, with such a cracking good chorus that we forgave him. Kim had a threesome with a couple of Italian tourists (and shortly thereafter met the love of his life). I was really into cooking at the time, and often cooked for everyone - some authentic curry recipes I'd learnt from an Indian gentleman back in Glasgow. Since I had the tiniest room in the house, I'd reserved our unused garage for the Crowleyan ritual magick I'd started doing, to the consternation of some of the others (Jon always laughed about the bone I carried with me up and down the country - Tibetan bell for the ritual striking of). I think that was the beginning of my drift away from the band - I didn't realize it at the time, but I was starting to alienate some of my friends, becoming unclubbable. Also, having actually read some Marx, I was starting to doubt, and began reading much more widely in philosophy than I had previously, and probably developed the wrong "ant smell" politically. On the other hand I'd always been a bit of an alien so maybe it was just a question of degree.
Simon Aldridge provides some technical details on the 2018 re-release:
About 2006-7 we managed to get the record label Warner Bros Records to find our old analogue master tapes, which of course were on 2.5-inch master tape reels that had literally not seen the light of day since 1985! Warners purchased the Magnet Record label in 1987 or 88 and they became our label from then on until we were dropped in ~1990/91.In ~2004 we'd obtained the reversionary rights for the songs (after our publisher Universal's retention period had lapsed the full song rights revert back to the authors) and set up our own publishing company KTPM Ltd. This was so we could control the written copyrights for the back catalogue, which was brilliant for us! But from our original 1981/2 recording deal with Magnet Records, the masters we made with them were legally bound 'in perpetuity' to Warner Bros which meant we'd never be able to own our recordings like the songs. But Warners are one of the great record labels and it feels good for us to be with them & for Cherry Red to be re-issuing them on CD again! There is a story /rumour that only a few weeks after Magnet sold the company to WEA (Warner Group) there was a fire in the one of the Magnet archive storage spaces. Everything, including contractual paperwork and many master tapes went up in smoke! We think that probably some of ours, along with our Magnet label mates Roland Rat's & maybe a couple of old Chris Rea b-sides probably went with it..... Strange fact: Roland Rat outsold everything else on Magnet when we were releasing "What Noise"! Imagine that! A glove puppet selling more singles than all of that record label's 'real' artists put together!
In the summer of 2006/7 we finally got the master tapes sent to a mastering suite in Camden Town where Jon, Nick & I started to open up the 1/2" and 2" tape boxes from our musical history. The 2" multi-track Track-lists showing each instrument channel brought back immediate memories of playing in, sitting in, and spending hours in studios such as Olympic, Eastcote, Utopia, all sorts...And the spliced together 1/2" tapes were the actual album mixes in sequence.... But the key thing was that because of the age of the tapes (20+ years old), we had to have the entire tape collection 'baked' so that the magnesium oxide would rebind to the acetate tape. (Over time the glue that binds the oxide and tape together is affected by moisture and looses its 'fix'. The only way to save tapes is to expose them to heat so that the glue rebinds the key components enough so that a few passes through the tape machine means you can transfer the parts to a pure digital medium. If we didn't do this then when we played them through the tape machine heads, the oxide would disintegrate and literally fall off the acetate and the original recordings would be for ever lost.) So into the oven they went at a temperature between 130-140 degrees for 6-8 hours and they even had to be turned every half hour or so. It is literally cooking the tapes...
Kim Howard provides a few more notes on the What Noise era:
It's been 30 years since I lived with a chunk of Kissing the Pink in a large semi-detached family house in Willesden that became a hub for a loose collective that used it as a studio, dark room, toilet, home; all at at time when you could still get by without doing much.I was a few years older than Kissing the Pink and from the wrong side of punk, but found common ground in science fiction and Moebius and pop science books about morphic resonance and dancing wu li masters, etc. It sounds a bit Spinal Tap now, but after Jon told us about program music and explained the difference between fugues and sonatas, and so on, we would try to create hallucinogenic soundscapes for our innerspace adventures. One long piece of ambience tried to capture the sounds of a group of turkish goatherds gathered around a nighttime campfire. Pure gold.
The two years or so it took to create What Noise, from early demos to the release of the LP, sit right in the middle of this time.
There were many great demo versions of the Other Side of Heaven, ranging from bittersweet burbling synthpop to a stomping a capella chant, each with its own distinct mood and style, and each with a pedal-crafted space that ranged the music from intimate whispered closet to heroically romantic mountaintop. Perhaps the label were starting to get excited about the song at this stage, imagining they could have a massive hit on their hands, and encouraged the band to pull out all the stops till it was over-egged, but at some point in its transference to recording studio the music was sterilized of its charm.
George (and to a lesser extent the rest of us) was very much into mysticism of all kinds and wrote Captain Zero nominally about the sun, though such were the hidden connections between various religions and belief systems revealed to us at the time following the consumption of massive amounts of psychedelics, I'm sure it could also be about almost anything to do with monotheism. Earlier versions had Adam and the Ants style Burundi drums similar to those on some of the Naked tracks, but...
Other Anecdotes
The Last Film Hymn Version: the vast endless note at the end of this track was made at AIR studios using their reverb chamber, the largest I've ever seen. It was an enclosed corridor, running the length of the entire studios. Projecting out of the chamber wall were hundreds of metal plates, each about 2 feet square, and set an inch or so apart. The sound to be treated was fed into the chamber and the resulting reverb was then re-recorded. You could sneak into the chamber and make funny noises and listen to their strange echo drift on forever - - a sound richly layered with lush undertones totally different in quality from that produced digitally by a small black box.
A year later we would go to a disused water tank many miles out of London, climb inside and record, using a Nagra portable, the incredible echo that the vast cylinder created. We took various objects that we thought would make an interesting echo, though in fact anything was made to sound brilliant by the effect. The tapes were used to create background atmosphere on a series of fine compositions.
Paul Mccartney, Linda, and George Martin, were in AIR making whichever Wings album was being done at the same time as 'Naked'. They were experimenting with an eccentric new kind of recording technique. The idea was that music would sound more real if you could record it the way a human hears it, so a dummy head was suspended from the studio ceiling with microphones where the ears would be, and was composed of substances that accurately reproduced the acoustic qualities of bone and brain matter. We were very polite about this new theory. Later Paul McCartney came next door and listened to the rough tracks of 'Naked' and was very polite about them too.
The band had wanted Eno to produce 'Naked', (his work with Talking Heads was a big deal to the band) but Magnet decided to go with the more commercial Colin Thurston, who had engineered Bowie's 'Heroes' album, and gone on to produce such bands as Duran Duran.
Kissing the Pink, probably like most bands, created a really good sound at home after becoming totally familiar with their own instruments and equipment. When they played live they rented or used the in-house PA system and mixing desk, so they usually sounded not so hot (especially with the kinds of engineers available for no-name bands.) In the recording studio, they would end up using the studio's equipment and so no matter how much they tried to recreate the sound they wanted, it never really materialized for them on record. (Plus the producer rarely shared their ideas of how the music should sound.) Thus the demo's, recorded at home or in a rehearsal studio, are the only recordings of how they wanted to sound.
Quite a few other people would come round and either join in or use the equipment to make their own music, most notably Roland Gift. Before Roland sang for Fine Young Cannibals, he used to come round and make demos with the Nuttall brothers. Toby Nuttall was a close friend of KTP, briefly played bass with them, and made a lot of demos with Jon. His band, Smell Funky Beast, a kind of retro hard rock band with a modern beat, made one meaty album and then disappeared.
I'm trying to find out more details about Nick's involvement with the Swedish band DOG. All I know so far is that maybe 3 or 4 years ago he went to Sweden to write a few songs for a synthpop band there called DOG. They liked him so much he ended up fronting them on 2 albums, but I've never been able to find out the names of these albums or any other details.
Fashion note!: Before 'Naked' came out Jon had a job playing lounge lizard type muzak on the grand piano in a very large posh old art deco hotel on Piccadilly called the Hyde Park Hotel. He bought himself a black tuxedo, and was soon wearing it with various incongruous articles of clothing. A tradition was born! I don't think there are any photos of this style, but for a while everyone seemed to be sporting black tuxes. His playing started off regularly enough but he soon got bored and started playing nonsense, but in that hotel lounge style, so no one ever noticed.