Flood's analysis at Mute Short Circuit 2011/05/14
As part of a programme of talks and films at the Mute Short Circuit event in May 2011, producer
Flood gave a presentation in which he recalled the production of several Depeche Mode tracks through looping audio examples and commentary. Among the tracks included in his presentation was
Personal Jesus. An abridged transcript of his comments can be viewed below.
"We started off with this particular song, this was the first song that we recorded. The demo was pretty much a smaller version of what you know and love, but everything about it was all a bit of a test."
"So the first day in Milan with Depeche Mode, what are we going to do? We're going to record ourselves kicking a bit of metal in the booth, me and Fletch, while Dave Martin and Alan and the engineer, whom I'd never met, are all sitting and looking. So, that was the first I'd ever done. And that took a long time to do, which wasn't something I was expecting. A foot stomp? How hard could that be? Oh boy..."
"Anyway, so we do this, and then it's on to the main riff of the song. Now, Martin, felt very, very strongly that it should be acoustic guitar. So, OK, you're the boss, I'm working my way in here, so let's do the acoustic guitar."
"So, well, he's written it. He's a pretty damn fine guitar player, which I didn't realize at the time. Depeche Mode, they don't do guitars, do they? So he spent a long time playing this, and playing it, and playing it, and then we all agreed it sounds pretty good. But personally, I felt it could go a bit further... but I had to wait. So we're going along, it sounds pretty good, it's basically the demo. So obviously Depeche are going 'Hmm, how much are you charging?'"
"Anyways, so maybe we can make the footstomps a bit bigger.
[plays room channel of footstomp behind the sound of the main footstomp channel, producing a thicker sound]
So, OK, they're going right, big deal, you recorded a bit of room. Sure, anyone can do that."
"So then another idea that was going along was to use acoustic-y type of instruments, so you'd have harmonica or... one idea for the bass was actually to use the Jew's harp.
[plays Jew's harp channel]
So we're going OK, that sounds pretty good. Sounds a bit like a blues band. We're Depeche Mode... what's going on? Where are you leading us now?"
"So anyway, try and re-address the balance. We're going to introduce something a little more Depeche Mode-esque.
[plays resonant synth bass channel].
It's starting to sound halfway decent now. OK, so that's pretty good, that's not a bad start off. That's probably a couple of days worth of work. A lot of testing, a lot of 'Is this as good as it gets?'"
"There are loads of other pieces in there that you just start to see -- essentially all I was doing was enhancing what they already had and trying to help them go to a new place, and it was very difficult. In the end, in order to get the life out of the guitar that I thought it needed, I finally persuaded Martin to actually put [in] an electric [guitar]. Maybe the acoustic had taken half a day to record, I remember he just did the electric guitar parts in one go. [He was] just like 'Ah, really, is that all I've gotta do? Alright. Uh, can I go now?' Small victories!"
"If I had the slide guitar part here, I could show it, but I always heard that as screaming voices, and there was one evening when they're all looking at me going 'What are you talking about? It's a slide guitar.' And Dave going 'What, just screaming to something" I go "Yeah, just scream to anything!" He goes "What, like this? Rahhh!" I went "Great!" So they sampled it and put it with the guitar that slides up, and that's why it sounds — it sounds like a slide guitar, but it's not quite a slide guitar, and that's something that they'd obviously learned from Daniel, and I had learned from Daniel, this thing of meticulously crafting something and building it."
"So that's the way that that track was built up. Each part of that track is very, very crafted, and it was just trying to enhance effectively what was there ... It's a fantastic piece of music but it was only a better version of the demo. That's the job of the producer, sometimes, to go, 'Look, it's great, I don't need to do anything,' which is a bit hard when the artist is looking at you going 'What exactly have you done in the last hour? How much are we paying you?'"
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