Concert films are big business these days – just ask Taylor Swift – so it’s perhaps not surprising that Janet Jackson is choosing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her breakthrough album Control by releasing one.
Rather than being built around archive footage, though, this will be based on a multi-camera recording of Jackson’s upcoming show at the Amerant Bank Arena in Florida on 12 December, which will see her perform not only Control in full but also other songs from her extensive back catalogue.
“It will be a whole new show – new costumes, new stage and maybe a little glimpse into the making of the album,” says Jackson. “It’s going to be filmed for a movie, which means that our time together will be remembered for decades.”
Released in 1986, Control was actually the third Janet Jackson album, but it was the one that marked her commercial breakthrough. Its tracklist reads like a greatest hits set – What Have You Done for Me Lately, Nasty, When I Think of You, Control and Let’s Wait Awhile were all smash hit singles – and its influence on other artists, particularly female stars, was felt for years to come.
While the title of the album makes it clear that this was Jackson setting her own creative agenda, it wouldn’t have been made possible without co-writers and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who worked across the record. But, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021 about how the collaboration came about, Jam admits that it was kind of by chance.
“There was another artist that we were supposed to be working with and - at that time - that artist didn’t want to work with us!” he explained. “So John McClain, who was A&R at A&M calls and says ‘Sorry, the artist doesn’t want to work with you. Guys, I’m really embarrassed. Is there anyone on the A&M roster that you’d like to work with?’
“So we said ‘Send the roster,’ and this was before the internet, so he had to literally send the roster, and we were going down it and we said ‘Janet!’. And he said ‘Oh wow, that’s cool. Do you want to do two songs? Three songs?’ And we said ‘We want to do the whole album,’ because we felt like we knew what we wanted to hear Janet Jackson sound like.”
This was around the time that Jam and production partner Terry Lewis were working with Cherrelle, who had scored a 1984 debut hit with I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. During this time, Jam and Lewis’s engineer walked out on them, but rather than hire another one, they decided that they were going to become self-sufficient and do the job themselves.
The problem was that they didn’t have any experience: “Cherelle was the guinea pig of our experiments,” admitted Jam. “We were blowing speakers up. Blowing headphones up… plugging the wrong thing in. She was so understanding. We learned to use the studio doing [1985 single] Saturday Love [a duet with Alexander O’Neal], and Control was the album after that and we ended up engineering it all ourselves.”
The duo were still kind of making it up as they went along, though, so decided to record in the way that they’d seen Prince do when they were working with him as part of The Time.
“When we recorded with Prince, Prince would always record in the red, on the VU meter,” Jam told us. “So we were like ‘We need to record like Prince records,’ so we recorded everything in the red. We were so proud of ourselves!”
The mood changed, though, when they took what they’d done to mixing engineer Steve Hodge.
“When Steve Hodge came up to mix it, he put the tape on and says ‘Who engineered this!?’ And we were so proud, we said ‘We did!’ And he said ‘Everything is recorded way too loud.’ We said ‘Yeah, we meant to do that - that’s the way Prince records.’ And he was like ‘Yeah, but what kind of machine does Prince use? An Ampex? On Prince’s machine zero is zero… Your machines are set to plus six… Zero is already six dB above… and you’re pinning the needles…’ And we were ‘Can it be saved?’ and he was ‘Yeah, yeah. But I’m going to have to come up and teach you guys how to record.’
There was an upside to Jam and Lewis’s technical naivety, though – their ‘mistake’ actually contributed to the way that Control ended up sounding, and made its songs jump out of the speakers.
“The way Control sounds is an accident because we didn’t know what we were doing and then Steve just basically saved us,” said Jam. “He made it sound great. But it made the record sound frantic. That’s what Prince always said. When your ear hears distortion, it thinks something is loud. He always wanted his records to sound loud and a little bit frantic on the radio. That was what Control had.”
Tickets for the Control 40 show are on sale now. A release date for the movie has yet to be announced.
