As it builds to its euphoric coda, you’d never imagine that Harry Styles’ 2026 single Aperture was born in a moment when the energy in the studio had fallen flat.

Speaking to Spotify for its Songlore series, though, Styles’ long-term collaborator Kid Harpoon (Tom Hull) says that was indeed the case. He’s been breaking down how the song was made, and remembers that the seeds of Aperture were sown when both he and Styles were feeling creatively spent.

“I guess the moment for me when it came together was, I'm standing in one room. Harry's in the live room of the studio,” says Hull. “He's playing on the piano. I'm stood there. We're both exhausted. The energy was low, and when the energy gets low in the studio, the songs get slower, the music gets slower. Things become a lot more introverted. You’re tired at work, and you've got to get through the day, but your day and your job is to go and make something creatively. I'm also in the same zone, and I was like, ‘I don't know what to do.’”

For Hull, the solution was to dig out his trusty Roland TR-909 – a drum machine he describes as a “work of art” – and bang it through a classic ‘80s Eventide digital effects box – the HS3000 SE Ultraharmonizer.

“Aperture started with the 909 and an Eventide delay, and I was like, I'm just going to program something up,” Hull remembers. “I'm just going to play around with some sounds and just try and see if this can bring us some energy.”

We get to see Hull recreating the hypnotic Aperture groove using the same hardware he used to produce what you hear on the record. He recalls that, once he had that initial drum groove, he decided to develop it.

“Start hitting a synth. That's kind of cool. Then I've got my modular setup. We're patching all these cables. I was like, I'm going to dick around with this and see what happens. 20 minutes [later] I had something kind of going, and then Harry came in from the other room. He's like, ‘What are you doing? This is quite good.’”

Soon enough, they were off to the races, with Styles riffing off what his producer was doing and coming up with vocal ideas. “The next thing, I look up, and he's already singing, and he's written some melodies,” remembers Hull. “And around this moment, he goes, [sings] ‘We belong together.’ Then we're sort of pointing at each other, saying, ‘Yep, that's good.’ And he's like, ‘Yeah, that's good.’ A couple of hours later, we kind of have it.”

As Hull tells it, all of this kind of came out of nowhere. “I don't necessarily believe in this ‘divine inspiration,’” he admits. “I think it's just, ‘some good things happen, some bad things happen.’ But if there was any point in my career where I go, that was a sort of divine moment, it was that.”

Hull also says that it felt like a “hands-off-the-wheel moment” that he wasn’t really in control of, but he is proud of his contribution to one part of the song in particular.

“There's a bit that sounds like an electric guitar part. But it's my modular synth, and I was so proud of it. And when I watch the live show I'm so proud because I'm like, everyone thinks it's guitar, but actually, they don't know it's my modular synth.”

Hull says that it was Styles who encouraged him to go against his concise pop instincts and stretch Aperture’s running time out to more than five minutes; at times it feels more like a formless electronic music jam than the number one single it would become. Both men were keen to retain a human element to the production, though – hence the addition of London’s House Gospel Choir towards the end, and the decision to play the synth bassline in a longer section rather than simply creating a loop.

Although Aperture ended up being the lead single from Styles’ 2026 album, Kiss all the time. Disco, occasionally, Hull also reveals that it was the last song that they made for it. It was only when it was done, though, that the project felt complete: “It suddenly became the touchstone – it made everything else make sense,” he says.

It feels like a Daft Punk collaboration with Lego has been on the cards for years, which is probably because it has.

Back in 2020, Patrick Harboun and his son entered a recreation of the duo’s iconic Alive 2007 tour pyramid into the Lego Ideas Music To Our Ears competition, which it eventually won. Now, five years later, the set is going into production.

“This all started as a creative escape during lockdown between my son and I because of our shared love of Daft Punk and Lego building,” says Harboun. “We never dared imagine it would take off in this way. Watching our passion project become part of an official collaboration is an incredible experience, and it's a reminder of what makes the Lego Ideas community so special. That a simple idea, shared by fans, really can become something much bigger.”

The new set forms part of a wider partnership between Lego and Daft Punk, which will cover “product, content and brand experiences”. This is being launched with a short video, which shows a console being built around Daft Punk minifigures in a holographic landscape.

The clip features two tracks from Daft Punk’s back catalogue – Voyager and Human After All – which the duo – Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter – selected with the team at Lego. As well as the pyramid set, we can also expect the collaboration to yield “a mashup of surprising events and content that crosses music, culture and creative spaces.”

"What makes this partnership so special is the enduring appeal both brands share,” says Julia Goldin, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at the Lego Group. “Like the Lego brand, Daft Punk inspires generations through creativity, innovation and a deep connection with fans. We’re excited to build on these foundations to reimagine the Daft Punk legacy in a fresh and unexpected way, creating something unique that resonates with fans across all ages.

“This is just the beginning of a bigger journey – a creative collab made for fans ready to lose themselves to play.”

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter might have called time on Daft Punk in 2021, but the end of the band certainly didn’t mean the end of the brand. Since then we’ve had reissues of both Homework and Random Access Memories, and the Daft Punk Experience came to the Fortnite video game in 2025.

No release date has yet been set for the Lego pyramid stage, but we’re told to expect more details on the collaboration next year.

Apple Music has been given a redesign, and it turns out that Fred Again was involved in the making of its new visual.

“For the rebrand of Apple Music, we wanted sound to create the visuals,” we learn in an explainer video. “How do we take this idea of music and distill it into something visually beautiful?”

Working with Nest Acoustics, the creative team decided that the answer to this question was to create “the perfect sound wave” and use it to generate a new and fluid visual identity.

“We take a frequency and we play it through a rig,” we’re told. “This rig then moves a large amount of liquid at the frequency of the notes.”

It was Fred Again – “one of the world's best music artists” – who came up with the musical motif that was used for the final mnemonic, though we don’t actually see or hear from him in the video.

In collaborating with a big tech company, he follows in the footsteps of his mentor Brian Eno, who created the famous startup sound for Windows 95. There was a certain irony, though, in the fact that Eno actually created this on a Mac: “I’ve never used a PC in my life,” he would later admit.

In the era of AI, Apple’s decision to generate its new visual by capturing something real on camera is certainly refreshing. What’s more, we suspect that it will be better received than its infamous 2024 ‘Crush!’ ad for the new Apple iPad Pro, which depicted a collection of objects associated with creativity - including a number of musical instruments and a mixing desk - being crushed by a gigantic slab of metal.

The company later apologised for the clip and withdrew it, saying: "We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry."

As the gamers of the world wait for the release of Grand Theft Auto VI next month, it’s been reported that Rockstar Games tried to throw a whole load of money at Daft Punk to score the game’s soundtrack.

Last week it was revealed that Justice had got the gig of scoring the game. But according to prominent leaker Has It Leaked, they weren’t Rockstar’s first choice: “Daft Punk’s management (yes, still exist) were pitched ‘a final comeback’ of the duo for the GTA VI soundtrack with what was ‘essentially an unlimited budget’. Justice were Rockstar’s second choice.”

When one poster cast doubt on this, Has It Leaked reminded them that “I’ve leaked Daft Punk and Justice news for 10+ years. Check my record. But I understand the hesitation.”

Poor Justice. Forever doomed to be overshadowed by their more illustrious robot-helmeted compatriots…

Anyway, Rockstar has made no official comment on the matter. Nor, unsurprisingly, have Daft Punk. The developers aren’t the first organisation that has tried to tempt the duo back together again – the artistic director of the Paris Olympics apparently attempted to convince Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo to reunite for the 2024 opening ceremony.

The pair broke up in 2021 after four studio albums and a 28 year career in which they changed the face of pop music. Speaking to The Times earlier this year, Bangalter again ruled out any reunion: “The history of music is made of fruitful partnerships and they usually last way shorter than the 28-year run that we had. It was great, but staying in character and not spoiling it became very difficult.”

Doubtless Rockstar will cope just fine with Justice scoring the game. In any case, it isn’t strictly true that Daft Punk doesn’t have any presence in GTA VI. Included on the game’s soundtrack is Travis Scott’s RHYNO, which is produced by… Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

As for the game itself, it lands on Thursday, 19 November.

She might have been a jobbing pop star for a decade or more, but it’s only in the past couple of years that all the pieces of Zara Larsson’s career have finally fallen into place.

After TikTok discovered her 2016 hit, Lush Life, Larsson was able to capitalise on her growing profile with 2025’s Midnight Sun album, and the title track served as a glorious day-glo manifesto for her new era.

Alongside songwriter/producer MNEK and songwriter Helena Gao, Larsson has been sitting down to discuss the making of the song – a pulsating blend of pop, drum ‘n’ bass and just a little bit of Jersey club.

The concept came from Larsson herself – “I just wanted to capture the feeling of what it feels like to be in the countryside at the peak of Swedish summer,” she says. MNEK then imagined her being “in the sun, in nature, hands in your hair.”

Musically, this led the producer to a ‘90s influence: “My first thinking was Ray Of Light, Madonna – that ethereal major key feeling,” he remembers. Later on, this was also a reference point for the video.

And so the song began to take shape: “I had these ideas for these chords – sometimes I'll hear the music in my head, but maybe don't know how it's going to be executed,” says MNEK. It was fellow producer Margo XS who suggested that these could be arpeggiated – “And then Helena got on the keys, and played something that's a constant across the song,” adds MNEK.

One other element of Midnight Sun that was “totally inspired by Ray Of Light” was the long, wavering ‘Sun’ that Larsson sings in the chorus, becoming one of the song’s main hooks. This wasn’t sung as you hear it, though: “We chopped that shit,” admits Larsson, referring to the editing process in Logic Pro. “And I was scared. I was, like, ‘how am I going to perform this live?’”

Fortunately, she’s been able to manage it: “Something happens when I go on stage and I hold the mic,” she says. “Then I'm just like, ‘Oh, I can really sing this.’ But in the studio, we really had to [be] like, ‘let me take a breath.’”

It’s underneath this sustained note that Midnight Sun has its ‘Jersey moment’ – there’s a lot going on in terms of production. When it came to vocals, though, Larsson was keen to keep things simple.

“I remember when we were finishing the record, one of Zara's main points was, ‘I don't want too much double tracking, I don't want too much left and right. just give me a little plate reverb – make it direct, and keep it hot,’” says MNEK. “And I was like, ‘that's great, but I'm gonna need a little harmony.’”

We get various little vocal flourishes that all help to add to the buoyant atmosphere, and Larsson also got the chance to hit a big note.

“The highest note Zara reaches in the song is an E5,” says MNEK, and he feels that this is something that helps Midnight Sun to stand out in the current music landscape.

“The way pop is right now, it's like there's such minimalism,” he argues. “No one is singing an E5 on a record no more. You know what I mean? That's the truth of it all. Everyone is a lot more chill and not as imposing or not trying to take up too much space.”

“And this song is loud,” interjects Larsson. “Like, it is taking up space.”

In fact, she feels like Midnight Sun is a perfect encapsulation of what she’s about as an artist. “It's amazing,” she says. “Like, I don't know – it just speaks to me, and if it speaks to me and to all of us, it has to speak to some other people. I felt really, really excited to play this track for people because I just felt so secure and confident in the song. I just knew what it meant to me and how I felt listening to this. And if they didn't like it, they wouldn't like me. That's how I felt. If you don't like this song, you don't like me.”

On paper, the second album by 80s sensations Frankie Goes To Hollywood should have been a nailed on cert. Released 40 years ago today, Liverpool was the sequel to the triple-platinum double-album excess of Welcome to the Pleasuredome and this was a band that finally had the time and money to grow and make good on their early, rough-and-ready promise. So when and how did Frankie’s wheels fall off and why does Liverpool only now get a glimmer of the credit and love it deserves?

To find out, we’ve got to go all the way back to 1984. Circa ‘84, Frankie were riding high. Their debut single Relax had just been deliciously banned, and they were about to score a simultaneous number one and number two when its bombastic sequel, Two Tribes, dragged Relax back up for a second ‘coming’.

For fledgling record label ZTT, Frankie were the golden goose, and for label owner and soon-to-be-superproducer Trevor Horn things were only ever on the up.

Horn had learnt his trade under the cosh of '70s producer Biddu and playing second fiddle (bass, to be exact) in a string of mildly successful bands. Not least his own Buggles, whose Video Killed the Radio Star wound up soundtracking the entire MTV era.

A fiercely enthusiastic proponent of new technology Horn had – part by right-time, right-place chance, part by virtue of his talent – found himself as the figurehead of a new way to make music. And as head of his own ZTT label alongside the talents of engineer Gary Langan, Fairlight operator JJ Jeczalik and keyboard player and arranger Anne Dudley, he’d found ready and willing compatriots.

Horn’s early-adopter suspicions – sharpened through his ‘fake band’ Buggles exercise – that recording studio technology was about to explode had been proved 100% right. And so, by 1984, with first-mover advantage, he’d sidestepped the naysayers, proved the old guard wrong and won the war.

However, that war wasn’t without its casualties.

Step up Frankie Goes To Hollywood. While Horn had ‘plucked them from obscurity’ following their lucky break appearance on The Tube and hits had ensued, post-Pleasuredome comedown, things weren’t as fluffy and fun as they seemed on the surface.

The Frankie we loved were a screen-hogging cultural behemoth able to top the charts non-stop for nine weeks, hold two singles in the top five and take a pricey double album to number one for their debut.

In reality, however, they were a mismatched, rag-tag, five piece funk/pop/rock/whatever gaggle of semi-friends who had inadvertently strapped themselves to a rollercoaster.

While having hits was ‘great’, and seeing the world from a first-class window was certainly an experience, the small matter of not receiving any credit or – worse – any money, had, by 1985, begun to rankle.

“We were denigrated for the fact that it was machines on the records, whereas New Order made Blue Monday and were hailed as the best thing since sliced bread,” lead vocalist and frontman Holly Johnson moaned to The Times. Famously, Horn and team had feverishly worked non-stop for days on tracks for Frankie’s debut without the band in attendance because they were forced to return to Liverpool once a week en masse in order to sign on and secure their unemployment allowance.

Johnson recalled to Q: “I went to my bank, the NatWest, and I put my gold disc down and said ‘This is my collateral, now will you give me a 500 quid overdraft?’ And he said ‘Let me show this to somebody’ and he came back, and he wouldn’t let me have it.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that with Horn as producer, studio owner, record company and band confidante, the route from cash register to the band’s back pocket would be more direct than usual. However, thanks to the unique way in which Horn’s empires were structured, the opposite was actually true.

Money for nothing

It worked a little like this:

Fledgling label ZTT (owned by Horn and his wife) was financially propped up by Island Records. And, as soon as ZTT’s first single broke – Frankie’s Relax (let’s not count experimental 12”-only EP Into Battle With The Art of Noise) – both parties were coining it in.

And flush with Frankie cash, ZTT would pay for Sarm studio time (also owned by Horn and his wife) so that Horn could make more Frankie hits. Horn could have his pick of new technology and duly spent hundreds of thousands on Fairlights and – later, and essential for Pleasuredome’s completion – a Synclavier hard disc system. Suitably tooled-up, as one of the world’s top recording studios, Sarm was – in return – able to charge ZTT a mint for recording time. And round and round the money went.

Meanwhile, as per every recording contract, a label ‘gives’ money to an artist in the form of an advance. This money is a) to keep them sweet and put some food on the table and b) cover their recording expenses, put their videos on TV and designer clothes on their backs. And Frankie were, of course, on the receiving end of such a deal. Never forget that on paper Frankie were a huge financial gamble, all leather and spunk and little else, and so ZTT were very much putting their money where Frankie’s mouth was.

The aim was, of course, to have a spectacular hit and if that hit happened the incoming mountain of money would pay off any and all bills and everyone would be a winner. Most specifically the band who, finally free from the debt mountain their contract had saddled them with, would finally get their share of the profits.

But work at Sarm’s coalface, cranking out the hits that would make everyone rich, was more laborious than usual. Instead of quickfiring singles at the chart and rinsing the band for a fast buck, Horn and his ZTT had other ideas.

Free from record company pressure (Horn WAS the record company) he would painstakingly spend days fine-tuning and experimenting. Free from shackles, Horn was hellbent on pop perfection, all the while earning a fortune on a tab that would only ever be picked up by the band.

Surely a ZTT bean-counter must have been chomping at the bit for new product? Watching hundreds of thousands disappearing into a studio with only a ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’ promise of salable material in return doesn’t sound like a great business plan. But when the label owner, studio owner, producer and band ringmaster are the same person, things can get a little muddied.

Frankie’s impending financial dire straits were clear from the off. There had been a lengthy seven months in the studio between the release of their debut single Relax and its follow-up, Two Tribes. And with a 24 October 1983 release for Relax and a 29 October 1984 release date for the band’s debut album, the band had already unwittingly been saddled with an entire year of recording costs.

So how much were Frankie in hock? Estimates place that bill at around £760,000. Further speculation suggests that Horn ran up another £80,000 in costs for mixing alone, bringing that total to £840,000. And given the amount of second and THIRD 12” singles of each release, it's clear that Horn and ZTT LOVED a remix…

But never forget that the magic worked. Welcome to the Pleasuredome – Frankie’s overblown debut album – was a huge success. It sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week alone in the UK, reached number one and enjoyed similar success all across Europe.

And this was a double album. At a time when single (hit) albums would retail for £4.99 in the UK, ZTT were able to charge upwards of £8.99 for Frankie’s double-helping – a figure that more than paid for that gatefold sleeve and extra vinyl (but which in actuality only contained 13 songs, including one instrumental and four cover versions).

And thus debts were cleared, and the band got paid. However, by this point, much of the damage was done.

It’s safe to say that Frankie hadn’t particularly enjoyed their rocket ship to stardom. Not being allowed to play on their own records, working non-stop on endless promotional duties, being publicly perceived as Trevor Horn’s puppets AND watching their share of the profits dangled on the end of an ever lengthening piece of string had, sadly, rather taken the shine off their success. And it’s this atmosphere into which – by late 1985 – thoughts of a Pleasuredome sequel were tentatively being launched. But this was a band that had scored three number-one singles and a number two. Plus a number one debut (double) album. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, pretty much everything.

Banned in Britain

Come late 1985, thanks to the state of UK taxation (with the band potentially losing 60% of their hard-fought Pleasuredome earnings) Frankie had decamped to Borris House in County Carlow in Ireland, as many UK pop stars did. The band would hang out with a similarly exiled Def Leppard and Spandau Ballet, learning from (and drinking with) pop’s pros. Besides, time away from the limelight would be an excellent opportunity for the band to come up with a worthy successor to their (filler-laden) debut.

However, forcing the band into seclusion together would only exacerbate divisions that – during a year on the promo path and a UK and American live tour – had already begun to open.

Behind the scenes, vocalist Johnson was growing rather tired of a band finding its feet and determined to prove its worth. ‘The Lads’ as they were known – drummer Peter ‘Ped’ Gill, guitarist Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash and bassist Mark O’Toole – had, thanks to their live appearances, grown in musical stature and were – second time around – determined to play on their records.

Johnson, meanwhile, had no such qualms with Horn’s grip and felt that ‘he’ was the true voice of Frankie anyway. “You’re hearing the sound of my voice and the melodies I wrote and the lyrics that I wrote – and that’s what most people listen to when they hear a record. Relax might have amazing production values, but it’s really the sound of the vocal that makes it exciting,” Johnson told The Times. Meanwhile, co-vocalist Paul Rutherford would skillfully dance the fine line between the two camps.

In short, Johnson had decided that the rest of the band and their producer were to be tolerated rather than collaborated with. “In Ireland our days of playing or jamming together were gone,” writes Nash in his Nasher Says Relax autobiography. “Holly didn’t have the patience to hang about while we kicked around arrangements and we didn’t have the patience to listen to him warbling and complaining that everything was “too loud”.”

Nevertheless, working on a four-track in the ballroom downstairs and passing tapes to an aloof Johnson upstairs, music did begin to happen. “Rage Hard was written there. Ped had been influenced by the drum feel from Ratt’s Lay It Down which was on heavy rotation during our time in America. We were suckers for a bit of metal, however cheesy it might be,” Nash explains. “Is Anybody Out There? was also written during this period… But those were the only ones that ended up included on the Liverpool album.”

Certainly, Ireland had made Frankie ‘a band’ rather than a studio experiment, but a band insistent on “developing” and “finding a new sound” for “a record that would have to be as good – if not better – than our debut”. And all the while they were falling apart from the inside.

“The elephant in the room was the fact that only Holly, Paul and Mark were actually on the records. Not putting them on the record was, I freely admit, a mistake on my part,” Horn admits in his Adventures in Modern Recording. “With a little bit more effort I could have figured out how to feature them and not doing so was a lapse of bedside manner on my part.”

Horn had spent all of 1984 under the cosh, crafting pure gold from raw musical iron. And now, at the end of 1985, with the band getting busy in County Carlow, with an increasing sense of dread, Horn realised that soon he would have to do it all again.

Or not.

Faced with a band whose passion for and confidence in Horn’s skills and business methods were tangibly on the wane, and seeing a year-long slog snaking ahead, Horn – perhaps with his successful reputation, record company and studio under his belt and with little else to prove – simply, unbelievably, instead, chose to pass.

Horn would not be producing Frankie’s follow-up. End of. And with Horn effectively the boss of everything, there was nothing that anyone – fans, band, manager – could do about it.

Wanted: Producer

But with Horn off the table, who would (could?) take his place? The answer was right under Horn’s nose. Stephen Lipson had been appointed to replace Gary Langan after Langan had departed to produce ABC’s second album (another sequel which Horn had mysteriously passed up). In a short time Lipson had proved his worth, going on to entirely produce Propaganda’s debut album for ZTT following Horn’s working and reworking of their Dr Mabuse debut single, as Horn himself became too embroiled with Frankie.

It’s Lipson that laboured with Sarm’s new Synclavier on the late stages of Two Tribes and Pleasuredome after it had sat unloved and misunderstood at the studio for weeks. Having mastered its intricacies, he would go on to construct (and deconstruct) Grace Jones’ classic Slave To The Rhythm single and something-out-of-nothing LP entirely within it. While it’s Horn’s name in capitals on the sleeve, it’s Lipson’s lower-case ‘Assisted By’ credit that follows immediately after.

So the more Horn squinted at the Frankie problem, the more simply having Lipson produce the Pleasuredome sequel looked increasingly like a formality. Sure, not stepping into the driving seat and crafting another Frankie classic might disappoint fans (and would perhaps deny the world another '80s classic), but at the end of the day he would still get paid via ZTT and Sarm exactly as before.

Besides – by perhaps over-indulging his ZTT uberlord title a little – Horn could dip in and ‘fiddle’ as much or as little as he liked. He could be ‘Executive Producer’ instead – dodge the hard stuff and still get the credit. This wasn’t a questionable about-face. This was an undeniable ‘win-win ’.

So perhaps Liverpool was doomed from the off. “We all knew it wouldn’t be as good,” admits a typically weary Lipson on the 80sography podcast. “It was a poisoned chalice. Nobody wanted to do it. I did it because the boys were happy with me. It was never going to be like the first album. It couldn’t be.”

Thus, it’s Lipson, not Horn who locked horns with a newly invigorated and educated Frankie at Amsterdam’s Wisseloord Studios in November 1985. He shipped over his Synclavier and they began building an album that had to keep everyone, from the band, to their fans, to their label, to Horn, happy.

“They’d write the backing tracks [the lads] and he’d figure what to do [Johnson]. It was very disjointed,” Lipson admits. Nevertheless, Lipson put the hours in, working alongside the increasingly studio-savvy drummer Peter Gill to craft backing tracks from fragmented recordings while Nash and O’Toole busied themselves drinking, phoning transatlantic sex lines and making countless model aircraft, purchased from a nearby shop.

“We donated our plastic masterpieces to the studio, and they hung the planes above the bar. I wonder if they’re still there?” muses Nash.

Gill, on the other hand, got busy with different hardware. "I've got an old Roland TR-808 drum machine which has a set of trigger outputs and I use these with either a Dynacord Percuter or a Roland DDR30,” Gill explained to Sound On Sound. “Once I've got a nice little groove happening along with the track we've already recorded, I use an SRC Friendchip synchroniser to lock the two together so that I can add a few electronic drum sounds to the basic three-piece foundation of guitar, bass and drums already recorded. I also use a Roland Octapad and assign the outputs to play samples on the Emulator.”

Free from tax exile, Lipson would sneak back to Sarm in the UK sporadically to employ the talents of keyboard players Peter Vettese and Pleasuredome mainstay Andy Richards to build upon the band's Wisseloord recordings under Horn’s watchful eye. Slowly but surely, the album that would become Liverpool began to take shape.

Johnson however, remained elusive and aloof throughout. And despite the band being totally at ease with Lipson at the controls, Johnson had other ideas.

“Holly was not happy with the sound of the tracks and thought they were too “heavy rock” and we were having too much influence in the direction of the music,” writes Nash. “Despite this he would never make suggestions as to how it should sound… On the other hand we would have probably ignored him anyway…

“Holly wondered why the producer wasn’t there… Trevor had told Holly that he would be producing the second album. The rest of us had been told that Steve Lipson was producing. Steve had been told that he was the producer…” Chinese whispers threatened to derail the entire project.

“Holly was – to put it politely – a little negative about the whole process,” explains Lipson. “He used to say to me “I need two days' notice if you want me to sing”. It was all just difficult. He wouldn’t participate. He wouldn’t be there with everyone. He had a new boyfriend, and they were loved up and good luck to him, but he made the album really hard for me. I was only trying to get it good. I felt like the enemy and I could never understand why.”

Confronted (and ever so slightly ambushed) by a band desperate to heal the rift, things were about to get even worse. “We just wanted answers,” Nash writes. “Like it or not, our futures were intertwined and we wanted to know what was going to happen down the line. Holly lost his rag – maybe he thought the best form of defence was attack – and he started shouting and told us to get out. We left. The crack had just got a little bit wider.”

So wide that – perhaps being a little stir crazy thanks to their Amsterdam exile – the next day the band decided that they needed a new vocalist. But who should they call? Simple: Simon Le Bon.

“The Power Station was doing its own thing and although the remaining members of Duran [Duran] had formed Arcadia there didn’t seem to be any firm plan about their collective future,” thought Nash, and soon O’Toole had tracked Le Bon down to an apartment in Paris.

“Do you fancy being the singer in Frankie Goes To Hollywood?” O’Toole probed. “I would be the perfect singer for Frankie Goes To Hollywood,” Le Bon responded, before explaining that “being the gentleman he was” he could not leave his fellow band members at such a time. “Simon’s loyalty lay with his mates. He said he was flattered, but declined our offer,” Nash writes.

And minutes later, a call to old friend Pete Wylie of Wah! drew a similar negative. “We got blanked twice in one night. We must be shite!” reasoned Nash.

Band on the run

However, the Frankie show had to go on and taking a break for their own sanity, the band collectively decamped to their next tax hideyhole on the island of Jersey. There, the band wrote Watching The Wildlife and laid down the grooves for Lunar Bay and For Heaven’s Sake.

But the tensions within the band were only getting worse. So much so that when The Lads and Paul decided to install themselves on Jersey, Johnson chose to live on Guernsey instead.

“The songwriting was laboured, bordering on the farcical. We had deteriorated into two camps writing on two separate islands off the coast of France,” admitted Nash. “We would prepare backing tracks and post them to Guernsey. We would not get to hear Holly’s input until we returned to Wisseloord weeks later.”

It’s a miracle therefore that, back at Wisseloord, Lipson had pieced together the band’s fragments and come up with eight coherent tracks – mercifully just enough for an album. Finally everyone’s nightmare was over, and a release would be a formality.

Everyone, however, was to be proved wrong.

Throughout Liverpool’s recording, Horn had been little more than a watchful eye. Voicing opinions on which of the band’s demos should make the cut and which should remain in the studio and ensuring that Lipson treated his investment with care. Now, with all the hard and painful work done, back in London, it was Horn’s cue to get busy. And that meant spending more of the band’s money.

Wisseloord had cost the band £300,000 already but in order to complete the task of putting together what would become Liverpool, Horn required another Sony 24-track digital recorder. Having two meant that he could move huge swathes of music between them, bouncing, extending and appending without any loss of quality. The price of such power? A total hire charge of £100,000. At the end of the day, poring over the bills, the band discovered that it would have been cheaper if he’d simply bought one.

Similarly, eight AMS digital delays were hired at a cost of £40 each a day. “How many do you need?” reasoned Nash. Meanwhile, a huge Marshall stack sat in the studio, hired in, but completely unused for the entire project. But the bitterest pill? The band had innocently borrowed Horn’s Roland TR-808 for a couple of days. Months later, examining an invoice, they saw that they’d been charged for it. Ouch.

The total bill for Liverpool would – just like Pleasuredome before it – come in at £800,000. This meant that, with the band earning around 80p from every album sale, they would have to sell over a million copies before any of them earned a penny.

It had better be good then. However… It wasn’t.

“Towards the end there was panic, because it wasn’t as good,” admits Lipson. “It was chaos. It was all hands on deck at this point. We knew that we didn’t have a smash like Relax or Two Tribes. It was patently obvious to me. And then they sort of pinned their hopes on Warriors of the Wasteland… But it was inevitable.”

And there was no going back. The show must go on, and Frankie’s long overdue comeback needed a suitably grandiose launch. Step up the Montreux Golden Rose Festival of May 1986.

The Montreux festival of pop excess had, by 1986, become an '80s institution. Featuring live (aka mimed) performances by the world’s biggest rock and pop acts and broadcast to a huge trans-European audience, where better to re-launch an all-new Frankie? Thus, versions of Rage Hard and Warriors of the Wasteland were rushed into service and on Saturday 10 May 1986 Europe’s Frankiephiles settled in to watch the band’s long-overdue return with their first new material since Pleasuredome 19 months earlier.

But while fans lapped up Frankie’s return, their new, more serious, ‘rockier’ sound was an unexpected party crash. Set opener Rage Hard, in its Montreux mix form, featured an extended (boring?) drum intro and so anyone expecting Relax-style dancefloor fireworks was immediately disappointed. Likewise, the early Warriors of the Wasteland traded Two Tribes’ machine-gun bassline and drum machine in favour of ‘real music’ on ‘real instruments’. The whole performance came across as ‘Def Leppard Lite’ for Frankie fans whose tastes had been finely tuned by the band's technology-fuelled excess previously.

More remarkable than the music would be the Lads’ decision – following a drunken afternoon watching Liverpool beating Everton 3-1 in the FA Cup Final – to smash up their gear at the end of their performance. Their exploits would win them some pitying tabloid coverage as they laid waste not only to the ruse that they had performed live, but also to a one-off, hand-made Levinson bass guitar, lent to O’Toole for the gig. “You f__king asshole, that was a $1,500 bass! I’ll sue you, motherfucker,” Levinson moaned as O’Toole took three attempts to crack its neck across the kick drum.

Nevertheless, with the cat now officially out of the bag, Rage Hard and Warriors single releases (and an opportunity to start earning back what they owed ZTT) would surely be a formality? But Trevor Horn, once again, had other ideas.

Back to the drawing board

Instead of trading on the Montreux hype, Rage Hard would endure months more of Horn tinkering and wouldn’t surface in stores until 25 August 1986. This meant that fans had waited 22 months for new Frankie material. Worse, in the absence of a single release, the Frankie faithful had watched their VHS recordings of the Montreux performance on endless loop for three and a half months. Even they were bored of Rage Hard by the time it was released.

Lipson and Horn did have one surprise up their sleeves, however. Rage Hard’s Young Person’s Guide To The 12” mix would go some way to explaining and making up for the delay. A pun on Benjamin Britten’s educational Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra, in which a narrator introduces the various elements of the orchestra, Horn’s 12-minutes-plus remix of Rage Hard does likewise, with a sexy female voiceover introducing elements such as “the perky percussion”, “the sequencer” and “the godlike bass guitar” as Rage Hard (in barely recognisable form) ebbs and flows beneath them.

Originally, actress Joanna Lumley provided the voiceover from a script written by wordsmith and ZTT's antagonist-in-residence Paul Morely, and while Horn, Lipson and the band thought her performance was excellent, Lumley, subsequently thought otherwise. Having second thoughts about the sexual references she’d committed to tape she prudishly prevented them from using the recording. Instead, comedian Pamela Stephenson was commissioned to replace Lumley and lent the track her best newsreader voice.

While the mix would reward the Frankie faithful (and came in a beautiful cardboard collector's box giving fans somewhere to put all of Rage Hard’s many mixes and formats), the 7” moved only slightly from the Montreux mix months earlier. “I don’t think there were major differences between the two,” complained Nash, “apart from one costing more money than the other.” Teamed with the delay to the track's release – with rabid fans literally unable to buy it following its Montreux debut – Frankie’s big comeback only debuted at number six in the UK.

Sure, it would go to number one in Germany and reach as high as four in the UK (seven in the Netherlands, 12 in Austria, 19 in Sweden and 32 in France) but following the band’s hard work on breaking America with Pleasuredome promo, its inability to hit any kind of Billboard chart in the big money market, came as a huge disappointment.

But with lead single duly deployed, there was nothing for it but to reveal the real fruit of their labours. Liverpool, the band’s sequel to their ground-breaking debut, was released in the UK on 20 October 1986, a date almost perfectly mirroring Pleasuredome’s release two years earlier.

And, from day one, things did not go well.

While Q magazine liked the album (Q itself had only just launched and were perhaps afraid of heaping ire on such a monster so early in their tenure) everyone else wasn’t quite so sure. James Brown called it “a predictable piece of rock junk” in Sounds while David Quanitck asked “What do you do when you've made a completely excessive double album which made history as highly moderate filler?” in NME.

Liverpool was impressive, certainly, but ‘good’? Arguably and demonstrably not. Common consensus suggested that by and large, Liverpool was the band being someone else. A new Frankie that, whilst being perhaps a more true, ‘real’ Frankie, wasn’t the Frankie that everyone in the mid-80s signed up for.

The infectious, trashy glamour of singles such as Relax and Two Tribes was gone. Instead of more hedonistic dance-pop brilliance, fans were served tense, self-conscious stiff rock posturing. Perhaps, above all else, Frankie simply weren’t fun any more. Serious in being taken seriously, they’d allowed their annoyance at their perception to break the fourth wall and be visible right there on the front of the box. And like a knock on the door during lovemaking, with the band’s finger pointed at them to comply, fans proved unable to keep up their enthusiasm.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that chart-wise Liverpool never matched its predecessor. While the album entered the chart at number five, it would spend only a single week in the top UK 10. And while it would go on to achieve Gold status in the UK, Pleasuredome’s triple Platinum rating cemented Liverpool’s standing as forever a flop.

And following Rage Hard and Liverpool’s moist squibs, it was only ever a case of diminishing returns for the rest of Liverpool’s singles. Warriors of the Wasteland (released 10 November 1986, three weeks after the Liverpool album and a full six months after its Montreux debut) only reached number 19 in the UK. While Watching The Wildlife, the third and final single release from Liverpool (and Frankie’s last ever release) only reached number 28 despite a blizzard of remixes across a cassette single and THREE different ‘fan-pleasing’ 12”s.

Special mention to Liverpool’s last stab, Wildlife’s Die Letzten Tage Der Menschheit mix (“The Last Days of Mankind”) which sets the otherwise perky and cheerful track to a stern teutonic backdrop over which the actor John Hurt dishes out doom-laden warnings about 1986’s ensuing AIDS crisis.

Johnson had wanted to call the album From The Diamond Mine To The Factory, a line from his Warriors lyric that spelt out the band’s journey, but – predictably – the rest of the band disagreed. Instead, Paul Morley suggested simply Liverpool, which met with reluctant approval. “In hindsight I would have picked Holly’s title because it was at least connected to the content of the album,” Nash would later admit.

And the final word on Liverpool? It’s perhaps best summed up by Johnson’s final words, emitted as its last track, Is Anybody Out There? – very much Liverpool’s Power of Love – melts into delicious, overblown reverb mush. At the end of it all, Johnson reflects: “I’m looking for something and I don’t know what it is.”

Buddy. You’re not the only one.

When you’re an up-and-coming artist, it’s safe to say that you’re going to take any work that’ll keep the lights on. But always bear in mind that when fame does eventually strike, your top priority will become making sure that your skeletons in the closet stay there.

So the story goes for Madonna Louise Ciccone, an up-and-coming singer/dancer/whatever who thought she’d finally found her lifeline when just-ahead-of-the-curve Was (Not Was) came looking for a vocalist who could seal the deal on their first real hit.

The track in need of a front was called Shake Your Head (Let’s Go To Bed) and despite Madonna’s subsequent best efforts to ensure that you never heard it, it remains alive, well and a still-gossiped-about '90s hit across Europe – if only on account of it having one of the most tortuous musical backstories ever.

Let’s take a step back.

Back in 1983, rising pop funk curio Was (Not Was) were on the cusp of greatness. Garnering major record company attention following their 1981 self-titled debut album, brothers Don and David Was were able to court sizey backing for their follow-up, Born to Laugh at Tornadoes.

So much so that despite having tracks already in the can, the perfectionist pair went into overdrive to ensure that every track was a big hitter.

One such effort was their amiable groove, Shake Your Head. Stuck for a vocalist, the track’s producer Stephen Bray had put his girlfriend in the booth – an as-yet undiscovered, pre-fame Madonna – and while Madonna’s performance was perfectly suited to the track's sass and charm, the Was brothers had bigger ideas than giving Bray’s girlfriend a break.

What if they could get someone bigger, they pondered? What about… Ozzy Osboure? After all, putting Ozzy on Shake Your Head has got to be better than… Er… What was her name again?

“She did a great job… but it didn’t sound like Was (Not Was) to me anymore,” Don Was told Rolling Stone, opting to have Ozzy rework the song as more groove-based rap.

And incredibly – through a multitude of machinations and string-pulling – it is indeed Osbourne who voices the first public airing of Shake Your Head as track four, side one on Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, an album which also features such vocal talents as Mel Tormé, Mitch Ryder and Doug Fieger… And which only ever peaked at number 134 on the U.S. Billboard chart…

Third time lucky

Back to the drawing board for album number three then. And – finally – some hits! Walk The Dinosaur, Spy In The House of Love and Anything Can Happen fired up 1991’s What Up Dog album, and with the band finally in the spotlight, their prodigious and powerful (but by-and-large unknown) previous output was ripe for re-release.

Thus came the compilation, 1992’s Hello Dad, I’m In Jail – a crude mash-up of the best of the band’s unknown work thus far, with one track garnering particular attention. Who was that girl on Shake Your Head again?…

With Madonna by now at the height of her powers, Was (Not Was) were effectively now in possession of an unreleased vocal by a megastar and their label couldn’t believe their luck.

“We realized about eight years later that we had Ozzy and Madonna on parallel tracks," explained Was. "So we gave it to a remixer.”

However, its release would require the newly minted Madonna to sign off on her pre-fame performance from almost a decade earlier, and with memories of being snubbed in favour of Ozzy Osbourne still living large, she unsurprisingly opted to exact her revenge.

A Shake Your Head single featuring the Queen of Pop? Forget it.

Nevertheless, undeterred, and knowing that they had a hit on their hands, the band typically flipped to an unlikely plan B. It was time to call Kim Basinger.

Batman star Basinger was midway through a relationship with the creator of its soundtrack, Prince, who, after becoming smitten, had written and recorded an entire (unreleased) album for her.

With the pair keen to kickstart a second coming as a music star, Basinger stepped into the studio for Shake Your Head and – perhaps a little green as to what was required – dutifully copied Madonna’s vocals syllable for syllable.

Time for the finishing touch – a remix by the so-hot-back-then Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley who gave it the luxe house treatment he’d been serving all over hits like A Little Bit More for Kim Sims and Got Love For You for Jomanda. And Hurley produced an awesome mix… With one small problem. He used Madonna’s vocals rather than Basinger’s…

“When they sent me the vocals and all their master parts, I didn’t know the backstory, so I just thought that Kim Basinger sounded like Madonna,” Hurley told S+S Chicago. “So when I sent them the remix, they loved it but I used the wrong vocals. So I had to get the new vocals from them and create the mix over again with Kim’s vocals.” And Hurley didn’t stop there.

With Osbourne’s 1983 vocals still on the multi-track, Hurley turned the track into the most bizarre duet ever… “But all the extra time put in was worth it,” Hurley reckoned. “It ended up being Was (Not Was)’s biggest record, reaching number four on the UK singles chart.”

Incredibly, despite its all-star line-up and European and Australian success, the track never earned a US release and to this day remains a much-whispered about Ozzy anomaly in the country that took him to its heart.

And thanks to one more mix-up – in which Hurley’s original, top secret, Madonna-blocked remix was accidentally sent to, and included on UK dance compilation Now Dance 92 – Doh! – we can all enjoy the track as everyone (except Madonna) intended below.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “I used to make these punk cover versions of records I loved as a kid,” Rob Cavallo, Grammy Award-winning producer, tells us when asked about his initial route into music-making.

“My dad was in the business, he managed Prince for a time and accidentally played my version of When You Were Mine to him in the car when he once collected him from the airport. Apparently, Prince looked confused, then demanded I join his band, The Family, in Paisley Park. My dad said he couldn’t have me – I was only 16.”

Despite his dad denying this early opportunity for him, Rob went on to become a true heavyweight producer in the world of rock recording.

His stellar CV speaks for itself, being the studio mastermind behind myriad best-selling albums including Green Day’s most cherished canon; Dookie, Insomniac, Nimrod, American Idiot - all made under Rob’s watchful eye. Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl and My Chemical Romance’s era-defining The Black Parade, too.

Rob’s career began in earnest during the late eighties and has seen him navigate various technological changes, surfing the wave of opportunities afforded by software and the arrival of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

“I was one of the first guys to ever use Pro Tools, Green Day’s song Brain Stew was recorded on that when the DAW was only two tracks and 16-bit,” he says.

“In my studio now, I have a computer filled with every single sound and every single DAW. But despite technological innovation, the end results still boil down to your taste and how you take the listener on a journey from the beginning of a song to the middle, then end. It doesn't matter if you’re programming or talking to a drummer in a room with 16 microphones set up, the producer’s job is still the same gig.”

Rob was brought up in a musical family with his dad, Bob, a hugely successful industry figure who, as we said earlier, worked with Prince as well as Earth, Wind and Fire and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

While Rob was finding his own feet in the industry, he managed to secure some work experience in LA with George Massenburg, an influential producer in the studio universe.

“He was one of the great engineers of all time, and I was like the third engineer guy, I didn’t even know what a studio was although I learned quickly,” Rob explains. “George was amazing, he was so tough, and it was a gift he was like that.”

Rob made some demos during the holidays when the studio was closed to the public. Warner Brothers and their crack team of influential executives and producers - Ted Templeman, Lenny Waronker, and Michael Ostin - got wind, heard one of the demos he’d worked on, then offered Rob a job as an A&R.

“I really needed a job at the time and I was so just so in love with music,” Cavallo tells us. “I was going to all the clubs, listening to every band I could find and involved in a network of people. I knew who was playing the Troubadour, The Music Machine, the Roxy, Madame Wong’s, all these old LA clubs.

“This combined with me making records and being a player - I could play bass, drums and guitar - it all made sense and fit together for Warner Brothers.”

As a producer, Rob’s discography is full of huge, global success stories from early on in his career. Green Day’s seminal 1994 major label debut Dookie was one of his very first production gigs. Making the record with the three young men who’d soon become a global alternative phenomenon, Cavallo was driven by a vision of what the album should ultimately sound like.

“When working with bands, you need a clear goal of what you’re trying to make - and be as balls out as possible,” he laughs.

“With Dookie, it was the second record I ever produced and people were telling me not to work with a punk band. But I had this feeling about it, I wanted to sonically create something where there would be higher BPMs and it would still be clear for you to hear.”

Rob came up with a way to record the drums using an SM57 microphone and used a tube direct box to ensure that “the bass cut through all the way into the guitars”, Rob recalls.

“I devised a way to capture the first reflection of the drums so it would be aggressive but it wouldn’t be too roomy so the next snare drum would avoid being on top of the prior one,” Rob tells us.

“For the drums, it’s an SM57 pointed an inch away from a hard surface at a ninety degree angle to the snare. It really helps the drum set grow teeth and you can quite clearly hear it on Dookie.”

Alternative rock bands like Green Day and Nirvana both had similar trajectories, working on indie imprints at the start of the nineties before signing with majors. Green Day’s preceding (independent label) LP Kerplunk! had a raw edge that Rob leaned into when translating Green Day’s live sound into a chart-friendly, radio-ready sound.

“[Nirvana’s debut] Bleach and Kerplunk! are similar because they were recorded and mixed in the studio, live off the floor, so everyone played together, there were minimal overdubs and it was recorded, mixed and finished in three or four days,” says Rob.

“Now what would be interesting with today’s modern studio software would be to take a band into a rehearsal studio, rehearse them so they sound great, then make a record like Bleach where it’s recorded in a handful of days. You could make something that sounds almost as good as Dookie with today’s tech. The possibilities it offers are so great.”

Beyond Green Day, and another pop punk troupe owe their finest hour to Mr. Cavallo. My Chemical Romance recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their landmark emo concept album, The Black Parade, and Rob was at the helm of the original recording sessions.

Infamously, some of the record was made at LA’s Paramour Mansion in Silverlake where the band’s frontman Gerard Way suffered recurring night terrors.

“I think environment is important in the writing and production, and the mansion was a cool, spooky place to go,” Rob says of the sessions. “It was absolutely haunted and freezing in there as there was no heat in the giant basketball sized living room. We put a PA in, hung a couple of fancy mics in there to record them stereo live.”

Rob also worked with Dave Matthews Band on their album, Big Whisky and the GrooGrux King in New Orleans while Green Day recorded much of their 2024 Saviors album at RAK Studios in London.

“With Dave Matthews Band, I convinced them to go to New Orleans and you can hear how the city rubbed off on them for that album, we even recorded some of the sounds of the city,” Rob explains.

“London is one the favourite cities for me and Green Day to work in, it’s such a vibe there, the people are amazing - and the microphones are pretty good too,” he adds.

“Culturally, people in the UK love rock music, they respect it, it’s a high art-form, you feel embraced and loved when you go to the UK as a music person. The energy is infectious.”

My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade and Green Day’s 2004 conceptual opus American Idiot both bristle with plenty of big ideas, although Rob feels they were born from quite different creative places…

“With Green Day, we didn’t like how iTunes, one of the biggest retailers at the time, would take your record and chop it up into 14 $0.99 dollar songs,” says Rob. “So we wanted to combat this and make an album that had to be heard as a whole.”

“With My Chemical Romance, Gerard is such a prolific writer, he has backstories for all his records, he just doesn’t show you - there are other things going on in his head that he’ll let you know when he’s ready.”

Rock music has gone through peaks and troughs over the years and Rob has rode the waves firsthand, including what he sees as today’s peak. At the moment, he’s working with a young band called Riff Wood who have just released their Butterfly In Black And White album after becoming a viral sensation.

“Guitar music coming off the stage is still the most powerful thing, you still feel it physically and emotionally when it’s performed there - more than any other genre,” he says of the sound’s enduring popularity.

“During Covid, more guitars were sold than ever before too, people needed something to connect with. And songs still find new audiences due to streaming. A song like Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, I cut that in the mid-nineties, it was their biggest streaming song in 2025 and younger audiences love it.”

Rob might be known for the big guitar outfits but he’s also worked with American rappers 03 Greedo and the late Lil Peep too.

“I always think there’s room for everything and innovation,” says Rob. “Lil Peep was the first emo hip-hop artist to ask me to collaborate with him, it was a tough one when he passed.

“I thought he could be so big due to how smart he was and as an artist, he asked if he could take one of my guitar riffs and put it to one of his FL loops. The first thing we did was Benz Truck and I love the sound of that record.”

With so much experience behind him and still in the mixer when it comes to new talent, Rob is well-placed to share some studio advice. He believes all producers should make sure they remember their purpose is to serve the band, not themselves.

“You want your artists to love what you’re working on,” says Rob. “I want whoever I’m working with to be over the moon with how the record sounds. What’s really smart about that, when you’re done, they’ll want to promote it, and serve it up to the world for the next few years, even the rest of their lives.”

Dookie might have been an early triumph for Rob, but the album's popularity - which includes Green Day staples Basket Case, When I Come Around and Longview - has an influence on guitar music that lives on and continues to inspire new generations of bands.

“After Billie Joe had sung about 90% of the record, he invited this couple to the studio and he played them the tracks,” Rob remembers. “I watched the look on their faces, their jaws hit the floor, they’d heard something they couldn’t believe, it was like a hit happened on the first listen.

“Then I remember Wendy Griffiths was in charge of promotions for MTV, she told me how the channel was looking for something faster and colourful after two years of grunge, maybe with a sense of humour. I was sitting on Dookie at the time, and just knew it would work.”

Rob is now busier than ever - he’s working with a string of acts including Henry Morris, and Riff Wood. He’s also trying to break Japanese band One Ok Rock in the US and Europe.

“Ultimately, your role as producer is just to try to serve up the record that meets the standards of every record you’ve ever heard,” he says in his final words of wisdom.

“Everyone has their own list of favourite bands - your goal is to make a record or sign a band that is as good as those. If you can compete, then you’re onto something. And of course, it might sound easy, but it’s definitely not.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: While it might sound like something of a cliché, Erol Alkan is an artist for whom ‘the music’ always seems to come first.

Between his seminal mid-noughties clubnights Trash and Durrr, his production credits for the likes of Late Of The Pier, Mystery Jets and Klaxons, his numerous DJ accolades and his countless remixes and collaborations, he has had plenty of opportunities for self-promotion over the years. Yet Alkan’s is a career built not on his own ego, but on using every outlet available to share, nurture and promote new music.

He’s also one of that rare breed of musicians whose talents aren’t confined by genre, with a career touching upon indie, electro, house, techno and beyond, with seemingly little regard for trends or fashions, even when he’s caught up in the middle of them.

2013 saw Alkan setting up his first purpose-built studio space, The Phantasy Sound, a North London hub for himself and the artists on his Phantasy record label. This played a major role in birthing a pair of stunning, yet very different albums: the lo-fi pop of Connan Mockasin’s Caramel and the warped electronic experiments of Daniel Avery’s Drone Logic.

It also resulted in Alkan’s first proper solo release, some 20 years into his career, in the form of the intricately-produced, club-focused Illumination EP.

A few years back, we headed up to North London to meet Alkan and take a nose around his studio. We republish the complete tour and interview in full below to mark MusicRadar's Recording Week 2026.

We started with Erol's DAW of choice…

“I use Pro Tools when I record bands, especially if I’m tracking drums, but Logic when it comes to using MIDI or anything like that.

“I tend to use the native plugins within Logic as I think they’re fine. To be honest with you, I haven’t found a stereo width plugin better than Logic’s one. EQ wise, they’re pretty good transparent EQs which seem to do exactly what you need an EQ to do. I tend to find that, if you’re not getting what you want out of a sound at that stage, maybe the EQ isn’t the main problem - maybe it’s another aspect of it? So I tend to use all of them in a pretty simple way, rather than expecting miracles from plugins.

“I don’t use any particularly esoteric plug-ins. I’ll focus more on what’s going in; that’s about 90% of it for me.”

That said, pride of place in the top slot of the rack is Alkan's own homemade compressor. “The Mustapha SSL-4000. It’s basically just an SSL clone that I’ve built with a Neve width module.

"If you whack it all to the far right you lose all the signal and you can check out your clocking as well. If your clocking is a bit dodgy, and it sounds all MP3-ish and digital, then that’ll tell you.”

Likewise Alkan has nothing but love for Pioneer's Rekordbox software.

“Ever since rekordbox came along, it’s meant that I can pool all my music together and organise it in a way I understand.

“The great thing is that you can come up with your own system of working. I do feel a bit guilty about being able to turn up somewhere with a pair of headphones and a USB key, when you see bands with trucks full of gear and a crew of 30 people to play the same stage, but that’s the way DJing has gone. I still believe that DJing in its greatest form is just as creative and exciting as what bands can do. It’s just a great system, though.

“I’m curious as to what the next thing is going to be. I know that you can do a lot of things with mobile phones now, but I don’t trust them!"

For crucial listening Alkan leans on those old favourites – a pair of Yamaha NS10 monitors. “I just have them because they sound so bad. As they say with NS10s - if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere," he explains.

“I’m a big fan of the Effectron delays from the ’80s. They’re great, unpredictable delays. I like to send stuff to them and have it very, very low in the mix.”

And while the Effectrons are best described as 'quirky' the next essential in Alkan's studio is only ever regarded as a classic: A Roland TB-303 bassline.

“This is a recent purchase and something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m in love with it - not just for the fact that it’s a 303, but also because it’s got cool things like CV out, so you can actually write a pattern inside of it and send that to other synths.”

Likewise another new addition to the studio is this Korg Mono/Poly dating from 1981. “So far I’ve just been messing around with it," Alkan says.

Something that regularly gets a workout in Alkan's studio however, is his trusty Roland SH-1.

“It tends to do bass like no other synth I have. I’ve a trick that I do with it, that I don’t want to reveal, but there’s a workaround if you experiment with the patching capabilities. You can get some pretty amazing, deep, cranium-quaking bass from it!”

And who else is going to team all of the above with a Formanta Polivoks?…

“I’m fascinated by Russian synths, in the sense that they were built to try and mimic what Moog was doing at the time. They kind of didn’t get it right, but they came up with something quite different.”

Rockstar Games has confirmed French electronic duo Justice as the soundtrack composers for Grand Theft Auto VI, the most eagerly anticipated videogame of the year.

In fact, scratch that: GTA VI is probably the most eagerly anticipated release of anything this year – movies and music included. As such, being tasked with writing the music for it is a considerable feather in Justice’s cap.

The announcement coincides with the release of Flower in a Hurricane, Justice’s new single, which also features Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

This features in the new Grand Theft Auto VI launch trailer, which has also landed and, for the first minute at least, has the vibe of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. The nuts and bolts of the music might differ, but the atmospheric synths, scattergun drums and chugging riff – played on an overdriven synth rather than a guitar, we think – definitely feel like an intentional nod. Have a listen and see what you think.

Flower in a Hurricane will also be included on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, the official game soundtrack, which can currently be pre-saved on streaming services and pre-ordered on CD and vinyl.

This 34-track collection will, presumably, feature more of Justice’s music, along with confirmed tracks by the likes of Yung Lean, Travis Scott, CA7RIEL and Paco Amoroso (with PinkPantheress, Fred Again and Etienne de Crécy) Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro and even still-Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Whether Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman will be included remains to be seen. It was featured in an earlier trailer for the game, but isn’t in the new one.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Touring rock musician turned film-score composer, Tyler Bates found his music-to-picture footing in the dark with 2004's Dawn of the Dead, then carried on with Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects and the Halloween films, where John Carpenter's iconic theme was refashioned into something grittier.

Notable credits include television’s The Exorcist, its notorious demonic dread stretched across ten episodes; a mountainous hybrid score for John Wick: Chapter 4; and a longstanding association with director Ti West on the slasher trilogy: X, Pearl and MaXXXine. His latest collaboration with West, the Johnny Depp-starring Ebenezer, is due out in November.

Beneath his experimental studio craft, however, sits a conviction to build sound around an emotional gesture or single vocal timbre. Always serving the scene, Bates believes learning starts with listening, a habit that never stops for a composer who first became enraptured by sound when layering up recordings on cassette tape as a boy.

For Recording Week 2026, we caught up with Bates to learn more about his route into film, his approach to recording technology and fascinating tales about working with William Friedkin, the legendary director of the original Exorcist movie…

MusicRadar: You began layering sound on cassette recorders as a kid. What were you trying to achieve with that setup before you had any sort of formal recording gear?

Tyler Bates: “It was clearly ignorance and experimentation. As I was composing my first music, I wanted to hear multiple parts and realised that I could play live into a cassette recorder while dumping tracks from another one simultaneously. Of course, the recordings were pretty muddy, but it was an opportunity to hear a multitrack of an idea, which was very inspiring and really set me on course to becoming a songwriter.

“I delved deeply into electric guitar after starting my musical journey on alto sax and was intrigued by sonority, song arrangements and developing song ideas that were more than me just strumming or hitting a guitar riff and yelling over the top of it. I began this period of experimentation out of pure curiosity and passion for sound and music.”

MR: Was there a specific moment when you had to make a decision between pursuing rock stardom or a soundtrack composer?

TB: “When I moved back to Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, I'd already been asked to do some cues for a movie because they had no money. I told them I didn't know anything about it, but I’d give it a shot if they really wanted me to, so the people working on the film shared their perspective with me, which is how I began learning about the craft and the purpose of music for film.

“At the same time, I was developing my band Pet, which signed to Atlantic Records, but I had to pay rent, right? People kept asking me to do scores, which kept me housed and gave me the opportunity to continue to make music for both, but before I knew it, I'd done 15 movies, and my 15th film was a jazz/bebop score that Blue Note ended up releasing.”

MR: What movie was your first big break?

TB: “Get Carter with Stallone and Michael Caine. It flopped terribly, but was such an incredible experience because it was among my first working with orchestras and hybrid scores, which set me on course for a lot of what happened afterwards.

“I had my lows - I was still painting houses between some of these projects until Tom Kapinos asked me to do Californication, which brought a true rock element back into my work scoring for film. At the same time, I was just starting on 300 and those experiences completely opened my mind to having a cinematic rock vision for music.”

MR: One of your transformative soundtracks was Dawn of the Dead. Was it a dream to soundtrack a film that was indirectly part of the George A. Romero canon?

TB: “To this day, I have to tell you I had such a good experience on that movie. I was up against a number of composers who had repertoires that were probably more appropriate because I hadn't had a tremendous amount of orchestral experience or any creepy music in my repertoire, but Zack Snyder believed I was the right person for the job.

“Once I was hired on Dawn of the Dead, I didn't have much time to do the movie and it was a massive challenge for me. It was right before Christmas 2003 and I was able to score a couple reels over the holiday break. They put the music into a test screening of the same cut they’d previously tested and the movie scored 25 points higher. They didn’t change one note about the score, and although I recognise my mistakes, I think the concept and tone were really distinct.”

MR: Does working on a score like Dawn of the Dead, or The Exorcist TV show, require a very different suite of tools to your ordinary movie?

TB: “If you look at most horror films, the horror exists inside of a drama, so if there's a really good dramatic story, there's a chance that the movie will be considered seriously and last the test of time. The Exorcist is really a drama - it just happened to scare the hell out of people. I've certainly learned a lot about that because I scored William Friedkin's final film, which was an extraordinary experience on so many levels.”

MR: Presumably, that was Killer Joe?

TB: “Yes, and I was hired under auspicious circumstances to work on Killer Joe. Billy had already hired someone who did a score for the movie in defiance of the producers, who then approached me at a party and asked if I’d be open to it. I asked them if Friedkin was amenable to it, so Billy came over to my studio and - I don't know if you've read his book or watched any interviews with him, but he was a very intense and highly intelligent but salty character.

“He came into the studio, sat on my sofa and said, ‘Tyler, I don't know why the f**k you're spending your time with me on my little f****g movie when you do all these big blockbusters’. I said, ‘Look Billy, the producers approached me and if you're open to seeing if we can do something that might suit the movie better, then I'm good, man.’”

MR: Having already done the score for The Exorcist TV show, you must have discussed the making of the original The Exorcist with William

TB: “In our conversation that day, I asked him about The Exorcist, and he told me the story about how he threw out Bernard Herrmann's score. He didn't want an organ score, but Herrmann didn't listen and sent the movie back with an organ score in it. That wasn’t going to work, so Billy fired him. I'm like, ‘Okay, so perhaps the greatest film composer of all time just got fired!’

“So then he hires his good friend Lalo Schifrin and tells him he wants a chamber orchestra, but when Billy showed up to the Warner Bros. sessions, there were 80 players and 5 percussionists. He said, ‘I don't want this crap in my movie’, so after a day and a half of recording Billy stopped the sessions and fired his good friend Lalo. At that point, Warner called Billy back into the studio and said, ‘Look, we'd really like you to use the music that we just paid Lalo to score and we're out of money, so either use that or look in the Warner Bros. library.’

“So Billy picked up the music reels, unspooled them in the parking lot right outside the studio and said, ‘Nobody's going to use that music.’ He was basically down to whatever he could find in the library and then happened upon Mike Oldfield's instructional album on the sonority of bells, which had the composition Tubular Bells.

“When Billy heard that, he said ‘That’s it!’ It’s crazy that a record that no one should have ever known about became a massive seller because Billy put it in the most successful horror movie in history. The Exorcist made $400 million in 1973 based on a $3 ticket price.”

MR: I understand Pro Tools is your hub for scoring, but you also lean on Logic and Ableton. How do you decide which platform a given musical idea belongs in?

TB: “I started on a PC because they were cheaper at the time, and Macs weren't fully developed until the end of the ‘90s. I went from Cubase to Digital Performer to Logic, but eventually realised that after they'd been playing back from Tascam DA-88s, all the dub stages had moved to Pro Tools and to deliver a score that was compatible, I needed to be on the same platform.

“For people just coming into movie scoring it’s way more cost-effective to work in Cubase or Logic. Ableton is fantastic for developing a passage or loop, and you can do things with effects that you can’t do elsewhere, especially when affecting a stereo sound. I basically use Logic as a sample playback platform for all of the bespoke sounds that I've made in the last 20 years.”

MR: We understand that you work quite closely with Wolfgang Mathis on creating sound design libraries?

TB: “He's still my dear friend and collaborator, but now lives in Canada. We used to set up multiple modular rigs in my studio, have our nerd jams, record stuff live, take the good moments of them and develop pads and pulses.

“I was always on a quest to have sounds to work with that nobody else had and would implement these conceptual ideas, but sometimes the clock would run out on me before I was able to manifest them as I’d envisioned. Sometimes it worked, like on the score for The Devil's Rejects, but that's a noise score really and it took a lot of tweaking to get that to land appropriately for the film.

“I do like to keep things interesting, because every time I experiment I learn more about the potential of sound synthesis and Wolfie really introduced me to thinking about the potential of a sound. It may start off as a bongo or some kind of bell or voice, then through experimenting with various synthesisers or modular synths, I learned the various permutations of sound and what the possibilities are. Now it’s part of my calculus when I'm thinking about what's appropriate for a TV show, movie or game.

“Sometimes that’s going to leave people scratching their heads, so as much as I love to experiment I have to make sure that the people I’m creating a score for can identify with it. They have to understand what it is, what it does to the picture and how to relate to it psychologically and emotionally. If they don't feel it right away, it's not a successful idea.”

MR: What will you focus on to nail those core psychological and emotional elements?

TB: “When I collaborate with different artists, especially singers, I'm thinking about the story they have to tell. Sometimes that’s intimated in the way they express themselves as much as it might be lyrically - or it might be encrypted, but it's important to understand how to help a person tell their story.

“With rock music, the riffs come when we need them and I never have had a shortage of riffs because I don't place all the weight on them. I place it on the storytelling, the song structure and how to best serve and frame a singer's voice.

“That could mean finding the right key for them to sing in to discover where their voice resonates best, but when I'm scoring on film, the actors are my singers. The timbre of their voice impacts my selections for various instruments and sounds because I don't want to compete with them; I want to make sure that the music complements the important aspects or frequencies of their voice.

“If the actor’s a baritone, I want to make sure that I clear the way for their voice to really resonate because that's going to empower their character and their dialogue the most. The whole thing is very much like a dance.”

MR: Looking at your studio - out of everything available, what do you like about using the Moog Muse?

TB: “It's very warm and sounds really good, but I've actually started working on this new TV show and have gotten back into using my Access Virus. It's kind of like a rekindled romance because I got away from this thing for 15 or 20 years, but even though it's an old synth, you can’t tell because of how I EQ and process it. If I run it through an overdrive pedal or delay, it takes on another life.

“But the Moog Muse has been great for really low tones. They're so rich and deep, and so many beautiful harmonics can emerge, even from a drone. The Dave Smith Evolver is another great one. If you want to do something weird or create some really crunchy pulses, that's an amazing instrument – and it’s favourably priced too.”

MR: You’ve mentioned that John Wick: Chapter 4 was the Mount Kilimanjaro of hybrid scores. What made that project a bigger technical challenge than anything else you previously worked on?

TB: “For anyone attuned to the properties of sound, the John Wick films have quiet dialogue, yelling and gunshots – and there’s a lot of Foley in John Wick 4, including car crashes and all that stuff. We also applied some orchestra, which didn't feel natural to the preceding three films, but the scope of it was so broad that we needed to engage an orchestra for some of it.

“At the same time, we still had all of these non-orchestral idioms that have been applied through the entire franchise that needed to be present – like all the crunchy synth pulses and atmospheres, and the hybrid rock/electronic orchestral score had to dance around all these frequencies. Believe me, gunshots always win, dialogue always wins, and in the case of John Wick 4, the cars win, so you have to factor in all that production sound.

“Mark Stoeckinger is a brilliant sound designer and a great collaborator - his sound design is so dense and compressed that there's no way I can beat it, so I had to be more like water in a stream. By being aware of what's going on in the sound package, you can negotiate a little bit by saying, I don't think you need all of those low synths in your sound package, but I’ll stay out of the way of your tyre screeches, crashes and engine revving.

“Mark and I would work on that and make sure that when they get to the final dub, all the required sound is represented by the two of us. It used to be, you're the composer, here's the picture, now write the music. Now the picture is moving even after we deliver the final score, so the whole time you're working on a movie like John Wick 4, it's literally like the tailor fitting the pants on the running man.”

MR: How do you mix a project when the compositions are continually changing?

TB: “When you’re working with pure orchestra, all those instruments are naturally harmonically balanced, but when you're using a ton of hardware synths, soft synths and playing guitars, mandolins, electric bass and drums, you've got so much going on. It's fun, but it's a nightmare to mix because you don't have much time.

“When we're delivering a score to a dub stage, it's all in stems and there’s some additional frequency management that takes place. They place the music into its appropriate context, depending on whether the sound is an enclosed space, a wide open space or a cavern.

“We have to factor all that in so that it's not only appropriate, but gives the mixers some latitude. If I slather a big reverb on everything, they’ll have way less latitude to get creative with how they place the music in the overall mix, so I want to give them options and make it a joy to work with as much as possible so people can actually hear the music in the movie.

“It's not like mixing a record. You have 25 minutes, and there might be 160 tracks of audio in a queue, so you've just got to do your best and rush through it, but sometimes we'll circle back around to the music when we do the soundtrack so it sounds a little bit more refined.”

MR: Once a film is released, can you totally relate to the score you made?

TB: “What you hear in the film is not necessarily the entirety of a composition. When I went to the premiere of John Wick 4, the music had definitely been thrown around to the point where cues that Joel J. Richard and I had done separately were intermingled and we didn't recognise a lot of our own work.

“We hear ourselves in it, but we're like, ‘I didn't do that’. That can be frustrating if you're emotional about the work, so I pour that into my songwriting where I know that what we're writing and recording in my studio is going to be on the final product. It's incumbent upon me to do that type of work so that I don't develop a bad attitude or become jaded about the fact that film is an entirely different process to what it was 20 years ago.”

MR: Do you have a bucket list of movies you want to work on?

TB: “I don't look at it that way. It’s an extreme privilege to work in this industry, because there are very few of us who have viable careers. I'm working a lot, so I prefer to just work on whatever I agree to do and not fantasise about the next thing.

“It would be fun to do a really interesting horror film because, creatively, you get away with murder and introduce concepts that would be inappropriate for any other style of movie, except for maybe an action movie. Having said that, doing a character drama would be cool!”

For more information on Tyler Bates, visit his official site.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “I feel like all of the records that have become special to me are born out of great friendships,” says producer, songwriter and mixer, Oli Barton-Wood.

This year, Oli bagged the Music Producers’ Guild’s (MPG) Breakthrough Producer of the Year for 2026. Noted for his ability to blend technical know-how with buzzing creative energy, Oli has worked with Ezra Collective, Luvcat, The Zawose Queens and many more.

Regardless of genre, the emotional rapport he establishes with his collaborators is equally as crucial as his studio expertise.

“It’s important to me when working with an artist that we have a connection, not just being their technical person but being part of their support network, building a relationship and understanding each other - it really informs every creative decision made.”

The MPG win came earlier in the year but Oli was unable to attend the event at London’s Troxy due to being on a trip to Vietnam. It was only when his phone started lighting up with calls and messages that he realised he’d been victorious.

“I never thought I’d win the MPG, which is why I booked the trip. I’d had this really busy year making Luvcat’s Vicious Delicious record and needed a break,” Oli explains. “I was asleep in the jungle when the awards happened and got all these calls at four in the morning.”

Does winning bring on new pressures and expectations? “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” he laughs. “I’m just trying to make good music and keep up with the projects I have going on. And pleasingly, most of my jobs come from people who have heard records I’ve worked on that they like.”

Oli’s studio ambitions first stemmed from playing in bands as a teenager, then he acquiring recording software so he could refine his own playing. He started out capturing the sound of his own emerging group before word spread of his affinity for the producer’s chair. Before long he began to work with others.

“I was putting every single penny I could gather into trying to build up my collection of gear, picking up microphones from Poundland, and using Audacity on my barely working PC,” OIi says.

“Initially this was for my own band but before I knew it, I’d started recording with other local bands in my parents' spare room. I guess I had a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and I feel very fortunate to have caught the bug early on.”

Producer Jim Abbiss was also a key early influence for Oli. Having been behind favourite records from Bombay Bicycle Club and the Arctic Monkeys, Oli chose to follow in Jim’s footsteps and study the Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) degree at the University of Surrey.

“I was really excited to have got on the course, then when I was finishing my degree, Jim was the judge for the final year of portfolio recordings and he chose mine,” says Oli. “I managed to have a slightly nervous conversation with him after the formalities, we stayed in touch and a few years later he asked me to come and work with him on an album with Tom Odell.”

The record was Tom’s second, Wrong Crowd, and saw Oli heading to Rockfield Studios in Monmouth in Wales.

“The stars just aligned,” says Oli. “It was my first major label gig, so we worked in Wales, then we went to Abbey Road, then RAK, it was a full circle moment and something I’d dreamed of when I was younger.”

These days, Oli mixes out of The Premises Studios in Hackney with an additional writing space in Peckham. But when he was starting to navigate the industry, alongside engineering, he’d been striving to build his production portfolio. A pivotal moment was working with Mellah (artist Liam Ramsden).

“I’d worked with Liam's band Black Manila and always loved his artist project,” says Oli. “We were experimenting with his solo work when he signed a small deal with Lucky Number. Off the back of that, he signed with Columbia and we worked on a couple of EPs together. He’s one of my absolute favourite musicians.”

Ever since, Oli has dedicated himself to building up an ongoing portfolio of projects with his time split between mixing, producing and songwriting sessions.

“Ultimately, I’m there to help in whatever capacity an artist needs me, which requires me to be flexible and keeps the work exciting,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any set way into the industry now. I came through the studio assistant path, but a lot of today’s young producers are just so insanely quick and talented on Logic or Ableton, they are making hits in their bedrooms in a few hours!

“I come from a technical background so I’m a producer that gets really involved in the sound sculpting element. I think having lots of strings to your bow in the studio is important, particularly as music tech gets more accessible and budgets fluctuate too.”

When Mellah signed a deal, Oli also secured a music publishing deal with Domino and the pair invested in building their own studio. Their Peckham base includes their main writing room and features plenty of music toys, drum kit and Oli’s mic collection too.

“I do plenty of writing there but I like to record in other spaces where the budget allows,” Oli says of his studio preferences. “If I’m working on a band record, I try to go to a studio to get a bigger drum sound and better separation, I prefer recording live as much as possible. My favourite studios in London are RAK, The Premises and Baltic, but working in residential studios is always great too, you’re able to totally zone in and tap out of normal life routines.”

Oli’s musical CV is one bursting with exciting records, artists and studio projects although the role he takes on differs depending on the artist’s needs. He worked with Nilufer Yanya as a co-writer and producer on her Miss Universe debut album from 2019 while also mixing Maisha, a band signed to Brownswood, and their 2020 record, Open the Gates.

Elsewhere, Oli produced and mixed Luvcat’s highly acclaimed Vicious Delicious album from 2025 while also working with Los Bitchos, Laura Misch and Jordan Rakei among many others.

“Ezra Collective are always a fun band to work with,” Oli says. “A lot of the work we’ve done has been at Livingstone in North London, they're amazing, often frenetic long days, chopping up parts, looping sounds and piecing songs together.”

God Gave Me Feet for Dancing is one of the group’s most popular moments taken from their 2024 album, Dance, No One’s Watching. Oli was asked to work on the session while packing down the Lemon Lounge stage at We Out Here Festival, a sound system project he helps run.

“I was working at Lemon Lounge when I took this call and they asked me to get to the studio within a few hours,” he says. “They were supposed to be collaborating with some huge American hip-hop artists, so I went straight to Livingstone. The collaboration didn’t materialise so the band ended up jamming, and we worked on the track that became God Gave Me Feet for Dancing. Those kinds of sessions are always my favourites due to the high levels of energy and musicianship.”

Another big project was Porridge Radio’s debut album Every Bad. A record that was Mercury Prize nominated in 2020.

“The basis of the tracks had been recorded with someone else,” says Oli. “I got hold of the files with the singer Dana [Margolin] and we set about injecting life into them. That was a really fun process, bringing in new character in the mix process and helping them realise their vision for it. To get the Mercury nod was amazing too.”

The music of The Zawose Queens is an ongoing project for Oli, a Tanzanian musical duo he discovered while in East Africa providing music production workshops as part of a British Council-backed initiative.

“I spent some time there as a kid and always had this affinity with Tanzanian music,” OIi says. “I went with fellow UK producer Tom Excell and while we visited, we connected with Pendo Zawose and her niece Leah Zawose from the Wagogo tribe.

“We started putting a record together with them. It turns out Pendo's father, Dr. Hukwe Zawose, had been signed to Real World, Peter Gabriel’s label. The Real World team were really keen to continue working with the family, we connected them with a booking agent and for the last four years they’ve been touring extensively throughout Europe - we’ve almost finished a second record with them which I can’t wait for people to hear.”

Alongside studio work and Lemon Lounge, Oli is also busying himself developing a new studio complex in South London. In collaboration with Mallah, the pair are looking for a property where they can run a number of production and rehearsal rooms with a recording studio.

“This doesn’t really exist in South London,” he says. “North of the river, there are all these great places that can offer this kind of community as well as functional music space. We want to build an educational side into it too and create learning opportunities for kids who want to pursue production or those young adults who might not be able to afford to work in traditional studios.

“Our aim is to support the next generation and give back too. I’ve just started mentoring as part of Fraser T Smith’s ‘Future Producer Academy’ as well as past work with BRIT School and Abbey Road Equalise. It’s something I’m really passionate about and can't wait to work on a similar project at our own studio.”

Find out more about Oli's work over at his official website.

Olivia Rodrigo’s third record, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, is most definitely an album of two halves. While Side A documents the start of a relationship and its subsequent blossoming, Side B covers themes of doubt and rejection as it starts to fall apart – though there is some optimism towards the end, too.

You could probably argue that the album reaches peak sweetness on track 3, Honeybee, and alongside producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo recently sat down with Mix with the Masters to discuss its writing and production.

“I remember writing it in like, an hour – just feeling like it sort of captured this feeling of intense romantic love and also the fear that comes with that,” says Rodrigo. “This song was just such a piano ballad to me – I wrote it on the piano with these arpeggios and I was so tied to this idea; I just loved how it sounded ‘acoustic’ in my living room.”

This presented Nigro with a slight problem: “The sad part of being a producer a lot of times is the artist coming in and being like ‘I just like my demo. I just like the way it sounds when I’m singing it and you’re not doing anything to it.’”

This being the case, Nigro had to be careful with his production choices, and we’d say that he managed to retain the sense of purity and innocence pretty well.

Honeybee does contain one element that ended up being slightly divisive, though – the synthetic choir backing that you hear in the second verse, which was played on a Mellotron.

In fact, even the person who the song was written about – presumed to be Rodrigo’s now ex-boyfriend, British actor Louis Partridge – didn’t quite get it. “When I played the song for the person who it's about, they were like, ‘Oh my God, I love it so much!’” she remembers. ‘“ But that weird choir bit in the second verse…’”

“It was really polarising to people, the fake choir,” concedes Nigro, but it sounds like both he and Rodrigo fought for it and it ended up staying.

This isn’t the only Mellotron moment in Honeybee, either. In fact, the parts played on the tape-based keyboard instrument – including the delicate flutes, which Nigro says are one of his favourite parts of the song – were there pretty much from the start.

Addressing Rodrigo, Nigro says: “The first thing that happened, besides laying down a demo the first day, I think you and I sat together and I started just messing around with the Mellotron, and so a lot of the sounds from the original day 1 demo are still in the song.”

Subscribers can check out the full six-part Honeybee video series on the Mix with the Masters website.

They questioned his methods at first. They called him obsessive. But now almost everyone has copied a production trick from the Mutt Lange playbook at one time or another. Lange’s rock and pop productions changed everything.

Recording each note of an electric guitar chord separately then processing and mixing it for maximum effect? Lange was undoubtedly a radical, unquestionably fastidious. But he was ahead of the curve. His attention to detail gave Def Leppard the blockbuster sound they needed, and to this day, guitarist Phil Collen remains in awe of Lange, and not just for how he records a band. As a musician, no one can touch him.

“He’s always the best singer in the room,” says Collen, joining MusicRadar over Zoom from his home in Orange County. “Whoever’s in the room, he’ll come in, it’s all one take, different voices and everything, it’s incredible. He’s like this chameleon with this level of excellence that’s beyond anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s really cool.”

Collen is joined by Tommy Henriksen of the Hollywood Vampires and Alice Cooper’s guitarist/MD. Collen has just guested on Thunder Love, the new single from Henriksen’s band, Crossbone Skully. Henriksen managed to coax Lange out semi-retirement to produce their debut, Evil World Machine, and has somehow got Lange to return for their sophomore album, Condemned To Rock N’ Roll. And he can’t believe his luck. Henriksen and Lange work remotely, sharing tracks over the internet and collaborating on FaceTime, and every day is a school day.

Henriksen describes a typical exchange with Lange: “He’s like, ‘We need to concentrate on the hi-hat.’ I was like, ‘Wow! okay.’ He would take my vocals, and I’d have all of these melodies, and it would just come back chopped. I’d be like, ‘What happened?’ He’s like, ‘Space, you need more space.’ Then he’s like, ‘Figure it out. Now try and tell the story with less words.’”

Henriksen did just that. When Lange gives him a note, he takes it as gospel. Whatever it takes to get the song done, even if it will require take after take.

“We go back and we’d do – I’m not exaggerating – 60, 70 versions of the song, dude,” says Henriksen. “And then he doesn’t even say, ‘We’re done.’ He just says, ‘Okay, carry on.’ So, it was never, like, ‘Great job, done!’”

When Henriksen records the band, he is trying to second-guess Lange, to make a recording that he would put his name to.

“I try. Every time I try to do a record I do my best Mutt Lange,” he says. “I go, ‘I think I got it this time.’ Never happens! So I send him it, and he’ll pick it apart, and then he’ll send it back to me, and he’ll be like, ‘Give it a go, tell me what you think. If you don’t like anything, just leave it.’ Everything that he changes, I listen to him, ‘cos everything that Mutt Lange does is always right. I don’t care what anybody says. Any time he changed something, I did it. Because it’s Mutt Lange.”

Lange is credited with many things in rock production. There’s that sense of space, exemplified best on his production jobs for AC/DC’s Highway To Hell and Back In Black, where the guitar seems to dance around the bass and snare drum in the mix.

He knows exactly where the vocal should land, too.

But there is an interpersonal aspect to producing records. Lange also knows his artists better than they know themself, and just how far he can push them. When recording Def Leppard’s 1987 magnum opus Hysteria, Lange pushed them all hard.

“It’s the most amazing thing – he gets you do things you can’t actually do,” says Collen. “The Pour Some Sugar On Me thing, on the chorus, you sing it, you go, ‘Pour some sugar on me!’ But he’s like, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You got to do that voice, that other voice we do.’ We call it Mr Shouty, and it hurts your throat, and it’s really not good. Singers will tell you, ‘Oh, don’t sing like that, that’ll mess you up. But Mutt’s going, ‘Yeah, you could do that.’”

What Lange can’t do is take no for an answer. Because he knows. Collen would protest but Lange would have an answer waiting for him.

Collen recalls: “I said, ‘I can’t hit that note properly!’ He said, ‘Yeah, you can. I’ve heard you do it today. You’ve done it earlier.’ I’m like, ‘Okay…’ So we’d done four tracks on that, and it’s the throat – ‘Pour some sugar on me!’ – it’s that…” Collen’s vocal demonstration is truly disturbing – the noise from his throat has Henriksen is doubled over in hysterics.

“All of that stuff, it actually comes out!” laughs Collen. “I wouldn’t normally have done that. He gets you to do things that you would never, ever do – especially in the vocal department. Stuff that’s physically impossible for you, he makes you do it. It’s very inspiring, I gotta say.”

Lange is just as exacting when it comes to directing guitar players in the studio.

“Same deal with guitar playing,” says Collen. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, you can do it. This is how it goes.’ I’m like, ‘Ehh…’ And you’ve got, like, one bar to do a shred part and that’s it!”

Def Leppard knew what they were doing. Having Mutt Lange in the studio, it would have been crazy not to get him involved with some backing vocals on 1983’s Pyromania and Hysteria. But Henriksen had to ask if Lange would sing on his record.

“It’s cool, because I got songs with him singing,” says Henriksen. “You hear the voice, you go, ‘Oh, my God, dude! It’s like, I said to Mutt, ‘We should be making a Mutt Lange solo record!’ It’d be so good. You hear his voice, and you just go, ‘Oh, my God!’ Because he can do anything. It’s crazy.”

“Anything,” says Collen. “And the cherry on the cake is he’s so humble. He will never say – like I would – ‘Yeah, check that out!’ He is the most humble person I’ve ever met. The most intelligent and talented. It’s crazy.”

It begs the question why Lange never fronted a band. He played in bands at school. He can play. He can write. He knows how to arrange a song and he can perform to. We’ve established he can produce. Why didn’t he play in a band or have his name in lights?

Collen can explain.

“That was never his thing,” says Collen. “He always said – even with interviews – he said, ‘Oh, I ain’t doing that.’ He said, ‘That’s what you’re for. You’re a rock star. You’re the band. That’s not me. I’m not that guy.’”

Everyone has their own idea of what creative fulfilment looks like. Henriksen and Collen come alive under stage lights. Lange is at his best in the control room, in front of the console, calling out the plays. “It was creating these masterpieces,” says Collen, who knows Lange better than most. Those Def Leppard production jobs were seminal. It has been said Hysteria was to do for hard rock what Thriller did for pop. It gave Collen a new perspective on what perfection might look like.

“With everything he does, he always has a level of excellence,” says Collen. “He won’t half-ass anything. It always has to be done to the full extent. So, sometimes it becomes difficult, but I love working with him. It was always totally inspirational, like totally, and you’d learn so much, and what’s cool and what’s not, and timing-wise and space.”

Again, it goes back to the recording of Pour Some Sugar On Me. Lange was more than happy to temporarily ruin Collen’s throat in the search for the perfect backing vocal, so of course he was going to tear his riff apart if it was going to step on that most precious of commodities in his rock arrangements, space.

“When we were first were writing the song, I had this riff that was kind of like a hip-hop thing,” says Collen. “But it was, like [hums riff]. He’s like, ‘No, you gotta have the snare drum poking through. You gotta have space, so chop that up. [hums riff] So, all a sudden, you go, ‘Ohhh, okay.’ It’s all about space, excitement, and context. He’s the best.”

We’ll all hear what Lange has done with Henriksen’s arrangements when Crossbone Skully’s Condemned To Rock N’ Roll drops on January 29, 2027, via earMUSIC. But that promo clip for Thunder Love offers some clues.

With Phil Collen playing the Jackson X-Stroyer that was modelled on his Ibanez Destroyer from the Photograph video, there’s more than a little of Lange’s Def Leppard circa ’83, Pyromania and all that.

In other Phil Collen news, Jackson recently unveiled the PC1-E, a Mexican-made Pro Plus version of his S-style signature guitar, complete with an active Sustainer/Driver, Collen's DiMarzio pickups and a heavily distressed nitro finish.

• “Mutt said, ‘Give it a go, and if it doesn’t work get rid of the guy.’ And that’s exactly what we had to do, because Jim was less than useless!”: Why Def Leppard couldn’t make their monster hit Hysteria with Jim Steinman as producer

Producer Andrew Watt has worked with a head-spinning number of rock legends over the past few years – everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop to the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Paul McCartney.

As such, it seems inevitable that things he did on one project would bleed into the next, and he’s confirmed as much in an interview with Mixonline.

Watt made specific reference to going straight from the Rolling Stones’ 2023 album Hackney Diamonds to producing Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter, which was released the following year.

“Keith Richards had just showed me so much about open tunings and playing different inversions, so my hands were in that mentality,” he explains. “Then there was a song that ended up being on the Pearl Jam album [believed to be Wreckage] that was in Open G tuning. I think those kinds of things can carry over.”

Having produced his well-received 2026 album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, Watt also discusses the influence of Paul McCartney.

“Every time I’m lucky enough to share a couch with Paul McCartney, I become ten times the musician I was before, just learning about chord movements and passing chords from him,” he admits. “If I get to go work on something else soon after I’ve been in the studio with Paul McCartney, the desire for passing chords and chords that are a little deeper, and going from major to minor and modulating, is sharp!”

Elsewhere in the interview, we learn that Watt’s Minimoog Model D once belonged to David Bowie, and was used nightly on the 1972 Ziggy Stardust tour.

Watt has also been talking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, describing the death of Ozzy Osbourne as “brutal," and saying that "I miss him every day.”

“The thing about Ozzy Osbourne is, if he chose you, if he chose to bring you next to him, your life changed,” he added. “And that has been true so many times in history. Look at Randy Rhoads, right? Zach Wylde? Every guitar player he ever had had a career after that.”

Lowe also addressed the fact that, despite the fact that he’s friends with the band and has played with them, Watt is yet to make an album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

It could only be matter of time before it happens, though: “I’m open to it,” says Watt. “They're heroes, and a foundation of how I know how to play instruments, make sound.”

You could come up with plenty of reasons why producer George Martin deserved to be known as ‘the fifth Beatle’, but one of the most tangible is the Bach-inspired piano solo from 1965’s In My Life.

The song featured on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ sixth studio album, which is about to get the special edition treatment with new stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes from Martin’s son Giles and Sam Okell.

In a new interview with Tape Notes, Martin Jr has been discussing that In My Life piano break, revealing that, as he delved deep into Rubber Soul’s history, he discovered that his father originally played it on an organ.

At this point, the Beatles were restricted to recording on four tracks and creating mono mixes. All the main instruments were usually on one track, the next two had vocals, and the fourth was often kept free for guitar or other solos.

“I think what happened with In My Life is [the Beatles] recorded it and they left a hole for a solo,” Martin explains. “The band went off, and my dad sort of decided to have a go at filling in the hole. The first thing he did, which we discovered, was he actually played organ on it and did the sort of ‘baroque ‘n’ roll’, as it were.”

Martin is making a playful reference to his father’s decision to bring a Baroque period sound to a (sort of) rock ‘n’ roll record, and we get to hear that original organ part for ourselves.

The final performance was played not on a harpsichord, as many people first think, but a piano. This is an understandable mistake for a listener to make, though, when you consider how the solo was recorded.

“It's actually a piano that's been recorded at half speed, then sped up,” says Martin, explaining that, when his father played the part, he would have done so an octave down from where he wanted it to end up.

How did we get to this point, though? “I know how my dad was,” says Martin. “He would have [composed] it in his brain first and written it down and scored it, and then realised that, with the counterpoint left hand, he wouldn't have been able to play [it].”

Explaining the switch to piano, Martin adds: “He'd have known that a double speed piano sounds a bit like a harpsichord, which again is quite Baroque. He probably wanted it to sound sort of harpsichordy anyway, and so he recorded a piano at half the speed, and there you have it.”

Martin also notes that the giveaway that this piece of studio trickery was used comes right at the end of the solo, when we hear the too-fast-to-play run down.

As for why it was George Martin who recorded the part rather than one of the Fab Four themselves, Giles suggests that “At that stage, he was the best keyboard player because Paul and John not not developed their keyboard talents as well as he had.”

You can check out the full Tape Notes interview with Giles Martin wherever you get your podcasts.

In some ways, the Rolling Stones’ 2026 single In The Stars sounds like it could have been made at any time in the past 50 years, but producer Andrew Watt has been explaining that, as well as making something in the band’s tradition, he also wanted to ensure that they still sounded relevant.

Speaking to Mix with the Masters about his work on In The Stars and its parent album, Foreign Tongues, Watt explains that capturing the essence of the Stones starts with understanding the importance of the way they interact when they’re playing in the room together.

“You just record ‘em,” he says. “You don’t want to ‘grid’ the Rolling Stones, so the entirety of this album was made with no click tracks. They set up very close together in the live room. They can see and feel each other at all times and they’re really just playing off of each other.”

That means recording the sound of the room, with bleed between microphones, but Watt says that keeping this is important.

“You just leave that shit in. You don't try and fuckin’ take it out. That's part of the energy of the song.”

Expanding on his point about how crucial it is to maintain the Stones’ live energy in the studio, Watt says: “This is not loop-based music. It is performance-based music. You can hear in Mick’s vocal – he's changing the phrasing constantly. He's expressing. He's ad-libbing. He has an unbelievable ability to kind of bring his throat into it to kind of make it grind.”

Watt also praises the control that Jagger has over his vocals, which he recorded on a Sony C800G microphone. “He sounds so good on it. It can cut through anything,” he notes.

And then, of course, there are the guitars, played by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. “Every song, Keith's on the left and Ronnie's on the right,” says Watt, referring to their positions in the mix.

Turning specifically to In The Stars, he adds: “They both play the riff slightly differently, but when they play it together, it's got that kind of weaving thing that the Rolling Stones are known for in the way that they interact. They're listening and feeling each other.”

Watt is also full of praise for the way that Mick Jagger interacted with Steve Jordan, who took over drumming duties in the Stones following the death of long-time sticksman Charlie Watts.

“One of Mick’s many talents is working with a drummer,” he claims. “He really gets right up against the drummer and really works to make sure the groove is making him wanna dance and feels, as he would say, ‘like a groove’. If it feels like that for him then he’s in.”

What of those attempts to modernise the Stones’ sound, though? Watt admits that he has to carefully “toe the line” of “keeping it classic but wanting it to sound like ‘now,’” and points to one specific production choice that comes as a genuine surprise.

“One of the things that we do on some of the songs, and we’re doing on [In The Stars], is the use of a sub-bass – we use Serum.”

Yep, the Stones use sub-bass: we’ll admit that learning that Xfer Records’ synth plugin is now part of the band’s sonic armoury wasn’t on our bingo card for today, but there you go.

Subscribers can check out Andrew Watt's full In The Stars track breakdown on the Mix with the Masters website.

She’s called it her favourite song on her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, and now Olivia Rodrigo has been breaking down the writing and production process behind The Cure.

Speaking to the Song Exploder podcast, Rodrigo revealed that she got the confidence to write the song from a conversation she had with a friend while she was sitting next to him in his Jeep.

“I was talking to him, and I was just like, you know, I'm making this record, and I'm in love, and I love this person, and I'm just so miserable so much of the time. I'm very unhappy, and I was like, ‘I just want to write love songs,’ and I remember him expressly telling me, he's like, ‘You have to write about how you're actually feeling. You can't pretend to write a certain way. You can't write in the way that you think you're supposed to feel.”

And so the theme of the song – that you can be in love with someone yet remain unfulfilled – was set, and a few days later, Rodrigo began writing what could become The Cure on her couch with an acoustic guitar.

“I'm not great at guitar,” she admits, but her lack of skill turned out to be a benefit in this case.

“I was trying to play a chord and I played it wrong. I messed up where my fingers were, but it actually just sounded cool. And I was like, ‘Oh, that's great!’ A wonderful thing about being a novice is sometimes you make a happy accident.”

We get to hear an early Voice Memo version of the first draft of the song that Rodrigo came up with, though she refuses to play the “bad chorus” she originally wrote.

No matter, because when Rodrigo took the song to her co-writer and producer Dan Nigro, who’s also interviewed in the Song Exploder episode, the pair of them managed to figure out something better – and a bridge, too.

Getting on to the nuts and bolts of the actual recording, Nigro says that rather than recording the acoustic guitar ‘correctly’, he just used what was in front of him in his studio.

“These two microphones that are up on my piano were there,” he says. “And instead of micing the guitar properly, I literally just stood on the piano bench and played the guitar into the two piano mics. It was a really like rough take, and then [Olivia] recorded her vocals to my guitar.”

Those vocals were double-tracked – not a trick that Rodrigo and Nigro have explored much in the past – and deliberately kept as raw as possible. “There's no Auto-Tune, and there's no Melodyning or anything,” says Nigro. “They're just her vocal tracks; they kind of rub a little bit in spaces [and] that makes it feel unsettling. And I feel like as much as we have all the modern tools that we can, like, make a vocal feel perfect, it felt imperfectly perfect.”

There was just one problem, though: Nigro had recorded the guitar part that Rodrigo sung to in such haste that he’d forgotten to get his instrument in tune. “My guitar is actually about 15 to 20 cents sharp, and so I ended up having to tune every other instrument to the guitar and the vocal because I didn't want to mess with it,” he says. “When I played the piano, because the piano was actually in tune, I had to Melodyne the piano to be in tune with the guitar.”

Rodrigo describes both the song and its production as “very tense”, and an intentional decision was made to keep this tension high for as long as possible. “I build up the guitar really, really intensely going into verse two,” says Nigro. “I think everyone thinks when they hear it for the first time that the drums are about to come in, but they don't.”

They do eventually, though, and Rodrigo believes that keeping you “on the edge of your seat” for as long as possible helps to make that moment of release all the more satisfying.

“One of the reasons why I love this song so much, and why I love the production so much, is it kind of feels like you really have to earn that payoff,” she says. “It doesn't give it to you right at the first chorus. You have to keep listening. It keeps you, hopefully, sort of engaged until the drums come in and the strings come in, and it feels like this like soaring huge payoff.”

WIth the demise of the monoculture it’s hard to have a bonafide hit, but try telling that to Ella Langley. Her 2025 single Choosin’ Texas has just broken the record for the most weeks spent at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – 23 and counting – beating the previous mark set by Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.

Of course, there will still be those who protest that they've never heard of either Langley or her omnipresent song, but her achievements are staggering. As well as breaking the Hot 100 record, she recently became the first country artist to top the UK singles chart for more than 20 years, and Choosin’ Texas’s streaming numbers and TikTok views run into the billions.

Langley co-wrote the song with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor, and speaking to Billboard, she said that she knew immediately that it was going to be included on Dandelion, her second studio album.

“When we wrote it, I knew it was going on the record,” she recalls. “I honestly knew it was gonna be the lead single.”

Despite her confidence in Choosin’ Texas, though, Langley admits that its massive success is beyond anything she could have dreamed of.

“We love that song, but I don’t think I could have ever imagined what’s happening with it right now. Every day I wake up and it’s doing something that I didn’t even know was a goal that I could have had. And it’s just, it’s nuts. It’s crazy to see the ownership that the fans have taken over it, and the different demographics of people listening to the song is so cool. Just nuts to see everything happen.”

Choosin’ Texas was written on a writers’ retreat, and was born after Miranda Lambert had been telling Langley a story about once owning a pet kangaroo.

“She was telling me this story about how she got pulled over once. She had the kangaroo in the passenger seat, dog in the back, and she said she got pulled over and the kangaroo ended up getting her out of a ticket, but she’s like, ‘Of course, I had Texas plates on too.’ And I went, ‘Well, she’s from Texas. I can tell.’”

Bingo: “Just from that phrase, it kinda all hit us and the melody fell right out of me,” says Langley. “I went: ‘She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s two-stepping round the room.’ Just like that. And Miranda was like, ‘Like the one he went with, the girl he went with.’ And 45 minutes later we had that song written.”

45 minutes well spent, we’d say, though there’s more to Choosin’ Texas’s success than the lyrics and melody. The introduction to the song features a distinctive twangy electric guitar lick, and that was played by renowned Nashville session ace Tom ‘Uncle Larry’ Bukovac.

Earlier this year, Bukovac discussed his contribution with the song’s engineer, Dave Clauss. “Ella came in and she was saying, ‘I want this vibe to be like an '80s country thing,’ he explained.

Addressing Clauss, Bukovac continues: “We all gathered in the control room and Charlie Worsham was there [acoustic guitar player on Choosin’ Texas] and we got a couple of acoustics and I just started coming up with that lick, and I thought it'd be cool to record it direct like the guys used to do in the '80s. So I said to you, ‘Can we just get a cool direct sound like a clean kind of Strat vibe?’ And I remember, I had my old Jeff Senn Strat and I ran the guitar into the pedalboard into the direct rig.”

“I think it went straight into the desk, which is an API, and then pretty slamming on the 1176 [compressor],” adds Clauss. “It's amazing – now it's almost like this iconic lick, direct.”

Not that this came as a huge surprise to Bukovac: “I remember saying on the session when we recorded it – and I never say this – I remember saying, ‘this song is going to be a fucking smash,’ and then when we got together months later to do another session, the first thing Ella said to me was like, ‘You called it. You knew it was going to be a hit.’”

Turning to the isolated guitar parts, Clauss reveals that the main lick is actually two tracks – a lead and a harmonised double – and that Bukovac added a third rhythm part underneath. There are also a lot of effects: “I was probably my EarthQuaker Dispatch Master and the Line 6 – I use a lot of Line 6 M9 digital reverb,” says Bukovac. Clauss added plenty of plugin “sauce” on top of that, too.

Listen to Choosin’ Texas carefully and you’ll notice the subtle guitar parts that fill the gaps between Langley’s vocals, which were recorded as the band played. This meant that Bukovac was able to make them respond perfectly to each line of the song, and helps to give it a ‘live’ feel.

Choosin’ Texas has definitely ‘connected’, and its cross-generational appeal is a rarity in this day and age. It’s worth saying, though, that Langley’s time in the Billboard record books could be short-lived: with the festive season looming charge and Mariah Carey going back out on tour to celebrate, surely it’s only a matter of time before her evergreen Christmas hit reaches the top spot once again…

While indisputably living legends in the world of writing and production, look a little closer, and you’ll find that the career and reputation of UK super producers Stock Aitken Waterman actually rocked steadily between multi-platinum smash hits and umpteen WTF failures throughout the 80s, right into their parting of the ways in the early 90s.

While publicly always playing up to their hits and reveling in their industry-confounding success, they nevertheless could never quite resist trading a little credibility in exchange for an easy payday on the quiet.

So while their early work with Dead or Alive (You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)) and Princess (Say I’m Your Number One) are undisputed genius, and even their Neighbours soap-star milking exploits with Kylie Minogue (Better The Devil You Know) and Jason Donovan (Another Night) now rightfully get the credit they deserve, there’s more than a few projects in their portfolio that they’d rather keep on the low down.

Yes, offering the mic to diminutive antipodean songbirds was by no means as low as they’d stoop and while highly-lucrative million-selling embarrassments with the WWF wrestlers, Robson & Jerome and The Power Rangers would finally help bring their careers to a collective close in the '90s, the boys weren’t afraid to taint the well even in their heyday.

Rat's entertainment…

UK readers, cast your mind back to April 1983. Britain’s breakfast TV wars were in full swing and, enduring audiences as low as 300,000 for their TV AM exploit, ITV were staring expensive failure squarely in the jaw while BBC’s Breakfast Time rival soared.

But programme director Greg Dyke had an ace up his sleeve.

That ace was Roland Rat, an irreverent, sarcastic, ‘did he really just say that?’ puppet character, created to cater for the early-morning, kids-and-young-family audience left high and dry by the po-faced competition. And following the introduction of the Rat’s mid-show interjections, the turnaround was remarkable. So much so that in 1985 the BBC captured the rat for itself, with a six-figure, no-more-early-mornings contract and his own Saturday evening prime-time chat show.

We’re not making this up.

Roland Rat: The Series, as it was ingeniously titled, would – of course – require a theme tune and given that the condom-eared, murine sensation had already released two hit singles, Pete Waterman was falling over himself for a piece of the action.

Thus Living Legend was born. Written and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman it’s a 30-second TV theme, a single mix in both with and without rat A and B-side forms, and a 12” ‘Rat In My House Mix’, and a record so embarrassing and buried that it not only doesn't feature on the official SAW website’s discography it also entirely fails to get a mention in both Pete Waterman or Mike Stock’s autobiographies.

And considering its number 104 chart ‘peak ’, that isn’t surprising. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that we own a copy (of the single AND the spin-off album featuring TWO further original SAW creations) you’d be forgiven for thinking that we were making this whole thing up.

But the fact that the single was sandwiched in between SAW’s work on Mel & Kim smashes Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend) and Respectable has made Living Legend an elusive talking point for SAW historians.

And there’s no mistaking that 12” mix – featuring zero rat input and new lyrics – as anything other than lost SAW gold.

What goes around comes around and the fortunes of venerable BBC TV sci-fi show Dr Who are perhaps TV’s greatest example of the adage.

The much-loved/equally-loathed sci-fi series was once a 1970s Saturday-night staple, but suffered a long, ignoble death in the '80s, before earning the 2000’s rebirth that put it back on top. Now, in 2026, it’s once again past its best, sitting in a stand-off stalemate, with a cancelled Christmas special and zero new episodes in production.

But let’s travel back in time to Dr Who’s first juicy demise and tell the story of what’s become officially recognised as the worst charity record of all time…

Despite having 22 annual series under its belt by 1985, Dr Who, the BBC’s former Saturday night centrepiece, was in trouble. In ‘85, the show was only ever earning diminishing returns with Doctor number six, Colin Baker, the ex-Shakespearean ‘ack-tor’, pulling in audiences of just three million, compared to the 16 million enraptured by Tom Baker during the show’s 1979 peak.

And with a thrifty, licence-fee-payer-funded BBC coming under fire for over-spending and a show visibly running out of budget, ideas and audience, the scene was set for the axe to swing. And on 25 February 1985 the BBC announced that the show would be placed on an “18-month hiatus” and, needless to say, for its fans, ‘hiatus’ equalled ‘cancelled’…

So far so fair-enough, but what was this? A gaggle of multi-talented, famous-name Dr Who fans swinging to the rescue? The great and the good of the entertainment world, ready to save Dr Who’s bacon? With a… charity record? Hurrah… What could possibly go wrong?…

Calling All The Heroes

In a sea of quick (but noble) cash grabs through the mid-'80s and beyond – with Band Aid’s inaugural December 1984 life-saver Do They Know It’s Christmas (released just three months earlier) being the crest of the wave – March 1985’s Doctor In Distress only ever dwells deep within Davy Jones’ locker. So deep, in fact, that it not only failed to appear on any charts ever but is equally absent from the CVs of everyone who took part.

The reasons for Distress being ‘the worst charity record ever made’ (a title it was awarded during a 2022 BBC Red Nose Day special) are manifold.

Firstly, there’s the star squad that the organisers – Dr Who producer John Nathan-Turner, production manager Gary Downie, K9 spin-off producer Paul Mark Tams and Jeff Weston, MD of UK Hi-NRG label Record Shack – put together. While big names (for the day) such as Holly Johnson, Elton John, and The Village People were mooted, when it came to the actual recording, each resoundingly failed to show.

Instead, the record housed a gaggle of Dr Who hangers-on and semi-stars of the day who weren’t so much disaffected Doctor Who fans sufficiently stirred to take arms, as a Band Aid B-team searching for a spotlight.

Thus we get Miquel Brown, Phyllis Nelson, Hazell Dean, Bobby G (from Bucks Fizz), John Rocca (from Freeez), David Van Day (from Dollar), Steven Grant and Julie Harris (from Tight Fit), Basia and Danny White (from Matt Bianco), Justin Hayward and John Lodge (from The Moody Blues), Warren Cann (er… the drummer from Ultravox) and Rick Buckler (er… the ex-drummer from The Jam).

PLUS ‘comedienne’ Faith Brown, actress Sally Thomsett, dancer Floid Pearce (from Hot Gossip), Richie Pitts (from the cast of Starlight Express), and [This can’t be right: Ed] Hans Zimmer.

Oh, and Jona Lewie. Yes THAT Jona Lewie.

Meanwhile, the show itself was represented by Colin Baker (Dr Who at the time), Nicola Bryant (his companion Peri Brown), Nicholas Courtney (Dr Who regular The Brigadier) and Anthony Ainley (aka The Master).

Let’s face it. They weren’t busy.

And special mention to those who dodged this sonic spanner by pure chance: Black Lace, whose train from Bradford got cancelled, and Gary Glitter [!: Ed] who’d dislocated his shoulder.

Phew.

And with the group duly assembled, that just left the song they would sing, and that too came via that Record Shack connection, with in-house producers Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench stepping up to the plate.

As to why so many stars of the mid 80’s UK Hi-NRG scene were sufficiently aroused to save Gallifrey’s finest son remains a mystery. Suffice to say it’s hard to imagine Iron Maiden or Motörhead giving much of a toss about Doctor Who’s demise. Though given that Levine and Trench had previously written the theme to Dr Who spin-off show K9 And Company, they were a match made in (London nightclub) Heaven.

And to ensure that the track hit the spot, the pair hired in Hans Zimmer, at that time a jobbing London session synth player who’d cut his teeth working with early electronic outfits such as The Buggles.

Yes. It's Hans Zimmer looking sheepish in the background of the video for their 80s smash Video Killed The Radio Star.

And Zimmer helped Levine and Trench build a ‘Proto’-typical (pun intended) slab of Hi-NRG fit for a Time Lord.

So far so ‘good’ but the wheels were soon to fall off their rickety rescue vehicle.

Despite being the product of Levine, a future 40-million-selling writer/producer for Take That, The Pasadenas, Bad Boys Inc and more, PLUS Zimmer, the soon-to-be multi-Oscar-winning soundtrack guru, it’s safe to say that Doctor In Distress was something of a rush job.

Levine himself was (and still is) a certified Dr Who nut, even at one stage being part of show’s continuity team, ensuring that its lore and canon be honoured. Thus, burdened by 22 years of Who history, Levine’s lyrics may have gone rather overboard. “It was pathetic and bad and stupid. I tried to tell the Dr Who history in an awful high-energy song,” he admitted to The Guardian years later.

And with a dubious cast and song duly assembled, one final stumbling block remained: Just who would get the money anyway? Was the record financing a new, independent series of the show? Or would Colin Baker and the show’s stars (of its most unpopular series yet) be trousering the cash? In short, just what was the point of all this?

Just as Band Aid’s millions came under increasing scrutiny following their success, so the final destination for Distress’s booty remained hazy in the public’s eye despite clear labelling on the sleeve that any millions raised would be going to Cancer Relief.

Why Cancer Relief rather than a children's charity or something more thematically linked to the show? Er… (Doctor) Who knows. And why on Gallifrey were the assembled supergroup christened Who Cares? Sure, it’s almost clever. But it’s actually hard to think of a worse name for a charity band.

By now, reportage as to the song’s chart performance feels like a low blow and we don’t want to (tar) dis’, but this joke needs a punchline.

Following the song’s release on Record Shack on 15 March 1985, Doctor In Distress by Who Cares? entirely failed to chart, generated zero cash for Cancer Relief and failed to recoup its costs, meaning that the label and Levine actually lost money for their efforts. "It was an absolute balls-up fiasco,” said Levine. “It almost ruined me."

However, there was a glimmer of light at the end of this particular time tunnel. Following the record’s release, Doctor Who DID subsequently return in September 1986… Series 22 was indeed followed by Series 23… And even series 24, 25 and 26 in the years to follow.

So, did Doctor In Distress turn back time and avert catastrophe? Or did the BBC simply follow through on its plan for an “18-month hiatus” as it had clearly announced in 1985, rendering the entire Who Cares? project even more redundant and ridiculous than it already was?

‘Who’ decide…

Kevin Saunderson, techno pioneer, one third of the Belleville Three and all round dance music legend is to give a Roland 909 workshop this coming Saturday (ie tomorrow, 12 September).

It’s being facilitated with the Underground Music Academy, which is a Detroit-based gathering space for “educators, artists and visionary thinkers”. Saunderson, you’d have to say, ticks all those boxes.

Anyway, if you’ve recently purchased the iconic drum machine, or you simply want to improve your skills, this is an invaluable chance to learn from a master. Saunderson will be looking at both the original TR-909 and the new TR-1000, and even if you own other drum machines, there’s doubtless loads to pick up.

The workshop will apparently dive into sequencing, sound shaping, and performance techniques while connecting the history of the 909 to where the technology is heading today.

And it’s absolutely free! There are both in-person slots and online options. If you happen to be in Detroit tomorrow and want an in person ticket, you need to move fast as they are almost sold out. Or you can simply log into the stream (above) which will be going live on Saturday.

Registration is taking place now but the deadline is midnight tonight Detroit time. It all takes place at 3pm – 6pm tomorrow Detroit time (that’s 9pm – 12am in London or 10pm – 1am if you’re in Berlin). For more information head over to undergroundmusicacademy.com.

We often hear of artists saying that they had a clear vision of how a song was going to end up sounding as soon as they wrote it, but sometimes, things can take a detour along the road to completion.

No lesser singer-songwriter than Taylor Swift recently gave us an excellent example of this during her Icon Sessions interview at the Grammy Museum. It came as she was discussing the 2012 song I Knew You Were Trouble: taken from the Red album, this was one of the singles that signposted Swift’s move away from her country roots to a more pop-orientated sound.

In this case, though, it wasn’t just pop – there were dubstep influences, too. But, as Swift explains, these couldn’t have been further from her mind when the song was being written, and it was only when she brought it into the producers she was working with, Swedish pop maestros Max Martin and Shellback, that they came into the picture.

“I wrote this really sad piano ballad called I Knew You Were Trouble,” she remembers. “I was really excited to bring it in, and I played them this really, really sad ballad, and I was like, ‘I think just no drums,’ and they're like, ‘What if it's dubstep?’”

That’s quite the switch-up, and Swift wasn’t convinced. “I don't know, guys… Let's give it a run,” she told the producers, without a great deal of confidence. But rather than walking back on the idea, Martin and Shellback were apparently keen to stray as far from her original vision as possible.

“What if it's electric guitar and dubstep? We're not putting a piano in this,” they told Swift, and looking back, she agrees that their changes “ended up being the best thing for it.” In fact, Swift dialled-up the dubstep wubs even further when she performed the song live - check out the breakdown in this performance from the 2013 Brit Awards.

Speaking more generally, Swift says that their refusal simply to do what she wants marks Martin and Shellback out as the kind of producers she likes to work with.

“As a collaborator, my favourite people to be in the room with are yes and people,” she says, with the emphasis on the ‘and’ indicating that she doesn’t just want to be surrounded by ‘yes’ people. “So why not try it? If they heard it and they thought dubstep, and I came to them specifically because I didn't want to be making lateral moves creatively, why wouldn't we go down that path? Like, why wouldn't we? And I really think that enthusiasm in the studio, it can really make or break what you end up creating.”

Looking back on Red as a whole, Swift also says that it marked the moment when she decided that she was going to work with as wide a range of producers as possible, which goes some way to explaining the variety in the album’s sound.

“Red was where I decided I'm gonna try to find myself by exploring all the edges of all the different producers I could work with – everyone from Dan Wilson to Jacknife Lee to Max Martin to Nathan Chapman to Jeff Bhasker,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to work with everybody I like – everybody whose music I like I want to see what they're like in the studio. And that album was very much like changing channels, back when we used to do that. When I look back on that album, that was what made it exciting, the variation of it.”

Two of the most influential figures in modern music have spoken up in favour of AI in music.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre – for it is they – have given an interview with the New York Times, in which they were asked in detail about the technology. Iovine was positively gung-ho, saying: “I’m very pro-AI in music creation. I don’t see the downside at all. There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now. In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they’re going to make better records.”

“The AI companies have the worst public relations in the history of the world,” he pointed out. “I don’t know the history of the world, but let’s just put it this way: They have terrible communication skills. That’s why everybody is all up in arms.”

Meanwhile Dre says, somewhat nonchalantly: “I don’t see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.”

It seems the producer views it as just another piece of gear: "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI and I’m like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right? It’s a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things. I’m embracing it. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with this.”

The two men have worked together since the early 1990s when Iovine’s Interscope label backed Dre’s solo albums, which rewrote the rules of hip-hop. In the Noughties, the pair launched the Beats By Dre headphones brand, which was acquired by Apple in 2014.

Both men say that they use AI. In fact, Iovine suggests that there are a lot of producers out there who are “closet” AI users. “They’re using it, they just don’t want to admit it,” adds Dre.

Iovine admits that he uses it all day. When asked what was the last thing he asked it, he reeled off a list: “The last thing I asked was what’s going on with democratic socialism. And another thing I asked was about David Byrne’s setlist. And about the absorption of iron in your body and the timing of it. And as far as iron’s concerned, shrimp versus tuna?”

As for Dre he asked how you put on muscle and lose fat. But revealingly, he says that the bot told him “nothing that I didn’t already know.”

Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.

That sound comes from the band's mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.

But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.

“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn't always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn't have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”

Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.

“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we've been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.

“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”

As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.

“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that's why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren't quite able to do it.”

“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there's also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you're working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that's been quite key to the way we've always worked.

“Whether it's going into a different room or just stopping what you're doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you're making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”

We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.

The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.

We hear a lot about hit songs having long runs at number one, but spare a thought for those that stayed at number two for numerous consecutive weeks but never managed to hit the top spot.

One notable example is Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever, which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 almost exactly 30 years ago and remained there for nine weeks.

Born in Cardiff, Wales, Lewis was all but unknown before the song became a hit. Remarkably, what you hear on the finished record is pretty much exactly what Lewis recorded in her home studio – but as we’ll discover, things could have worked out very differently.

These days, it’s taken for granted that you can make a release-quality track from start to finish in your bedroom, but in the mid-’90s, most aspiring songwriters were working with far more limited technology, and Lewis, who had spent years trying to get a record deal in England without success, was one of them.

“I was working with my Tascam PortaStudio eight-track recorder and my little Alesis MMT-8 sequencer [an ‘80s multitrack MIDI recorder that enabled DAWless music-making before DAWless music-making was ever talked about],” she said in an interview with Sony Music Publishing earlier this year.

“I probably manifested that song because I was walking around the streets in Birmingham [UK], and I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what it's like to write a song where you get on stage and everybody knows it as soon as you start singing it?’ And so I had this ‘feels like’ [opening line from the song] in my head, that little melody, and got to Martin, my husband's office, and said, ‘Give me some paper. I need to just jot this down. You know, I did some manuscript lines, to write the melody, so I didn't forget it, as we didn't have phones in those days.”

There’s definitely something quaint about the idea of someone rushing to notate a musical idea rather than humming it into a phone or mobile recorder, but Lewis clearly knew she was onto something, and was determined not to lose it.

“I think some songs come on the wind and you just go with it,” she says. “I think that probably took a day or so to write because I was obsessed with the single note sound on the Korg M1 [a synth that Lewis had recently bought] so I started sequencing that, and then adding all these atmospheric sounds around it, and then I was ready for the melodic ideas.”

Discussing the song’s lyrics and title, Lewis explained: “Originally, it was called Lydia when I wrote it because at the time I was reading the book For the Love of Lydia by H E Bates – just a simple romantic novel set in the 1920s in the English countryside – and I just thought, ‘Oh, the verses will work well, you know, falling in love for the first time in this descriptive wonderful world.

“There's a line in the book – ‘I love you always forever, near and far closer together’ – and I just thought that was great. So that ended up being the chorus.”

Lewis has said that she had doubts about this main hook: “I remember trying to rewrite the chorus because it sounded too much like a nursery rhyme,” she told Celebrity Parents Magazine in 2023, “but when I did, it didn’t work, so I kept it the same.”

A good idea, as it turns out, but there were other potential changes along the way that could also have scuppered the song’s ultimate success. The demo eventually got into the hands of Jen Stark, who worked in Atlantic Records’ A&R department, which resulted in Lewis being flown out to the US to meet company boss Doug Morris.

“I wasn't that optimistic because I thought, ‘Oh, probably just another rejection,” Lewis admitted to DJ Bowie Jane in a podcast interview last year. “So I sang a bunch of songs for him, and then he said, ‘Congratulations, we'd like to offer you a record deal. And who do you fancy producing – Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson? And it was like, you know, all my heroes. And so it's a bit like a fairytale at that moment.”

Ultimately, neither Horn or Lipson was available, so Lewis ended up working on I Love You Always Forever with Canadian producer Pierre Marchand. After a while, though, she began to feel like the song was going in a direction that she didn’t like, so she ended up back in New York working with another producer, Kevin Killen.

“I’d recorded everything on my Korg M1 keyboard - the brass organ, the sequence, everything – and then when we came to record it [in the studio] he said, ‘Why don't we get Chris Botti [US trumpeter and composer] in to do all the brass section? OK, that sounds great. And we did a bunch of different things with it. But then when I went to meet with Jason Flom [record company exec] after it was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I do feel it's lost the magic.’”

At this point, it sounds like frustration was starting to creep in in some quarters: “I did have a couple of people saying, 'Oh God, you're being so obsessive, Donna.’ But it had – it had lost the magic, and so he said, 'Do you know what to do?’ And I said ‘I do.’

“So we went back in the studio. We got rid of – it sounds crazy – we got rid of all the real brass. We brought in all the Korg M1 corny brass organ, everything.”

The result is that, other than a re-recorded vocal, the finished version of I Love You Always Forever is pretty much identical to the demo. “I'm glad I stuck to my guns,” says Lewis. “It was hard, you know, because you can so easily say, ‘OK, yeah, you're right,’ but it definitely lost magic, and so we brought the magic back. And thank God, you know, it did what it's done.”

Acclaimed British musician and producer William Orbit has died at the age of 69, it’s been confirmed.

Perhaps most famous for producing Madonna’s 1998 album Ray Of Light – widely regarded as one of the best of her career – he also did notable work with Blur and British girl band All Saints.

Alongside his production work, Orbit released a consistent stream of solo albums, the last of which – The Painter – came out in 2022.

His golden period, though, came in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. After Ray Of Light had reinvigorated Madonna’s career and turned Orbit into a household production name – hits from the record included the title track, Frozen, Drowned World/Substitute for Love and The Power of Goodbye – he was invited by Blur to give their sound a makeover. The result was 1999 album 13, which featured the singles Tender and Coffee & TV.

Once again, Orbit had helped an artist to create some of the best music of their career, and he went on to work similar magic with All Saints, producing Pure Shores and Black Coffee from their 2001 album, Saints & Sinners.

Orbit's biggest solo release was his reworking of Barber's Adagio for Strings, from 1995's Pieces In A Modern Style, with the Ferry Corsten remix of the track becoming a massive club hit.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2022, around the time of The Painter’s release, he was asked to name his favourite collaboration.

“I've had great times and it's very hard to pick one,” he replied. “There are these fun, crazy sessions where everyone's wild and probably drinking too much and something comes out of it and then there are ones that are a struggle and suddenly there's a breakthrough. I just enjoy them all."

News of Orbit’s death was broken in a statement posted by his family and friends on his social media channels, which confirmed that he died at home on 23 July.

“We are deeply saddened by his passing,” it reads. “He will be greatly missed by us and by so many whose lives he touched through his music, friendship and kindness.”

More trouble is heading Kanye West’s way. A freelance producer who worked for him on his Vultures 2 and Bully albums is suing him for unpaid wages and has alleged that – contrary to West’s claims – AI was used in the Bully album.

Days before the album was released online in March, West wrote on Twitter/X (all in caps and without punctuation) that: “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI”.

The unnamed producer said that he was hired “on an emergency basis” for Vultures 2, but still has not been paid for his contributions to that album, nor to a number of tracks on Bully.

The action claims that “despite nearly two years of demands, (the) defendants have refused to compensate plaintiff for plaintiff’s services, have failed to provide any written contracts as required by law, and have failed to credit plaintiff on digital streaming platforms for his creative contributions.”

Apparently West hired the producer at the last minute for Vultures 2, just two days before the album dropped in August 2024. The plaintiff says he performed extensive vocal production services “under extreme time pressure,” creating at least 13 custom AI voice models, more than 400 individual vocal generations, and source material using his own voice.

Just a couple of months later, he says that he started work on Bully, which included more AI vocal production. The producer is seeking $110,000 in compensatory damages for his work on the tracks, as well as a similar amount under the Los Angeles Freelance Worker Protections Ordinance.

It’s only a week ago that the news broke that West, who now goes by the name of Ye, had reached a settlement with Lauren Pisciotti, an assistant to the 49-year-old rapper who had accused him of sexual assault, sex trafficking and wrongful termination of employment.

Earlier this year, he had to pay £200,000 to the composers of a track that was illegally sampled on Hurricane a track from his 2021 album Donda, the most recent of more than a dozen cases of copyright infringement that have been taken out against West over the years. He also had to contend with a flood of lawsuits from ex-employees after his infamous anti-semitic social media postings of 2022.

Maybe he just likes paying lawyers?

Brian Eno’s groundbreaking 1979 album Ambient 1: Music For Airports is to played in the environment it was designed for – an airport – in September.

It is to be performed by a chamber orchestra at Terminal 2 of Manchester Airport on September 20 as part of the Here We Are festival. This fest is the brainchild of the orchestra in question – the Manchester Camerata, which will see them perform music in all ten boroughs of the city in some unlikely places, including skate parks, libraries and shopping centres. And the airport.

Eno’s album is to be performed twice during the afternoon, from 2pm to 3pm and again from 3:45pm to 4:45pm. Be careful not to miss your flight.

In a statement about the project, Bob Riley, Chief Executive of Manchester Camerata, said: "To be able to partner with such a forward-thinking organisation as Manchester Airport for this concert has been a total dream.”

"Human connection through innovative, fearless and excellent performance is at the heart of Manchester Camerata, and we can't wait to share this special experience with the travellers at Terminal 2 on the day," he added.

It’s not the first time someone’s had the bright idea to perform Music For Airports at an airport. Twenty years ago, a New York ensemble called the Bang On A Can All Stars did the honours at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.

The original album was Eno’s first foray into the world of ambient music and went on to become hugely influential, not least in airports and among airlines themselves. That calming music that you invariably hear when you board a flight – where do you think they got the idea from?

For more information about the Manchester Camerata’s performance and everything they’re doing as part of the Here We Are festival head over to their website at manchestercamerata.co.uk

Frequent Prince collaborator and renowned producer David Rivkin – known professionally as David Z – has died at the age of 78, it’s been confirmed. He was being treated in hospital but suffered complications from an infection.

Like Prince, Rivkin hailed from Minneapolis, and the pair came into contact in the mid-’70s. It was Rivkin who worked with Prince on the demos that would eventually secure him a recording deal with Warner Bros, and the pair had a long-standing creative relationship. Indeed, Rivkin is remembered as one of the originators of what became know as the 'Minneapolis sound'.

Perhaps Rivkin’s most notable input came on 1986 mega-hit Kiss, which Prince began on the acoustic guitar, and was originally intended for Minneapolis funk band Mazarati, who he was working with.

“The song sounded like a folk song that Stephen Stills might have done,” Rivkin told Mixonline in 2001. “I didn’t quite know what to do with it and neither did the group.”

The story goes that, alongside Revolution bassist BrownMark, Rivkin then worked until 3am to create something very different, using the Linn 9000 drum machine as a foundation.

“The groove began to get complex, especially the hi-hat pattern,” he explained. “I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes. It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and complexity but was still steady.

“Then I played some guitar chords and gated them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.”

With Rivkin absent (possibly at home getting some well-earned rest), Prince returned to the studio the next day and asked an engineer to pull up the track. By the time Rivkin returned, Prince had recorded his own guitar and vocal parts.

“I asked him what was going on,” the producer recalled. “He said to me, ‘This is too good for you guys. I’m taking it back.’”

Kiss wasn’t the only ‘80s smash that Rivkin was involved in – he also co-produced Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy, which became a US number one. What’s more, it was Rivkin who was responsible for the song’s distinctive and much-copied snare sound, which used not only the Linn 9000 but also some clever processing of an acoustic snare.

“I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he explained to Mixonline. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.”

There was more, though: Rivkin then took this blended sound and ran it through an upside down Autatone speaker that was sitting on a snare drum, which then rattled and added more ambience. A bit of limiting and a touch of reverb and the wood-blocky ‘snare’ was complete.

Rivkin was also a member of Lipps Inc, who had a 1980 hit with Funkytown. He was the elder brother of Prince and the Revolution drummer Bobby Z, who broke the news of his death to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

“He was a master of gizmos in the studio,” he told the paper. “He was linking instruments together and using the board in unorthodox ways. He was a true rebel. He was a very creative guy.”

As befits a man who’s had countless hit records – as part of Tony! Toni! Toné!, as a solo artist and producing/writing/playing for others – Raphael Saadiq’s Blakeslee Recording Studio is seriously impressive.

In a new video for Reverb, he gives you a tour of this facility, which contains an almost bewildering array of classic gear.

One of the first things we see is the Yamaha EX-2 Electone, a massive organ/synth hybrid from 1977 that bears some visual and sonic similarities to the CS-80, which was released in the same year. “It’s like the beta [for the CS-80],” says Saadiq.

Soon enough, we’re onto a vintage Fender Rhodes 73, which previously belonged to Leon Ware, the driving creative force behind Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You (Ware had originally planned to release many of the songs that ended up on this record himself) and hits for countless other artists.

“He made so many hot records that when we turned it on it was smoking,” says Saadiq, possibly in jest.

Among the other keyboards are an Analogue Solutions Maximus 8-Voice, the funky Vintage Vibe Vibanet, and a Clavinet (one of five that Saadiq owns, apparently). Over on the guitar stands, meanwhile, we find Saadiq’s beloved P-Bass, which he’s owned for more than 25 years.

“That bass doesn’t leave the building,” he says. “It’s been on all my records. I grew up playing a Jazz [bass], and then one day, I figured out that to make records I needed to be playing a P-Bass.

Another highlight is the Prince-style Hohner Tele. “This was a hard one to get,” says Saadiq. “You can find guitars that look like ‘em, but this is the actual one.”

There is one thing missing in comparison to Prince’s Hohner, though: “I think his has a different pickguard… a leopard [print] one or something.”

Of course, this being a studio, it’s a place not only to play but also to record, and when the red light goes on, Saadiq’s preference is to commit to tape on a classic Studer machine.

“I don’t want any undos,” he says. “There’s no ‘undo’ in good music. It’s a performance.”

That said, there are times when Saadiq works in the box – using Ableton Live and the Telepathic Instruments Orchid, by the looks of things – as it enables him to create without having an engineer in the building. When it’s time to get serious, though, it’s always tape – even if that sometimes means losing a great take.

“This thing makes you take chances,” says Saadiq, pointing at his Studer. “I remember recording here one day, and I was doing a vocal, and I had my vocal, the one I loved, and I was recording myself, and I left the vocal on input. I recorded it, and then when I realised that I recorded over the vocal that I wanted, I was just sitting there by myself, going, you can't get mad at yourself, because it's gone. There's nothing you could do. There's no undo. You can't even get mad. You just have to do it over. And I didn't like that feeling of me losing that track, but I do like the feeling of… I just knew I had to do it over.”

Later on, we move back to the keyboard area, where we discover another Prince favourite: the Oberheim Four Voice synth.

“I've been wanting one for 15 years,” says Saadiq. “I finally pushed the button, and the thing for me is I like the way Prince used the Oberheim. I'm now finding out how other people used it, but I like how he used it – I like how [Revolution keyboard player] Doctor Fink used it. He's an amazing programmer of this thing. He defined it for me.”

Moby has used the occasion of his headlining set at the On The Beach festival in Brighton to pay tribute to the British rave scene.

The 60-year-old producer knows what he’s talking about, having had first hand experience of what was arguably youth culture’s last great cultural explosion. Between 1990 and 1992, when the scene was at its peak, he was a rare American interloper in what was largely a British creation.

“When I was growing up I was such an Anglophile,” he began. “I was obsessed, probably from the time I was six years old because I was able to watch Monty Python TV on Channel 13. But later on when I discovered the Sex Pistols and Public Image and The Clash. Then I discovered Joy Division and New Order and Echo and The Bunnymen. I just fell in love with music from the UK.”

“This is where house music exploded,” he said, referring to the UK. “This is where techno exploded. And thanks to the originators like Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling and Pete Tong and Carl Cox... I don’t think it’s overstating it, I don’t think it’s hyperbole – you guys invented rave culture.”

Indeed. In the pre-digital age, Britain’s music scene arguably moved faster and was more agile than anywhere else in the world, due to its small geographical size and centralised media.

The producer and DJ shared a personal memory from those years – of playing a Raindance party in 1991. “It was warm, it was beautiful, a field in the middle of somewhere and there were 10,000 people just celebrating.” One tune in particular stood out, he recalled: Everybody’s Free by Rozalla. “It had just come out and everyone threw their hands in the air and it felt like perfection” before dedicating his final song “to the spirit of rave culture.”

Of course Moby moved on from techno and has done a bit of everything during his long career, ranging from out and out punk rock (his Animal Rights album), soundtrack-inspired music (I Like To Score) and ambient (his most recent record, Future Quiet).

His most successful album was the uncategorisable Play, which was built on a foundation of samples from old soul and blues recordings and ended up selling a still-astounding 12 million copies.

Former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter has been reflecting on the origins of 2013’s Random Access Memories, the duo’s fourth and final studio album, and how making the record affected his creative process.

Spearheaded by lead single Get Lucky, RAM ended up being Daft Punk’s most successful album – it’s sold more than four million copies and won multiple Grammy Awards – but, with its focus on musicianship and live instrument recordings, was a markedly different beast to their previous records, which were created using synths and drum machines.

Speaking to Dev Hynes on the A24 podcast, Bangalter says that the catalyst for this change in approach came from Daft Punk’s work on the soundtrack to 2010’s Tron: Legacy movie soundtrack, which was made with an 85-piece orchestra.

“The benefit of the Tron score, on a very personal creative level, was how we got from Tron to to Random Access Memories,” says Bangalter. “Before Tron, all the music we had made was just the two of us in in in my bedroom, and on a very super intimate level, not letting anyone in the process, even until it's mastered.”

Bangalter alludes to the limitations of this way of working – “Part of Daft Punk was working with electronic instruments, and it it takes so much effort to bring soul to the to the sound of those synthesizers” – and says that after they’d made a start on Random Access Memories before the Tron soundtrack, he made it clear to Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the other member of the band, that he wasn’t happy with the results.

“We had made demos at the studio, you know, in Paris at Gang in 2008 and 2009, after the Pyramid [2007’s Alive tour], and I was not happy with the with the sound of all these demos,” he admit. “I think there were some kind of cool groves, but I was like saying to Guy-Man, ‘We need to trash everything, production-wise.’”

Their work on Tron, though, showed them a way forward.

“Tron was this kind of collaborative process… film work,” says Bangalter. “That's what Random Access Memories was – I really consider that Random Access Memories was like a film without cameras, basically the entire process of it. And somehow, at the same time, Tron happened in the middle of this process.

“After the Tron thing, there were all these demos, and we were like ‘OK – maybe we can go to LA and have these amazing session musicians turn it into something.”

Assessing the impact of the Tron project, Bangalter says that it helped him to discover “the magic of human beings performing,” but the eventual scale and size and RAM took a huge amount of creative energy, and so when it was over, it was time to strip things as far back as possible.

“For me, the pause was after Random Access Memories,” says Bangalter. “A song like Touch, with Paul Williams, had 250 tracks on Pro Tools. It was a 70-channel Neve board, and we had to divide it into three parts to be able to mix it. And so after that, I remember literally for two years, I had like one piano with like a a GoPro that I mounted on my piano. I didn't touch one synthesizer. I didn't open any machines.”

Explaining how alien to him this size of project was, Bangalter says: “You’ve got to understand that Homework and Discovery [the first two Daft Punk albums] were mixed on this 8-channel, small Mackie desk. So four mono, four stereo; like 12 channels, and that's as much as I can handle in terms of mixing myself.”

Daft Punk officially disbanded in 2021, and Bangalter has since focused on soundtrack work for ballets, films and an art installation. Homem-Christo has busied himself with songwriting and production for the likes of Travis Scott and Rosalía.

InMusic – the parent company of Moog Music – has donated an extensive collection of vintage synthesizers, prototype models, schematics and letters to the Bob Moog Foundation Archives.

The vast collection of 4,489 items includes a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular system, and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype.

There are also letters and schematics from legendary synth pioneer Bob Moog's personal office files and effects, alongside rare product catalogues and industry magazines dating back decades.

The donation shines a light on Moog's personal and professional life, revealing thoughts, ideas, and providing fascinating insights into his relationships with other visionaries like Wendy Carlos and Herb Deutsch through letters of correspondence.

The Bob Moog Foundation was established in 2005 to pay tribute to the godfather of subtractive synthesis and an icon of electronic music. The collection now consists of over 15,000 materials, preserved at the so-called 'Moogseum' in Asheville, North Carolina, where Moog lived for the final 25 years of his life.

"The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music," said Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic.

"We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans."

The Foundation's Executive Director Michelle Moog-Koussa added: "This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history. Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob's complex, indelible legacy."

Visit the Moogseum's website.

For Rogét Chahayed, every hit record begins the same way: with a musician chasing an idea. Whether he's digging through Kontakt libraries, improvising at the piano or jamming alongside fellow producers, his role is rarely to finish a song from start to finish, but to spark ideas that an artist can transform into a global hit.

It’s an approach that has made Chahayed one of modern hip-hop and pop's most trusted collaborators, and he’s developed a workflow designed to capture inspiration the second it strikes. Looking back on some of his biggest credits, he explains how both technology and collaboration have become equally important parts of his creative process.

“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.

“When I started making a little money, I'd go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas. I thought to myself, wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.”

Success eventually allowed Chahayed to build the studio he'd always imagined, and one that’s designed to capture spontaneous musical ideas before they slip from view. “I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place. I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.

“Saying that, over the years, I've developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you're in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”

Going deeper on his working process with Vasquez, Chahayed explains: “Julian’s usually recording me 24/7, so while I'm coming up with stuff he's locking in a tempo and recording it into Logic just in case somebody hits on a moment. Then he’ll put it into Ableton and start building a session around it.

“Since we built this routine, it’s been like an indestructible weapon. We produced J Lo's album This Is Me… Now, Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT. and Drake’s Janice STFU on this system, which is designed to capture whatever’s happening in the moment through jam sessions.”

Despite all of the technology at his fingertips, Chahayed still believes the best productions are built on rhythm rather than technical virtuosity. “I've always strived to discover what they would call the perfect loop... four bars, eight bars, four chords or whatever, but I think it's less about technique and more about rhythm. That's why I think Scott Storch is one of the greatest producers of all time - the way he approaches production is so attractive to me because his rhythm is so strong.

“When I first started making beats, I was trying to be Oscar Peterson and doing way too much noodling and riffing. Mel-Man used to say to me, ‘Hey, they teach you how to play all these notes in conservatory, but they don't teach you how to play with rhythm, and you have terrible rhythm’.

“You've got to fill the spaces in between and it's probably harder than people think to consider how you’re going to contribute to a genre or sound and insert yourself musically. The cut-and-paste approach means you’ve got to find the perfect riff for the perfect bassline or few bars because rappers are always saying something different, and the beat is just a mattress for them to float on.”

This philosophy played a key role in one of Chahayed's earliest blockbuster records: the opening of Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, which began life as an improvised late-night studio session. “It started out as a session cooked up with Hit-Boy. We're still friends today, but in this particular scenario it was just another night of going to his studio and making ideas without any aim or direction.

“On this occasion, we were at Chalice Studios in Hollywood sifting through sounds and I was looking through the Kontakt factory library and saw a sound called the Rapman Waw and thought, ‘That's a cool name for a sound’. I didn't know there was a Casio keyboard from the ‘90s called Rapman, but I pulled up the sound, played this chord and thought, whoa, I’ve never heard a crazy organ sound like that before.”

Chahayed completed the progression, layered it with bass and watched as Hit-Boy immediately jumped behind the laptop to transform the idea into the frantic, off-kilter foundation that would eventually become the opening movement of Sicko Mode.

From there, the beat took an unexpected journey before finally landing in Travis Scott's hands. “Within a month or two, he’d sent the beat to Jay-Z who held onto the Sicko Mode part one intro beat for about a year, but didn’t do anything with it.” Chahayed continues. “After that, Hit-Boy took the initiative and sent it to Travis who called him the next day to say, ‘We've got a crazy song.’ It was originally for a track he made with Drake, but I didn't hear a bounce of it until I heard Sicko Mode on the day his Astroworld LP came out.”

Throughout Chahayed’s career, not every success has happened overnight. His long-running relationship with Doja Cat stretched back years before either of them celebrated a mainstream breakthrough. We asked the producer how it all started. “I'm really grateful for my friend Yeti Beats because he’d been working with Doja since she was really young and approached me saying he’d love for me to meet an artist he was working with.

“I didn't really know who Doja was, but she loved the sounds I was playing and her vibe and approach wasn't like anything I'd ever seen. Her talent was clearly enormous and she wrote three or four songs to all the beats we'd made together in one sitting.”

That early faith was eventually rewarded, as years of collaboration culminated in the global success of 2021’s Kiss Me More. “As the years went on, I knew there was something really special there, and she had a big viral moment with the song MOOO! Fast forward to 2021 and Kiss Me More was our first big hit, which felt like a reward for all our patience, but she didn't really have many collaborators in the studio - it was just Yeti, Kurtis McKenzie and Jerry, our engineer.”

By contrast, Chahayed explains how songs destined for pop's biggest stars often take on a life of their own, evolving through countless revisions before reaching the finish line. “A good pop song can go through 14 or 15 versions. Even in the case of Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT., we had a completely different version before Bruno got on it, but it went through a version that we thought was pretty special, although we didn't think it was going to be the global hit that it was.

“One year later, Bruno hops on it and does his thing, so we’re just planting the seeds of good songs and ideas that will either end up finding their way to a really big chart position or get stuck on a hard drive forever.”

More recently, Chahayed found himself adapting his approach for Drake, with his ideas often pared back to let the vocal take centre stage – a process that was particularly evident on Iceman standout Janice STFU.

“In the case of Drake, I’d already played the horn riff on Laugh Now Cry Later, but there was also this Janice song. We didn't hear his vocal or even know what the song was called, but we knew from our source that he liked the loop we’d sent. Basically, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of the sounds that we did for those songs got filtered to become more background.

For Chahayed, it's a reminder that a producer's job isn't to dominate a record, but to give an artist the strongest possible foundation to build upon. “If you hear the original version of Laugh Now Cry Later or Janice STFU, the beat, synths and horns are really in-your-face, but after Drake did his thing, they're used as support rather than the main riff.

“Drake’s voice is so much like an instrument that it needs support rather than to be led by a sound, so the delivery of an idea has to be big and crazy – and if they like it, they’ll take it from there and make it work for him.”

• Read more: "If I was going away on a trip and could only bring one keyboard, I’d bring that one, because I know where every sound is blindfolded": Grammy-nominated producer Rogét Chahayed on the stage keyboard he can't live without

“It's quite a strange sounding song, in a way,” says Alexis Taylor, reflecting on his band’s 2008 single Ready For The Floor. “You wouldn't really write it down as an idea: Let's have gentle falsetto vocals referencing a Batman film, while singing about a kind of brotherly connectedness – and try to be inspired by UK garage music and Prince.”

It’s this eclectic and at times eccentric mix of reference points that makes Taylor’s band Hot Chip such an enduring force.

Operating at the intersection between dance music and indie pop, the London five-piece have taken something of a mix-and-match approach to songwriting over the years, blending synth lines and sequenced beats with live percussion, rhythmic guitar lines and an inventive approach to arrangement that often subverts the structures of traditional pop music.

Formed in 2000 by Taylor and schoolmate Joe Goddard, Hot Chip evolved into a five-piece by the time of their debut album Coming On Strong, adding Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin to complete a fluid lineup that sees members regularly shifting roles both in the studio and onstage.

The band’s breakthrough came with Mercury-nominated second album The Warning in 2006, which was followed by 2008’s Made In The Dark and 2010’s One Life Stand.

This month sees Hot Chip reissuing all three albums. Ahead of the release, we sat down with Taylor, Goddard and Doyle in the band’s London studio to talk about the making of Ready For The Floor, the Grammy-nominated second single from Made In The Dark and – along with The Warning’s Over And Over and Boy From School – one of Hot Chip’s most popular tracks.

“I think Joe just played it in the middle of us working on something else in the studio,” Taylor recalls. “It was a bit of a surprise to hear all of these sounds that he'd been working on. We were midway through something else and took a pause, and then we heard these drum sounds and that main synth riff.”

That initial sketch was created by Goddard in his home studio, although as he explains, to call his setup at the time a ‘studio’ might be overselling it.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

The core elements of Ready For The Floor were sounds sequenced from a Moog Modular, a synth the band would later buy in hardware form when the System 55 was reissued in 2015, although at the time Goddard had to settle for Arturia’s Modular V emulation.

“I’d just got this soft synth version of the Moog Modular,” he says. “I think I was very excited about that synth at the time, because I used that to make the beat and the main chord pattern in the song as well.

“I’d probably just learnt that you could use a synth to make drum sounds, which is something that we still love doing today. It kind of makes things feel a bit more unusual.”

The main body of the beat comes from rounded, bouncy synth kicks interspersed with stereo ‘laser’ tom sounds and noisy snares. The result is a very electro-sounding pattern, where the drums fall into the territory somewhere between beat and bassline. There’s a distinctive shuffle to the track’s rhythm too.

“We were all really into UK garage at the time,” Goddard explains, “so it's got a kind of off kilter feel a bit like that.”

That workflow was typical of Hot Chip’s creative process at the time, where Goddard would bring loose ideas to the band during rehearsal or studio sessions, and the remaining members would then work together to form them into a proper song.

“We have moments when all of us bring in ideas to the studio, but it's always been my passion to make drum tracks and bass lines as the beginnings of things,” Goddard tells us. “I often make beginnings and present them to everyone to be finished together.

“On this song, I definitely would have started just making that drum beat and then making bass and chords to kind of fit in the funkiest way I could with that drum rhythm.”

“It was inspirational,” Taylor continues. “It was just instantly exciting-sounding and interesting. I think the vocal ideas came very quickly. I’ve got quite vivid memories of us all hovering around the computer and thinking, ‘oh, I've got an idea’. Those are the most fun moments for me, in the studio, where you hear something new and you just can't get the recording done quickly enough. You're reacting to the music and to the atmosphere.”

That atmosphere, as the band recall, had a slight edge to it on the day Ready For The Floor was written.

“I think there was something a little bit tense, maybe from what we'd been working on previously,” Taylor explains. “I don't remember what song that was. But the words are partly about breaking that tension and communicating and speaking. And sort of getting stuff out in the open. That's part of what the song talks about. But being a typical Hot Chip song, it's also got these weird allusions to the Tim Burton Batman film for some reason.”

That allusion comes in the form of Taylor’s repeated mantra, ‘you’re my number one guy’, lifted from a scene in which Jack Nicholson’s Joker confronts a crime boss played by Jack Palance in the 1989 film. The line in the film is delivered with an aggressive undertone, although Taylor takes the phrase more at face value.

“In this case, it wasn't really meant to be a kind of threat or anything. It's more taking that phrase from pop culture and just using it in a different context. We’re singing positively about, you know, ‘Oh, this track sounds great. Joe, you're my number one guy. We can do this, we can make this brilliant bit of music all together.’”

The approach of all members chipping-in is evident when the band opens up the track’s stems for us in Cubase. While the beats and chords provide a backbone throughout the song, the rest of the arrangement is built out of a collage of often short ideas. Taylor’s simple vocal hook is fleshed out with harmonies from other members; percussive guitar parts start and stop; simple synth riffs create layers of counter melody.

“We have this thing that somehow happens where there's something on every album that sounds like the Coronation Street theme," Goddard says, soloing at meandering riff played on a Dave Smith Poly Evolver, which does have a passing resemblance to the trumpet motif that precedes ITV’s long-running soap opera.

It’s just one of numerous ear-worm synth motifs that make the song memorable. Another is a telephone-like melodic line, as well as another descriptively named ‘cow synth’ in the stem files – both of which potentially originate from a cheap Casio Tone Bank keyboard.

“There's sounds in there from a keyboard that I bought for Joe for two pounds at the car boot sale,” Taylor tells us.

Hot Chip’s studio resources have come a long way since the band recorded Made In The Dark. We meet them in their current studio, situated next door to the room Doyle was using as a studio at the time the album was made, but now stocked with an envy-inducing collection of music hardware, including the Moog Modular, a Yamaha CS-80 and racks of vintage drum machines and outboard.

On reflection though, the band admit that part of the success of tracks like Ready For The Floor and Over And Over might lie in the naivety of their songwriting and production at the time.

“There's a point to be made about how we didn't really know what we were doing,” Doyle says. “We were still learning our craft at the time. We were definitely very interested in production, and we were listening to lots of cool music and trying to replicate our heroes, but we had a pretty basic setup.

“There was nobody around us that was teaching us how to do this stuff, so we were having to figure it out ourselves. We probably made some quite weird decisions, or just did things that you wouldn't do if you were in a more professional studio or working with a producer.

“It's difficult to get back into that mindset,” he continues, “because it's difficult to unlearn what you already know. It's funny to think that these songs that were earlier in our career have made this tremendous connection with people.

“I think that is something to do with the directness between thought and expression. You're just thinking of an idea and getting it down in whatever way is available to you. People respond to that because there isn't a set of production layers between you and the listener. I think that is quite instructive.”

Watch the band break down Ready For The Floor in full at the video at the top of the page. Hot Chip’s reissues of The Warning, Made In The Dark and Coming On Strong are out now.

Irish rockers U2 have teamed up with Dutch DJ and producer Martin Garrix to release Fireflies, a new single that was premiered during Garrix's headline set at Tomorrowland festival last weekend.

The show featured a surprise appearance from The Edge, who had previously collaborated with Garrix on U2 tracks such as 2019 hit We Are The People and Scars, which features on the band's latest EP, Easter Lily.

“We go back a long way with Martin, and there’s always a sense of adventure whenever we get together," The Edge said.

"Playing Fireflies for the first time at Tomorrowland, in front of one of the most passionate festival crowds anywhere, was such a rush... in fact I might have enjoyed it a bit too much. It reminded me of why I love playing outdoors. I like it better when there’s no ceiling."

The single comes as U2 gear up for the release of their first original new album in almost a decade. Timeline details are hazy, but rumours suggest a new record by the end of the year.

The band recently released a rousing music video for new track Street of Dreams, filmed in Mexico City with original drummer Larry Mullen Jr. back behind the kit having recovered from the major back and neck surgeries that caused him to leave the group temporarily.

It's unclear whether Fireflies will feature on U2's forthcoming record, but either way, it's clearly a meaningful release for everyone involved.

"Fireflies has a very unique mood. It's a special song we started working on six summers ago," Garrix said. "It felt electrifying and very surreal to finally debut it at Tomorrowland with The Edge."

He added: "I've worked with Bono and Edge before, but working with the whole band I got to get a glimpse of their chemistry and why U2 are who they are. It has been an absolute honour to work with them again."

By the time Rogét Chahayed crossed paths with Skrillex, he'd already worked alongside some of music's biggest names.

Yet despite collaborations with Dr Dre, Drake and Travis Scott, the Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter still describes Skrillex as one of the most naturally gifted musicians he's ever encountered.

Chahayed first worked with Skrillex on Hydrate, a highlight from the producer's 2023 project Quest For Fire that also featured dubstep artist PEEKABOO and vocalists Flowdan and BEAM. Since then, the pair have linked up to collaborate on Baby Royal, a high-voltage cut from the imaginatively titled 2025 album Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!!.

Their sessions reinforced a philosophy Chahayed has carried throughout his career: that memorable records rarely come from expensive equipment alone. Instead, it's curiosity, instinct and the ability to hear potential in even the most unlikely sounds that separates truly great producers from the rest.

For Chahayed, the quality of Skrillex's music has little to do with the gear or software that he uses, but the way he treats every sound as raw material waiting to become music. “He’s one of the most remarkable and talented people I've ever worked with and full of life and energy, but you don't feel like you're with this mega-superstar DJ,” Chahayed tells us.

“He's one of the most enormous talents in the world and one of the only people who treats the computer like an instrument. You’ll graze a key by accident and he’ll say, 'What was that?' very much in the same way that Dre is very sensitive to sounds.

“I could hit this table and he'll make a crazy snare out of it, so he’ll take whatever’s available and make it work. Sometimes we’ll be in a room with multi-million dollar speakers and he'll be sitting on the floor listening to a song on the worst quality headphones with his laptop doing his thing. To me, that’s very grounding and cool.”

That approach extended to the studio itself, where Chahayed says Skrillex regularly proved that creativity outweighs even the most sophisticated setup. “There was a day when I went to one of his studios but was feeling kind of lazy and didn’t want to bring any crazy equipment. All I brought was a shitty quality Korg KROSS keyboard and a lot of those sounds are not good.

“They're very basic and in-your-face, but there was something about it that I thought could work and I remember making 10 different beats with him and every sound was hitting because Skrillex is really good at taking raw, fake sounds and making them pop out and cut through.”

Looking back, Chahayed says those sessions proved that great production is all about imagination, and the ability to make magic with a limited set of tools. “He really showed me that it's not about what you have; it's how you use it - I get the feeling I could go to Toys R Us, buy a $40 keyboard and he'll just make something out of it. Skrillex really is proof that you don't need anything but a good ear.”

And yet for all of his technical brilliance, Chahayed claims it's Skrillex's attitude in the studio that makes working with him so enjoyable. “There's no ego there. Every time we work together it's just this insane exploration of sounds, and he likes to keep it interesting and fun.

“I’ve had some of my best days making music with him, and he's always been a great collaborator and friend. I’m hoping to get back in the studio with him soon!”

• Read more: “It's not just about the money – I just wanted my name on there because it was my work and somebody else took the credit”: Rogét Chahayed on signing away his contributions to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly for "a few thousand bucks"

Before becoming one of hip-hop's most sought-after producers, Rogét Chahayed spent years honing his craft as a conservatory-trained pianist, composer and session musician.

That technical foundation, combined with an apprenticeship under Dr. Dre and Mel-Man, has helped him develop a musical identity that's landed him credits on some of the biggest releases of the past decade.

Having contributed to tracks such as Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, Doja Cat's Kiss Me More and Drake's recent chart-topper Janice STFU, Chahayed's studio reflects a balance between classical musicianship and modern production. Packed with hardware synths though it is, he still enters studio environments with the same instruments that first sparked his love of music.

Asked which pieces of gear he simply couldn't live without, Chahayed doesn't hesitate before naming the keyboard that's central to his creative process. “My number one keyboard is definitely the Nord Stage 4, but I combine some of my favourite sounds from the Stage 3.

“If I was going away on a trip for a week and could only bring one keyboard, I’d bring that one, because I know where every sound is blindfolded. It's also a performance keyboard and when you're recording a performance in the studio it's going to resonate like that on the record.

Meanwhile, when it comes to creating depth and texture, two keyboards consistently earn a place in Chahayed's sessions. “Another one that I love is the Korg KRONOS, which is fantastic for layering and organising sound categories. There are a few sounds on there that are just brilliant and it has the perfect combination of what you might call low-quality or low-tier sounds and ones that really cut through.”

“Another keyboard that I love to use is the Prophet X, which has an unbelievable sound selection. The 8Dio sound engine is the same that the Native Instruments and Kontakt people use, so it’s very cinematic.

Though Chahayed now owns a vast collection of instruments, he fondly reminisces about lusting after gear during his early days as a musician breaking into the industry. “When I started making a little money, I'd go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas.

"I thought to myself, ‘wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.’” Fast forward a few years, and Chahayed has built that very studio, which he describes as an “amazing” space to work in.

“I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place,” Chahayed says. “I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.

“Over the years, I've developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you're in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”

Hardware may form the backbone of his setup, but Chahayed says his workflow wouldn't be complete without a handful of software instruments. “I can't live without my Kontakt libraries, so my MacBook is very important and I've been finding some incredible sounds in Native Instruments’ Play Series libraries recently.”

“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.

But what about the instrument that started it all? “I guess the last piece of gear or equipment I need is a good piano. Wherever I am, the piano is always the thing that grounds me; it’s where I discover a lot of movement and things that work with those other sounds, so my Steinway Model B grand piano is one of the most important tools that I own.”

Before making the leap from classical piano to hip-hop production, Grammy-nominated songwriter Rogét Chahayed found his way into Dr Dre's orbit, where long days in the studio taught him to think less like a virtuoso and more like a hit-maker.

Chahayed's apprenticeship with Dre would eventually lead to credits on some of the biggest songs of the past decade, from Travis Scott's Sicko Mode to Drake's recent chart-topper Janice STFU.

Long before those successes, however, Chahayed experienced the harsh reality of the music business while working on sessions intended for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly LP.

Having unwittingly signed away his publishing rights, he ultimately saw his contributions released without receiving an official credit. More than a decade later, Chahayed reminisces on how the experience shaped both his career and his view of an industry that, despite its continual evolutions, still operates like the "Wild West”.

The story began during a break from working with Dre, when Chahayed found himself bouncing between studios across Los Angeles in search of his next project. “The Kendrick Lamar album was something I worked on, but didn't know I was working on because I wasn’t credited.

“Around the time I was working with Dre, there was a break period where I was going to studios trying to find different opportunities and ended up working with a producer in LA who was really connected to music and fashion. Anyone who knew anyone was saying, ‘Oh, you got to go work with this guy; he's always doing cool stuff.’

“So we’re in there making beats, which were supposed to be for Kendrick, and had a crazy time discovering all these insane samples and playing them over very strange acid jazz-type things, but we didn’t understand publishing and signed away our rights to get some cash. We thought, just give us a few thousand bucks each and if we do this every week we'll be rich. Then about a year and a half later, To Pimp a Butterfly came out and sure enough two of our songs were on there.”

Looking back, Chahayed describes his involvement with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly as an early lesson in how unforgiving the music business can be. “I love speaking about this situation, because it's a great lesson for people who want to get into the music business. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who still operate with the old mindset and rules whereby if a guy plays keys, just pay him 50 bucks and get him out of there.

“I did a podcast recently and a lot of people were bashing me because I said I’d got robbed even though it was my choice to sign the paperwork. It's not just about the money - I don't care about that or the publishing, I just wanted my name on there because it was my work and my contribution. I never pursued any kind of legal action - I just kept my head down and a lot of blessings came out of that, honestly.”

On apportioning blame, Chahayed continues: “I definitely don't blame Kendrick because, for the most part, artists are unaware of most of the things that are going on. I blame the system and whoever was in charge of executive producing the album, because somebody else took credit for my keyboards on those two songs and my friend's guitar work.”

They say Los Angeles is a small town disguised as a big city, and Chahayed would eventually come face-to-face with the person he says took credit for his work during a chance encounter at Guitar Center.

“I approached him very cool, told him which studio I’d worked at and who with, and just said: ‘You know I worked on those songs.’ It was kind of awkward, but at the end of the day no one cares about the full story. In those situations, there’s not much you can do except keep working and find your way back.”

More than a decade on from the experience, Chahayed believes the industry has changed in many ways - but when it comes to getting recognised for your work, the same issues remain.

“As far as the music business goes, unfortunately, you have to do a lot to get the respect of others and people won't even look at you until you’ve had a big song. You’ve got to keep proving yourself, putting numbers in the charts and maintain that success. It’s like a battle!

“Even today, certain people won't respond or get back to me about business, and if I don't remind anybody I won't get paid. It’s still very much like the Wild West, so the most important aspect of my career was to find friends and people I know I can trust to call into a project.”

Despite the disappointment, Chahayed insists the experience ultimately opened more doors than it closed. “The situation helped me a lot, because I ended up meeting my manager after posting about my work on the album.

“Greg Katz loved the work I was doing and introduced me to people like Imad Royal, who’s an incredible producer that brought me into Shangri-La Studios to work with DRAM. A few weeks later we made the track Broccoli and I let life do its thing.”

As a songwriter, producer and musician, Ian Kirkpatrick has worked with some of the biggest names in pop – Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter and Selena Gomez, for example – and, in a new interview with Antares, creator of AutoTune, he’s been offering us some insight into how important the famous pitch-correcting software is to his process.

In fact, says Kirkpatrick, “If I didn’t have AutoTune, I probably wouldn’t have a career to be honest, because I'm very impatient. I certainly would have less hits.”

Quite an admission to make, but he says that the software’s biggest benefit for him is that it enables him to work at speed and use vocal takes that would otherwise need to be re-recorded.

“The reason I use AutoTune is for efficiency – for help in sessions when I'm writing songs, to make things go quicker, and to take some of the pressure off of the vocalist,” says Kirkpatrick. He adds that this is particularly important when he’s working with a major-league pop star such as Dua Lipa, whose time with him can be limited.

“Sometimes the artist might not have all day and we need to get takes,” says Kirkpatrick. “You know, even at the level of Dua Lipa, she's only available the day we write the song. There's a song called Pretty Please [from Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia] where the vocal on it is the vocal we recorded on the day of [writing the song] on an SM7 [Shure microphone], realtime AutoTune, on the couch, and it just ended up – literally, I didn't take it past [AutoTune] EFX. I just left it on the track and that was it.”

Of course, purists might argue that re-recording would be the preferable option, but Kirkpatrick suggests that, in doing that, you might lose something else. AutoTune, he says, “lets me use takes that might sound a little more honest in delivery even though the pitch wasn't a priority. The pitch might be a few cents off, but like, enough to distract a listener from the message and a waste of a take if I couldn't fix that, you know, and AutoTune just helps me do that.”

There can't be many conservatory-trained pianists to successfully transition into hip-hop production, but Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter Rogét Chahayed has done exactly that, turning a childhood behind the keys into a career spent behind the boards, crafting some of the genre's most memorable records.

After beginning his career working as a music director, session musician and piano teacher, Chahayed reoriented his skills towards hip-hop production under the mentorship of Dr Dre and legendary producer Mel-Man. Building a reputation as an ideas man, he became well-known for generating loops and musical sketches that then found new life in the hands of other producers and artists.

It’s a track record that's not only earned him several chart-topping hits, but recognition as one of the industry's most dependable "hit machines", with production credits spanning some of the biggest records of the past decade, including Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, Doja Cat's Kiss Me More and Drake's recent No 1 single Janice STFU.

We sat down with Chahayed to trace his journey from conservatory pianist to hip-hop hitmaker, and he opened up about landing a coveted spot in Dre’s studio at such an pivotal stage of his career. “I initially got in touch with one of his right-hand guys, a legendary producer called Mel-Man who had a very important role behind 2001 and The Marshall Mathers LP,” Chahayed recalls.

“He took me under his wing in 2013 and after six months of working together, surprised me by taking me to Dre's studio one day. Dre already knew about what I was able to do, and put me to the test that night by asking me to put keys on a track that had nothing but a drum beat and a hook. After that, he wanted me to continue working with him.”

At this point in his career, Chahayed had yet to work on any major commercial projects, but Dre saw potential in the young producer. “I hadn’t done anything notable at that point. I'd been in a few cool rooms with people, but nothing had been released. I was still finding my way, but I knew that I had a different approach to keys, chord progressions, beatmaking and trying to make music a more integral part of a song.

“Back in 2013, I didn’t feel like there was a lot of great rap music,” Chahayed continues. “It wasn’t very riff or keyboard-driven, like a lot of the music I grew up listening to, where those elements were the nucleus of a song. Dre was able to see that I had a solid technical foundation, and because I was running keyboards through guitar pedals and had a more complex knowledge of chord progressions, there were more possibilities.”

Under Dre’s tutelage, Chahayed says he learned that survival in hip-hop meant standing out from the crowd and always bringing “something different to the table”, whether that meant having the “hottest drums” or “some kind of weird, rare sample”.

“Dre was constantly flexing and thinking about what you had to do to be different to everybody else,” he says. “One day you'd be playing a riff or making a beat and it would be his favourite in the world, but a week later it would be like it never existed. The most important thing is his ability to see things in other people and put a room together correctly.

“He’s like a conductor with an orchestra; he may not be touching anything on the computer or the keyboard, but he'll be pointing things out and bringing the best out of people until some amazing piece of music comes together. I've worked with some of the best artists in the world, but to this day, working with Dre is like nothing I've ever experienced - it’s like watching Fantasia!”

For Chahayed, the most vital lesson that he learned from his mentor was to broaden his perspective and look beyond the minor details and technical decisions that make up a song’s production, which he says – important though they are – can often distract from the overall vision behind a project.

“My specialty is the keyboards, sound design, structuring a track and seeing it through all the way, but I'm not a great engineer or the best drum programmer in the world – I have people that do that for me,” he says. “All those technicalities can take you away from your vision for a song, and Dre taught me a lot about that.”

“For him, all of his biggest songs, including stuff like 2001, were about the art of collaboration – putting great musical minds together. He’s very much the Quincy Jones of the rap world, and that's when you really know you're a great producer.”

Italian DJ and producer Ciauru has won the Reply AI Music Contest, a competition designed to reward "experimentation across AI, music and live performance".

He took home the prize after performing at Kappa FuturFestival in Torino, alongside four other finalists selected by an international jury. His winning project, titled Raw Botanical Data, used platforms such as Krea.ai, SeeDance, and Higgsfield to turn video footage into "impossible movements, recursive spatial structures and unstable textures".

According to Ciauru, whose real name is Simone Privitera, "Artificial intelligence is not necessarily a danger or an obstacle. In this case, I used it creatively: everything started from the hand of a human being, who guided 90% of the work." (Musically)

1,400 projects were reportedly sent to Reply ahead of the contest, and it ultimately took a creative with genuine pedigree to come out on top: Privitera has previously worked with various high-profile artists including Italian electro house heavyweight Benny Benassi, Dutch DJ Don Diablo and American super producer Steve Aoki.

That being said, Privitera's decision to dive headfirst into the controversial world of AI music would be frowned on by many within the industry.

The Association for Electronic Music's Chief Strategy Officer Jay Ahern recently warned of the dangers of AI being used for "the wholesale ripping of people's creative works" (MusicRadar), while the recent formation of the anti-AI band The Bootleg Velvet Sundown shows the lengths some artists are willing to go to protect live instrumentalists and reject artificial intelligence in music.

"AI was very useful in speeding up a process that would otherwise have taken me much longer," Privitera said. " I hope that more and more emerging artists decide to take part [in this contest], because creating connections with platforms like this through initiatives of this kind is not only possible, but also extremely effective."

This week sees the release of Confessions II, Madonna’s new album and a spiritual sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor, the 2005 long-player that she made with producer Stuart Price.

Price is back this time, too, and has been talking to The Times about his working relationship with Madonna, which began when he ended up joining her touring band in 2001 as keyboard player and musical director on the Drowned tour

This might not have happened, though; Price says that he was initially intimidated by the “incredible musicians with an array of gear” that he encountered when all he had was a monosynth that “only makes one sound at a time”.

In fact, such was the level of Price’s imposter syndrome that he raised doubts about his suitability for the role.

“I’m from dance music – there’s nothing wrong with staying on one note for six minutes as long as it’s a really good note,” he argues. “So I said to her: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to do this.’

Rather than accept that he was a bad fit, though, Madonna supported Price’s musical vision. “She reconfigured the whole setup on the basis of that comment. Instead of going back to my parents’ house in Reading, I ended up staying and she made me musical director of the Drowned world tour. So our relationship is ultimately based on honesty.”

It sounds like this high level of trust helps when the pair are in the studio together, too. “You always tackle a problem with a solution,” is Price’s diplomatic answer when asked if he and Madonna ever disagree. “When you have faith in your writing partner, the whole thing becomes pleasant.”

So pleasant, in fact, that Price describes their sessions “like being in a school band,” with both parties feeling able to be themselves. “Madonna will say, ‘I think I have something,’ and what comes out is not calculated, it’s just unquestionably her.”

The biggest hit from the original Confessions on a Dance Floor, of course, was the ABBA-sampling Hung Up, and Price previously spoke about the origins of that record to Music Week.

“Madonna was doing a movie at the time with Luc Besson, that didn’t materialise, which was going to feature music from different generations – a punk rock era, a ’20s era, and a disco era. So she asked, “Do you have anything that is like ABBA at Studio 54?” Originally, I said no.

“However, six months beforehand, I had a DJing residency at a club in Liverpool called The Masque, at the Chibuku Shake Shake night. One night, I was coming back from Chibuku, it was 5am on the M1, I was falling asleep – I wasn’t driving! – and Radio 2 was on. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! started playing, and in that dream state I thought, ‘Wow, that would be a really good sample for a song.’

“So just before I went up to play Chibuku again, I quickly hacked the sample into a track that I could play in my DJ set. It was immediate – the whole room felt pretty special. I played it for the next couple of months, but like most DJs, I wore out my records and moved on. So when Madonna mentioned ABBA, I suddenly went, ‘Well, there is one thing…’

“I played her the track, she listened intently, then she just opened her mouth and sang: ‘Every little thing that you say or do, I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you…’ It really happened that quickly. We were in the studio, which was in the attic of my flat in Maida Vale, so I recorded her. Subsequently, the production took some work, but the whole thing about making Confessions On A Dance Floor was that it was such fun. Hung Up really set the tone for that album. In her brilliantly instinctive way, Madonna just pivoted, and instead of doing the movie with loads of sections, she went, ‘We’re going to make a dance record!’”

Confessions II is released on Friday, 3 July.

Finneas O'Connell is perhaps best known as the co-producer and co-writer behind his sibling Billie Eilish's chart-dominating pop songs, having worked with the Grammy-sweeping artist across all of her projects since they began collaborating in their teens.

Alongside his production work, the multi-talented Finneas is a successful solo artist – most recently releasing 2024's For Cryin' Out Loud! – and a composer for film and television, having penned scores for several productions, including the second series of hit Netflix show Beef, which premiered in April.

It's no surprise, then, that Finneas chose to pick out several musical moments from film and television scores when digging into his favourite "weird production choices" during a recent episode of the Track Star Podcast, a popular music show hosted by filmmaker and content creator Jack Coyne.

Talking through unconventional production in tracks from Outkast, Pink Floyd, Frank Ocean and The Beatles, Finneas also highlighted the work of Ludwig Göransson and Hans Zimmer, with whom he collaborated on Billie Eilish's Bond theme for No Time To Die.

Alongside these Hollywood heavyweights, Finneas singled out a composer behind one of modern television's most memorable theme tunes: Cristobal Tapia de Veer. The Chilean-Canadian is responsible for the music heard in The White Lotus, an Emmy-winning comedy/drama with an instantly recognizable opening theme characterized by a strangely ululating vocal melody.

Finneas reveals that he has a personal connection with the show: his partner Claudia Sulewski is a friend of actor Lukas Gage, who played a central role in The White Lotus' acclaimed first season. "I remember in 2021, this show starting to air, I'm in New York... I'm with Lukas and I'm like 'this show is so sick'," Finneas says.

"Each episode I would be saying to my girlfriend, 'this is the sickest music, this is so cool and weird'," he continues. "Cristobal Tapia de Veer, goated composer to me."

Digging into the origins of the show's theme music, Finneas surprised us with the revelation that elements of the eccentric theme song were originally created for Kanye West. "Apparently, the lore is, that beat was originally for Kanye, like years ago," Finneas tells Coyne. "Then that didn't work out, but he was like... 'I know where to put this', and he used it for the show."

As it turns out, the lore is entirely accurate: back in 2021, Tapia de Veer revealed in an episode of the Broken Record podcast that West reached out to him to collaborate on music for a Nike-related project he was working on. West tasked the composer with figuring out how a certain "Nike shoe relates to music", and he set to work crafting ideas based on this somewhat unconventional brief.

"I had those voices and I tried to find a way to play melodies that is really striking, and this happened by accident," Tapia de Veer said. "At that point I knew that this was like gold. I was like, ‘OK, this I’m going to show to Kanye.'"

West wasn't so enthusiastic, however: "I was there for like a week and I had to leave, and there was problems, and Kanye started firing people and his lawyers and everything was too long," Tapia de Veer recalls. "It was a mess.”

The composer never heard back from West, but what seemed like a lost opportunity later turned into one of the most successful creations of his career, when he dug those "tribal voices" out of his vault and used them as the basis of The White Lotus' Emmy-winning score.

Check out the full episode of the Track Star podcast.

Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas has been paying tribute to the late Clive Davis – and giving us a fascinating insight into what it was that made him such a music industry legend.

In an essay for Rolling Stone, Thomas goes back to the making of Smooth, the 1999 smash hit single that he co-wrote and eventually performed with Santana. Both the song and its parent album, Supernatural, were released on Davis’s Arista Records label, and Davis was involved in the creative process almost from the start.

Smooth was Thomas’s first project with Davis, but he was originally intended to be just the songwriter, alongside Itaal Shur. After hearing his demo, though, Santana and Davis had other ideas.

“We were sitting in his office debating whether George Michael or Jon Bon Jovi should sing it,” Thomas remembers. But Carlos was like, ‘I like this guy’s voice,’ and Clive loved the idea of getting this older generation guitar player together with newer generations.”

Thomas has mentioned the George Michael possibility before. “It was George I had in my head when I recorded the vocals in the first place,” he told Billboard in 2017. “If you listen to the melody and the cadence, it’s an attempt to emulate his style in so many ways.”

Davis knew what he was doing, though: Smooth hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for 12 weeks. What’s more, Supernatural was stuffed with cross-generational collaborations, and went on to sell 30 million copies.

This is just one example of Davis trusting his instincts rather than going for the biggest name, and Thomas says that there was another during the making of another Santana album, 2002’s Shaman. It came when Davis was considering what to do with lead single, The Game Of Love.

“He played me The Game of Love with Tina Turner singing on it, before Michelle Branch came on,” says Thomas. “Only Clive would get the magic of Tina Turner on a track then have the wherewithal to say, ‘I’m not sure this is the right look for Carlos.’”

It was Davis’s willingness to go with his gut rather than listen to voices around him that made him so special, believes Thomas, and possibly the last of his kind.

“Losing Clive is the end of an era,” he says. “There were a handful of people like him, people like Ahmet Ertegun [co-founder and president of Atlantic Records] – the last ones who weren’t weren’t all about the algorithm.

“There are fewer and fewer people running labels today who are COMPLETELY guided by their own taste meter. If you come to a label or a management company today they present you with a five-page report on your fan base, how they skew, and what brands they buy.

“I’m sure Clive was aware of those things, but they never informed what he did. Even if everybody around him said, ‘I don’t get it,’ he would say, ‘You don’t have to get it.’”

Alan Myson is a producer, composer and sound designer whose versatility within electronic music spans work for film, TV and advertising alongside his own output as a recording artist. As Ital Tek, he's released eight adventurous, varied albums for lauded underground label Planet Mu.

It’s a two-decade journey of sonic exploration that started when Myson picked up his first effects pedal as a teenager.

“I got an electric guitar when I was about 13, and that was what really set it alight for me,” he tells us when we visit him in his Oxfordshire studio. “My first setup that I remember feeling like I could actually get something cool out of it was an electric guitar, a multi-effects pedal and a MiniDisc player. I used to just make loads of really long droney, ambient guitar effect loops.”

His career as Ital Tek started a few years later, following a move to Brighton for university that was largely inspired by a desire to break into the city’s music scene. Myson began handing out demos and posting tracks on Myspace, which caught the ear of Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas, best known for his output as μ-Ziq.

Over the 20 years since then, Myson has become one of the label’s key artists, releasing multiple albums, EPs and singles, ranging from his early experiments in atmospheric dubstep and IDM through to the dark cinematic sounds of recent albums Outland and Timeproof.

His latest full-length, Mind Abandon, landed this May, and sees Myson pushing his sound into new territories, warping recorded instruments, synths and vocal sounds into ambient textures with granular processing and creative effects.

We visited Myson in his Oxford studio to break down the multi-layered sound design behind album highlight A Hidden Path (above) and discuss his studio setup and outlook on music (below).

Tell us about your studio…

“I've been through quite a lot of studios, I've been doing music as my full time job for nearly 20 years now. I was lucky enough to start doing it when I was 19. Over that time I’ve had different home studios, rented studios and purpose-built studios.

“The place I’m in at the moment is outside of my house in a separate building. I'm lucky enough to have accumulated quite a few toys over the years, which I get to spend all my time messing around with. It's a cool place to work.”

Tell us about your new album, Mind Abandon…

“The new album is definitely a very introspective album for me. It focuses on the feeling of getting older, kind of losing a sense of your identity as you get older, as your life changes, you have kids, your priorities change, your time changes.

“Music is something that's really precious to me. I put so much of my energy into it and so much of my time into it. As I'm a solo artist, I spend a huge amount of time by myself trying to get something going with these instruments. It's by definition very introspective. I think this album in particular came from a place of really trying to understand my own mind, trying to focus on what makes me inspired, what makes me a better person. It was a deep dive.

“A lot of this record comes from a place of feeling quite shit, to be honest, but there's also a lot of love and a lot of optimism in my music. I like to think that what I'm doing is focusing on harsh extremes. I sometimes go down a path of just making really hard, dark music, and then other times I'm really motivated to try and make something that's soaring or optimistic. Sometimes I merge the two together.”

Your last few albums have been quite conceptual – is having a defined concept important to your creativity?

“I think having some idea of a theme is important when going into a body of work or an album. That can be something that's more conceptual, or it can be something a bit more tangible, something to do with the actual sounds or equipment you're using.

“For each record I do try to have a distinct sound palette or sound world that I'm exploring. That tends to then influence the emotional output of what I might be writing.I kind of see the two things almost the same really. The individual sounds that I create are like a way of expressing a mood, a picture, a story.

“I've been putting out records since 2007. It's been a long time and there's a part of me that feels like it's all part of the same body of work. It's all just this wave you're on and it never stops, but then it is punctuated by these releases. So every two to three years I definitely try to reset my brain a bit and just freely create sounds without thinking about how it's going to be used, what the record's going to be like. Hopefully that creates something interesting and keeps me inspired as well.”

How has your approach to production evolved over that time?

“I think my production techniques have definitely changed over the years, although I don't necessarily see becoming more proficient in the technicalities of what you're doing as a bonus, as such. Some of the best things I've ever written, in my opinion, were quite naive, where I didn't really know what I was doing. I like to keep that in mind when I'm writing tracks and writing larger bodies of work.

“That’s why I collect lots of instruments that I can't play. A lot of the time when I go and visit somewhere, I'll be eyeing up some weird, you know, Indian banjo or something. I have no idea how to play it and whilst it may not even feature that heavily on a track, just having all these inspiring bits of kit, along with synthesizers, guitar pedals, it's all nice to have. It's inspiring and it sparks something in the process.

“There is something to be said for the naivety of just making do with what you've got though. I think those are things I try to balance.

“I'm fortunate in that over the years I've managed to accumulate lots of cool bits of kit, and I enjoy using them, but whether they inform what I'm doing or vice versa, it's hard to say. I don't think of myself as particularly good on any of these instruments either. I'm kind of sound led rather than gear led. I just sort of tinker with them all and try to get something that interests me out of it.”

Were there any new techniques you explored on Mind Abandon?

“Going back to what I was saying about trying to find new sounds every cycle of making a record, I thought this time it'd be interesting to feature my own voice a bit more, although not in the form of traditional singing. There are no lyrics and it isn't even particularly discernible that it is my voice. It was just a way of getting ideas down quickly. I’d pull over the mic arm to the desk, and just be ready to go. It was about being able to immediately just hum something, sing something or make some weird beat boxing sounds – anything like that.

“It just felt quite immediate. There was absolutely no interface – it's just me on the track, I can then mess around with it and treat it like any other sound source, whether that's one of my guitars or a synthesizer or a field recording or anything like that. It was just a nice way of having immediacy and a very personal connection to the music.

“Another thing that has always been a part of my sound but was particularly important for this record is processing sounds. Processing things with guitar pedals and processing live sounds through digital means.

“Going back to when I was a teenager, I was absolutely fascinated by guitar pedals, although I couldn't afford any of them. I just had quite a cheap multi-effect, but I dreamed of having a pedal board with loads of knobs to tweak.

“Guitar pedals were a huge part of this record. Also just trying to dive back into the guitar in general, in a textural way, rather than chords and song structures. That's kind of what I was doing years and years ago, before I started doing my Ital Tek stuff. I wanted to bring some of that DNA from my original music experiments, harking back to when I was doing it on MiniDisc in my parents' garage. I just wanted to bring some of that energy into this record.”

You’ve been doing film and soundtrack work in recent years, how does your approach to that differ from your Ital Tek work?

“Aside from doing all my Ital Tek work, in recent years, I've also been hired to do a few composing jobs, for film and television, and some video game work as well. I've done all manner of things – dance projects, some adverts, stuff like that. I think it's a good way of keeping you sharp, kind of testing your ability to work with other people.

“It's quite an isolated experience, just making solo electronic music. I've spent a lot of time by myself in this room, just hoping that something's going to come out of my brain, whereas I've actually really enjoyed the last few years or so of collaborating.

“It's amazing to work with people where, yes, you might be the person being tasked with doing the music, but it's their project and they've got their ideas. You're trying to make their project as great as it can be by bringing something that you do to the table.

“I've loved doing that, and I hope to do a lot more of it, like working with directors, editors, producers, sound designers, is brilliant, and it makes it feel like being in a band or something. Everyone kind of leans on each other a bit to bring out the best in each other.”

What one piece of studio gear could you not go without?

“My desert island music kit is the Korg MS-20. For making electronic music and doing my Ital Tek records, it is really expressive. I feel like I know what I'm doing with it, which isn't true of all my gear.

“There are lots of bits of gear in my studio that I am not as well versed in, but the MS-20 is just fantastic for getting ideas out. It just gels with me. I think it suits the extremes of my music very well: it's super dark and gnarly, and heavy and nasty, and then it's also lyrical and you can get these beautiful tones out of it as well.”

What one piece of advice would you give to other producers?

“It's easier said than done, but focus less on what other people are doing or expecting, and try and home in on why you’re doing what it is you’re doing. What clicks for you hopefully clicks for other people.

“It took me a long time to get to the point of realising that. I spent a good 10 years feeling extremely unconfident with making music. I still don't really – everyone's kind of got some level of imposter syndrome with what they're doing, but I definitely pay less attention now to expectation, what I'm supposed to be doing or what anyone else is hoping I'm doing.

“I've enjoyed the process of making records a lot more since I tried to harness that kind of mindset.”

Ital Tek: Mind Abandon is out now via Planet Mu

Oscar Scheller isn't a name that'll be familiar to most of our readers, but this London-born producer and songwriter is one of pop music's fastest-rising behind-the-scenes talents – and the man responsible for producing one of 2026's biggest global hits.

That song is a remix of PinkPantheress' Stateside featuring Zara Larsson, a rework of a track from PinkPantheress' 2025 project Fancy That that featured on remix album Fancy Some More?, released in October of the same year.

Going viral in early 2026, the Scheller-produced Stateside remix became PinkPantheress' most successful song to date, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 and Spotify's global chart simultaneously while reaching Top 10 in the US and generating close 50m weekly streams at the peak of its popularity.

But, according to its producer, the track's skyrocketing success came as something of a surprise. "It's a pretty oddball song to be a hit," Scheller told MusicRadar in a recent interview. "But it feels good. It’s the moment that all producers wait for, but I’m just really happy it happened with her, on music that I’m proud of too."

Now based in Los Angeles, Scheller has forged a longstanding creative relationship with PinkPantheress that began in 2021, and has since led to collaborations across multiple projects. “I knew as soon as I heard PinkPantheress that we had similar musical DNA from the samples and interpolation, that we had a similar way of thinking,” he says.

“She’s insanely melodic, I reached out and we had a session just before I moved to the US. She seemed really shy but was quietly confident, and we hit it off straight away.”

Not only working on the Stateside remix, Scheller was invited to collaborate on numerous remixes on Fancy Some More?, including Girl Like Me (with Oklou) and Tonight (with Jade). However, it was his take on Stateside that was eventually picked up for release, along with a contribution to the Sugababes-featuring rework of Nice to Know You.

“I did Stateside, Girl Like Me and Tonight and was praying for the first one to come out. She wouldn’t tell me who the feature was, then she sent the version back with Zara - it was crazy,” Scheller says.

Despite the astronomical popularity of Stateside's alternate version, Scheller told us that a handful of fans have questioned the song's production, picking up on slight variations in tuning between the elements that make up the track. “There’s all this discourse online about how everything is out of tune on Stateside,” he says.

“But I’ve been pleased with that – we need imperfection," Scheller continues. "It’s like a retaliation to AI and this weird humanless vacuum of sound that people keep pushing down our throats. We need the human touch!”

Read the full MusicRadar interview with Oscar Scheller, where he digs into his musical background, his studio set-up and his recent work with Lily Allen and Kelela.

Rick Rubin certainly knows how to feed into the sense of mystery that surrounds his production style. Both fans and critics have long speculated on what it is he actually does in the studio, and Rubin made headlines during an interview in 2023 when he claimed not to know how to use a mixing desk.

Now Finneas – a much-more hands-on kind of producer both on his own records and those for other people, most notably his sister, Billie Eilish – has had his say on the myth of Rick. And, like many of us, he’s a little perplexed by it.

“He’s made work that I’m really inspired by,” he tells Billboard. “I’m a little confused by his kind of – he swears that he knows nothing at all about music, and it’s like, just Google Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash. There are many videos of him setting up the mics. He doesn’t know nothing.”

Almost certainly not, but Finneas also has a theory as to why Rubin likes to play down his technical abilities.

“I think what I assume he means by that, and I respect this, is similar to what I’ve said before: there are a lot of people that know a lot more than I do. I don’t know the most, but I also don’t know nothing.”

Finneas goes on to suggest that perhaps Rubin is attempting to make sure that people he may be working with aren’t put off because they’re not genius technical producers.

“I think it’s an effective — I think I try to do the same thing, which is, I don’t want to make people feel like it isn’t achievable,” he says. “I think that you don’t want to intimidate somebody out of trying to make something by way of, ‘I have my 10,000 hours, I know so much, you’ll never know as much as I do.’ So I like that about that.”

Discussing his own production style, Finneas says that, although he’s been encouraging his sister Billie to get more involved in the technical side of things and take on some of the vocal engineering work in particular, there also benefits to working with someone who thinks about sound and music more descriptively.

“One of the things I said to her like a year ago was, one of the challenges with the more you know is the less you imagine, I think. So what I want is for an artist to just be purely imaginative.”

Finneas also remembered a key moment in his production journey – when, in 2011, Apple decided to significantly drop the price of its flagship DAW.

“I was saving up to buy Logic Pro,” he recalls, “and it was like $799 or something, and I was saving up, and in a couple months I’d have enough money, right? And then they dropped the price to like $199 and I was like, bro, I can afford this.”

With a new single – A Crazy Shot In The Dark for The Fizz – and the long-awaited release of Suzette Charles’ 33-years-in-the-making debut album now finally a reality, we recently caught up with Mike Stock of legendary producers Stock Aitken Waterman for a lengthy look back at his career.

During that conversation, we just had to ask him about some of the technology that he’s used down the years…

SAW’s studios were famously always equipped with the very latest gear, and you were the first producers to get the latest sounds on record. So were you ever a ‘gear head’?

“I've been surrounded by people who were more interested in the technicality of the synthesizers and the gear that we were using. Matt [Aitken] was very into that and the engineers definitely were, but I definitely thought it was just a tool.

“I would grab whatever new synthesizer was on the market, like, like the [Yamaha] DX7, and decide, ‘This is the best one for basslines’. Or, ‘It's also got a fairly good Fender Rhodes electric piano sound,’ but most of the others I wouldn't bother using.

“Then I'd get a [Roland] Jupiter and go, ‘This is good for the brass thing that we want,’ and the Emulator II was good for the piano, so we’d end up with so many synths just to cover one instrument.

“And I discovered the AMS [DMX 15-80] back in the days of the Marquee Studios, making Hazel Dean singles. You could sample about 600 milliseconds in there and you could trigger it off a drum, or just press the button, and that was a marvelous moment for me. I thought, ‘You could do all sorts of things with this!’.

“And then later on we got the Publison, the French machine that could sample 30 seconds worth of vocals. So if I got a whole chorus structure recorded on tape I could put a whole chorus into that, and then fly it into the rest of the song just by pressing a key. And then I found I could change the key! And you could change the key without making it go chipmunk-y because it had an algorithm that for every percentage of increase in speed it will reduce the vibrato by the same amount, so it always came up even sounding. Though to be fair if you went beyond more than a tone higher than you recorded, it did sound a bit weird.

“But I played it like a keyboard. I played it on Mel & Kim. We would sample things and use the hi-hat to trigger a gate open and shut to the rhythm. And like with Kylie, on I Should Be So Lucky where we couldn’t work out what to do for the middle eight. Anything for a gimmick, but back in the day that was new.”

Is there a bit of gear that's around today that you wish you had back then? Something that would have made things even faster and better?

“Well, can I say something? Everything that's come – ever since the very first recordings we made – has made things slower, not faster.

“Back in the day, when I started recording, you set up the drums, you set up the bass and that's it. You've done it. You've rehearsed it. You play it all down. And theoretically you’re done. You might spend months worrying about the snare drum, I suppose, but that was a problem that the Linndrum solved instantly! But as soon as you got computers involved that allowed you to edit those… It just takes much, much longer.

“Logic and Pro Tools don't make this situation quicker, it just makes it endlessly editable, and that's what you end up doing. So I come to sessions, and I'm looking at the setup and I’m saying, ‘Why have we got 128 tracks going in? Why are there four hi-hats? Why does it take this many bass drums to make a groove? What's going on?’

“And that's all you did. You get every opportunity to try something else. Let's add another. Let's add another!

“Now I work on the principle of cutting to the basics. What do you need to make this work? One bass, one drum pattern… Get those ingredients, and then hone the ingredients. Don't just add more to it.

“I worked with Paul McCartney, and we discussed how The Beatles used to do it. They recorded their first album in a day. But they were well rehearsed because they'd been to Hamburg. They'd been doing gigs every night, and they were ready to do it. If bands come to a studio fully rehearsed with a song they've learned for years then you can do it very quickly.

I’m thinking you must have been crying out for a bit of Auto-Tune from time to time…

“Well around ‘94 I had an Atari and I actually spoke to Steinberg to ask them if they could make something that could do that. What I was describing was a vocal tuner – and this is a few years before Antares and Auto-Tune. See, in ‘92 and ‘93 I would spend a long time editing a vocal using the pitch adjustment on the AMS. You could raise things up and down or use chorusing effects, just to try and smooth over some cracks. So I suppose if I’d had Auto-Tune back then it would have made things quicker.

“But that is the one criticism I have, mostly of modern recordings, is they are using them to the nth degree. Now, mostly, I've gone back. Most of everything I've got in terms of the outboard gears is analogue, and I still use synths. I don't use virtual instruments, plugins, or the ones that are sort of supposed to emulate ‘the real one’. I don't like all that, because they only get close to it.

“And there is a difference in my recordings. The Fizz single is the first record we've actually done, where we've completely gone, ‘No, we're not going to use anything like that. We're going to go straight via hardware’. And, of course, I still use the Calrec microphone, but there's no vocal tuning, there's a real guitarist, real bass, the drums are programmed, obviously, but we're close to being as analogue as you can before you mix it down… And somebody plays in 16-bit on their earphones, and the work you've done is wasted!

“But if you put that track on big speakers in a big hall, it will boom.”

Great to hear that you’re still using the Calrec Soundfield microphone. Is that the ‘secret sauce’ behind SAW’s vocal sound?

“Believe me, I've tried every single mic under the sun. In fact, we did a double blind ‘placebo test’ in a studio. We got the Sony, we got the Neumanns, we got the Shures – alongside the Calrec – and we got them all up and got someone to sing on them, and we didn't listen or watch which mic they were on… And we picked the Calrec every time.

“For transparency, it's very clean, very full, and doesn't colour the sound. All of the other mics coloured it slightly, but then some people say, ‘I like the way the Neumann colours my voice, so I'll use the Neumann.’ So, I’m not saying don't buy Neumann, but buy it because it colours the sound slightly, you know?

“But we get the best result out of the Calrec because it is the cleanest. I've had about five of them now.

“The Calrec was designed originally for orchestra use; it has four heads and you can directionalise them. It's not to record in quad. So, if you put the mic over the top of an orchestra and you want to try and get a balance – you can't hear enough of the violas – you can point the mic down at the violas and get a bit more of them, and you get a nice spread.

“When I have backing singers in, we get them either side of it, because you can change the orientation of things.”

The perception is that the very tight, double-tracked, slightly phasing sound of Kylie Minogue's voice on her hits is all down to the Calrec microphone.

“No, that wouldn't be the reason for that. It just records whatever she sings. There's not a great deal of double-tracking on Kylie’s vocals. I know there is a bit in the chorus, but not as much as you might think.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.