LESTYN POLSON: Recording David Gray's 'Babylon'

Interview | Producer

Published in SOS November 2000

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People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers

David Gray's album White Ladder has become one of the most successful UK chart albums of 2000, a breakthrough spearheaded by top five chart single 'Babylon'. Engineer/programmer and co-producer Lestyn Polson tells Tom Flint the story behind the song.

The kind of recording technology featured in SOS is enabling more and more musicians to produce release-quality singles and albums from home studios -- while at the other end of the scale, hugely extravagant album and single projects are as prevalent in the charts as ever they were. These days, it's not that unusual to find that a hit song was recorded in someone's sitting room; nor is it unusual for an album to take a year or more to produce in a range of top-flight studios. What is rarer is for both approaches to come together on one song, as they did on David Gray's 'Babylon'. The single took almost two years to record and was mixed on a Neve VR desk at Metropolis studios, recorded to 2-inch tape, and edited using state-of-the-art Pro Tools hardware. Yet the core of the track was recorded in the modest surroundings of David Gray's living room using no more than two mics and a handful of budget equipment. Between this humble beginning and its ascent of the charts in July 2000, the song was overdubbed, rerecorded, remixed and previously released once. By the time of its second release by East West Records, the song had become an unusual hybrid of high-tech production values and low-tech DIY bedroom recording.

Although the success of White Ladder has propelled David Gray from relative obscurity into the public eye, the release is album number four for the London-based singer/songwriter. Back in 1993 he was signed to Hut Records for the release of his first album A Century Ends. The album Flesh followed in 1994 and Gray's third album Sell, Sell, Sell, was released by EMI in 1996. By the time work began on the recordings that would become White Ladder, however, Gray had lost his record label support. With this in mind, the original intention was to record some demos to attract the attention of another label, which could perhaps be sold as an album in their own right until this was achieved (White Ladder, and 'Babylon', were initially released on Gray's own IHT label).

David Gray's manager had met producer andengineer Lestyn Polson previously and, aware of his studio production experience (see Lestyn's Ladder box on page 49), contacted him to ask if he would be interested in working on the project with Gray and his drummer Craig McClune (known simply as Clune). The plan suited Lestyn well: "I like to get involved with people right at the ground level, from the songwriting and arrangement side of things. I'm not really cut out to be one of those jobbing producer/engineers; if I don't like a track I can't get the motivation for it. Whatever feeling you get about a track when you're doing it comes across. If you're feeling good it always remains that way in your mind."

The lack of record company backing meant that Gray's songs had to be recorded on a shoestring budget. Unable to even consider working in a professional studio, Gray, Polson and Clune commenced recording in the living room of Gray's London flat.

Since the goal was to make recordings that would impress record companies, the team's primary objective for the initial sessions was not to get the most finished-sounding recording, but to get the best representation of Gray's compositional ideas onto tape. The first task was the recording of vocal and guitar tracks. The main guitar line of 'Babylon' was played to a click track and recorded onto ADAT, providing a guide for the vocal. Remarkably, the mics used for these crucial recordings were not selected out of preference, but because they were the only ones available. "We didn't have any mics at all when we started recording," confesses Lestyn. "We had no money, so we had to borrow them. Dave had this very cheap Electrovoice ND257 mic and most of the guitar stuff was recorded through that, and we used an Audio Technica -- a £250 black thing -- for vocals. At that time Dave only had an old Mac with no audio, so all we had at the time to record onto was ADAT."

Perhaps because David was performing in an informal non-studio environment, the recordings proved to be far better than anyone could have expected considering the limited recording facilities. "It's very much about performance with Dave," insists Lestyn, "so once you've done that definitive take you don't want to go back and

Pleased with the excellent vocal and guitar takes, the team turned their attention to some programmed material. One of the first parts added was a pulsing string sound which Lestyn describes as a 'vocodery summer pad'.

"The vocodery thing was from a cheap and cheerful Zoom 1201, which is just a £70 box. Right at the start of the album I thought I'd better buy a good lo-fi effect, because it is a lo-fi record. If you try to use things that sound too hi-fi it makes everything else sound out of place, so there are limitations. Using the vocoder setting, I fed some keyboard strings through one side, a drum loop through the other and then the output of the vocoder is the combination of those two sounds, so you get the strings being triggered by the envelope of the loop and you get a 'bop bop bop'. The drum loop was an Akai S3000 sample but Recycle-d. I always use Recycle in my programming."

The available recording equipment was added to as the recording of the album and single went on, making it a hard task for Lestyn to recall exactly what was recorded at which stage. However, it wasn't long before the initial ADAT setup was abandoned. "We moved to Logic Audio within the first month and bounced everything into Logic Audio from ADAT. Dave has new ideas all the time, so he likes to change the arrangements afterwards and put little things in. Obviously, Logic Audio works very well for that. To do the job we bought the cheapest audio card on the market which was an Emagic Audiowerk 8. I can't believe we got away with it!"

Early on in the recording of White Ladder, a drum session was recorded -- albeit rather crudely, as Lestyn explains: "All the drums for the album were recorded in this big concrete photographic studio. It wasn't a nice room! Again we only had the one Electrovoice mic up in the room and a Shure SM57 on the bass drum. The whole drum track on the album was recorded like that, in mono. You could put up the fader and that was the drum sound. When we came to the single it was a case of looking at the weak points in the production of the song to see how we could tidy them up, so the first place to look was the drum sound."

After it was decided that 'Babylon' was to be released as a single for the first time, the drums were rerecorded during a half-day session in The War Room at Mylow Studios. An Electrovoice RE20 was used for snare and bass drum, a Shure SM57 on top snare, an AKG C414 on bottom snare, a pair of C414s for the overheads and a pair of Neumann U87s in the room, while a B&K mic was used on hi-hat for its acoustically flat characteristics. "It was just standard overheads, kick drum, snare; there's no toms on the kit. There was also an underground chamber room adjacent to the drum room, which I put a mic into," explains Lestyn.

Like strings (see box on page 48), piano played an important part in the sound of 'Babylon', although it ended up being used differently on the album and single versions. "The album version has piano at the start and echo piano with a left/right delay on the verses. We had a bit of vocodery piano in there as well, going 'dnag, dnag dnagn adang', which was the same Zoom effect used on the string pad. We used a Roland piano on the album, but on the single we bought a Kawai MP9000 which was much more pleasant-sounding.

"The piano only ever comes in on the choruses on the single version now. It was removed from the verses and a pad was put in place. I think we got bored of the sound, basically -- every time we put up the fader the first thing you'd hear would be 'dnag, dnag dnagn adang', and we wanted to hear something different this time around. Each time we went back and mixed it was to make it more exciting for us.

"There's also an extra guitar part that comes in right at the start of the second verse to lift the song. We did that back in Dave's house. I chopped it up with in Recycle loads of times, so it's the same part but all detuned slightly to give the chorusey effect. You can hear all the traffic rumbling under that sample as well. There's loads of background noise, but I like noise -- it adds character.

"In that verse the bass line becomes more simple, so the shift is from rhythm to melody and becomes more light-hearted. It's nice to have some musical relief after the chorus has been banging away. The bass line is just off a Roland MC303 groovebox.

"My favourite bit is the wacky guitar thing that comes in right at the end of the song. That's an acoustic guitar loop, edited, then put through a North Pole plug-in resonant filter. It's a tiny bit of that first guitar motif from the beginning of the song, bounced out through the digital bounce page."

Throughout the chorus sections of 'Babylon', a vocal harmony follows David's lead part. Lestyn reveals the singer's identity: "The backing is actually Clune, the drummer. Singing drummers, you have to watch out for them! He's very involved with the whole production side of things as well. We were recording it in same photographic darkroom studio where we did the drums, but that time we used the darkroom bit, which was better acoustically for vocals than the big echoey concrete room. We managed to borrow an Audio Technica AT4033A mic for a couple of weeks. It's just one harmony part, double-tracked."

As well as the full version released on the album, 'Babylon' underwent two releases as a single, each receiving rerecording and remixing sessions. The first release was on Gray's own IHT label, and the mixing sessions were as chaotic as the original recording time: "We were moving around with the computer from place to place, with hardcore crashes. We borrowed a Soundcraft 6000 desk from a mate to mix the album as well. The power supply was playing up and buzzing all the time. We were working with the maximum number of audio tracks possible with our computer drive so it was hit-or-miss whether the computer would make it through the song each time before overloading, and we had builders outside digging up the road while we were trying to do the vocals. It was a nightmare. The album was cobbled together, believe me!

"Originally there was a three-week period where we did the strings, edited the song down, recorded the drums and made it into a seven-inch. We wanted to make more of a start point, so straightaway you get to the guitar bit which is reminiscent of the chorus -- all that standard stuff.

"The strings took quite a lot of sorting out because some of the harmonics in them were a bit weird. The tuning on the whole track is ambiguous, because of the way it was recorded. Dave's guitar is really nice and old but it's not perfectly in tune with itself, and as the track goes on it gets more 'sway' around some of the strings. I put a bit of an MXR phase/flanger on the strings, resonating with a nice harmonic. To do that I took the auxiliary out of the desk into a flanger, set the width and speed at minimum, mix at 100 percent and regeneration at around 33. That defined the resonant point which is in key with the track, so it's just ringing all the way through; then there's something that is constantly in key with the strings on the track. After that I compressed it totally so it fitted the mix and sounded a bit more sturdy.

"I like to go through tracks in real time, so I start with the first thing you hear in the track. I tend to think of a track as a story. What has just happened and what is going to happen is just as important as what's happening there and then. Each event is a dynamic point in the track that should work in relation to whatever's been going on before it. I don't tend to work in solo very much. If I want to hear something a bit more clearly I turn it up for a moment so it's still sitting in there. In solo you start to wonder what you're listening to and in relation to what. I did do lots of rides throughout the track -- I think everything moves in volume. I like to make sure there are points where the track gets louder, because the vocal does and a real drummer would."

"We had to change some of the vocals when we edited the song down for the first single. The dynamics of the choruses didn't quite work, so we redid some vocals just to make the dynamic of the song make sense. I think the whole last chorus was a new vocal take. Those were recorded straight into Logic Audio. Again, they were done in Dave's house but this time we had some long mic leads so Dave was able to record in his bedroom while we'd be sitting in the living room with the gear -- almost like a proper studio.

"I didn't do much editing on Dave's vocal at all. You don't have to, he's a proper singer; I'm not into spending hours chopping up vocals. You start thinking, 'Hang on, someone here can't do their job and it's not me!' If you're just sitting there in front of a computer doing that you might as well be shuffling data around in a bank. You can't put emotion in with a computer. I think there was just one edit, so we just muted the other vocal then recorded it."

When East West decided to rerelease 'Babylon' as a single, both Lestyn and the record company felt that more work was needed on the mix: "By that time, East West Records had got on board so we had some money. It was supposed to be a single and we were supposed to be competing in the same market as all these other pop stars. The idea was to make it work on radio. Those opening moments are always really important on

"That first single release was mixed on a Harrison desk. The Harrison didn't have gates and compressors on every channel, so we ended up hiring in loads of Ureis. On the second we had unlimited compression, so we started setting it up again. For the actual mix I hired a Digidesign 888 system using Logic and went to Metropolis studios. The final mix was a three-day affair. I did one day where I went in, set up, made sure everything was running in sync, got all my effects plugged in and running, then mixed it over the next two days.

"By the time we got to mix the song for this second single release it was about the fourth or fifth time I'd mixed it. I've already spent another four days with it on a Trident desk doing the rough mixes. We first set the mix up in our own place on the old Trident desk and it sounded really good. But when we got to Metropolis we were using one of those big Neve VR desks where you can hear every little cough, rumble and car going by outside. And you can really hear the ADAT thing going on in places on the vocals. The starkness of those big expensive desks that don't colour the sound means you've got to go back and blur all those edges again. All the moves and events had already been worked out on the Trident so it was just a case of adding the reverb and delay, levelling it out and then whacking it down to half-inch.

"I like to put quite a lot of things down to 2-inch tape for the sound. I put all the drums -- there were nine or possibly even 11 tracks of drums -- some strings, bass guitar, stereo strings and a pad to tape. You have to run the tape for the desk's automation system to work properly, so if you've got to run it you might as well put audio on it, then at least you know it's there and it's in sync. Once I had it all down on tape I could free up some outputs."

The twin intentions of creating recordings that would both be saleable in their own right, and capable of getting Gray a new record deal, were both fulfilled eventually -- but, as Lestyn explains, the latter was a slow process. "We toured the album three times, sold 7,000 copies in the UK, and still no-one wanted to know. The album was out there, but it was just a case of people getting to hear it. We tried our hardest, then East West thought they could make it work -- and they did."

Having achieved this success at last, the David Gray team could potentially work in any studio they chose and finally leave the bedroom studio ethic behind -- couldn't they? "We don't want to start making the next big record in a big studio. It's never what it was about and never what any of us liked. I don't feel at home in big studios. I always feel there are too many other people wandering around. We finished White Ladder to a higher standard than just demos, but ultimately it's still a bedroom record."