Part one: the Abbey Road years, 1986 to 1993.

This month marks forty years since I walked into Abbey Road Studios for the first time and started working in music. 11th August 1986 to be precise. Four decades of film, television, records, games and theatre, and I still cannot quite believe any of it was possible...

My first day at Abbey Road, August 1986, I had to push my way through a crowd. Fans pressed against the gates, cameras going off, everyone waiting for a glimpse of Duran Duran. I was twenty-two, I had just graduated with a degree in electronic engineering and no idea what I was walking into, and I remember thinking: right, so this is what work is now.

It never happened again!

But in a way I did not understand at the time, that morning turned out to be most accurate foreshadowing of all that was to come. Not because of the crowd. Because of the sheer improbability of being in the middle of it. Forty years on, the one constant in my working life has been that there is no constant. Every project has been different from the last. No two days have ever looked the same. I have never once known what was coming, and it turns out that is the job.

The trial

I was taken on for a one-month trial doing technical work and tape copying.

I still have the letter. EMI Records, 20 Manchester Square, dated 6 August 1986. Temporary employment as an Assistant on recording and transfer work, based at Abbey Road Studios, reporting to Chris Buchanan and Colette Barber.

No promises of anything beyond that.

About two weeks in, the studio manager Colette, a music business legend, asked whether I would cover as a tape op on an album being recorded and mixed in Studio 2. The band was Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mike Hedges producing, Ian Grimble engineering. And now me assisting.

I was thrilled. I loved that band. The album turned out to be Through the Looking Glass, recorded and mixed in Studio 2 across August and September 1986, which means I walked in soon after the project started.

The Banshees had a habit of renaming people on a whim, apparently at random. Bassist Steven Severin decided I was to be called Grip. I never found out why. It followed me around for years, and there are colleagues from that era who still call me nothing else.

And that was that. I was on the studio side. Nobody ever told me the trial was over, I simply did not go back to tape copying.

I have thought about that a lot over the years. Almost everything that followed rests on a temporary contract, and a tape op vacancy suddenly appearing. That is the business. You can be as prepared as you like, but you still need the door to open, and you have to be standing near it when it does.

Every session is different

What followed was an education you could not design or pay for.

From the Banshees I went on with Mike Hedges to a Toyah album, with Haydn Bendall engineering. Then back with Ian Grimble on a Peter Murphy album project. Let’s Active with Mitch Easter. The Beautiful South. The Fall. The Stone Roses with John Leckie. Pepsi and Shirlie with Gary Langan (of Art of Noise). Pink Floyd, as an additional engineer on Delicate Sound of Thunder. The Hollies, with the much missed Mike Jarratt engineering, and the Classic Rock series with his brother Jeff Jarratt producing. Assisting Haydn on Kate Bush string sessions. And threaded through all of it, film and classical sessions, and the Abbey Road Mobile, which took me to Berlin, Oslo, Vienna, Munich and Tel Aviv. Churches, concert halls, rooms never intended to be used as recording spaces. I worked alongside incredible orchestral engineers: John Kurlander, Mike Sheady, Stuart Eltham and Shawn Murphy. Learning to capture real air moving in a real space, often under conditions nobody had planned for, is still the most useful skill I own.

What strikes me now is how little any of those projects had in common. Post-punk one month, a sixties harmony group the next, then an orchestra in a Viennese hall, then a Manchester band who would change British guitar music, then a military marching band. Different rooms or locations, different microphones, different rules, different temperaments. You could not coast. You had to think from scratch every single time.

That is the thing I would say to anyone starting out. Variety is not a distraction from developing a style. Variety is how you develop one. Every one of those producers and engineers did things I had never seen done, and often things that on paper should not have worked. Hedges, Bendall, Grimble, Leckie, both Jarratt brothers. I watched, I borrowed, I adapted, I experimented myself in spare time, and slowly the fragments turned into a way of working that was mine.

Breaking through

Then came the second piece of luck: I found myself engineering and mixing sessions much sooner than I had any right to expect.

Remixing Syd Barrett material, which was surreal on every level. Mixing The Stranglers live at the Hope and Anchor, a tape recorded in November 1977 that had been sitting in a box for fifteen years waiting for somebody to finish the job. Mixing the Buzzcocks live from Hammersmith Odeon with Martin Rushent. Sessions with Bappi Lahiri, fusing Bollywood and Western pop in ways I had never heard, and Luis Cobos doing something similar from the Spanish classical side. String overdubs, my first synth and sampler programming work. Film dates, including mixing the score for a film about Romeo and Juilet, where all the parts were played by cats.

Then the records that put my name properly on album sleeves.

Buddy’s Song, Chesney Hawkes and Roger Daltrey, produced by Alan Shacklock, who I owe an incredible amount to, and recorded and mixed entirely at Abbey Road studios 2 and 3. “The One and Only” (co-produced by Nick Kershaw) spent five weeks at number one. I have never had another single do that, and I doubt I ever will.

Wolfsbane’s Down Fall the Good Guys, produced by a young Brendan O’Brien, before the Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine records that made his name, with Blaze Bayley singing, years before Iron Maiden came calling. Heavy, and an enormous amount of fun.

The Grapes of Wrath’s These Days with another hero of mine, John Leckie, which went gold in Canada.

And Vanessa-Mae’s The Violin Player, which turned a classical violinist into a pop star and sold millions.

People

The other thing about Abbey Road is that you genuinely never knew who would be standing in the room.

I met my wife Linda there. She worked at the studios too, which is the single best thing the building ever gave me and puts every credit on this page firmly in second place.

Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, turned up to visit the Chesney Hawkes sessions. Princess Anne came through the same studios. And one lunchtime I sat down in the canteen with my tray, looked up, and found I was directly opposite Eric Clapton. Another time it was Mel Gibson, standing next to me in the queue to pay.

You cannot plan for any of that. You just learn to keep your composure, do the work, and save the story for later.

Destination unknown

Two things happened in those years that I did not recognise as turning points until much later.

Eric Tomlinson, one of the great film music engineers, worked out that I belonged in film music long before I had worked it out myself. He took me under his wing across several projects, including flying me to Munich to assist him on Hider in the House, where I first met orchestral contractor Paul Talkington and conductor and orchestrator Allan Wilson, with whom I will be working next month on a recording with the RSNO in Glasgow. The circle closes again. Watching Eric, pipe in mouth, casually and expertly balance the orchestra against picture was the moment the direction of the next thirty years quietly yet inexorably set itself.

And on the James Horner sessions, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, I first saw Ian Underwood’s synth rig sitting underneath a full orchestra. Something in my head rearranged permanently. Electronics were not a replacement for players. They were an extension of them. Every hybrid score I have mixed or written since comes out of that realisation, and on many projects I have worked as a synth programmer myself.

I left Abbey Road in August 1993 to go freelance, which is where part two picks up: Trevor Jones, Notting Hill, Dark City, a duckling called Sean, sixty-five episodes of a preschool cartoon, a man walking alone around the Arctic Circle, the complete works of Shakespeare, and eventually Gravity.

None of which I saw coming either. Which is rather the whole point.

Gareth Cousins is a score mixer, music editor and composer. He joined Abbey Road Studios on 11 August 1986 and has worked in film, television, games and theatre ever since.

The story continues in part two.

garethcousins.co.uk  |  gc@garethcousins.com