ASHLEY HOWE began his career in 1970, and more recently retired. I had the pleasure of interviewing him this time about his career, where he began as tape operator, and becoming an recording engineer and producer, before relocating to the US to work in television & film sound (where he’s picked up a few EMMY Awards!). Although many Uriah Heep albums will recognize Ashley’s name for the many Heep albums he’s credited on (including producing Abominog & Head First), we discussed a number of other bands Ashley worked with in the 70s and 80s, as well as what he got up to when he left the UK. Ashley has a lot of great stories, and I’m sure (and yes, I did ask!) they could make for an entertaining book someday!. Although Ashley might play it down, but I would say the man’s had a legendary career in the recording business, having been connected to many classic bands and big albums.

We started off this conversation bringing up his recent appearance on Rock DayDream Nation‘s Youtube show, which was a ‘reunion’ show….

Enjoy the read. All photos were kindly sent by Ashley. I have also included images of albums he worked on over the years (click on the images too!).

You had a reunion recently!?

I had a little reunion with the wonderful Uriah Heep. I do want to just say one thing, a mutual friend of ours, Peter Goalby, that gentleman deserves so much respect, and so much acknowledgement, and the stuff he’s putting out now is just as good as it was 40 years ago.

Yeah, there’s a lot of what-ifs there with that stuff, right? There’s a lot of Wow – if this had come out, what it should have.

Yeah, should have. But just a wonderful gentleman, and one of the best singers I ever worked with, and I was lucky enough to work with some great singers, Freddie Mercury and people like that. Peter’s just, he’s just way up there….

To kick I started when I was 16 and three quarters, or 17, in late 1969, with Uriah Heep, and the first project I worked on, and that has a history to it, 15 albums later, and et cetera, et cetera, …but there’s a few stories along the line that people might find interesting.

How did you get into all the, to the technical end of the music stuff?

Well, actually, it’s a good situation. I was in a school group with a guy called Peter Coleman and Richard Dodd, and Richard Dodd was a very, very famous engineer, very accredited, wonderful, fantastic people. Peter went in first of all, and he became famous very quickly, and he was working at CBS, and I went to CBS to record our little band and snuck in after the Hollies, and decided that this is something I’d like to do, so I actually applied to the BBC, because they were advertising for school leavers in the south, so I went there, and I got my interview, and the guy said, “Oh, absolutely fantastic. How many years experience have you had in television and recording?” I said, “Well, I’m still at school”. He said, “Well, we can put you in the accounting department, and when you’re 32, we’ll re-review you”.  Well, straight from that interview, I went to a studio, and I was greeted by the studio manager, who turned up about 20 minutes late. The receptionist had told me to sit down and have a cup of tea, so eventually he came down, and as he came off the elevator, he said, Hi, and I went to get up, and he said, “What’s your name?” I said, Ashley Howe, and he said, “Don’t talk to me while you’re sitting down. Let me just tell you that I fire people in 30 seconds.”  And this is the first interview at a real studio. I then went from that interview to Lansdowne, and at that point, I was feeling a little uncomfortable, and I walked in, and the gentleman that I met Adrian Kerridge, very famous, and he’s sitting behind his desk with his suit on and everything, and I just, he said to me, “What exams do you have? And I said, well, actually, I’m pretty ignorant, really. I don’t really have A-levels or O-levels, but I’m really willing to start at the bottom, be a tea-boy, and put everything into it.” and I said, “but I think I need to leave, because I feel so intimidated with you behind that big desk.”  And so I’ll never forget this, he took his tie off, took his jacket off, came down, pulled the chair up next to me, and he said, “What are your interests?”, I said, “Everything”,   He said, “What are your hobbies?” I said, “I don’t have hobbies. I’m just interested in music.” And that was it, then I started at Lansdowne. Just to cap this story off, years later, I was chief engineer. The guy that was nasty to me turned up to get a job at the place. I turned around to him, I said, “Don’t talk to me while you’re sitting down.”  

That’s quite the beginning. There was an interview posted with Alan Parsons, and he had a similar where he just showed up and took anything type of job.

So, what was the first album you worked on, the first Uriah Heep album!?

That was the first one I worked on. In those days, you worked on a lot of different clients that were coming in through the door, left, right, and center. You’d be doing four or five sessions a day. Yeah. That was the first one I worked on.  And I have some interesting stories about Lansdowne, some funny stories, but if you want band stories.

Yeah, a bit of both. Lansdowne, is that where you were primarily?

That’s where I started off, and then I eventually moved over to the Roundhouse Studios, which Gerry Bron bought, and then took myself and Peter Gallen, the two engineers that pretty much worked on all of his projects, over to there.

When I went over to the Roundhouse, I became an in-house producer as well, and I did bands like Hawkwind and Motorhead. I did the big album with Motorhead, Overkill. There’s some fun stories there, with Motorhead.

When we started to do the album, we were using a drum riser, because the studio was a little dead, so we brought in a wooden platform, and he (Phil) was hitting the drums so hard, they kept moving off the platform, so we tried bricks, and we tried everything. In the end, the drummer got two nine-inch nails, and ploughed them through his bass drums, and nailed it to the platform. That was one of the stories. Another story is with the first playback – They came upstairs, and everyone said, “Stop the tape, stop the tape!” So, I stopped the tape. Lemmy, said  “There’s something wrong.”  And I’m thinking, well, I’m not that bad of an engineer, there’s only bass drums, guitar, and vocals. He said, “No, no, I can hear my bass.” And I said, “Well, of course you can, you’re playing it.”  He said, “I don’t want to hear it.” I said, “Well, I really don’t want to hear it either.” Then the last thing that went on was that I used to have to wake up Fast Eddie with a broom, because he’d fall asleep on the couch, and he’d wake up very violently punching, so I had a broom, and I’d bang him in the stomach, and he’d wake up punching around his head.

Then after that, I was a bit bored one day, I went down and made the mistake of cleaning Lemmy’s bass guitar, because it was so sweaty. When he came in, he couldn’t play it, so he had to go out and get some axle grease.

What music did you grow up on? Before you got involved, what were you listening to, and what bands were you going to see and such?

I was listening to anything and everything on radio at that point, but in that era, there was so much good music, but more importantly, good songs. I like to think of myself as a song person, and just pretty much everything really.

I didn’t really have a complete genre. I mean, a lot of American stuff, a lot of Quincy Jones stuff, a lot of jazz stuff actually, and of course Led Zeppelin. But pretty much all the commercial stuff.

Are you familiar with Discogs, the website?

I’ve seen it.

I went into that because it’ll have a listing of everything you’re credited on. It’s quite a thorough listing. A lot of the bands you worked with, I wasn’t familiar with. I had to go back and listen to a few things that were kind of interesting, like Capability Brown, Rare Bird. You did a lot of different bands over there.

What were some of the favorite ones that are lesser known that you did, worked on?

I loved working with Rare Bird. Actually, I did a little bit of percussion on there. I thought they were very good. One of my favorite things I did was one of the very first things I engineered was a band called Spiteri. And I think they’re still getting acclaimed for it; it was very Santana-ish. And that was probably one of the very first things I did. I did… Spencer Davis was a good album. It was a little strange because, again, another experience when Spencer came in. Either way, I was told, don’t bother recording Spencer. So, I recorded him anyway. But that was an interesting thing. Because in those days, people would come in and do a lot of overdubs and then they’d move around studios. You would see all these acts come through and maybe you did a guitar overdub or an organ overdub. Lansdowne was very famous for its string sound.

*So, we’d have a lot of bands that would come in and do strings. I just had a very diverse engineering background. I’d be working on the Pink Panther movie, or Coliseum. Coliseum was another great band that I worked with.

That was the one with Mike Starrs on it, right?

Right. And actually, in fact, it was a lovely album to record because they all collectively wanted to have an album what they really sounded like. But it was actually put to me that most engineers go in and they start equalizing before we even go down and listen to drums and stuff. And now they don’t even need to take the drums and it’s fabricated.

So, John Heisman and Gary Moore actually said that this is the first album they’ve actually felt that this is what they really sounded like. And in fact, I don’t think I used any EQ on John’s at all.  It was a nice collaboration of very, very good people that were there to make an album and try and be connected with one another. So that was a lot of fun.

Hawkwind was fun, with Ginger Baker. Interesting drama. We did the whole album and then… they had a history of firing people. And we did this whole album and then they fired the drummer. So, we had to replace the drums. Well, I think it was on 16 tracks or 24 tracks. I didn’t have a way of keeping the original drums in the first place. So, we brought him in and he just played the whole album in one go. Well, one take. I had to wake him up between takes.(ha-ha) But yeah, that was that was a good experience.

Babe Ruth were an interesting band. Very good. They never really got their due. I know they had some following in parts of Canada and UK and that.

*Yes, good band. And a little story about that is that we had a sort of thing where the producer would need to track the guitar like six or eight times. Well, we knew that after two or three times, it was just massive and didn’t get any bigger. So we just used to mime it.

It’s interesting because the last one is where they had a lot of change in the band and new singer. I imagine that one probably gets forgotten the most. But you had a lot of name guys in that band that went on to other things. Neil Murray and that.

Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of these, like I said, a lot of these groups like even Heep went through a lot of different people and all in different areas and different genres. It was a learning thing for everybody at that time. But totally, totally different. And thank God for Led Zeppelin for not conforming and not following the norm. And if you want to buy a “A Whole Lotta Love”, you buy the album.

I’ve often wondered, like Zeppelin obviously is the biggest band of the 70s, but all these other bands that, like Deep Purple, even Black Sabbath, they end up going through so many changes. You kind of think that the whole thing about Zeppelin being so popular still is the fact that they just left it where it was.

And that’s the key. Honestly, I hate to make a comparison. It’s a bit like the mafia, you get everybody and it’s working great and all the other stuff and then everybody wants to be the boss. They can’t stay at their own level and they all get whacked. There’s very few people in there honestly, that can come from an entity and make it on a solo basis. Rod Stewart, people like that Rod Stewart had The Faces, and branched off. People can branch off, but in the end, they should stay as they are. And you’ve got to admire bands like The Stones. They just, it is what it is. They do what they do and they’ve got their own clique. And there’s a reason that things work, and you should never try and change that because it won’t work.

You did the first Angel Witch album, a little more metal there.

I think I was kind of branded, not branded, but nicely mentioned as the man of metal at one point. I could tell you a few stories about the Nugent album.

Yeah, you did Ted Nugent, Penetrator. You had Brian Howe on that album. Is it true you asked Peter (Goalby) about doing that album?

At one point, I’d asked Peter when I was doing it, and I think Peter was not free. And in actual fact, when I was trying to come up with a different person to do that, I was walking in the Atlantic and I used to go to Atlantic Studios a lot to get demos and that sort of stuff, and I heard a demo going on with Brian’s voice. And I said, “That’s it. That’s the guy!”

It was difficult to convince Ted to use someone. In fact, one of the reasons I did the album is I said, “Ted, if I’m doing this, I’m not even using anybody you know as musicians. I’m going to import those guys and get an outside singer in.  And I’m going to use some outside songs.” But the reason we arrived at that point was that John Kalodner had heard the Heep albums and stuff. I believe he was a very good friend of Ted’s, (whatever the situation was) and he told him that he should give it a shot because of the way I do things at that time. And so I went in with Ted and we sat down. I went to meet him and he said, “I’ve got to tell you, I *was just with a very big-name producer and he told me all my songs were fantastic.” He played them all to me. And I said, “Well, then you should use them because you’re going to be paying a lot of money and you’ll have an album, but it’s not going to be what I think you should do. But that’s OK.” I thought I’d blown it. And as a matter of fact, I came back straight into the Uriah Heep album that I was doing in the middle of, got a call and he said, “When do we start?” And he was the most wonderful man to work with, huge, biggest ego ever.(Lol) And on the first day, I had the Squires band in New York for a week rehearsing and I brought in six outside songs and we were rehearsing.

And funnily enough, next door was Ozzy. And I went to Ozzy and said, “I’m going to be doing Ted next door. You want to meet him?” He’s like, “I don’t want to meet him; He’s crazy!” But Ted was nothing like you’d imagine. I mean, he’s got a big ego, there’s no doubt about it! But then, long story short, he comes into the rehearsals after a week off. It sets up and everybody’s a little bit, he comes with a big stature, no doubt about it.

And the band, I needed to know that I was controlling the band because I knew that he would be difficult to control. So he comes in, I tell him the first song he starts playing and I stop everybody and he carries on playing. I said, “Ted – stop, stop, stop, stop.”  So in the end, I went over and I pulled this thing out of his hand. “We need to have communication. That was the, I’m trying you out.”  So he said, “Well, I’m deaf in one ear.”  I said, “Which ear? He said, “Well, I always put my good ear to the amp.” It was a 200-watt Marshall.

So, I got the roadies to put the amp on the other side. And I said, “OK, put your bad ear to the amp and your good ear to me.” And that’s how we started off. I think there was a lot of respect between the two of us. And he spent four days on the album. But the first day that he went down to do the overdubs, he comes in, he doesn’t talk to me at all.  I like to do his guitar in the control room so If I have to raise anything. So, he plays away first of all, and we do a song and I stop it because it’s a little out of tune, I thought it was a little out of tune.

So, I said, “Could you tune the guitar, please?” And he took his pistol out from his bag, dropped the bullets down, and put them in one by one. The assistant is now ducked under the drums. And he flicks it like this, rolls it around and holds it up. I said “OK asshole, you can load a gun. Can you tune a guitar?” He said, “Nobody speaks to the Nuge like this.”  And I said, “I’m getting divorced, I don’t care.” And we got on great after that. It was really good. He just did everything. And at the end of it he went away and he came back three months later to hear the album when I finished it. {And I said, I got to tell you, it doesn’t sound like me. Nobody wanted me anymore.)

It was a calculated album, and it did him good. He was very impressed with that.

“Draw the Line” was a big hit. And that was, I interviewed Jim Vallance there last year or earlier this year, and that was one of his. That song got done by quite a few people.

Yeah, well, it was an interesting era at that time. And I was starting to get a bit of a reputation for taking outside songs into the situation, which I’d like to point out, it was not done because of the inadequacy of the people I was working with.

It was done because I think there are very few artists nowadays that can do… Adele can pull it off, 10, 12 songs that were all great. You’re always going to get five or four or five brilliant songs. And I kind of wanted to give everybody their best shot. And I think because of that album, his career took off again. It wasn’t a massive album, it might’ve gone gold, I’m not sure. It was a design situation.  Also what I found is that using outside songs increased the playing level and their own material, because you’re trying to prove something. I actually prefer a couple of Ted songs to anything else because I think it made him try harder.  It didn’t do him any harm.

Draw The Line certainly suits him, it doesn’t come off as a cover.

It shows his brilliance as a guitar player, which is another thing. I mean, I’d never really heard Ted before, I heard “Cat Scratch Fever”. It’s like when I worked with YES, I’d never really heard Yes before. But I didn’t think that made any difference, because it’s what you’re doing at the time, and may have even helped in a way to change the model a little bit or give him a different direction. But, I mean, my opinion of a producer is that he shouldn’t be telling everybody what to do, he should be capturing the performances, which is what is difficult about being an engineer and a producer. If you’re a self-critical engineer, you shouldn’t be worried about pops…. I mean, there’s big pops everywhere and that sort of stuff. But you clean those up and you lose performance. But anyway, that’s my idea. Production should be encouragement and then telling people when to stop. I mean, I think Freddie Mercury, who was a perfectionist, would still be doing “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over again. And he nailed it; you won’t get it better than what’s on the record. I don’t care how many melodical changes you do; that’s the best it’ll ever be. And to me, a producer needs to tell someone when to stop. At least in my career.

What about Brian Howe?

Well, I discovered him and insisted that we put him on the Penetrator album. And the way I work is always kind of one-on-one.

I don’t have other people in there, only because I find that it’s difficult to put someone in a situation and perform. And it’s even more difficult if you’ve got a bunch of people up there waiting for them to perform. So, I like to do one-on-one.

So anyway, the first day of recording, we were in the Record Plant. I took Brian in, and I gave him the song, and we started to go through it. And he absolutely would not cooperate with any of the ideas that I had or anything. So, I said, “Brian, you’re only here because of me, we can fire you and we can bring someone else in, but I really think we can make this work.”

*And he kind of said, “Well, I don’t want to sing it that way.” And I said, “In that case, this is the way I want you to do it; and if you don’t do it then it’s not going to work.” And I got a little belligerent, and I actually locked him in the studio. I turned all the lights out, and I went around, I came back two hours later, and I said, “Are we ready now?” And he said, “No.”  So, I turned the lights out again. I think that I came back about 10 hours later. I turned the lights on, I said, “Now are we going to do it?” So, we did it. A little bit reluctant, but I think it started to get into it. Cut a long story short, we played it to Nugent the next day, and he went absolutely bananas, he said, “Oh my God, this is fantastic!”

And from that point on, Brian and I got on. Well, we didn’t really get on, but we got on enough to make it through. Years later, I saw on his website that he complimented me for doing it, and we became really good friends.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see before he died. And over the years, we became friends. I kind of kept that back, because I had a call from his sister, because she wanted to know, really. And to be honest, I didn’t really tell her about that, because I didn’t see the need to do that. But it was the truth. And from that album, he got into Bad Company, which was not a bad move at all.

Now, the other album I thought was interesting was the Wishbone Ash Twin Barrels Burning. But there’s two versions of it. The remix, I don’t know why.

Oh, I didn’t know there was another version. I didn’t know there was a remix.

Yeah, there was a different mix for the U.S., I guess.

Yeah, the U.S. tends to do that. And I really didn’t agree with Abominog‘s rearrangement in the US, because it was a concept album. It had a meaning, and I really did it for a reason. It started off with the old “Too Scared To Run”, which is like, yeah, this is the 70s Heep, and it went into “Chasing Shadows” and stuff like that. Now we’re going to be the new Heep. And then the end of it was “Think It Over”, which is really kind of a message to the fans to say, “okay, I’m not sure if I like this, because I love what they used to be”. And to the new people, “hey, you haven’t heard the old, but this is a mixture.” But they mucked it up, in my opinion, when they re-formatted it.

There’s a few albums like that in the 70s and 80s, where they just, you know, between the US. and the UK, they changed the running order on that.

Yeah, A & R people. I mean, in my opinion, there was only one great A & R person, and that was John Kalodner. And I’ll tell you a little story there, I was in Atlantic, they commissioned me to do Lita Ford. And we went in, and she didn’t want to be produced by anybody. So, I was like three weeks into rehearsals, and she not cooperating at all… So, I got paid by the record company and everything, and I said to them, “Well, now I’ve got time on my hands. So, they said, “Okay, we’ve got this other band called Malice.” I said, “Okay, great!”  So, I go into Pasha Studios, and I start recording Malice. And to tell a long story short, I keep sending them rough mixes – “Take a look at this….”…. And they’re going, “No, don’t worry about it. Carry on.” So, I carried on and finished the album.

Quiet Riot was next door doing the remake of “Come On Feel The Noise” and that sort of stuff. And I went to playback the album for the A&R guy, and he went, “Oh, crap, I didn’t realize this was heavy metal!” And I said, “What are you talking about? It’s called Malice! I mean, it’s not going to be called Mary, you know. And he said, “Well, we didn’t sign this, did we!?”  I said, “Apparently you did, because you gave it to me.” (lol). That was a classic example of an A&R guy. And he was actually at my wedding.

I wanted to ask you, last time you had mentioned that Twin Barrels Burning had started out as a different title.

Yes.

Well, what happened there was, it was originally called The Nature of the Beast (“It’s just The Nature of the Beast”). And I’m trying to remember what it was… It was the April Wine album, Nature of the Beast.

So, at the last minute, they changed the lyrics and everything to, “You Make My Engine Overheat”, which totally, to me, kind of ruined the whole point of it. Changed the whole thing. But yeah, that was the decision made, because they thought it would be comparable to them.

I know they still have the line in the song, Nature of the Beast, but obviously they took, they changed the title.

And that was another interesting little situation. We were recording at The Soul, which was Jimmy Page’s studio. We’re working away one night and all of a sudden, the roadies or security guards were over there, said, “We’ve got this guy trying to come into the studio.” And I thought, who is it? So, we look at the camera and it’s Jimmy Page, who owned it.

I said, “I think you should let him in.” And he came in and I was trying to get him to do a little cameo, but he just spent a few hours talking and that sort of stuff. But I learned something from that. I learned that you could have the same guitar with a different player and it’s totally different. Like Clapton could play a note on his guitar and I could play the same note and it just couldn’t be the same. So it was very interesting. It was a fun album to work on. The studio was so dead that Trevor Bolder and I went to another studio in the middle of the night and I did all the bass parts in one night with Trevor because we just couldn’t get a bass sound. I couldn’t get a bass sound. I mean, not to say someone couldn’t. So, it ended up fine. I didn’t end up mixing that, I think I had to go on to another project because we’d overrun at some point. I grew up on this band, so I loved it. And to have the opportunity to end it and to work on a Wishbone Ash album that I did was a lot of fun.

Yeah, it’s a good album. It’s kind of more of a straight forward rock album for them. The song Trevor wrote, “Hold On”, was probably the standout track for me.

I thought it was a good rock album, I think it stands up. I don’t remember, but as you know, with these recordings there’s always some drama going on somewhere. I don’t believe there was any drama on that album at all. It was kind of fun, and we did it as quick as we could because it was a limited budget.

Speaking of ‘Drama‘, you were credited on that album as well! Was that a strange atmosphere with that line-up of Yes?

Very strange. Again, I wasn’t that familiar, well Fragile and that kind of stuff. Steve Howe is an amazing amazing (!) guitarist. So, I did all the guitars on the album (I think I did all the guitars?).  They had like four studios running at the same time, one person was doing the keyboards and they had like six slave rooms. It was obviously going to be the end of the band because it should have been five solo albums. Funnily enough, the first time I met Chris Squire, well I’d just been working with, I think I’d done a Pink Panther movie or something and Peter Sellers was absolutely a wonderful person and I said to him, “Would you like a cup of tea?” And he said, “Oh actually I’ll go make you a cup of tea.” The next day Chris Squire comes in and he walks in and he says, “I want a cup of tea.” And I said, “Okay, well the kitchen’s that way.” because I’m busy type of thing. And he said, “Well I’m Chris Squire. And I said, “Okay, I’m Ashley Howe, the kitchen’s that way. So, the drummer turns around to me and says, “Wow!”

But…Steve was just a wonderful person and I’ll never forget, he was in the control room and he was working out a part and so I put the tape at half-speed and he was doing this part and it was a lot of finger-work. They said, “Okay, let’s record it.” So, he goes downstairs and I left the tape at half-speed thinking they’re going to record at half speed, it’ll go up the octave. He said, “Oh no, put it up to full speed.” Now we’re twice as fast. He transposed it and then said, “Now let’s do a harmony.” And I thought, Okay, you might not like the guitar, but you can’t fail to admire the technique. He was wonderful and he brought in 13 amps and we tried about 100 different guitars and each overdub. And we ended up with the same John Mayall guitars with the same AC30. But he said, “I need to try this.” But in the end, unfortunately, it should have been a Steve Howe album because a lot of the guitar work was taken away. Because when they all came together, they played all over each other. They literally let the keyboard player play over the guitar parts and… You had to take a lot of stuff out in order to have the room. So, it was obviously an attempt to solve the situation. I don’t know if it was one of their worst albums. It was a pleasure to work on.

It’s different, obviously. I kind of like it for being a little more modern…

“Machine Messiah”…There’s a couple of great tracks on there.

But yeah, you got a lot of great things out of it. I mean, in time, you got the next Yes album and it’s a different lineup, and you got Asia and all that.

One other thing I’ve got to show you, I picked this up a couple years ago, a very strange album, Mike Maran.

I recognize this, Mike Maran.  He was a fantastic session keyboard player. In fact, he was very instrumental in a stage-show called Time, for Dave Clark, and we had Freddie Mercury on it, Laurence Olivier, Ashford and Simpson. He was very much an instigator of most of the arrangements, and we recorded a lot of stuff in his studio.

At what point did you kind of get out of the kind of the rock producing in the UK and then coming over to moving over to America in that?

*Well, between 1980 and ‘85, ‘86, I was doing a few bands, I was doing a band in Australia called The Angels. I did a few other albums in that period. But about 1986 I basically started to not do anymore. And in actual fact, what I did was I was getting a little bit disenchanted, to be honest, with the way the music business was going, and people weren’t using big studios anymore. A little example of that is I did an album with John Sinclair, a band called Estrella in 2010. All done on Pro Tools. In fact, he would send me the files and the overdubs. And in the end, I mixed the album on my Mac book; 128 tracks. And the big studios weren’t being used anymore. It was becoming too easy for people to do this stuff. And the age of the plugins came in where you could, where we would spend all that time trying to work out sound and tape phasing with our hands. It just became too easy. So, I did not want to do disco era and that sort of stuff. I did a few disco records. To me, the music business was changing. So, in actual fact, what happened was I got married.

I did the Time, I got married when I came back and did the Time Project, which involved doing all the films, mixing the double album with all the different artists for Dave Clark and Black Record years ago, at Lansdowne and that was fun. And then I actually went into television, in the post-production side. I was fairly successful. I got eight Emmys for post-production, various things, long form shows and stuff like that. And then I did a lot of live television. By going into the post-production with my lead, we ended up on the Massenburg Console. So, I still got to do some good audio, but it’s just a different genre. It’s just a different approach. I went from 128 faders to five.

What exactly will you be doing as far as the sound goes?

Well, it depends. I actually ended up doing a lot of soap operas, whereby I’d be putting in, I’d be editing the dialogue and putting in all the sound effects and the music and balancing the whole thing. I did a lot of live post-production for Monday Night Football, for example, where we do the opening. I did a lot of 20/20 broadcasts and Primetime Live, a lot of news broadcasts, which was live posts where they were bringing stuff in and I was putting it all together and airing it straight away or sometimes airing it and balancing it. It was challenging. It was a minor use of the skills that I had, but it was still incorporating some of the processes.  I think I managed to change it a little bit and made me the most highly paid audio engineer in television, which was great. I had a separate contract above the union contract. And I got myself eight Emmys for doing it, and that sort of stuff. It was fun.

Some of the long form shows, I kind of got a reputation where the producers would just bring the tapes in, leave me, I’d be mixing it all night by myself, and just put back the finished thing. So, I got a kind of a reputation where if it came to me, and I’m not trying to be big-headed, it’s just the way it was, there were five other engineers, but I kept getting in trouble because they kept booking me. And so, I was highly paid and working a lot and it was enjoyable. And then at one stage when Disney decided to shut down a lot of it’s operations, I came out of the post-production situation into the live area. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

It’s like the second to air-traffic control intention without the reward. At that point, they were trying to get rid of people by pure attrition, basically. And they actually employed people that were there to watch you if you made a mistake. There’s nothing like doing a live broadcast to 60 million people with someone over your shoulder waiting for you to open up your own fader and write a report on it. So, it wasn’t a very pleasant atmosphere, but I wasn’t going to let them use that as an excuse to not get me full pension. I ended up with a lifetime entrance to Disney and stuff like that.

So, I went into that, I went into post-production. I’d lost a little bit of, I wouldn’t say of interest, I love what’s going on and stuff, but I just don’t totally agree with the methods totally that are out there nowadays. And maybe it’s because I’m old-fashioned, but I mean, as an engineer, we grew up with no second chances.

It was like, if you screw up, you screw up. I mean, like the Heep stuff was done on 8 tracks. So, we’d be dropping in a bass solo in, and the backing vocal tracks. And if you didn’t come out in time, there’d be no more backing vocals. There was no margin of error. And I think a lot of that kept everybody doing things differently. You didn’t have computer mixing, you’d mark your tape with your Chinograph Wax Pencil and that would be your base level. And not bass as in bass, but your starting point. You’d move the mix around. And you know, if you moved the drums up, you’re going to have to push that guitar up a bit more because it’s not in balance anymore. So, you played with the mix.  And once you’re into this computer situation, it’s just too easy. And I think just reiterating about engineers, I think in those days, we cut tapes, spliced tapes. And I was taught by a guy called John Mackswith an incredible engineer. He made me edit with bent scissors that were like this. Now, once you edit like that, it’s not like using the splicing block. And I kept saying, “Can I buy a pair of scissors that are straight? Because I don’t want to make a mistake.” And he said, “Just don’t make a mistake.” And that was the way I was trained. And I didn’t make a mistake. But it’s all changed now. It’s all too easy, to be honest.

And you moved into movies as well?

Yeah, I did soundtracks to a couple of the Pink Panther movies. And I did the recording to Time. Are you familiar with Time?

No.

Okay, well, it was a theatre situation. It was a musical theatre with Cliff Richard, and like I said, Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Freddie Mercury, a lot of big people, and they were on the album. The concert of the album was in the Dominion Theatre in England, 5000 seats there. And we had a live studio underneath, which was great, which Richard Dodd, who is my best friend; we’ve been best friends since the age of five. We got to do Raging Silence together, for Heep, which was great.

So yeah, so that was a concept album that Dave Clark put on. And it ran in the theatres for a long time with Laurence Olivier. And we had to record Laurence Olivier. The gentleman had Parkinson’s at the time. So, we had to literally hand him a chair. I’ve got a lovely story for you.  Because it was going on to a 15-foot holographic head, which was flying around the studio. And so, a guy called Simon Napier Bell, l was involved with the theatrics, and up until the point of time, the biggest show only had 15 hydraulic systems in it, his had like 60! And the stage actually went up on end with all the people on it. And it was amazing the technology that went into it.

And talking about that, I went to Laurence Olivier’s house to record him personally, for the overdubs. But then we had to have him in the studio to do some of the filming. And it’s a lovely story. We actually had to bolt him in because he was shaking. And a shake at that level would put the nose on your ear. So, he had to be corrected.  A mail boy came in with a message for him. He looked downstairs and he was like, “That’s Laurence Olivier.” He was totally awestruck. He looked up and he saw the mail boy and he said, “Please, I’m doing that. I need to go upstairs.” And he went up to this kid and he said, “Hi, I’m Sir Laurence Olivier.”  And the kid’s like shivering. And he said, “I’m very sorry to keep you waiting.” So, what a wonderful man. What a great human being. So that was the technology and that was a lot of fun to do. And I started off doing the first few shows live. We did a raw performance. And once the thing started, I think it lasted for about four or five years.

That was, again, another collaboration I did with Richard because he’d done half of this double act. We’ve had a couple of times that I’ve got to work with Richard and it’s been a lot of fun.

Were you on like set for a lot of any of the movies and stuff that you’d meet a lot of people over the years?

*I mean, the movie ‘stuff’ (in brackets) is the recording of the music, a couple of songs on each, a couple of things on each one. And even there, there’s a nice little story. You have to be heavily unionized to do that, and I wasn’t part of the union. So, Dave Clark pulled a few strings because he wanted me to do it. And I said, “Great, I’d love to do it.” But there was a lot of.. I was not allowed to talk to the person operating the machine. But I had to talk to another guy that would relay what I wanted to – to him. So, I went out to mic up the people, and I tripped over a bloody microphone, pulled the thing out of the wall. And I went to plug it in and they said, “Oh no, don’t touch that!” So, we waited 15 minutes for the electrician to come to plug it in. Now we’ve got about 35 seconds to do a 30 second piece of music. So, I said to the guy, “Put it in record.” And this guy said, “You can’t talk to him, you have to talk to me.” I said, “Okay, don’t put it in record.” He said, “The engineer in charge of the session would like you to put the machine into record status.” So, we just got it in. And at the end of it, I said, “If we hadn’t gotten that in, what would have happened?” And the guy said, “You’d have to book another 12-hour minimum session.” And then he proceeded to tell me, “I don’t understand why we’re losing all our recording in England.”  And Dave Clark turned around to me and said, “Next time I’ll just record in Germany, it would be cheaper for me to ship all the musicians over there. And why the Hell do you not think that you’re losing it?”  Very strange atmosphere. And a lot of other people from the outside. But we got it done.

Are you still active?

Not really, to be honest. Retired…I say retired, I was let go or tried to be fired from ABC, but I was a little bit smarter than them. So, I ended up with a pension. I went back and did something with John Sinclair. I’m always open to do stuff.  I just don’t really need to do it. And I don’t want to spend many more days in studios. I mean, I spent most of my life in studios.

Have you considered putting some of your stories down in a book?

Well, it’s funny you should say that. I have a lady that contacted me.  I believe she’s interviewed a lot of engineers; Richard has been one of them. I think she’s interviewing a bunch of engineers and putting them in a categoric “top”, or whatever. So, she is going to come and talk to me.

I would love to, I don’t know. I mean I tell people these stories, which they’re more sort of nostalgic, but also it takes me back into those days’ moments. A lot of people have said, “You should share them because,….”

There’s some interesting stories, not even just with the Heep stuff, but obviously like Motorhead and Yes.

Well, I think I’ve got enough to make it at least a couple of pages of interest.  …So, in answer to your question, and ironically enough, she sent me a text yesterday saying, I’m coming back up your way, let’s get together. I know she’s done a lot of very, very good people.  I don’t consider myself a big person, but I think I’ve contributed something. I’ve probably got my name on a couple of million records, but that’s not the point, I think I actually helped some people, which I think is important. So yes. I mean, hopefully I’ll have something of interest in it and make it to a book somewhere.

And then I’ve got Uriah Heep stories. I used to be a bit of an idiot. (lol)  Well, I’d make everybody laugh. There’s a story when we were doing “The Wizard”, I’d set Ken up in Lansdowne, under a spotlight and the chair in the middle, and he’s doing his acoustic part. I’d also got a great big cardboard box and I’d written “10 tons” on it. And I put it above so no one could see it, looking down. As he started the intro, I dropped onto him and covered him with a 10 pound weight, which was very Monty Python. Gerry Bron got pissed off at me and fired me, then re-employed me.  I used to do silly stuff.

Gerry was one person I never got to interview.

He was an interesting man.  I have to say he looked after the people that looked after him. You know, at the ripe age of 19, he bought me a BMW and gave me a separate contract and all that sort of stuff.

And, I was doing a lot of engineering with him and then later on Peter Gallen and I did the solo albums with David Byron and Ken Hensley, and then he (Jerry) gave me Hawkwind and Sally Oldfield, Motorhead…stuff like that.

LINKS:

https://www.discogs.com/artist/81045-Ashley-Howe

https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/roundhouse-studios/6629

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0397777

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