Will Mowat: Soul Music

Will Mowat's career to date looks like a musician's dream come true. A routine programming assignment turned into full membership of Soul II Soul; now he's working with Godfather of Soul James Brown and producing a new album for rising African star Angelique Kidjo. Richard Buskin talks to Will about his approach.

After joining a band as a keyboard player in 1977, Will Mowat's next experience in the music business came when he was recruited by Chase Musicians, a major importer of synthesizers during the early‑'80s — best remembered for its heavily discounted prices. Next came a stint managing Aosis Studios, which happened to coincide with a programming assignment for U2. After a spell of sporadic session work, he embarked on a joint enterprise producing jingles which in turn led to further programming and sequencing assignments, session work with the likes of Living In A Box, D‑Mob and Dusty Springfield, and, by 1991, an approach from Soul II Soul's Jazzie B to contribute to his outfit's next album, Just Right. Against all expectations, within three weeks Mowat also found himself writing material with Jazzie, since when he has become a stable part of the lineup, enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with the 'Godfather of Soul' James Brown, and, most recently, completed his own first production project, Paris‑based Angélique Kidjo's Ayé album for Island Records. Mowat produced and played on five of her tracks, recorded at Harry Son in Paris, as well as Soul II Soul, Master Rock and Britannia Row in London.

How did your programming work with U2 come about prior to the Unforgettable Fire tour?

"They had approached the Rock Shop for an Oberheim programmer — in those days you were a Prophet programmer, an Oberheim programmer, ARP or whatever. I liked Oberheims and ARPs from my days at Chase so the Rock Shop got onto me and I was coerced into flying to Dublin. This was in the autumn of '84, just when MIDI was coming in and I really knew bugger‑all about it. So I read the manuals on the plane over to Dublin, and then when I arrived at U2's place it was a case of — without having previously heard the music — transferring the same sounds which Brian Eno had produced on the Fairlight over onto the Oberheims for Edge to trigger. After that they did their first warm‑up concert at The Academy in Brixton, and I went along to fine‑tune a few things.

"That was my first true programming session, and it made me realise just how much power you can wield as a technology guru. Of course, if artists genned up just a bit more about their gear then they could do everything themselves, and that's largely what's happened now."

Technology VS. Music?

As an artist, writer and producer, how important is the available technology to you as part of the overall creative process?

"Well, what comes first is the idea. That spark which sets the whole thing on its way. Technology — hardware and software — is just one piece of the puzzle. For some people it's a fairly large piece of the puzzle and for others it's a tiny, tiny piece. The healthy way, the right way, is to have the idea first and then set about discovering what you need to bring this idea to fruition."

In your case, however, considering the kind of work you've generally been involved with throughout your career, is technology not a large part of the puzzle?

"For me, the creative process is down to chemical reaction between people, as well as that sort of instant reaction when my hands are on a keyboard; I hear a chord and that sets me off. I'm not a purist, but I don't submit myself to the studio and then allow the studio to dictate how the material should develop."

In many cases today the creative process appears to have less to do with machine‑aided composites than with melodic inspiration, and there's a heavy emphasis on perfection.

"Well, I think melody is still around but it's on a back‑burner at the moment, because the commercial market wants rhythm. But I think you're right — technology has pushed us into making perfection a sort of religious cult. I'm probably as guilty of this as other people, and it's got to a point now where you deliberately try to put the rough edges in and keep them in. You don't need to use technology if you don't want to, provided that you've got the budget. That's the crunch; having the budget to do what you want. I've always wanted to use a real drummer, a real bass player, real strings and so on, but they're horrendously expensive to hire in. If you've got a home studio, you're the only musician, and if you want to make some nice music, you have to use technology — and you have to buy very wisely. That is why things like the SY77 and M1 get mentioned so often; people want to see them as workstations, able to do a lot of things. The less money you have to spend, the more important the technology is to you.

With an extensive [£100,000] budget for the Angélique Kidjo album, did this rule apply?

"For me, yes. The first inclination of both label and artist was to go with technology — with a drum machine in particular — to give it that tight, computer‑driven flavour. I wanted to try something else so I said, 'Look, on my leg of this album I'm going to use a real drummer.' That's what we did, but then, of course, I took the best bits of that real drummer's [Andy Gangadeen] performance, sequenced them up and added the keyboard parts! So we chose a sort of middle road between technology and free style, providing this feeling that it's not being sequenced while having the advantage of it being very tight."

Did you not feel that any drummer could play that tightly?

"No, it wasn't that. When we went in the studio with Andy, we had already decided that we were going to sequence.If we had gone in with the intention of having a really tight, but steam‑driven rhythm track, we'd have spent much more time doing drop‑ins. Also, I've yet to come across anyone who can drum so tightly that you can get him to play to a click track, before you add another loop on top, sequence the keyboards and so on. Modern listeners' ears have been trained to hear milliseconds, simply by virtue of the fact that most of the tracks released today are sequenced.

"We wanted Ayé to be a techno album, as well as being very melodic and musical. We wanted the groove to be there and we wanted the dance element to be there, and you can't really have technology — if technology means music that sounds like it's been made by computers — sitting on top of a steam‑powered drummer.

"As a new producer, I am learning that the decisions you make at the beginning of a production can have many ramifications. For instance, on the Angélique Kidjo album I made a number of key decisions very rapidly one after the other; the general direction, the feel, the personnel, the recording medium and, less importantly, where it should take place. By going 48‑track digital on half‑inch it certainly meant that I had this wonderfully compact medium, very clean and quiet, and her voice could really stand out with no hiss, as could all the keyboard and synthesizer stuff. But that snap decision had number of down sides, one being that we had to make clones of the recording when we travelled between Paris and London, and each time it cost £400 to make duplicates. At the same time, some of the studios that we used didn't have 48‑tracks and I wasn't prepared to hire in a machine, so we used two 24‑tracks with Dolby SR. The result was a lot of mechanical to‑ing and fro‑ing which we had to do, dumping stuff across in sync using a Lynx synchroniser, checking the integrity of the product to make sure that it looped properly, and because it was on 48‑track I couldn't simply pop into a cheap little studio and try out all of my keyboard ideas. Instead, I had to do all my keyboard work in 48‑track studios. Thinking about it now I should have perhaps done the project on two 24‑tracks with Dolby SR, enabling me to do a dump onto a slave reel.

"Then there was my decision to use a real drummer. I was absolutely definite about that and so was everyone else. We wanted to try for an underlying James Brown‑type groove, and it came out incredibly well, but there's a definite conceptual difference between using a real drummer and a machine — and it has massive ramifications from an artist's point of view. After all, when you're producing something you are virtually dictating the direction of that artist for the next two years or so. He or she has to live with your work, the video guy cuts to your music, all of the publicity shots, everything, is done to the music that you've produced, so you have an incredible amount of responsibility."

Real Strings

Talking of real and synthesized brass, do you think you can successfully use synthesized brass, piano or strings with the intention of passing it off as the real thing?

"Not really, no, although it depends on how much things are being used. I mean, you can do brass stabs which sound just like the real thing, but you see, going back to what we were saying before, if I wanted real strings I would use real strings. We've had a session of ten string players in this room and what a beautiful, beautiful session that was. We'd written something out on the synthesizer using the sampler, we had our arranger in, and then the musicians came in and played — and it was fantastic. You just can't get away from that real sound. So, provided that you are able to choose between the real thing and the technology, it doesn't matter that technology hasn't got it right, because you can ring your fixer and get brass and string players in. Technology is a sound in its own right — that's the only way to treat synthesizers."

But I don't think everyone does that.

"I quite agree. Take your typical MOR‑type artist — easy‑listening stuff — who has record company money behind him, and who can use the London Symphony Orchestra if necessary, yet on his latest record you can hear that they've just gone out and got a synthesizer and a sampler producing this nasty synthesized background which really is so crass.

"It's not so bad in this country because, like it or not, we do come up with fairly good quality productions here, but listen to some of the European productions and it's an embarrassment! When I did the brass parts for the James Brown record, OK, I layered two brass sounds which I thought would sound as realistic as possible, but I never intended to pull the wool over anybody's ears. They weren't even intended to be heard by anyone, because they were intended as the guide for the real brass, but for a couple of the songs we left the original brass parts as they were, simply because the feel was right. Now, when you're talking about commercial music you can do that sort of thing, but there's certain other music where that really, really jars and you do need to use the real thing. Glenn Nightingale's larger‑than‑life guitar work on the Angélique Kidjo album is just irreplaceable, and the disadvantage of doing everything yourself is that you're giving everything in your music the same viewpoint. If you open it to all comers as I was able to do on the Angélique Kidjo production, you come up with a product which is larger than the sum of the parts. You can always judge a production by that criteria; does it sound more than what was put in?"

What, for you, are the most pleasing aspects of your work?

"In everything I do as a musician, I always try achieve that 'lump in my throat' feeling. I can be as cynical as I like, but there are things in almost every song which I want to be there, and that's even more so when you're a producer. I have a physical thing too: when I play a certain combination, when something is so right, I get a cracking sound in my right ear. Now, this may well be down to me tensing myself, but this only happens when I have a certain feeling, and so if I hear that cracking sound I know that I've hit it."

Do any specific examples come to mind?

"The James Brown track 'Moments', which is an incredibly long track with lyrics by Haitch, is basically a sermon, and in the background there's just some percussion, a pad, and then there's a brass line that comes in. Now, it doesn't come in as often as I originally wrote it, but it's the chemical reaction between this very intense talking and this driving pad — because I really love pads — and then the brass comes in towards the end, and it's really almost everything that I've ever wanted to do in a few notes.

"Again, on the Soul II Soul Just Right album, right at the end of 'Intelligence', over the fade, a pad comes in, and once again it gets me every time. I don't know any more than you do as to why a certain song has come out this way, but it has and I'm just glad that it's me doing it and not some other guy!"

"I think melody is still around but it's on a back‑burner at the moment, because the commercial market wants rhythm."