The control room at Sawmills is still based around the same Trident console.
The control room at Sawmills is centred around a Trident 80B console. "I just love the board," says Williams. "It's a transparent-sounding board. It's got immense mojo, but you also feel like it doesn't obscure the contact with the music. There's a monitor section on the 80B which has this different EQ from the main channels. John Cornfield said, 'Look, Sam, when you're gonna pop 3k on the guitars, do it there.'"
Monitors-wise, at the time of the recording of 'Alright' and I Should Coco, Sawmills offered the choice between Quested 212s and Yamaha NS10s. "The control room was small," says the producer. "A very shallow space. So, you're not looking at a textbook studio for monitoring. But I have to say, still one of my favourites for containment. The sound was very focused, very punchy. A bit like having a big pair of headphones on."
Tracking was done to the studio's Otari MTR-90 MkII 24-track two-inch. The evening before the five-day session was due to begin, Williams and Cornfield set up the facility's Premier drum kit and prepared a drum sound for the next day. "It was [AKG] 414s for overheads," says Williams, "and [Shure] 57s top and bottom on the snare. Probably Sennheiser 421s on the toms and the kick would have been an old school [AKG] D12. We were tracking pretty quickly the next day.
"My whole production ethos was about capturing it quickly, before it went off the boil. Because this was a young band and this was about capturing a kind of energy that does not hang around. You're not gonna benefit from spending two days getting a bass drum sound."
Straight To Tape
In keeping with this approach, the basic tracking for the six songs Sam Williams and Supergrass recorded that week at Sawmills — 'Caught By The Fuzz', 'Alright', 'Strange Ones', 'Sitting Up Straight', 'Mansize Rooster' and 'Lose It' — were cut with the minimum of takes. "When I'm rolling tape, I want to get it, if I can, inside one or two cuts," emphasises the producer.
"Danny was aware that it was down to him to deliver it in that time spec. In the worst-case scenario, I think with a difficult track like 'Lose It', we may have gone six cuts in a row. And he's sweating and dripping, because every time he's giving it up in that immensely physically demanding style that he drums in. But we would very rarely need to go more than two cuts and often they'd get it in one."
'Alright' was cut in the space of 10 minutes — two takes, first and second halves cut together from the two-inch tapes. That was it.
The team were similarly unfussy about the choices of guitars and amps. They simply went with the equipment that the band had at the time, namely, Gaz Coombes's Fender Telecaster or Epiphone SG played through a Sound City 2x12 combo amp and Mick Quinn's Carlsbro bass and amp. "His bass made a farting, blown-up sound which was very much key to the distortion," says Williams. "Same with the vocal sound on 'Lose It'. We had a [Shure] 58 going through a distortion pedal for Gaz to sing straight through the Sound City amp, and that was it."
As the live takes were being laid down, Sam Williams would typically be in the control room, directing the proceedings and trying to bottle the band's energy: "When they were delivering cuts as a power trio, I wanted to be making calls in the spirit of the three-hour sessions that I grew up with as a kid that don't go beyond that time zone. I wanted to have the confidence to stop a take when it was necessary and restart it. In other words, to optimise a cut while it's happening, so that they get the best that they can.
"But most of the time we didn't have to do that," he adds, "because they were playing great. 'Alright' was cut in the space of 10 minutes — two takes, first and second halves cut together from the two–inch tapes. That was it. Then overdubbed with piano and the other things."
To recreate the pub-ish piano sound that featured on the demo of 'Alright', Sam Williams took some liberties with the studio's Rönisch grand piano. "We nearly fell out with the studio there," he laughs. "I got in there with John Cornfield and I just detuned everything. Not randomly, because I knew what would cause that effect. I didn't need to destabilise the whole piano. I just needed to destabilise two out of three strings [of the chord]. So, if I went sharp and flat on both sides of a relatively accurate string, then you got that pub thing.
"The piano needed to sound inherently out-of-tune. But it didn't go down well with the studio because obviously you've got to put it all back in again. But it worked perfectly for 'Alright'. I think we may have tracked it in octaves, and it did give it a massive sound."
While a guide vocal was always committed to tape during live tracking sessions, typically Williams would re-record Gaz Coombes' lead vocals — and Mick Quinn's characterful falsetto BVs — after the fact, using either an AKG C12 or Neumann U87. "Sometimes guide elements were kept," the producer says. "But often we'd go and cut vocals properly. Mickey was doing incredible backing vocals that were like another personality in the band. Very difficult to record, at the extreme velocity and pitch he was using. But we'd get them right."
On the last of the five days at Sawmills, Williams mixed all six of the tracks that the team had recorded that week, including, of course, 'Alright'. Ahead of the mix session, John Cornfield had set Williams up with a variety of effects sends on the Trident, including to two Revox reel-to-reels used for tape echoes, an EMT 140 plate reverb, a Roland Dimension D stereo chorus, an Eventide DSP4500 harmoniser and a Universal Audio 176 valve limiter.
"The 176 was the original [Bill] Putnam thing which was on the Sinatra and Beach Boys records," Williams recalls. "John used to rig it for our parallel distortion on Gaz's vocal. There was always a tape slap running on every vocal. There was also an AMS [DMX 15-80S] delay but, most of the time, I'd use tape echo if I could.
"I'm used to getting very hands-on on that board," he adds. "So, John would always be amazing in setting me up with a session built on a great engineering basis. I could get in and do my thing as a mixer and cut and craft and shape sounds."
Round Two
As soon as they were completed, Sam Williams brought the first six Supergrass track masters to the attention of Radiohead's managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge of ATC. Williams remembers, "Chris was pretty much like, 'Well, that's the first six singles laid out. Can you ringfence this? And we'll come back on it.'"
The result was Supergrass signing to Parlophone Records and then returning to Sawmills in the summer of 1994 to complete I Should Coco. "It was a golden summer that would never come again," says the producer, "and that's when we cut the rest of the record."
In this second half of the album's sessions, Williams and the band stretched out more in terms of playing and production. "I'd be starting to sit in on keyboards," says Williams. "On the second sessions we had a Vox Continental, so I would be in the room playing on 'I'd Like To Know'. We started using Wulitzer [electric piano] or other keyboards."
Another key track, the mid-paced, early Pink Floyd-y 'Sofa (Of My Lethargy)', featured much instrument-swapping between Williams and the group, the producer moving onto bass to connect with Goffey as a rhythm section, as Quinn changed over to guitar and Coombes to piano. "I was a kind of floating auxiliary player," says Williams. "So, it was a flexible musical thing that could move around very easily like that."
Gaz Coombes and Sam Williams, mid-'90s.Varispeeding tape was a trick that Williams and the band began to use more during the second set of sessions. The two–inch master of propulsive rocker 'Lenny', for instance, was sped up to achieve the right feel for the track. "That track was 6 to 10 bpm slower," says Williams, "We'd got an accurate cut of 'Lenny' that was too slow, too rock, and we sped it up considerably. We erased the bass and the guitar, and Gaz and Mickey re-recorded them over a sped-up drum track which then had the exact tempo. Whatever it took, we would do it. There wasn't any kind of purist idea of how you do it."
On 'We're Not Supposed To', meanwhile, Williams took a four-track home demo the band had made, experimenting with tape-speed chipmunk-y voices, and embellished it at Sawmills. "That is so Danny and his sense of humour," he laughs. "I took all the crazy things that he'd done from the four-track cassette, spun it onto two-inch and then rebuilt the guitar, the bass, everything around it.
"Congas were overdubbed with that kind of early T Rex/Bolan thing as an influence. Two acoustic guitars, the left/right [panned] stereo thing, and an elastic band kind of bass sound. So, it's actually quite a polished production around a complete bit of lo-fi. It was all very arranged chaos and probably one of the most complex productions, actually, although some people would mistake it for a comedy track."
Elsewhere, two tracks from the original sessions, 'Mansize Rooster' and 'Sitting Up Straight', were re-recorded during this final stretch of making the album. "Because the songs were requesting an alternative approach to the production that wasn't benefitted by speed," says Williams. "You can hear that we've spent more than an hour [laughs] getting a drum sound. Not that it was bad in the first place, 'cause it suited it perfectly
"So, in other words, if you had the options open, cut everything at no-brainer speed to start with. Anything that doesn't make it with that methodology, then apply the remit of more expansive, more detailed production to it. But not the other way around. And that way you're never gonna miss energy, you're never gonna miss capture. You're only gonna expand naturally into things that require it."
Williams thinks that overall the rooms at Sawmills contributed hugely to the tight, fuzzy and energetic sound of I Should Coco: not just the live room playing space, but also the control room during the mixing. "I later noticed that people like Flood would mix in rooms that often didn't have a huge space," he says, "that were very flat and contained and based on that principle. I think, considering its limitations, it was one of the best-sounding, punchy, tight, controlled rooms to mix in."
Postscript
For Sam Williams, his main memories of working with Supergrass on their landmark debut album are of himself and the band laughing. "I've never laughed so much making a record," he says. "To the point where you actually had to stop recording. I'm very grateful and honoured that I've been lucky enough to connect with them."
The subsequent chart success of 'Alright', however, he only remembers as a blur. "It rushed by us like a high-speed train," he says. The producer however is in no doubt as to why the song was set to become regarded as a classic track. "It's incredibly positive," he reasons, "and, actually, it's got two sides to its coin. It's got a very British pub knees-up kind of energy. It's everything that teenage life is about — sex, drugs, rock & roll. It's saying something that you can only really know in that window of time when you're kind of leaving school and before the engagement of other issues becomes unavoidable as an adult.
"But, also, it's looking at identity. It's got a duality which is beautiful: 'Are we like you?/I can't be sure.' Because they were at that age, it was authentic. It was the real thing."
Ultimately, Williams is as thrilled as Supergrass' legions of fans are that the band have decided to reunite. "Yeah, I'm delighted," he states, "because they're a great live band. When I speak to people about Supergrass, I often get the same thing: 'God, weren't they great?'"
Supergrass: The Strange Ones 1994–2008 is out 24 January 2020 on BMG.