Page 2: Bombay Bicycle Club

Room For Improvement

By the time the writing period was done, the demos that Bombay Bicycle Club sent to John Congleton were, in reality, near-complete productions. "He sent us an email," says Steadman, "being, like, 'I have some reservations about how fully formed they are, because they make me feel quite bashful.' I think he much prefers to work with people that have an iPhone recording of a guitar and a voice, so that he can just start from scratch."

"I get a little bashful about how I can be helpful," agrees Congleton. "Because it's like, 'Well, it seems like you've committed to this thing and I don't want to just show up and get a pay cheque and say, it sounds awesome!' But sometimes the demos would just sound awesome. So, there were several things from the demos that I was steadfastly into keeping and working from. It would usually be some more idiosyncratic synth sound or something."

Drummer Suren de Saram, bassist Ed Nash and guitarist Jamie MacColl lay down a track at Konk Studios in London. The minimal drum miking with a pair of Coles 4038 ribbons as overheads was a feature of the album.

Band and co-producer first got together to record in North London in the spring of 2019. The band had asked the producer where he'd like to work and he suggested Konk, the Hornsey studio founded by the Kinks. It was somewhere that the band knew well. Being their local studio, they'd recorded there at various points down the years.

"We've recorded in Konk for three different records and they've all been entirely different experiences," says Ed Nash. "All of us really like Konk, which is why we keep going back."

"We like really homely studios," says Steadman. "Konk feels very warm and lived-in, which some people might not like, but I personally really love. It hasn't really changed much over the years and that really appeals to me. It was strange for us, 'cause we were feeling slightly sentimental, coming back from such a long break. But then added into that was this place with so many memories for us. As soon as I walked in, I was just like, 'Woah, I feel like I'm 17 again!' It took a few days for us to get over that kind of nostalgia."

"For me, it really was more of a tactical decision," says Congleton. "It was convenient for everybody. I was just like, 'Let me go on your home turf.' I think it was a positive thing not to throw them into a completely foreign situation with me. Konk is really idiosyncratic. The room is sort of strange-sounding — not in a bad way, but there's no room that really sounds like Konk. Everything about it is sort of a little peculiar. I really enjoyed that, personally."

Jack Steadman: "If we were using samples or lots of electronics, we'd go for a roomier sound with the drums. It means you don't have to quantise as much."

Making Room For Programming

The second batch of sessions for the album took place at LA's Sargent Recorders.From the feet up, Congleton close-miked drummer Suren de Saram's late-'60s Ludwig kit in a fairly traditional way, though he often stripped most of the channels out to focus on a pair of Coles STC 4038 ribbon mics. "That was something we kind of arrived at together early on in the London session," says Congleton. "We were working off some bass drum/snare drum programming. And we were just getting so much flamming between the drums and the programming. Even though Suren's an amazing drummer, you can't help but get a little flamming.

"At some point I'd said, 'Well, let's just get rid of all the direct mics and make it sound like a breakbeat from an old hip-hop record or something.' So, I just used a stereo pair of Coles and the programming. That was a little bit of a through thread of the record: really spare drum-mic usage. Just stereo pairs, or a stereo pair and room mics and maybe a little bit of a direct bass drum or snare drum microphone just to make sure that it was even."

"If we were using samples or lots of electronics, we'd go for a roomier sound with the drums," agrees Steadman. "It means you don't have to quantise as much, because even if a kick is slightly off an electronic kick, if you're using a room mic sound, you get a lot of leeway. Then if there wasn't any electronics, we could really go for a traditional close-miked sound."

Ed Nash's bass rig is a classic combination: a Fender Precision through an Ampeg Portaflex.Bass-wise, Ed Nash's setup of a Fender Precision through an Ampeg B15 Portaflex has remained pretty much constant throughout the band's recording career. "That's the easiest decision on every record," he says. "If you need to divert a small amount from that, you can use flat wounds, maybe use an older bass, maybe use a Jazz bass. On this record, we were using those [Acme Audio] Motown DIs."

Elsewhere, some of the bass lines were provided by synths or the 808 Warfare plug-in. "Another thing we've been using since day one," says Steadman, "is baritone [guitar] as the bridge between the guitars and Ed's bass. If we want a bit more distortion on the bass, rather than ruin our bass sound and try and add loads of fuzz to it, we'd overdub it with a very, very distorted, low-passed baritone."

No Frills

In terms of guitars, Jamie MacColl tends to be the more experimental when it comes to different configurations of instruments and amps, whereas Jack Steadman tended to stick with his '70s Fender Stratocaster and various effects pedals.

"There wasn't a lot of fuss with the guitars," says Congleton. "If it was kind of a normal guitar sound, there's nothing very sexy about how it was recorded. Jamie uses a Divided By 13 amp. He was pretty loyal to that, but we used a [Fender] Princeton a lot with him. I would usually use a large-diaphragm condenser microphone and then a ribbon mic of some variety. So, I had a bright mic and a dark mic and we would pick which one we used in the mix, or sometimes we'd use both. No big fuss. A lot of Jack's stuff, I was just using guitar direct. A lot of times, he would run through an array of effects that were noisy so we would just take a direct of it."

"John had a lot of cool pedals," says Steadman. "One that we kind of fell in love with was the Electro-Harmonix SYNTH9. We were trying to make guitars sound like synths and the soft synths from the demos sound a bit more dirty and horrible. So, we'd play along on guitar with a lot of that stuff.

"On a song called 'Do You Feel Loved?', John did a really cool trick where you record one take just playing the line and then record the same line again, but he'd come over and start moving your [guitar] neck around and making it go in and out and wobbling. Then they'd kind of chorus with each other. That sounded amazing, like a kind of organic way of doing chorus."

The Element Of Chance

Four tracks — 'Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You)', 'Do You Feel Loved?', 'I Worry About You' and 'People People' — were completed in the Konk sessions for Everything Else Has Gone Wrong. Then, in September 2019 the team moved to Los Angeles to complete the album in an intensive three-week burst of activity. The location was Sargent Recorders, situated in the basement of Gus Seyffert, bassist for Roger Waters and a friend of John Congleton's. Like Konk, Sargent is based around a late '70s Neve console. "I used to live next door to the studio," explains Congleton. "It's a vibey kind of situation — not super-pro–looking or anything like that. It's basically the downstairs of a duplex house. A small drum room, a large live room and an iso room where you can put vocals or guitar amps. It's just a bunch of old gear. Basically, just Gus's collection of shit that he's accumulated over the years."

"He had a huge amount of pianos and keyboards," says Nash. "He had a celeste that made its way onto quite a few songs, and a huge collection of shakers and tambourines, which sounds like quite a silly little thing, but we used them a lot and they were really effective.

"John works very quick, and everyone told us that in advance. They were like, 'You're gonna have spare time.' We were like, 'Nah, I mean it took us a year to make the last album, so three weeks doesn't seem like very long.' And he absolutely smashed it. We got through it really quick."

As well as the speed at which Congleton works, Bombay Bicycle Club were equally impressed by the random, spontaneous elements that the producer would introduce to the proceedings. "A little trick that he has," says Steadman, "is that next to him he'll always have a little delay unit, like an Echoplex or something. And when anyone says, 'Oh, can we make that a bit weirder?', he'll just run a vocal or anything through that or just do little flourishes with it or just maybe take the wet of it."

"It's not specifically an echo," Congleton explains. "I'm always manipulating things. Seventy-five percent of the time what I end up with is not usable or used. But I'm just constantly looking for something to happen that sounds interesting. I do that for a lot of reasons. One is because you can potentially inspire something really exciting from the band that they didn't expect, and also it keeps me a little inspired. It gives me something to do instead of sit there and overly regiment what's happening with the band.

"A lot of times it'll just be like, 'What's this piece of shit effect? Let's just plug it in and see what happens.' I love it when I don't know a piece of gear. I just plug it in and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing with the parameters or anything."

Classic Chain

One element that was constant throughout the process, however, was Congleton's vocal recording setup for Jack Steadman. "It was a [Neumann] U48 through the Neve through an LA-2A," says the producer. "So, definitely nothing surprising or fancy. That's a pretty classic, standard kind of vocal chain setup. He is a great fucking singer. Really, really good pitch. He's just like kind of an effortless singer. So, it was a delight to record him."

For his part, Steadman was impressed by Congleton's cool approach to directing him through the vocal takes. "What to say after each take is the most delicate part of producing," he laughs. "How to perfectly phrase the notion that it was all right but you could do better, while still maintaining a singer's confidence. It's so difficult to do. Everyone has their own methods and John's, which I loved, was just to be almost robotic in the lack of emotion that you give. So, you'd do a take and he'd just go, [sniffs] 'All right, one more.' For some reason, that was the best method ever.

"He tends to just comp as we're going, so by the time I walk back into the control room, it's all good to go. Which is great because you don't want to listen to people comping you. I don't think it's a very pleasant experience."

Vocal effects-wise, Congleton says, "I used a lot of real [Electro-Harmonix] Memory Man [delay] on him. There's also an EMT 140 plate and a reverb chamber at Sargent that I used quite a bit."

"Most of the sounds we get come from layering rather than vocal effects," Steadman points out. "So, double tracking certain parts or adding a female voice to it, rather than using a whole lot of effects."

Quiet Riot

In keeping with the pacey nature of the sessions, the mixing stage was swift and relatively uncomplicated. "The actual process of mixing the songs was not particularly tough," says Congleton. "All the sort of details that they find really important weren't the game-changers for me. But it was the stuff that mattered to them. There was a lot of very fine-tuning things that they wanted to work hard on. All that stuff I was completely happy to go along with."

As far as the final result is concerned, John Congleton jokes that he isn't entirely sure what the members of Bombay Bicycle Club ultimately think of his work on Everything Else Has Gone Wrong. "They're really quiet, stoic dudes," he says. "I hope that they had a good time making the record with me, but I honestly don't know for sure, 'cause they're so quiet!"

For the record, then, Ed Nash states that he thinks Congleton's involvement in the album was "fantastic", while Jack Steadman credits the producer for loosening him up. "John's influence is quite important," he says. "I'm not really sweating the small stuff as much. You should just relax and listen to it like a fan would.

"The first four albums were kind of this journey towards trying to squeeze in all the different influences and sounds," he concludes. "This one is like, 'Let's just go back to basics, almost.' You don't need to shove every idea you have onto a record. There is a time and place for each sound. I think the record sounds a bit more like you've just selected the key ideas and got them in the most direct way possible to the listener."