Respected British record producer and engineer David Lord has manned boards for artists ranging from Peter Gabriel and Tears For Fears to the Korgis and Jean‑Michel Jarre, as well as Australian legends Icehouse. Between 1978 and 1988 he owned and operated Crescent Studios in Bath; now semi‑retired, he still works with a select group of artists at his smaller home studio base, Inner State Studio, which houses a selection of the Crescent Studios equipment. Asked to nominate a favourite sound from the many he’s recorded, he chooses XTC’s ‘All You Pretty Girls’, from their 1984 album The Big Express.
Mellotronic Feeling
A Mellotron ‘choir’ forms the intro to the song ‘All You Pretty Girls’.“XTC had purchased a rather beaten‑up Mellotron, sometimes known fondly as ‘the first sampler’. Beloved by prog‑rockers, and of course the Beatles, it’s an electro‑mechanical keyboard instrument in which, simply put, each key pulls a recorded loop of tape across a playback head. Different banks of tapes contained different sounds, for example strings, flutes, choirs and so on.
“We used this on a couple of songs on The Big Express album, which was recorded at my Crescent Studios in 1984, including the ‘choir’ which forms the intro to the song, ‘All You Pretty Girls’ — a rollicking sort of sea shanty, which Andy Partridge told me grew from him ‘dicking about’ with some quasi Hendrix‑like guitar licks and a Melos echo unit. ‘A real Nuremberg rally of an echo, the sort of thing Hitler would have had under his podium!’
David Lord: Andy wanted to open the track with Mellotron choir samples, but we thought it somehow sounded too real. So, I tried a little trick — nicked from Peter Gabriel — of feeding the recorded Mellotron part into a tiny handheld transistor amp and speaker combo.
“Andy wanted to open the track with Mellotron choir samples, but we thought it somehow sounded too real. So, I tried a little trick — nicked from Peter Gabriel — of feeding the recorded Mellotron part into a tiny handheld transistor amp and speaker combo, nicknamed by Peter as the ‘9.95’ after its price in Radio Shack. It basically de‑hi‑fi'ed the sound, which was then miked up and re‑recorded. This got us some of the way there, but then I had the idea of putting the tiny ‘9.95’ into an empty metal waste paper bin and hanging a Shure SM57 over the top, with a cardboard tube from the middle of a kitchen roll taped to the mic. This coloured and gave the ‘choir’ a much more interesting and unusual sound which, with some added ambience and compression, along with a touch of — I think it was either an Eventide Harmonizer H910 or Roland Dimension D chorus — to ‘stereo‑fy’ it, came out sounding a bit like a cartoon Albert Hall!
“Incidentally, though the budget for the whole album and studio, including me, came to £75,000, Virgin Records thought nothing of then spending £33,000 on a video for ‘All You Pretty Girls’. The album’s multitrack masters were then lost for many years, preventing any remixing, but were located in 2022 and recently remixed in immersive Dolby Atmos by Steven Wilson.”