Giles Smith meets the behind-the-scenes mixer and fixer with the unenviable job of goosing Elton John for re-release. It's a thankless task
At the plush Metropolis studio complex in Chiswick, London, the singer Gabrielle is working on her second album, and Andrew Lloyd Webber is in and out on some project or other. Upstairs in the mastering suite, the record producer Gus Dudgeon and one of the house engineers, Tony Cousins, are spending long hours fiddling with Elton John.
Gus Dudgeon has a shock of peppery hair and wears a bootlace tie, shades (indoors), jeans and a jcket with two enamel electric guitar badges pinned to the lapel. He worked on David Bowie's Space Oddity and more recently he produced XTC's Nonsuch album. But his finest hours would have to be the 13 albums he produced for Elton John, from Empty Sky in 1969 to Blue Moves in 1976, via Tumbleweed Connection, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy - the records which took John from low-key singer-songwriter to world-maurauding roack star.
Dudgeon is also, it seems, a fan. In 1988, when Elton had a massive clear-out at home and sold his ornaments and baubles through Southeby's (his Lowrys, his Magritte gouache, his 200 Art Deco nymphs), Dudgeon went to the sale and bought a cushion depicting the sleeve of Madman Across The Water - a snip at 2,950 pounds.
The Elton John back catalogue is already available on CD. Dudgeon wants to release another version of it because he despairs at how thin and misrepresentative the current CD versions of some of those albums sound. He had no involvement in that first transfer process - orignal producers rarely do. "It's done by an engineer who simply looks to see what the loudest peak is and then goes off to have a cup of tea while the thing runs off." In many cases, the record companies either couldn't find, or couldn't be bothered to dig out, the original master tapes, so all you get on CD is a hastily prepared copy of a copied tape. "I have to tell you, I don't think this situation is unique to this artist. And that's why I have a beef about it." The real scandal about CDs, Dudgeon says, is not their price, but the shoddy standard of what you get for your money. (Dudgeon, incidentally, offered his services to Phonogram for free.)
The process by which old, analogue recordings are prepared for release as digital CDs presents an opportunity to radically alter the sound of the original - or as Dudgeon puts it: "We can goose the tape to make it sound that much better." When I visited the studio last week, Dudgeon and Cousins were seated at two rather 1950s-looking mixing consoles and some strictly 1990s computer hardware, working on Tumbleweed Connection. For comparison purposes, we listened to Come Down In Time, a ballad. Cousins switched between the existing CD version and the remastering. The distinction was marked. The voice, rounded and full, seemed to spill out at you from the centre of the arrangement. It was possible to hear breath at the edges of the lines. And when the strings came in, you were almost lifted on air to the back of the room. It sounded, in a word, goosed.
Dudgeon says the biggest obstacle was tracking down the master tapes. He failed only on Empty Sky, the original of which went to India and never came back. It's clear that archivism is a skill which the pop industry is learning late. Throughout the Seventies, master tapes were frequently lost or filed under "T" for "tossed in the back of a cupboard". "Check this out," Dudgeon says, holding up a square, orange tape-box, so battered and split at the corners it looks as if, for much of its life, it has been employed as a washing-up towel. "What does that say?" says Dudgeon, pointing to the sticky label. It says, in felt-tip letters, "DO NOT USE". "But in fact," says Dudgeon, "it's the master tape of Tumbleweed Connection. Now look at the track listing." Two of the song titles have been vigorously crossed out. "But those songs are on there," says Dudgeon. "It's baffling. It's also my handwriting..."
Dudgeon and Cousins spend about three or four days on each album. Sometimes they find themselve spending four or five hours jiggling with a single track. The effect of this can be wearing. "I don't ... love Grimsby," says Cousins tactfully, referring to the third track on side one of Caribou. "A shit recording," says Dudgeon, less tactfully. "And a shit song." Still, here was an opportunity to correct Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me.
"Originally, I had to quieten the opening right down, in order to get a contrast with the big finish. You hear the song on the radio now, and you wonder if it's actually started for about a minute. Now, in the remastering, I've been able to pull up the intro and the front part to where it always should have been."
Dudgeon says he realizes that people are going to accuse him of re-mixing or of adjusting the work to fit modern tastes and expectations. We're used to digital sound, with its clarity and its crispness: it's easy to overlook the way older recordings gained their mass and momentum from the middle and bass areas. But Dudgeon insists he is only working to bring out what was already there but what he was forced to leave out because the vinyl format wouldn't hold it.
"The whole time I worked for Elton, he only once asked me to remix, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, which I had made a complete mess of the first time. And he once asked me to take a banjo off a track. He didn't want a banjo there. But he never used to come to the overdub sessions, so half the time, the first time he heard what was on his record was when it came out. In fact, sometimes I used to put things in there deliberately to surprise him. He came up to me once and said, 'Who's that tap-dancing on I Think I'm Going To Kill Myself?' " (It was "Legs" Larry Smith from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.)
And what about Elton John? What's the level of his involvement and interest in this loving and dutiful restoration work, this furrow-browed attention to detail on his behalf? Dudgeon doesn't even pause.
"To be honest, I don't think he could give a tuppeny fart. He might listen to a couple of bits and pieces - out of curiosity. But the technical aspects of recording have never interested him. Still, if it sells, he'll be happy. Major shopper, Elton."
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