Soho, Kokomo, Backhanders, Dark Moments, & The Rabbit Punch — Part 2

Trident Studios, Soho, London (1981-1982)

Soho, Kokomo, Backhanders, Dark Moments, & The Rabbit Punch

Part 2 (of 3)

Trident Studios, Soho, London (1981-1982)

Continued from Part 1

I started working at Trident in January 1981. I was eighteen.

I finished working there in around April 1982, so about a year-and-a-half later. In that time I worked my way up from runner, through tea-boy, via audio editing assistant, to tape-operator, and finally, first assistant audio engineer.

This is part 2 of a piece about my experience, my minor and brief blip on Trident’s majorly enormous and influential horizon…

One brief blip for Trident… one gigantic step for me, circa 1981

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For a fuller taste perhaps also read these articles:

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Trident Studios, 17 St Anne's Court

The building, the equipment, the characters…

Here’s a quick guided tour of Trident (from bottom to top).

Basement = Studio One’s live room

Home to the beyond legendary C.Bechstein concert grand piano — on which, just for example, “Hey Jude”, "Killer Queen” and “Your Song” were recorded. And so too was Bowie’s “Oh! You Pretty Things.”

I played that piano almost every day that I worked at Trident. I was still a teenager, and I have to admit back then I did not fully appreciate just how awesome my luck was!

Level one = Studio One’s mezzanine control room.

Also on this level were the reception area, the main stairwell, and the building’s lift.

Look at the control room’s wood panelling, it was an incredibly beautiful room.

There is so much written online about Trident Audio consoles and the electronics contained within them. I’m not going to attempt anything in-depth here. All I will say is that the build quality, how this equipment felt under your fingers and responded, was beyond compare. And the sonic quality is something you can still hear and appreciate on the records recorded there. This studio had its own distinct sound and you can hear that sound on those records.

I remember one of the characters at Trident was Henry (I have absolutely no recollection of his surname, apologies), the chief studio maintenance engineer — who was responsible for making sure all of Trident’s studio equipment was in top working order. Henry explained to me that in the early days of Trident, specific sound engineers (like, for example, Roy Thomas Baker or Gus Dudgeon, both of whom I met later, but not during my time at Trident) would literally almost on a daily basis swop components inside the console (the console had modules for each input and output channel that could be removed, and contained, just for example, the frequency equalisation controls) to experiment with how the new component would affect the sound quality. They did this with Barry Sheffield, one of the two brothers who founded Trident Studios and Trident Audio.

Eventually, over time and with lots of experimenting they found an exact combination of components that worked better sonically than almost any other console being produced at the time — this experimental approach is the foundation of Trident’s distinct sound.

Henry also talked with me about current and future developments, and these chats with him made me begin to realise that maybe my father had a point… maybe computers were going to influence everything in the future…

Henry was telling me that the next generation of consoles (which were already arriving at some studios in London) had built-in onboard computers that could be used to store mixdown data, which could be recalled, and updated, and used to control a console with motorised faders. With the mix data, these consoles could automatically mix the track again (almost) perfectly (in theory), and adjustments could be made as required. This was a breakthrough. It meant if you wanted the vocal of a mix you’d done last month slightly louder (or quieter), then you could (in theory) just recall your mix and make a slightly adjusted update. Before this the only way to record data for a mix was with a piece of paper and a pen, literally writing down the position of every nob and fader on the console — which took hours, I know, I’ve done it! We also even did it with instant Polaroid cameras to save time.

Henry also explained how digital computing technology could be used to perfectly synchronise two multitrack tape machines. This had been possibly already to a point but could be unstable. Now it was possible to do this perfectly and stably using computer chips (a very new concept back then) containing phase lock loop technology.

Yep, my father had been correct… computer technology was going to be everywhere… but still, at that point, although I understood it, it still didn’t really interest me. I’d very much fallen in love with Trident’s analogue technology, and its distinctive sonic quality…

Trident Studio One control room, with Trident Audio A Range Console and Studer A80 16 track.

Level two = Studio Two mix suite

Mix control room with vocal booth, live room/auxiliary equipment room), and client lounge area.

Again Henry, the chief maintenance engineer, told me the history of the mix suite. At one point (and this had already been removed and was in storage elsewhere in the building) there had been an additional twenty-four-track mixing console in the auxiliary equipment room behind the main control room. This had been specifically installed for Roy Thomas Baker so that he could mix Queen songs that often had way more than the standard sixteen or twenty-four tracks of audio (A two-inch multitrack tape could not really hold more than twenty-four simultaneous tracks of audio without loss of quality or what was bleed “bleed-through” — the audio from one track leaking [“bleeding”] on to an adjacent track).

Queen achieved this more than twenty-four track recording by syncing two or more tape machines together, making more tracks available (for example two sixteen-track multitrack recorders synced together would give, in theory, thirty-two available recording tracks).

With Queen’s recordings there simply were not enough inputs on the existing Trident mix suite mixing console to accommodate all the recorded tracks, so Roy Thomas Baker (Queen’s producer) needed this extra mixing console installed to make mixing Queen possible.

Trident Studio Two — mix room, B range console.

Level three = maintenance area, workshops, and storage.

This floor was also used as an echo chamber and spring reverb. So if a client was recording and using this echo chamber the floor was off-limits or you had to be totally silent and move in cat-like-stealth mode. There were two building’s maintenance guys based on this floor, proper salt-of-the-earth, belt-and-braces tea-drinking English workmen, often in painting overalls and flat caps. One was called John. I wish I could say the other was called Fred, but he wasn’t and I just don’t recall.

Level four = record label offices, audio edit suite, and Ray Staff’s disc-cutting mastering room.

Where to start with this floor?

First of all, this was where a lot of action had happened, was happening and would happen. Trident’s record label staff had their offices here. This is where the deals were done, where all the future plans were hatched, where the hiring and firing happened, and where the hit records got cut.

At that time Trident’s label manager was a guy called Dave Thomas, who sounded like he was from Newcastle but acted and dressed like he had spent a lot of time in Texas or the Arizona desert — perhaps too much. He wore flared Levi’s, decorated cowboy boots, had a decorated leather belt with a silver encrusted with turquoise buckle, and matching silver and turquoise rings, bracelets and pendants. He wore decorative jean material cowboy shirts, with pearl inlay poppers which were always undone to his belly, which was sufficiently fattened with beer etc, and he had long dishwater blonde hair. He was loud. Arrogant. Angry. Obnoxious. He drank way too much and took far too much coke. I don’t think it registered with him that I existed. We never spoke.

Then there was Jenny Torring, who worked for or with Dave (I’m not sure which, I think she was his subordinate). She was blonde and glamorous, however, she also did far too much coke, which eventually is never a good look for a beautiful woman. She registered that I existed. She was friendly but busy and stressed. Both Dave and Jenny could either be found on this floor or in The Ship, their second office (perhaps main office?).

Also on this floor was Norman Sheffield’s office — the big boss, the owner. Every week I would go to his office to collect my wages in cash, in an envelope. There’d be a sheet of paper on his desk which he’d glance at and read before giving me the envelope. It was the chief engineer’s (Stephen Short, I’m coming to him soon) summary sheet. If any of the trainees, or indeed any of the studio staff, were not pulling their weight or didn’t fit in, well it would be written on that sheet, and they’d be out the door with their last pay envelope. To begin with, and during most of my time at Trident, Norman Sheffield never really talked with me or even made eye contact. However, that changed (and I’m coming to that).

Also on this floor could be found — initially from time to time, but towards the end of 1981 almost all the time — Rusty Egan, Jean-Philippe Iliesco (JP), and Stephen Short. During 1981 these three found backing to enable them to buy Trident Studios from Norman Sheffield.

Rusty I would get to know, but in the future, not then in 1981. JP I never really knew.

Stephen Short was Trident’s chief audio engineer, so effectively my direct boss. What to say about Stephen? Well, that’s as good a place as any to start, his name…

“Don’t call me Steve! My name is Stephen!”

Stephen Short was one of life’s larger-than-life characters. I’m guessing when I met him in 1981 he was in his mid-twenties. He was a super-star audio engineer and record producer. Already he had produced songs that had won major industry awards (a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Song for Donna Summer’s “Last Dance”).

Two-inch master tape box for Spandau Ballet’s “To Cut A Long Story Short”, recorded by Stephen C. Short at Trident in 1980.

I think on my first day I inadvertently called him Steve, for which I was instantly rebuked and corrected.

Stephen was like God in Trident Studios. On his say-so, you could be out the door and on your way within five minutes.

Stephen is dead. He died in 2015. There’s a saying — never speak ill of the dead. Believe me, I’ve pondered that saying deeply, and yet, here I am about to tell my truth about Stephen Short. Again, I am very aware that there will be many people who thought Stephen was an amazing person, and I’m sure to them he genuinely was. However, to me, and I’m absolutely certain to many others who worked under him, he was (or could be at times) a classic tyrannical Flashman-type bully.

So, that phrase is key here, “could be at times”.

A lot of the time Stephen was fun, gregarious, entertaining, witty, intelligent, — actually super-intelligent — and a fantastic teacher (an amazingly musical and talented audio engineer, and an innovative producer).

At other times he was a total arse-hole.

I can clearly remember how he would be on a super animated very loud (meaning everyone in the vicinity could overhear, whether they wanted to or not) luvy-duvy phone call to his girlfriend (actually I think fiancé). He’d be on the red extension phone on the reception desk, which had a super long cable on it (pre-cordless phone and mobile era). It would be maybe midday or so, yet already he would be coked off his nut and had been drinking heavily, quite often Champagne just for the hell of it. He’d pace up and down, up the stairwell just off the reception area, or up into the entrance of studio one’s control room, or sit on the edge of the reception desk with a pristine white shirt on, undone to his waist. And all the time that he was very loudly, unselfconsciously, telling his loved one on the phone how much he loved her, and missed her, and could not wait to see her later, and giving ho-holes-barred details of what he wanted them to do when he saw her, well, all this time he’d also be flirting with Fran the receptionist, who kind of mimed mock you-naughty-boy-angry with him (he was her boss too).

More than once Stephen was unnecessarily abrupt and rude with me, downright unreasonable. But I had to take it. I had to just bite my lip and do whatever he said, when he said it, how he wanted it.

To be clear about this, to give context, I’m six-foot-three. At that time I was probably about one hundred and ninety pounds, without an ounce of fat on me, just meat. At school, I played Rugby, a lock-forward, first fifteen. I was no stranger to violent full-contact, and I knew how to take care of myself, and I did when necessary.

I’d met Stephen’s type before, these Flashman-types. I knew how to deal with them. We had power-crazed prefects at school. And I’d spent eight months travelling on my own living on my wits in California, believe me, I’d survived some serious scrapes.

Very soon after meeting Stephen, I sized him up. He was perhaps seven years older than me, overweight, verging on alcoholic, had massive coke-induced mood swings, and was generally out of shape. I had no doubt, that if it came down to it, he posed absolutely no threat to me whatsoever.

So I just kept my mouth shut.

One day, a Sunday evening to be precise, Stephen was doing a late-night mixing session in Studio Two. I was his assistant engineer. I’d already done maybe fifty or sixty hours that week on other sessions, and I was exhausted. I was supposed to be actually “assisting” Stephen, meaning, setting up the mix, plugging up all the ancillary equipment, running all the tape machines etc. Stephen was in one of his really bad two-faced moods — charming with the client, but with me like a short-tempered irrational hung-over bear with a hand grenade. When I arrived (on time, if not early) he told me he didn’t want my help, in fact, he didn’t want to see me, and I was to stay out of ‘his’ control room, and go and tidy the tape library or clean the kitchen, he said if he wanted anything he’d phone me there.

So that’s what I did, I went up to the top floor. Very late that evening Stephen phoned me on the internal line and told me to come to Studio Two, it was past midnight and I thought maybe they were going to actually finish a bit early.

When I got to the mix suite control room, without hardly looking up — and kind of ‘we’re so crazy, ordering food this late…’ laughing about what he was saying with the client — he told me to go out and get wanton soup, crispy aromatic duck with pancakes, fried seaweed, cold Tiger beer (emphasis on ‘cold’), warm Sake, Cadbury Wholenut chocolate, some Mars Bars etc etc (long list of nibbly-bits and tasty-pieces). He then handed me some cash. And looked me straight in the eyes and said “If you can’t get it ALL, don’t come back, EVER! You’re finished here!” He fixed me in his stare for a few emphatic seconds and then got back to his happy charming bubbly chatting with the client.

Remember, it’s after midnight, on a Monday morning, in Soho, and I’m already exhausted after a sixty-hour week. I wanted to pulverise Stephen there and then. Fuck the job! But I didn’t. I went out into Chinatown (which was for the most part shut) to several restaurants and late-night shops, until I found everything on this list, and took it back to Stephen, who didn’t bat an eyelid when I came in with it all (including perfectly warmed Sake and some of my gob in his wanton soup).

Kind of a spoiler alert here, jumping to the end of the story, of my time a Trident. Eventually, after Stephen Short’s investment group had bought Trident Studios, I left and went to work a CBS studios. The last month or so at Trident was very sketchy. I didn’t know from day-to-day if I’d have a job. I didn’t know if I’d get paid at the end of the week or not. There were rumours that most of the staff would be laid off… And actually that happened, yet I was one of the ones that did not loose their job… but there were no sessions booked… And I was back to a 9 to 5, just running errands and doing menial chores… so I left. I had an interview at CBS, to be a trainee audio engineer at their Whitfield Street studios, and I got the job and left Trident in April 1982.

Again, spoiler alert, I kept contact with one of the audio engineers at Trident, Adam Mosely (and I’m coming to him soon). Soon after, I actually arranged for Adam to do some covert recording at CBS Whitfield Street (I’m also coming to that too).

At some point in 1983 I got a phonecall asking if I wanted to go back to work as an assistant audio engineer at Trident, which was now open again fulltime, up and running under the management of Stephen Short. By that time I’d started to get my fisrt freelance audio engeering jobs at Basing Street and Maison Rouge. So I declined the offer.

Stephen Short and I’s paths did cross again, perhaps four years later, in about 1986. By then I had signed a recording contract, and my manger had booked me into record in Trident II, an off-shoot of the original Trident, in another part of London (amazingly I cannot find anything online about it or its location). When I arrived there, I soon realised that Stephen Short was there, that he was the owner, and he was sitting around in the client lounge loudly making phonecalls… déjà vu…

I had not somehow put all that together in my head until I actually got there, that I was recording that day in a studio called Trident II and probably that had something to do with Stephen Short. When I realsied, when I finally caught-up, I basically immeditely called my manager, whilst sitting in front of Stephen, and loudly told him, in front of Stephen, to cancel the session, that I would NOT record there with Stephen Short in the building. Stephen (nor any of the musicians I’d booked for that day) could believe their ears.

Eventaully, Stephen agreed, with my manager, to leave for the next couple of days to avoid the sessions being cancelled. Like I say, he was also a good teacher, I’d learned all I needed to know about being a bratty prima dona directly from the master.

Neumann VMS70 cutting lathe

For a while (and on various other occasions) I worked solidly for a month or so on this floor, on level four, in the edit suite and cutting room.

All the trainee tape-ops / audio engineers had to learn how to handle and edit tape. They had to learn how to set and align a tape machine and do basic maintenance. A tape-op’s tools were a cue-tip, isopropyl alcohol, a ‘tweaker’ (a multitrack tape recorder alignment tool), a razor blade, a chinagraph, splicing tape, leader tape, and an editing block (BTW a razor blade and metal tape reel could also be, and often was, used recreationally, both having been cleaned with isopropyl).

Ray Staff, Trident’s cutting engineer was looking for an assistant, and I’d been put forward for the role. Long story short: Ray didn’t like me much and I didn’t like Ray much either, and (most importantly) I didn’t want to be a cutting engineer. Anyway, I did this compulsory stint in the editing suite and also assisted Ray Staff.

I remember one day I had to do an edit session for a compilation album that was going to be cut later that day by Ray (so he would make the master disc used to make the stamper for the vinyl). That meant that I had to take all the quarter-inch master tapes of all the songs that would be included on the album, copy them (high-quality copy, as a backup — high quality but still unavoidably slightly lower quality than the master) and then edit the original masters all together, in the correct running order, top-and-tailed (meaning that there was a gap in between each, and hopefully a musical gap, so each new album track kinda started on the beat).

That day’s editing job was for a very small independent Jamaican reggae label, called Green-Sleeves Records. And it was the label manager who brought in the tapes and supervised the edit. This guy’s side gig was selling locally handmade shirts, and he brought in a big bag of these to the edit suite, along with a big bag of Jamaican grass. He showed me the shirts, I wasn’t interested, but I was interested in the grass. He and I got totally wasted, at like 11 am.

I then had to do these edits, however, the label manager (I just don’t recall his name) also had some ideas about shortening some of the songs and re-ordering song sections. He also wanted to add some momentary dub repeat echo right at the end of some tracks that would repeat a beat in time, cueing the next track. This was quite technical, not least that I’d have to record these dub-beats onto a separate section of tape and edit them into the gaps. I was so stoned that I did not even think to go and clear this with my boss at the time, Ray Staff, it just all seemed like a great idea, and I was up for it.

Remember I was eighteen or nineteen. Remember ‘editing’ literally meant cutting the quarter-inch MASTER tape with a razor blade and sticking it back together with splicing tape… Also, keep in mind, that this Jamaican grass was unbelievably strong, stronger than anything I’d previously had.

So, I had a razor blade in my hand, I was listening to first-class dub reggae straight out of Jamaica on Tannoy Red monitors… I had the volume up very loud… I was stoned out of my head… what could possibly go wrong?

With the bass from the edit suite speakers making the whole of level four vibrate, Ray burst through the door within a few minutes, looked at us both through a smokey ‘aze, and basically said “Nic, WTF are you doing?” Me and the Green-Sleeves label manager just collapsed floorwards, bursting into fits of giggles. Ray disarmed me — relieved me of my trusty razorblade — and shooed me out into the corridor. To be fair to Ray, he probably saved the day.

Level five =

• Audio workshop (where new Trident Audio equipment was designed, built and tested, you’d quite often find the other engineers and assistants here, like Craig Milliner, who was super interested in the actual components inside the equipment).

• Secure storage area (containing expensive microphones, components from old Trident consoles etc).

• Tape library (containing several very famous masters and valuable, as yet un-bootlegged outtakes).

• The accounts office.

• And my ‘office’ — the kitchen, in my first few months at Trident all I seemed to do was make endless pots of tea… my official title was the “Tea-Boy”.

Sidenote:

Music business accountants truly are a bread-apart.

I’ve met several and they’ve always left a deep impression in my mind (just for example, Shamsi Ahmed, Innervision’s accountant).

Trident was no exception.

I don’t remember the accountant’s name, however, I clearly remember him.

He was no more than five feet tall, perhaps less. He had a slightly hunched back, meaning one of his shoulders was bigger and higher than the other. He wore very expensive specially tailored suits to compensate and attempt to conceal all of this. He walked with a slight stoop and limp, and on occasion would use a walking cane. He would sometimes wear an overcoat, the sleeves of which were slightly too long and covered his hands, which were often clasping a huge-looking (compared to him) black leather attache case. He was bald, but had a spectacular comb-over, that quite often got displaced, especially when he got agitated or stressed, which seemed to be quite often. His face and hands were very often very moist and sweaty looking. The comb-over also snowed dandruff onto his suit’s shoulders. He wore very thick-lensed, round, metal-framed spectacles. He must have been about fifty.

His wife always seemed to be with him. She was much taller than him, maybe thirty years old, always dressed impeccably, in very sexy stylish expensive outfits, with her fine-head-of-hair coiffed, wearing a lot of expensive-looking jewellery, made up to the nines, wafting expensive perfume everywhere. I think my jaw dropped the first time I met her. I think her husband noticed.

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BTW should you ever want to own and use this kind of historic recording equipment look no further than Funky Junk. I met their founder, Mark Thompson, back in the early 90s, when, due to the global economic downturn and the digital revolution, analogue recording studio consoles — that had originally cost hundreds of thousands of pounds — where then changing hands for peanuts… that’s another story… Fortunately, Mark, with his passion for music, and well desinged handcrafted audio equipment, astutely stepped into that space, and his company Funky Junk was the result.

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To be continued in part 3

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Please note: I have another infotainment channel on Substack, called Unleashed & Unlimited, where I post podcasts, articles and content unrelated to music.🖋🎥🎙