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| JOIN HANDS
Marc Bolan was going to produce Join Hands but well.... So I got hold of Mike Stavrou (Bolan's engineer). Mike Stavrou was a mistake. l made a mistake there. I had my gripes against Lilywhile but I never realised just how hard it was to produce them. I had been execitive producer on everything to maintain a some sort of 'quality control'. Apart from Hong Kong Garden, I'd never sat through the whole recording process of anything until Staircase and it was bloody difficult. Simple things like "John give me some feedback." He couldn't. All you got to do is point the guitar at the amp and it goes Whoooooooooooo. He couldn't get it. So I borrowed one of Steve Jones's Les Pauls ... nothing, then I got Jonesy's Fender amp. John eventually got a little 'piip'. I thought he was earthed or something. So "We put that wimpy little feed-back through echo and delay and harmoniser and double track it to make it souud ballsy. That was the beginning of Staircase, and Kennny... "Can you do any other sort of beat?" "Yeah.' Course I can" So he'd play the same beat faster. John and Kenny really wanted Lillywhite back. I'd heard enough of the 'Lillywhite Sound' and tried to make the group feel the same way. They'd done that sound, they should move on". Commercially, that sound may have been a good idea but was 1too easy. 1I wanted to gel onto something new, completely different. Let's get bells on it ... and thunder ... dry drums ... right up front, , none of that echo on everything - the opposite. I was really into sound effects .I wanted the album to be full of them. Well, I got this through to Steve and Sioux, but not John and Kenny. They didn't like it at all, they 'wanted LiIlywhite and the 'space'. There was no arguments about me producing Join Hands but l didn't know enough about the desk so I got in Mike Stavrou and took on the role of Executive producer again. I booked Air Studios for three weeks solid. No-else was allowed in. Real big-time! Ł30,000! The atmosphere there 'was terrible. John said he wasn't ready - he wasn't happy with the tunes he had, But we had to get the album out for the tour. The recording just dragged and dragged. I couldn't get any ideas through. They wanted the Lords Prayer on the album. I said, "if you're going to have one whole side of the Lords Prayer, then let's really go for it! We'll get a choir, an orchestra, go completely over the top, get Marco to do a bit, splice the tapes, play em backwards, open the song up to the studio." But l just couldn't do anything not even over dubs.' They just thought I was being silly. There's two or three good tracks on the alburn but it could have been a greal album. Even the bloody sleeve for Join Hands was a problem, John Maybury came up with a design, it was really good but it involved using a drawing of two litlle kids getting married, but couldn't find out who owned the copyright and had a hard time explaining to Kenny that we would be brankrupted if we were sued. Then I thought let's have an embossed sleeve. No ink at all, just the four soldiers indented in the card, because we were rushing everything we never got any proofs. Came release of the album there it is, bloody PRINTED. We went mad, really mad ... got a new label manager. The whole point was not the soldiers, but the embossing, not that John and Kenny liked the idea anyway'. They still wanted John Maybury's idea. NILS STEVENSON (Banshees Manager 1986) |
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| Great pic of the Banshees...sleak stylish but with that punk edge. Below Nils Stevenson gives an inside account on how the album got made despite.... |
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