Tim Palmer: Prolific Rock/Alternative Producer and Mixer (Pearl Jam, Robert Plant)

Interview transcription: 

Warren Huart:

Hi, everybody. Hope you’re doing marvelously well. I’m sitting here with my good friend, Mr. Tim Palmer. How are you?

Tim Palmer:

I’m very good, mate. I hope that you are doing inordinately well.

Warren Huart:

I am doing inordinately marvelously well.

Tim Palmer:

I had to try and one-up your “marvelously” somehow.

Warren Huart:

I love this quote. “Tim Palmer has played a part in some of the best rock albums of the ’80s with Robert Plant’s Now and Zen, the ’90s with Pearl Jam’s Ten, and the 2000s with U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” Who did that quote originally? Because it’s…

Tim Palmer:

I think it’s one of those… There’s many different polls and charts that you can… You can always find yourself somewhere if you look hard enough, but it was one of those.

Warren Huart:

Oh dear!

Tim Palmer:

I think it was Ultimate Guitar magazine polls and it was just in there and yeah, it’s pretty impressive. I mean, as I said to you yesterday, I’m now entering my fifth decade doing this for a living. So during this strange time that we’re going through, it’s given me the opportunity to pause and realize just how grateful I am to be able to still do it and still love it.

Warren Huart:

Well, if you’re entering your fifth decade, you’re… I know roughly how old you are. That must mean you… That’s a good place to start. You must have started super young, then. When did you first start on this lovely musical journey?

Tim Palmer:

I did. I started right at the beginning of the ’80s. Usual thing, tea boy; no recording schools because they weren’t even a thought in anyone’s mind at that point. It was an apprenticeship and I got the job at a studio in London called Utopia, basically clearing up and winding up the mic cables, all the stuff, all the good stuff like that. And it was a wonderful opportunity and something that I enjoyed very much, but it was definitely the early ’80s.

Warren Huart:

Now, at Utopia, who were you working with or who were you wrapping cables for and making cups of tea for?

Tim Palmer:

Well, it was an inspiring time to work at a recording studio then, because the difference between then and now is that studios were known for their engineering staff. An artist would book into a studio based on the reputation of the engineers alone. This was sort of before the concept of bringing in your own engineer or an outside engineer or a freelance engineer really had taken off. The first people who started to do that were the Americans. They would occasionally turn up and bring in their own engineers. I worked on a session assisting for Neil Dorfsman, who’d come in from New York on a record with the Dire Straits… Well, it was Mark Knopfler, he was doing the soundtrack to the movie Local Hero.

Tim Palmer:

But before that, studios were made or… Their success was based around the fact that they had great engineers, and we had wonderful engineers. We had Andy Jackson.

Warren Huart:

Oh Andy!

Tim Palmer:

Andy and James Guthrie, who had worked obviously, as you know, on a lot of the Floyd and Heat Wave and stuff like that. We had Pete and Greg Walsh, and Pete had worked with the Simple Minds and Greg had worked with Heaven 17 and Tina Turner. So they were both young, really great engineers. And we also had, our chief engineer was a man called John Mackswith, and he’d been working for longer than all the others. He was the oldest member, but he’d worked with everyone from The Dave Clark Five to The Sweet and had a relationship with the owner of the studio, who was Phil Wainman. And in case you’re not aware of Phil Wainman, Phil produced all the records for Sweet and Mud and the Bay City Rollers and he was the archetypal perfect example of a ’70s rock or pop record producer. He turned up in a Rolls Royce each morning. He had a big office with all these discs behind him and-

Warren Huart:

Medallion?

Tim Palmer:

Yeah!

Warren Huart:

Medallion? Hairy chest?

Tim Palmer:

He didn’t really have the medallion.

Warren Huart:

Down to about here?

Tim Palmer:

He didn’t have the medallion, but Phil was fantastic. He was just what you wanted a record producer to be.

Warren Huart:

Oh, that’s amazing. I can think of all that, Tiger Feet and Ballroom Blitz and “January, February…” Oh God, I remember that time very, very well.

Tim Palmer:

That was his time.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I was about to say, that was before you, yes.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. My time, was ABC, Spandau Ballet, Kajagoogoo, Duran Duran, Dead or Alive, Classix Nouveaux, all that sort of ’80s stuff. It’s interesting that as a young assistant, you thought you were learning about everything at that time, but really we were just plugging in a lot of Oberheim sequence systems and recording a few vocals. We didn’t really understand the concept of recording a full band lineup. That came for me much later, and we can talk about that when we get there. But yeah, it was, it was a great time to be an assistant.

Tim Palmer:

And I worked a lot with producers like Colin Thurston when he was producing Kajagoogoo and that’s ultimately how I got my very first break. I worked, as I said, with Neil Dorfsman and I was also very fortunate to work with Barry Blue, who was a very successful record producer aside from being an artist, and he was producing Heat Wave. And Heat Wave… He was working with Rod Temperton. Now, in case any of your people that listen don’t know who Rod Temperton is, he was probably the most successful songwriter during that period, writing for everyone from Donna Summer, all the great Michael Jackson, Off the Wall, Thriller-

Warren Huart:

Off the Wall, yeah. Masterpiece.

Tim Palmer:

I mean, his credits are just insane. And I was fortunate enough to become his assistant. So it was just incredible to be able to watch a man like that do vocal arrangements and build up all the tracks on the multi-track and be in charge of manning the tape machine. It was a little bit scary, but sessions were then, as you know. There was an element of danger to recording, which we seem to.. that’s almost lost.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely

Tim Palmer:

But you learned so much by watching these people work. And sometimes you learned what you didn’t like about the way that they approached bands. And sometimes you learned what you did like. So, gradually, by working with all these different, great engineers, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn.

Warren Huart:

All those guys you mentioned, I have memories of albums and the artists, the producers, the engineers, I mean, wow, what a time! One of my first really great recording experiences was working with my now friend Louise Goffin at my studio and she was the first real artist that ever came in. And the engineer producer that came in with her was Andy Jackson. That’s why I reacted like… So that was like late ’80s. And that was a big deal for me, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. Just being surrounded with that kind of level of talent; unbelievable.

Warren Huart:

Just to go back though, how did you actually…? You were at school, how do you get to become even rolling cables at Utopia? How did that happen?

Tim Palmer:

It was a bit of luck, really, to be honest, because I finished school at 18 and didn’t do too well because I was very distracted by music, because I was in a band. My band were called Emergency Exit and we were a punk band and I was the singer/guitar player. And I wasn’t particularly great as a vocalist, I knew that. Didn’t really know where to go after leaving school. And fortunately for me, my mother and father worked in television and my dad happened to be working on something called The Big Top Variety Show. And it was a variety show within a circus tent. And he had a lot of musical guests and one of the guests was a band that you’d know called Showaddywaddy.

Warren Huart:

Of course!

Tim Palmer:

So dad said, “You should come down and see Showaddywaddy play, and the producer who works with them is going to be there.” And I thought, “Oh, well that would be great. I’d love to meet a record producer. That’s really cool.” So I turned up to my dad’s show and I met Phil and I started chatting with him and he said, “Oh, would you like to see our studio?”” And I said, I would love to.”

Tim Palmer:

So I went up to see Utopia Studios and was totally blown away by it, of course, because I’d only ever worked in your little eight-track or 16-track studios with my band. And basically at the end of the tour, I said to Phil, “How do you get a gig here? How do you get a job here?” And he said, “Well, put your name on the list, and when we need somebody to start at the bottom, because you literally do start at the very bottom, if you’re prepared to do that, then we’ll consider you.” So I thought, “Great.” So I put my name down immediately and waited.

Tim Palmer:

And it probably took about five months, and then I had a phone call saying, “Would you like to come up and have an interview?” So I went up and had my interview and, luckily for me, I got the gig and that was it. I can remember my first day turning up very overdressed because my dad’s saying,” You better look smart for this job.” So I turned up with a nice jacket on and everything, and then of course you see how everyone else is. And I realized, I looked very out of place.

Warren Huart:

No Hawaiian shirt for that one?

Tim Palmer:

No, no, it was way before that. But it was just great. I mean, it was like… for me, it was living the dream. I can remember sessions in those days, and you know this, they weren’t nine to five by any stretch. People were working till 3:00, 4:00 in the morning; and I would be working so late it didn’t actually make sense to actually go home. So it would be far better to just sleep on the couch, but that was never an issue to me. I loved it. I switched out all the lights in the studio and I would be in the… I can remember I always used to sleep in the remix room, which had a big, big Neve console with the Necam automation. And I would put on a record, dim the lights, lie on the couch, and just think, “This is dreamy.” This is really what I wanted to do.

Tim Palmer:

And the idea of assisting was something that I just really enjoyed. I loved the fact that you could be part of it and you didn’t actually have the pressure on you at that point. Once you got the pressure on you, then there was the nerves started racking up, but when you’re an assistant, you just have to listen and be very aware of how the session is going. If you hear a whisper of a piano, you need to be out there and have that piano miked up. Studio etiquette, I think, was pretty tough in those days. You were supposed to be seen and not heard. I think I, well, I definitely broke the rules a few times and spoke out more than I should have done and was reprimanded a couple of times; but you learn the hard way.

Tim Palmer:

I can remember Neil Dorfsman and Mark Knopfler at one point taking me aside when I came into the studio and said, “We really love the fact that you’re passionate about this project, but you’re really going to have to keep your mouth shut because we don’t need another opinion.” And I was actually mortified and embarrassed. So I went very quiet and sat working the machine. But they were very, very sweet and Mark Knopfler would play a few guitar takes and they would discuss it, and then at the end, they’d often say, “Which one did you like, Tim?” And I would be able to contribute. So they were very sweet, but I learned my lesson: keep your mouth shut until you’re asked.

Warren Huart:

Well, I think the assistant rule is, always agree with the producer.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, right.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Because he’s ultimately the one. You’re not going to be there the next day. It doesn’t matter how much the artist liked you. If the producer doesn’t like you, you’re gone.

Tim Palmer:

It’s true.

Warren Huart:

But it’s interesting. You should talk about that because I’ve had assistants that have gone on to become Grammy winners that I had to reprimand really early on, and it’s how you deal with that. That’s the big… That’s the differentiator. Because some people, you take them aside and say, “Look, stop giving opinions on it, especially counter… This is totally counterproductive, and you’re derailing the process.” And I try to explain it to them in detail and if they don’t get it, it’s like a career ending thing. But if they get it, then actually they’re… it’s a wonderful life experience because I think you’re pointing out, we all make that mistake. We all don’t understand at first our roles until we’re put in our place by Mark Knopfler and Neil Dorfsman. I wish that had happened to me. That’s kind of a nice story.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, I mean, the thing is that I think in America, I think it tended to go a little far for me where the producers were just really mean to people just because they could be. And I never bought into that way of thinking when I had that opportunity. I expected people to listen to what’s going on and not interrupt, like you said, but I think it went too far in the States for me, personally.

Warren Huart:

It’s interesting, because I’ve seen the great producers, like working with Jack Douglas, he actually likes… He keeps the young guys quiet, definitely, but he also likes interacting with them because he realizes a 19-year-old kid’s got to have a better finger on the pulse about what’s current and hip than quite often a lot of the other people in there. So it’s that balance, isn’t it? That’s… I get, I understand what you’re saying. Good respect for everybody in a studio is going to help the project.

Tim Palmer:

Definitely. And giving… A lot of the times, people have come out of recording school now and the last time I was doing sessions in studios recording, I’d find that the guy who’d spent all that money going to recording school was not even allowed to come in the room. And I would talk to them while they were making the coffee and I’d say, “What’s the deal?” And they’d say, “Well, we can’t actually come in the room,” and I’d say, “Well, I say you can and it’s my session, so please come in.” And they would come in and be so grateful. But it seems so counterintuitive to me, the idea of having these people on, if you’re not going to give them a break and let them at least witness what’s happening.

Warren Huart:

Frankly, I’ve had so many younger guys that work for me that know newer pieces of gear like that. And they’re telling me, “Oh no, no, no, you should do this, this and this,” because I’ve been using the gear you see here for the last billion years and something new comes out and they’re way ahead of me because their world is…

Tim Palmer:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

So it’s really… Yeah. I think the analogy I always use is, if you’re writing a song with a teenage girl, listen to the teenage girl, you know what I mean?

Tim Palmer:

Of course.

Warren Huart:

She knows how to be a teenage girl, I’m not. So taking that kind of mentality, we know that there’s so much we can gather from each other. Anyway, you’re in Utopia.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

You’re involved in a lot of great records. I mean, that Local Hero soundtrack, I remember everything about that; the movie, the music, and everything.

Tim Palmer:

It was great. It was really good. I mean-

Warren Huart:

Mark Knopfler…

Tim Palmer:

What a player. Yeah. What a player and what a nice man too. He was so kind to me. Yeah, being in a studio like that, the opportunities that can come your way or fall into your lap are quite astounding. There was…

Tim Palmer:

We had a little demo studio at Utopia and Sting was in recording the demos for the Synchronicity album. He would turn up each day on his own and he was doing the sketches of how it would be. And the guy that was recording the demos was a more senior engineer, I was just an assistant, but his kitchen flooded. And obviously, for me this was a wonderful opportunity because Annie, who was our bookings lady, said, “Well, can you handle the demo room?” I said, “Yes, I can.” So she said, “In you go.” So, one minute I’m assisting, next minute, I’m recording demos with Sting. And I did a song called Tea in the Sahara and spent the day. And Sting of course is from the same part of the world as me and Mark Knopfler, which is the northeast of England, so we had a little thing in common there, but it was just wonderful to get the opportunity to, to actually record with Sting for a day.

Warren Huart:

Where are you from originally?

Tim Palmer:

I’m from Whitley Bay in Newcastle. So this accent, this Texas accent that I have confuses everyone, but it’s not even a Geordie accent because as you know, the Geordies have a completely different accent altogether. But yeah, I moved to London when I was about eight. That’s why I don’t sound like I’m from the north really, but I am. I’m a Geordie.

Tim Palmer:

But there was just great opportunities to be an assistant in those days, and another perfect example of that, “Can you work on Monday in the remix room?” This is by the time I was an engineer. “Yes, of course. What’s the session?” “It’s a band, a new band.” I said, “Great. What are we doing?” “You’ll be mixing two or three songs.” “Okay.”

Tim Palmer:

So I turn up at the session, in comes the band, and I start mixing a song called “I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight” for Cutting Crew. And of course-

Warren Huart:

Amazing.

Tim Palmer:

Let’s face it, that’s just an unbelievable piece of good luck because that session could have gone to anybody, really, but I was the one who luckily ended up on that session and somehow or other I managed to do a good enough job and the band were happy. It took a long time because, as you know, mixing… We’ve got better at mixing, I think, through the years, but in those days, mixes were very, very commonly 12, 15, sometimes 24-hour sessions. I don’t quite know why we spent so long, but they were. We did spend a long time. I was very fortunate to be involved in that song. And that was a great credit for me to get because that was like three years or two years after I joined Utopia.

Warren Huart:

I see you’ve got production and engineering credit on Kajagoogoo back in ’82.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, I did, guilty as charged. What happened there was, I was assisting for Colin Thurston again and Colin was producing with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran. It was for EMI and-

Warren Huart:

Who’s the keyboard player, for those who don’t know.

Tim Palmer:

Yes, that’s correct, for those who don’t know. And what happened there was, when it got to about 6:00 or 7:00 PM, most evenings, Colin and Nick sort of had enough and they were… They’d been doing it a lot longer than I had, so their enthusiasm was obviously not as at a high level and they were quite happy to go out for dinner and finish for the day. But with this young keen engineer, who’s happy to stay late, why wouldn’t you put him to work? So they left me to record a lot of the parts and they would come and check the parts in the morning. It was fine because it was a great opportunity for me and I got to work with the band and we worked on the record like that.

Tim Palmer:

And when the album was finished, in the old days, there was something called B-sides to be done. You remember B-sides, don’t you, Warren? Right?

Warren Huart:

Absolutely.

Tim Palmer:

Nobody really wanted to do the B-sides, but of course I did. I was happy to do that. So Colin and Nick said, “Do the B-sides with Tim and we’re all done.” So I spent a couple of weekends doing besides with Kajagoogoo and, fortunately for me, they came out really well and the label decided to put one of them or two of them, I think, on the album. And I’d asked the band-

Warren Huart:

Very nice!

Tim Palmer:

I’d asked the band if I could have demos from them and contribute and write some notes so I was prepared for these little B-side sessions, and they agreed to give me a co-production. So I started the album as an assistant and ended up producing a song and it ended up being the introduction music to the movie Sixteen Candles!

Warren Huart:

Wow!

Tim Palmer:

Yeah! And I only found that out about the Sixteen Candles about three weeks ago. I had no idea.

Warren Huart:

That was a huge ’80s movie.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, I know, I know. It was a very important one, but I just… You know what it’s like. I work in studios, mate. We don’t get out much.

Warren Huart:

Yep. With John Foxx here, they’ve got you down as mixing engineer. Now, I actually want to qualify what does that mean? Because there’s mixing and there’s mixing engineer. Did you actually mix on it or were you…?

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. I mean, these terms are very pliable, aren’t they? Let’s face it.

Warren Huart:

Exactly.

Tim Palmer:

Well, basically back in those days, and you know this very well, you made a record with a producer and you were his engineer and at the end of the project, 9 times out of 10, you continued on together as a team and mixed the record.

Warren Huart:

Absolutely.

Tim Palmer:

So you didn’t actually get that credit “mixed by” too often. A lot of the time it was just “produced by,” “engineered by.” And the engineer would have probably mixed the record pretty much on his own in those days and the producer would have chipped in with what they wanted to change, which is sort of how it is now, but the credits have changed around. So what happened on the John Foxx record was I had started to work a lot with a German producer called Zeus B. Held and I’d assisted for him on an album by a band from Birmingham called Fashion. They made a fabulous electronic-sounding record in the ’80s and I was the assistant on that record and Zeus liked me, so I continued to be his engineer and we worked on the first Dead Or Alive album together. And we did John Foxx, as you said, and we did a band called This Island Earth.

Tim Palmer:

And on John Foxx, it was a mixing session. He brought me in to mix, so I would just mix away and Zeus would be next to me and if he didn’t like something, I would change it, and that’s the way it was. So that’s basically what… But he wasn’t really hands-on on the console. I was the one who was hands-on on the console, but it was his production and his idea.

Tim Palmer:

One session that I was assistant on, which was great back in those days, was the session was booked in and I said, “Well, who… What is the session?” Telly Savalas is coming in.

Warren Huart:

Oh, wow! Kojak is in the building!

Tim Palmer:

Kojak was in the building. He came in, he looked exactly how I wanted him to, a big American movie star. He had the big, deep voice because he’d had a number one single in the UK.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Tim Palmer:

You remember that? I don’t know if he did in the States, but he came in and he sent me out. I went out on a food run and he tipped me, which you don’t didn’t really get tips in the UK as an assistant. But Telly said, “Yeah, just get some… get this and get that. Get some burgers for me, Timmy, baby.” And he actually called me Timmy baby, so that was even better. And I got to keep the change and-

Warren Huart:

Timmy baby!

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, it was great. It was great. Telly was great.

Warren Huart:

Oh, that’s amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I think there was a couple of those, wasn’t there? David of Starsky and Hutch.

Tim Palmer:

Soul, David Soul.

Warren Huart:

David Soul had number one singles in England. It’s weird, those kind of classic American TV shows. We loved it.

Tim Palmer:

We did, and Britain, as you know, our radio and the way that we listen to radio is always very different to the way that people heard music in the States. And I think that’s a big part of… I think that really shaped the way that as producers and engineers, we have a different take on stuff because when we listened to the radio, we basically had Radio 1 and that was sort of it. Our parents listened to Radio 2, but we listened to Radio 1. And within Radio 1, you would hear everything from Sly and the Family Stone to The Clash to Elvis Presley. It was all in there. So we grew up and we would hear September by Earth, Wind and Fire just as much as we’d hear something edgy. And in the States, when people grew up, I often meet a lot of musicians and they grew up on classic rock. They just listened to the classic rock station and or their alternative station.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, one genre, yeah.

Tim Palmer:

So when you say to them, “Have you ever heard this or that,” they’re often… they’ve never heard of these artists. But we got to hear so much and it was all mixed together. And for most of my life, it was all on shortwave. We didn’t get the stereo sounding radio till later. So the other thing which was great was everything had an equal playing field. I mean, playing an Elvis record had the same chance of sounding great on the radio as something that was contemporary recorded. So you basically judged music on the emotional content on the songs alone.

Warren Huart:

One thing to add to your point there, I think, for those people that are watching this in America, the other thing about the UK that we were blessed with was we have one time zone. So Radio 1 played to the whole country, where you might get a big radio station in America with maybe a million people listening. That’s a huge radio station. I remember when I was in a band, we had a song played in drive time and our label was freaking out, and I was like, “Oh, why? What’s so good?” They’re like, “16 million people are sitting in their car listening to your song at the moment.” It was mind blowing.

Tim Palmer:

Absolutely. That was the same for television too. I mean, when we had BBC 1 and when my father worked in television, his shows would get millions and millions of viewers because we only had two or three channels. There wasn’t much to choose from. So it was a wonderful opportunity to actually make something and actually know that it’s either going to be heard or seen.

Warren Huart:

I’ve got your old music out here, so I’m going to… I have no problem with going through this because it’s really fantastic. Look, so many of these albums I own, bought them at the time. I mean, I had Local Hero because anything by Martin Knopfler, especially the late ’70s, early to mid-’80s, is some of the best music he ever recorded. I mean, I’m a huge fan of his playing, his singing. Frankly, his songwriting is unbelievable. When you think he wrote Private Dancer and songs like that, it’s mind blowing.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

To write from that perspective…

Tim Palmer:

I saw a great documentary the other day with him and Brian Johnson, because he’s a Geordie as well, of course. And he was in the band Geordie. They were both walking around Whitley Bay, which is where I grew up, and it was just fantastic for me to hear those two guys talking about how they grew up in that same environment.

Warren Huart:

There’s a book by Charlie Gillett called Sound of the City and he makes the argument about some of the… in England and in America as well, the industrial and the poorer areas always produce the best talent because you had to fight — Life wasn’t… You weren’t laying in the beach in Hawaii.

Tim Palmer:

No. And reading Elton John’s book recently, that definitely proves that point too. I mean, he really went through a lot in his early career, didn’t he? That was fascinating book.

Warren Huart:

We’ve got The Mighty Lemon Drops. I remember them very well.

Tim Palmer:

When I first started to produce, I got caught up in the more synthy, poppy world. So obviously, working with keyboards, working with all those sort of sequencers… I even did a record with Rick Wright from Pink Floyd. I was a co-producer on a solo album he did, which was all done in the Fairlight. And I worked a lot within the new technology. And it was strange, because it was when I got the opportunity to work with Robert Plant, and he wanted to work with me because I’d worked with this new stuff, but it was after I’d worked with Robert that I began to get into the area of music that I wanted to work in, which was bands. And The Mighty Lemon Drops were one of those bands. The Mission were one of those bands. Big Country, James, all those sort of bands like that from that particular period were all out of the fact that I was now finally accepted that I could work with a guitar band.

Warren Huart:

So that seems like a big turning point, then, working with Robert Plant. How did that come about?

Tim Palmer:

Well, it came about because basically, Robert had decided that… I mean, you know what he’s like. He doesn’t rest on his laurels. He doesn’t stick to the sound that he always has success with. He’s always trying new things. He wanted to experiment a little bit with some of the new keyboard sounds. He was` a fan of bands like Depeche Mode. He was a fan of a lot of the modern-sounding music, and thought, “Well, I want some of that incorporated into my next album.”

Tim Palmer:

So he was reaching out to find a young engineer who knew this stuff. And my manager, Sandy Roberton, my manager of over 30 years… over 35 years, I think, actually. Sandy from Worlds End. He had found out that Phil Carson was looking for a young engineer. So he suggested me, and Robert Plant literally called me out of the blue. And I thought it was a windup. I thought somebody was winding me up, because I was on a session, and this guy rings up and says, “Hello, it’s Robert Plant.” And I just thought it was some sort of joke. But I met him and we got on really well.

Tim Palmer:

And luckily for me, I got the gig, and worked on… The first album that I worked… I worked with him on about three or four albums, but the first one was an album called Shaken ‘n’ Stirred that was recorded at [Marker 00:27:32] Studios. And it was a full band lineup, Richie Hayward from Little Feat, Robbie Blunt, Paul Martinez. It was incredible. And I was extraordinarily out of my depth. I mean, I’ve told this story many times, but I literally was out of my depth, because I’d spent my time working with all this other type of music, which I said, which there was a lot of DI boxes. And we did vocals and guitars and things, but I wasn’t used to the full band setup of… You know, how do you do this? You’ve got six people wanting all different can balances.

Tim Palmer:

So I was really dropped in it and very nearly didn’t pull through, because the session took a long time to get to shape because of me, and Robert went and complained to the studio owner and said, “Your studio is crap. Nothing’s working.” And the studio owner said, “No, it’s that guy in there. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.” And luckily for me, Robert enjoyed working with me, and he stuck with me, and we got through it, and I was very proud of the way that record sounded. It was quite an unusual record, but Little by Little is still, I think, a great track. I really love it.

Warren Huart:

Two things spring to mind, which you and I actually talked about a few months ago on the phone. A little bit of… In those days, the sort of earn as you learn mentality.

Tim Palmer:

Oh, God, yeah.

Warren Huart:

One of the things that I always speak out against is this sort of expert, elitist mentality, when you and I know all of the best music ever made is made by flying by the seat of your pants. It’s made by a bunch… And it’s not even necessarily an age thing. You could be 60 and still thinking that way. But yeah, a guy who’s a teenager with a record deal goes into a studio with an idea for a song and a lyric and something that’s new and edgy, and you don’t want the experts there homogenizing it and making it perfect.

Warren Huart:

And so you… Yes, Robert Plant is a very smart guy. He saw something in you. Number one, I think, you hit the nail on the head. He liked working with you. There’s always a thousand people that can do any one job. We work with the people we like. So yeah, those are the two things that strike me, is like, yeah, okay, maybe it’s going to take twice as long to get that part down, but you know what? It’s going to be edgier. It’s going to be a… Might try something, might be something will go wrong which actually ends up being right, i.e. pretty much everything that The Beatles did. You know, like, “Oh, that accidentally fed back. Oh, that sounds good. How do we do that?”

Tim Palmer:

Necessity is the mother of all invention, and sometimes you think, “I can’t do that. I’ll do this instead.” And that actually ends up being something that’s very special. In the early Bowie records, when you hear that extra bar that’s before the first chorus in The Jean Genie, you know that the band… it up and that they accidentally put an extra bar in, so David just went, “Get back, Jojo. Jean Genie.” Hey, so you’ve got this weird piece in there that couldn’t be planned, but it’s the best thing about it. And later in my career, I got the chance to work with David, and he said, what you said, is basically, allow things to happen. And if everything’s too planned, and you try and tell people what to do, then you’re never going to get any of that special stuff that happens organically, those magic moments.

Tim Palmer:

So yeah, it’s funny, because being out of your depth is very challenging, but I don’t know. I think there is something to be said about it. Learn as you go along, as you said. I certainly had to learn as I went along. It’s just that opportunity to be able to relate to someone one-on-one has been taken away from us so many times now, especially as a mixer. And that was sort of half the battle to be a mixing engineer, was not only do you have your own vision of how you think this mix should be, but you had an artist come in, and they expressed to you something they were trying to achieve, and you read that, and you had to make that work.

Tim Palmer:

Now, when you mix, you’re working in isolation, so you don’t have that vision from the artist. So you really have to be on the case even more, because they’ll just listen to it, and they’ll say, “I like it.” Or, “I don’t like it.” “I’ll use that mix,” or, “I won’t use that mix.” So there was an opportunity to have a relationship with an artist and be able to understand each other and push each other’s buttons and things and make something special happen. But we’ve sort of lost a bit of that now, and I think that’s a sad loss for us. And it’s also a lot less fun. Because bands coming down the studio, it could be a pain in the ass, but there’s a hell of a lot of fun that went on too.

Warren Huart:

Obviously, there was a period of time when that was the contemporary music and that was how contemporary successful music was recorded. Therefore, you know where I’m going, there was a budget. You could go into a beautiful room where you could mic multiple things in different directions and all kinds of fun things. And I definitely do miss that. How do you find yourself bringing that energy of creativity into making records or mixing records or anything now, considering you don’t have at least six weeks to do things anymore?

Tim Palmer:

Well, budget, it’s a really interesting topic, actually, because if you remember, in the UK as a producer, you really didn’t get involved in the budget. They would ask you to produce a record, and you’d say, “I need to go to rich farm for three weeks. Then we need to mix it at Olympic for two weeks.” And no one would ever say to you, “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s over budget.” Having to think about budget was only something that happened when I came to America to make records, and everything was budgeted out and had to be approved. But in the UK, the A&R man, if you needed an extra week, because the vocals weren’t the way that you hoped they would be, you’d just ring them up and say, “Can I have another week?” And they would say, “Sure, no problem.” Hopefully. Most times, I’d say that they would.

Tim Palmer:

As you said, there wasn’t really too much compromise going on, which can also have a danger, too. When you’re working with an artist and you have an unlimited budget, it’s really hard to ever finish because if you can try something and you’ve got the time to do it, why not? Sometimes it’s better to actually have a time when you say, “Well, we’ve run out of money now, so let’s work with what we have.” Because you could literally go on forever. So there is some good about having some sort of restriction.

Warren Huart:

Hitting on something I noticed immediately coming from the UK to the US, and I’ve said this a few times before. I remember getting bands signed, one of which was my own band, in the UK by producing, engineering, co-writing, playing on, material, getting it signed, and they remixed it then went back to my mixers and then put it out, and it charted. But there was no… Here, I came to America thinking, “Oh, this is the way it’s done.” And the first band I developed, I took it in, and they went, “Thanks very much.” And then they took the band and then they gave it to the one of five producers and five mixers that was making every record in America, and all of the soul was completely sucked out of it.

Warren Huart:

And it became very… That’s the one thing. It’s very different now because it has to be, because they don’t have the budgets anymore, but it used to be very business. I suppose maybe I’m being naive and in saying this, but it always felt like the creativity came first in the UK growing up, and when I came here, the business came first.

Tim Palmer:

Well, you’re 100% right. And another thing that was very, very different was, if you remember in the UK, the A&R were almost the enemy in a way. They approved the budgets, and obviously, there were some great A&R people. There’s no doubt about it, but bands generally really were very, very worried about the A&R people, and they didn’t want them telling them what to do. So there was always a constant struggle between what the record company wanted and what the band would want. And most of the bands would say, “… you, that’s not the way it’s going to be.” And eventually, the A&R man would say, “Okay, fair enough. We’ll do that.” I mean, I can remember on the first Mission album that I did, Wayne said that he refused to allow the A&R man to ever visit the studio until it was finished.

Tim Palmer:

So the first time Charlie Ayer was allowed down to the studio, he was the A&R man for the first couple of Mission albums, was when we’d finished mixing it at Utopia, and we played him the album. But that’s the way it was. The bands, they didn’t want to… Everything now has changed. It’s like everything about the persona of an artist and the secretive side to them and the way that they want to do things is all in the open now. Everything’s on social media. There’s no fantasy about where they go and what they do. Everything’s out there. And the first thing I noticed in America was the A&R people had much more of a role in making records than they ever did in the UK. It was very, very different.

Tim Palmer:

But budget, ultimately, when I moved to America and when things began to change after the music industry started to slip into streaming and all things like that, that was the reason that I built my first studio, was basically because I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was compromising my work for the sake of the budget. Because it got to a point where it would be, “Here’s the fund.” They call it a “fund.” “The fund to make this single work and get it mixed and everything that you need to do and be done is this amount of money.” And I’d say, “Okay.”

Tim Palmer:

So you go to a studio, you’d have to call the studios yourself, do a deal with the studio, haggle, which I hated to do. That was not what I wanted to do ever. Haggle with the studio, get the price down, rent the gear, get the artist in, and then you’d work on the mix. And in the morning, if you thought, “I’d like to spend at least another four or five hours getting the guitar levels right,” you’d think about, “Well, hang on. If I spend another day in the studio, that means actually I won’t get paid anything.” And I thought, “Well, this is just ridiculous.” So it’s far better to own your own place, have your own gear, take that money, and then spend as long as you… need to make it great, because you’ve got to feel good about it. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing this?

Warren Huart:

Now and Zen, that is an absolutely amazing record.

Tim Palmer:

After Shaken ‘n’ Stirred, Robert decided he’d have a fresh approach, new band. So everyone went, and the only thing that went across from the two albums was me, actually. I moved across to do the next album, Now and Zen. And I was co-producer of… Basically I was engineer/co-producer on Shaken ‘n’ Stirred, but I was a proper producer of Now and Zen, so I got my name first next to Robert’s and Phil, who was the other producer. And that was my first proper production.

Tim Palmer:

But yeah, it was the 80s. Everything was like… As you can hear from that record, everything was really clean. That was just the time that we were in. We made the guitar sounds, a lot of them are very, very precise, very clean and sparkly. It almost sounds like it was recorded digitally, that album, when I listen back to it now, but it wasn’t. It was just very carefully thought out. But yeah, Robert was giving up smoking at the time, so he wasn’t always in the best of moods. Yeah.

Tim Palmer:

It was a challenging record to make, because as a producer, one of the dilemmas you’re faced with is that you know the sort of record that you think an audience would like to hear, and you also have tremendous respect for the artists, for the record they want to make. And those two things don’t always tally up. So obviously with Robert Plant, I knew that his fans, especially in America, would like to hear thick, strong drums, big guitars, you know what I mean? You know the sort of thing, the Zeppelin thing. And that was not what he wanted to do at all. He was co-writing with all sorts of different people, and we had a lot of sequencers on there.

Tim Palmer:

So somehow, it was a case of trying to make a great record that actually encompasses some of what Robert does well and some of the new stuff at the same time. And it was always a little bit of a battle, but it was a great record to be part of, I must say. And we had a lot of great things happen. Like it was the first time Jimmy and Robert had worked together. So Jimmy Page came to the studio, and…

Warren Huart:

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. I was excited, like, “Oh, can we talk about Jimmy Page?” How was that?

Tim Palmer:

It was just… He was perfect. He was just like a cartoon character of himself. He had a guy, he had his man. His man comes in, sets up his amps, and he even had one of those units, you’d know more about them than me, where you can adjust the amount of power so that the…

Warren Huart:

Sure. Power soak.

Tim Palmer:

Power soak. He had a power soak so he could get the AC30 or whatever just cooking, just nice. He had it all set up. The Les Paul was there. Jimmy wanders in. He looked just how I wanted him to look. And Robert and Jimmy were chatting away. The guy actually lit a cigarette for Jimmy and put it in the end of the Les Paul, which was quite special, I thought. So Jimmy puts the guitar on, and he puts the guitar on, and he starts pulling those faces and the cigarette’s burning at the end, and he’s doing all this, and it was just great. And of course, I stepped right back, to the point of, “Look, here’s some tracks, just do what you do, and I’ll go through it later.” I just wanted to enjoy the moment and let Jimmy do… I’m not going to tell Jimmy Page what to do.

Warren Huart:

I was about to say, yeah.

Tim Palmer:

And the other thing, of course, is that as you know, in the UK, your assistant engineers tend to be AWOL a lot of the time, and the technical staff. But for some reason, there was a couple of maintenance guys working at the back. I had two assistants that day. Everyone wanted to be on the session. And yeah, he played some really… I mean, I’ve always thought that Jimmy… I mean, for me, Jimmy inherently is a sort of sloppy type player, but the notes that he chooses are the ones that I love. I’d rather hear Jimmy Page play than hear somebody play perfectly and all that stuff, because Jimmy picks out notes that you just go, “Wow, that’s just amazing.” And that’s true to most of the guitar players that I love, whether it’s John McGeoch, or Wayne from The Mission. They just play notes. They play notes to me that musically really moved me. And yeah, Jimmy’s great. I loved it.

Warren Huart:

Must be about three years ago. We were just started, a couple of years into doing Produce Like a Pro. I started thinking, “This is going to be really great, because I can start interviewing people that I grew up absolutely loving.” And one of those, of course, was John. And I had seen John play when I must’ve been 16, and he had a band called The Armoury Show, which was with…

Tim Palmer:

Richard Jobson.

Warren Huart:

And John, of course, had played with Siouxsie, and he was like the archetypal guitar player for guitar players, because he had a JC-120 for his chorus sound, and then a Marshall half stack for his driven sound. And he just had a foot, an A/B switch, and he’d go between the two. And I remember he was playing a Yamaha SG 2000, and I had to have that guitar. I needed the JC-120. All his parts were amazing. He was obviously a very fluid, incredible guitar player, but his note choices and his parts were amazing. So I got super excited. So I looked him up online, and he died a few years ago.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, I know. There’s a good documentary you can watch. It’s a two-part one on YouTube, and it’s very good. It’s really good. I mean, the Banshees… I mean, I could just listen to the guitar parts on the Siouxsie and the Banshees records and try… I mean, I watch those YouTube videos and I try and figure them out, because I just love it so much. I mean, that’s my sort of guitar playing, definitely.

Tim Palmer:

I’ve worked with some of the greats. I mean, I worked with Zakk Wylde, and he’s just mindblowing. For an example of what he does, when he was set up, and I would sit down next to him, and he’d play, I would literally laugh, because it was just so incredible to watch the way he played. He’s just the king of that. But it’s a whole different world, like you said, to what McGeoch’s doing. That’s a whole other thing. It’s almost like he’s playing a different instrument, really, isn’t it?

Warren Huart:

I have to ask this question, and this is maybe my own… My thing. Because I feel like there’s two things going on in the music industry at the moment, and there’s the lack of… We’re all calling it out, going, “We wish there was more guitar bands, we wish this,” and everybody always talks about that kind of stuff. And I don’t disagree. But I also find when I am working with guitar bands, I have to fight them to make the songs hookier. Why is that? Why? Because you put on… We’re talking about Hong Kong Garden, that’s a fricking hit song. (singing) You know, you can sing it. But if I sung that melody in a room with a band now, they go, “Ooh, it’s a bit pop.”

Tim Palmer:

I mean, the thing about now, which really shocks me, and I was going through loads of different names the other day because I was putting together a committee for something to do with the Academy, and I was looking UP different artists. And it’s amazing how much music is out there that just goes under the radar for me that…

Warren Huart:

Yeah, that’s very true.

Tim Palmer:

Some of the bands, I’m almost embarrassed and I’m like, “Wow, I haven’t heard of this group.” And I’ll put in them into Spotify and listen, and think, “This band’s really cool,” and then find out that they’ve had 300 million streams. And this happens more often than you think. I mean, there’s so much good music out there that… We’ve lost the filter. That’s the point. And that was one of the great things about radio, was that at least it gave bands the opportunity to show what they do to a mass audience and it being played more than once. So you hear a song on KROQ, and you think, “Nah, I don’t know.” But then you hear it on Tuesday and Wednesday and then Thursday, and by Friday, you say, “I get it now. I get it, and I really like it.”

Tim Palmer:

And we need that sometimes. We need to be able to get people to hear things more than once. Then you would go and buy an album, you spend $15 on it, you’re going to… listen to every track, because you’d spent all that time. You invest yourself in that project. But that filter that we had, it’s really been detrimental, I think, ultimately. It’s like food. They say you have to try a food 15 times or 10 times for a new taste to get your head around it, and we know that’s true. And music’s the same. If you’re going to do something, particularly that is a slightly obtuse or creative, that takes the mind a couple of goes to get their head round, then it’s going to be hard to get that across in one play. And that’s why a lot of the time, I think these labels stick to songs that you basically get them on first listen, but you know what? You get sick of them after the second listen, that’s the problem.

Tim Palmer:

But it’s very much music that we hear is created to be liked very quickly, whereas we didn’t think about that in those days. And we knew that we had a label who would support an artist for maybe three or four albums before they got a breakthrough. So there was the staying power, and there was the chance to learn to love this new thing. And it’s sad. It’s one of the sad things, is that filter. I think it was very important, and it’s gone. I mean, getting onto a big TV show, the labels controlled that. They could say, “We can get you on Saturday Night Live, we can do this, we can do that.” And there would be loads of people watching those shows, and they would see these new bands. But now even that doesn’t seem to have any great effect.

Warren Huart:

I can’t overstress how important Now and Zen is, but we can move pretty quickly to where you know my love is lying, and that’s working with Bowie. I mean, I know when I talked to Bob Clearmountain about working with Bowie, that was the most excited he was. That was the pinnacle for him, and that was really early in his career. So is that something that mirrors your experience?

Tim Palmer:

There’s definitely no doubt about it, that I worked with David Bowie when I was very young, too. I mean, it was just before my first daughter was born, so I was probably 28. And what an incredible opportunity. I can remember at one point when we were mixing the first album being in New York and thinking, “I’m in New York City, and I’m working with David Bowie, and there’s Iggy Pop sitting there, and there’s Brian Eno, who’s popped in.” And I was like, “Wah!” It was pretty… special, I must say.

Tim Palmer:

But yeah, it was very fortunate to get involved in that. And once again, it was one of those things where, because I’d worked with a lot of guitar bands, like The Mission, and The House of Love, and this sort of thing. When Reeves and David were looking for an engineer to engineer and co-produce the first record. I think it was Billy Duffy, actually. That’s the story he tells me, anyway. Billy said to Reeves, “You should check out Tim Palmer.” And luckily for me, he did, and I got the chance to have a conversation with David. And he was at a point where he was ready to move away from being in that bubble of being the pop star and making music for the masses and wanted to go back into a much more creative zone, or at least a carefree zone, that’s for sure. And I was the guy who was lucky enough to be part of that. And yeah, it was incredible.

Warren Huart:

So you did both the Tin Machine records, that’s correct?

Tim Palmer:

Yes, I did. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

You know what? I don’t know where to start on this one, because I have about 25,000 questions working on that, because the Tin Machine records at the time were some of my favorite albums. I suppose I’m… As a big fan of any artist, I just let anything in and I get to soak it in. And the thing about the Tin Machine stuff is… For Reeves, actually, what was interesting is because as experimental as he now gets, especially like playing with The Cure, I saw him with The Cure a couple of years ago.

Tim Palmer:

Done that for a long time now. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, done it for a long time. This was some of his most straight-ahead rock mixed in with some insanity as well. It wasn’t as crazy as he got with with Earthling, but at the same time, it was like… You’re right. It was a return to rock, hence the name Tin Machine, not a Bowie solo record.

Tim Palmer:

It wasn’t intended to be a Tin Machine record. That was something that it became, okay. So when I originally got the phone call to go to Switzerland to work with David and Reeves, it was still a David- Bowie’s-next-record situation. And of course, when you’re working with someone of the caliber of David Bowie, you don’t say, “Can I listen to the demos first?”

Tim Palmer:

So I was in from the first phone call, and I actually messed up, and he told me a date I was supposed to fly, and I didn’t bother checking my ticket, because I was so excited about going that when he told me the date, I remembered it. I didn’t need to look at the ticket. And they changed the date. So I was actually at home, waiting to fly to Switzerland the next day, when I had a phone call from the studio, and the owner of the studio said in a French accent, “Why are you not here, Mr. Palmer?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, they’re all here. Everyone’s waiting for you.” And I was mortified, as you can imagine. Of all the people that you don’t want to turn up for on the first day.

Warren Huart:

A day late.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. A day late. So I said, “Oh God, you better put me on the phone.” So I spoke to David, and I said, “Look, there’s been a terrible error.” And he laughed and he said, “It’s okay, no problem. Don’t sweat it. I live close by, we’ll stop for the day and we’ll start tomorrow.” So I arrived a day late. But yeah, I worked with David and Reeves and we worked on ideas for songs, and after a couple of weeks, David talked about how he had envisaged the idea of getting Hunt and Tony to be involved in the project because he’d worked with them on the records that he produced.

Tim Palmer:

Tony and Hunt flew in and the energy changed very dramatically because they’re crazy guys. They’re really fun, very energetic, always mucking around, they’re not the sort of people who are sitting around overthinking things and overthinking arrangements, they just want to go and play because that’s what they love to do.

Tim Palmer:

And so suddenly the vibe on the session changed and it was like, “Okay, we’re going to record this as a band.” And the way the Mountain Studios is set up is it’s a tiny little hole in the wall, a control room with a big Neve, which is beautiful, but it’s certainly not luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. And there’s tie lines through to the casino at Montreux, and of course that’s huge.

Tim Palmer:

So we put the drums, Hunt in the middle of the casino, we set up Tony out there and Reeve set his guitars in some iso booths or whatever, but essentially, everyone was in that room. David, I set him up with an SM58, and he just sung with a handheld with them.

Tim Palmer:

Hunt was unhappy that there wasn’t enough sound coming out of his drum kit to feel it right, so we ended up renting a PA. So the PA pumped the sound of the kit even louder into the casinos. So I walked around the top of the casino on the next level up and placed various microphones around the top of the casino, which was incredible because it was… On the record, if you listen to the first track Heavens, and you hear, it really does sound like a nice lexicon reverb or whatever, but it’s actually the sound of that casino, it was so long and natural and fantastic.

Tim Palmer:

So that part of the record that we recorded there is very open and very reverberated, and the other part of the same record was recorded at Compass Point, where we were in a small 70s, dead sort of sounding room, so songs like Crack City and I Can’t Read are right in your face, so that was sort of cool and not planned, but it worked out well for that.

Tim Palmer:

But yeah, Hunt and Tony just wanted to play and David being the sort of person that he is, where he allows people to bring to the project what they do best. He doesn’t tell you what to do. He didn’t tell me how to set his vocal mic up, and I was obviously really scared about his headphone balance, is he going to be difficult? He was so easy. He’s such a pro. It’s just incredible I think, that I had the opportunity to record him singing, I’m so fortunate to have done that, and to watch his process and to allow these musicians to play.

Tim Palmer:

And I was sitting at the console as they were running through tracks and oftentimes, if he didn’t catch it in the first take, that was the one they wanted to keep, so some of those songs on that first album, you can actually hear me dialing in the EQ on some of the symbols and things you can hear a few as I’m trying to find certain things. Because they’re like, “That’s it, we’re done now.” And then just walk out.

Tim Palmer:

If Hunt didn’t like his can balance, if he wanted more, instead of saying, “Can I have more symbols in my cans?” As he was playing, he would just be out there and he would just grab the microphones and pull them closer to the symbols and he’d just carry on playing right in the middle of a take. He was great, he was so funny.

Tim Palmer:

But there was so much energy and so many songs were being written and recorded, and it was just a wonderful experience for me, I must admit. David taught me basically, I think the biggest thing I took away from all that was the fact that, don’t overthink things.

Tim Palmer:

Coming through the 80s as engineers, we wanted things to be perfect. We would purposely listen to a guitar and solo, and if it was breaking up a little in solo, we’d be very upset about it, because somebody else might listen to your multi-track, we wouldn’t want that to happen.

Tim Palmer:

Everything had to be just so, and of course, that’s not the way music is, and that’s never been important. And I think being forced into that situation with David, where there was a lot of things going down that that I was, is this going to be okay? And David would be like, “No, no, leave it, leave it alone because by the time we finish, this may actually be your favorite part of the track.” And he was often right.

Tim Palmer:

Occasional strange notes that were here or strange bits of feedback that you might want to in the 80s have cleaned them up painstakingly, that’s not what music’s about. And as I said, luckily for me, I got to learn a lot of lessons and learn by my mistakes fairly early on, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to watch someone like David Bowie and Reeves and Hun and Tony, all those guys and Kevin Armstrong just playing together.

Warren Huart:

So incredible. I love the little bit you’re touching on there, because I do think it’s about acquired knowledge, isn’t it for us? It’s like you acquire when to do the right thing. Meaning there are times if I’m making a silly damn record, if you’re working with those kind of players, your job is to replicate exactly what they’re doing in the cleanest possible way.

Warren Huart:

But when you’re in a situation like that, actually you want to be capturing not only the excitement, but if you can, kind of adding to the excitement, because one of the things I think about, if you walk into a live room, for instance, and a band is playing, the drums, especially something like the Sales brothers, I mean the rhythm section must have just been like, I can imagine just absolutely deafening. Now, you put mics in front of it, close mics you pull them up on faders, it’s probably quite polite, but it’s painful in the room. So our job is to take that and exaggerate that experience, get people to feel what it actually feels like to be standing in a room with a rhythm section as amazing as that powering on.

Tim Palmer:

Like you said, when you’re standing next to someone like Hunt playing drums, or anyone who’s playing drums, your ears are compressing naturally. You come into the studio and listen to it on a small pair of speakers, and that’s why drummers walk in and say, “That’s not what it sounds like out there.” And you say, “Well, it sort of does actually,” but they say, “No, it doesn’t.”

Tim Palmer:

I remember our chief engineer when I was very young, our chief engineer, the drummer kept saying, “That’s not my snare sound.” And he said, “Well, it is actually, it’s a very good microphone and it’s capturing your sound.” And he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like that out there.” So he said, “Just go over.” It was one of those Westlake rooms. And he said, “Just go over next to that speaker over there.” And he turned the volume up full and he pressed play on the thing, and then the drum sound was like deafening in the control room, and the drummer went, “Oh yeah, that’s it, that’s it.”

Tim Palmer:

Because it’s obviously hearing something brought down to the level that we need to, you’re right, you need to compensate for what we’re losing by hearing it like that, and one of the things that’s been great about the modern plugins and the access to distortion units so much more than we had then, and we used to overload channels or things like that, or overload AMS units, whatever they were. But now, the amount of distortion and side chain compression and all this stuff that you can replicate the sound of energy is quite stunning what we have now at our fingertips, I think.

Warren Huart:

This year alone has been the year of the distortion saturation plugin. I think every single company has brought out, not just one, but multiple versions. A couple of absolutely fantastic that I’m loving, without necessarily naming names, but the reality is like, I think we’re back to a little bit of what you were touching on with the over cleanliness, the reality is, with so many virtual instruments now, we don’t get that sound of the room, the sound of the mic pre-accidentally overloading, something red-lining in the chain, all of this kind of stuff. Maybe the mic SBL can’t handle it.

Warren Huart:

So, we don’t get that built in wrongness that we got from completely analog and tape, so sometimes you get the Vienna Symphony, Bechstein piano, and it’s like so pretty and beautiful and perfect, which I always find hilarious because when you and I first started, we coveted those sounds. We were like, “Oh my God.”

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, it’s true.

Warren Huart:

And now they’re ordinary.

Tim Palmer:

Well, there is a case of my mage Chris Sheldon always says, “Well, you have all the gear and no idea.” And there is a little bit of that I think with all these plugins, because at the end of the day, you have to have an idea of what you want to do, and you have to get to the point where you go, “That’s what I’m looking for, there it is.”

Tim Palmer:

And we used to get to it by overloading a delay, overloading a channel, and it wasn’t perfect, but it did the job and we got what we wanted emotionally. And I think that’s the thing is, you’re trying to reach an emotional space with something, whether it’s a guitar or a snare drum, you want it to be nasty or you want it to be warm and there’s just a million ways to get to it. And you can get to that I think easier now, I think we have a lot of control to be able to do that.

Tim Palmer:

And I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I think ultimately the power that we have as mixing engineers and as recording engineers now, it’s all good. You can make changes now in a second that will be heard by every single listener. And when I say that, I mean, when we argue about, should the high hat come up a little bit in that? I need a little bit more 10K on the high hat. That’s great, and everyone’s entitled to their opinion of how that should be. And that’s fine, but guess what? Every headphone, speaker, big speaker, small speaker, radio, whatever, it’s all going to affect the high-end differently. So your high hat balance is in every speaker listen to it on from this point onwards. It’s probably going to be affected more than the amount that you’re changing it on this mix.

Tim Palmer:

So, no, I wouldn’t be rude to anyone about it, but that’s just the truth. You are not going to hear on some fancy, bright speakers and you go, “Oh, the high hat’s a bit loud.” But with the modern technology, we can do things like musically make things better. And when you change something musically, everyone will hear it on every system.

Tim Palmer:

So you find a bit of guitar in the first place, this sort of strange couple of notes and you think, wow, that’s interesting. That’s really cool, I’ll loop that, and I’ll use that in the second half of each of the choruses and make a little part out of that. Then when somebody listens to it, whether it’s your grandma or whatever, they’re responding emotionally to music, and they’re hearing that thing.

Tim Palmer:

And in the old days of mixing, it was really hard to do that because before AMS units where you could sample things, are you going to rent another 24 track machine and try and move something from one thing over to the other? We didn’t do that. We stayed very pure to what we were given.

Tim Palmer:

And mixing now is way more than that, way more, and a lot more is expected of us because we have this tool. Now I call what I do is almost predixing. I call it predixing because it really is producing a mixing. When we made records in the 70s and 80s and 90s, we talked about budget. We had a budget, we had studios that were great. We had mics that were great. We had players that were great. We had producers and engineers that were great.

Tim Palmer:

Nowadays, there’s a lot of music being made where they can’t afford the good gear. They can’t afford the fancy studios. They can’t afford the time, that’s the most important thing. We put a lot of time into these things. Let’s try this maybe we could try that there. No, that doesn’t work. Maybe we could try that there with a different sound. No, that doesn’t work. We keep going until we get to what we want.

Tim Palmer:

Nowadays, a band may have a couple of days in the studio and they will be at a point where they’ll be like, “That’s fine. That’s good enough, let’s move on.” Now at my level where I’m mixing, I can come in as a producer at the end of the line and say, “Hey, lads, this is great but that little guitar part at the front, I’m going to double it with like a Zeppelin tremolo, and I’m going to use that as a hook and I’m going to put an octave on it and I’m going to use a little AlterBoy plugin, and I’m going to put an octave on it, and now it’s become a thing. And I’ll use that here, here and here. Okay. Here, it seems like it’s not moving anymore, so now maybe I’m going to chop up that base or maybe I’ll redo the base in the second verse to get it to move a bit more. And here I might add some percussion, whatever.”

Tim Palmer:

So you do all these things and going into it. And of course, there’s a chance that they’ll say that’s not what we want at all, but at least you’ve given them that option. They can say fuck you, we like it the way it was, but nine times out of 10, from what I see, people are grateful for that extra effort that you put in now as a mixing engineer and it’s almost required.

Tim Palmer:

And in fact, it’s required to the point that sometimes they don’t even mention it. You can sometimes play new parts and they’ll say, “Yeah, sounds pretty good.” And you say, “Did you notice the fact that there’s a brand new guitar part with a hook on it?” And of course they’re like, “Oh yeah, sounds great. But it’s like, no, well that’s your job, you’re the mixer.” But that’s what we do now, and it’s changed so much.

Warren Huart:

You’re opening a massive can of worms here, this is such a huge discussion when I think about it, because there’s sort of six or one half a dozen, because I agree with everything. There was a lot more commitment made. Up and coming, you’d commit to sounds and parts. So the one argument for me is like also some of my favorite albums ever didn’t have a mixer. They were mixed by the producers and engineers.

Tim Palmer:

By the engineers, absolutely, yeah.

Warren Huart:

And then we got to this phase in the mid-90s, where mixers… This is going to be really contentious. I’m setting it up here. When mixes sort of got used to having those records to mix, they were charging an absolute fortune to sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust over something that maybe you had spent three months recording, but the label insisted they needed John Smith, the hip mixer of the day, and it would come back and I don’t know, I’m sure you had this experience, you come back and you’re like, “Yeah, they used a little less delay. They put a tiny bit more reverb on the snare or something.” You know what I mean?

Tim Palmer:

I agree, but that’s, and it always was. I mean, unless somebody was doing something more drastic than that, there was a lot of… and it was all about getting someone’s name on it, because they thought that radio would see that name on there and they’d get played.

Tim Palmer:

But we know that if you’re working with a great song and the song is great and the parts are great, and it’s performed well, unless you really stop the mix, you’d have to seriously it up. Then the song is what’s going to be successful.

Tim Palmer:

I mean, you put the radio on all the time and you’ll hear a song and you’ll go, I love this song. What’s the mix sound like? But that doesn’t matter because it’s got a vibe. So yes, you’re right. That was where it was just a marketing thing. But the truth is, when you worked as a team, you could sometimes, and this is an argument for a fresh set of ears. You could sometimes go up your own backsides, and you could lose the plot at some point, and there is value in an [inaudible 01:05:28] hang on, I think we need somebody to come in here and say, there’s too much here, let’s just get rid of that and concentrate on those two guitars because they sound so good together with the vocal.

Tim Palmer:

So there is marriage, but when it was just like you said, when it’s just replicating and just doing it and putting a different reverb on, forget about it, I hated that too. But it was always the job. I mean, the fact is that when you work with a producer who has crafted something, for instance, when I mix for Larry and I mixed for Larry Klein, and I don’t know if your people know Larry, I’m sure they should do because he’s been producer of the year nominated three times at the Grammy’s. I mean, he’s an incredible producer, an incredible musician.

Warren Huart:

I mean obviously, bass player, very famous bass player, very famously married to Joni Mitchell, of course.

Tim Palmer:

So when I’m mixing for Larry, of course, it’s like being back in that period that we talked about. I immediately work coming from a basis of, I respect that this project has been thought out musically, sound wise, and there’s a reason that this is like this. So I’m helping the process as best I can to try and just elevate something that’s already great.

Tim Palmer:

And quite frankly, it’s oftentimes harder because when something’s already great to take it to the next level is pretty tough. But every project you approach is very different, and as you mentioned earlier, I’ve been very fortunate to work in different areas and learn a lot from different people. But there’s no doubt that when you’re working in that format of a producer who knows what they’re doing and has recorded it properly and has spent the time and the budget, then you mix it in a certain way, as opposed to when you get a band that sends you something and you listen to it and they say, “Look, help us out. We want this to be great.” You put in a different hat and you approach it in a different way. And it’s all good. I like it all.

Tim Palmer:

It’s certainly a lot of fun for me to… I’ve got as you can see behind me, a selection of guitars, and I can get the feedback going into choruses or whatever it is, just those little touches and the bands haven’t had a chance to sit there and get that right, and they listen to it, and they’re just so happy that you’ve taken the time. And I think especially in this day and age, if we don’t enjoy what we do, we should probably quit.

Warren Huart:

There was this band called Mother Love Bone, and I remember early, it must’ve been 90, 91 being in the UK in England and hearing that record and just being absolutely blown away by it. Tell me a little bit about that, and can I make that assumption that that is how you got into mixing? Of course, Pearl Jam’s first album.

Tim Palmer:

Yes, That’s how I ended up working with Pearl Jam was because of the Mother Love Bone. I mixed that album in a studio called White Castle, I think it was, or Sound Castle.

Warren Huart:

Sound Castle.

Tim Palmer:

Sound Castle, Yeah, that’s the one.

Warren Huart:

Not the burger joint.

Tim Palmer:

No, I mixed it in the burger joint, actually. Some people will say, “Yeah, it sounds like it.” No, I mixed that album at Sound Castle, and what was interesting was that there was no band involved in the mixing at all, which is pretty weird actually, especially for a project like that, because it is such a band sound.

Tim Palmer:

And the only person that would stop by it was Michael Goldstone, the A&R guy. So I had a bit of contact via the telephone, remember when we used to call each other, and I spoke to Andrew and I think I spoke to Jeff a couple of times, but basically I had no contact with the band at all. I did a couple of recalls in London and the album was due to come out, and unfortunately, we lost Andrew Wood because of his heroin addiction. He was trying to get out of it, but sadly it didn’t work out that way.

Tim Palmer:

So basically after that, some of the members of Mother Love Bone carried on working together and look for a new singer, and obviously they found Eddie, and I received a demo tape from Sandy of [inaudible 01:09:18] one day. And he said, Michael, I sent over this new band for you to listen to who were called Mookie Blaylock at the time.

Warren Huart:

Mookie Blaylock, catchy little name.

Tim Palmer:

After he’s a basketball player, a very famous basketball player. The band, as you can tell from the album cover of Ten by the way that they’re all together, that’s a basketball sort of thing. They were big fans. Yeah, I listened to it and of course it was quite an interesting combination of music really because it was obviously an alternative band, but Mike soloing was quite traditional and it was very rock, it wasn’t holding back on that. Chord wise, they could be definitely an alternative band, but with a rock element to it. And Eddie’s voice was very unique.

Tim Palmer:

And of course I was interested, and so we had a meeting, we went to actually see the Lakers play and had dinner and everyone was good. So we did a test mix, or at least I did a test mix at A&M studios, which is handsome and everyone seemed happy. The only problem was that I was sick of being in America by that point. I’d been working on the first rock album for Jimmy Lovine’s new label, Interscope, and I’d done a band called Neverland.

Tim Palmer:

So I was ready to head back to England, and I suggested the idea to Michael that I work at Ridge Farm in the Surrey countryside, and I thought it might not go down too well, but they said fine, and they would fly the whole band over to London, and that’s exactly what we did.

Warren Huart:

That was great.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah, it was great. I mean, I would drive in everyday through the countryside, work on this lovely Neve in an old barn. You know Ridge Farm, it’s a fantastic studio. Queen worked there, I did the first Mission record there. It’s just a great place, great vibe, everybody eats together. And of course the band was staying.

Tim Palmer:

So I did a mix every day on the Pearl Jam record, it was a pretty low pressured album because the label hadn’t really expected it to be more than an introduction to this new band. They weren’t expecting huge things from it, so they left me alone and the A&R guy Michael flew in on the last day and had a listen and he was happy.

Tim Palmer:

And as I said, we did a mix a day, I’d take the mixes home, listen in my stereo in my home, go in, make my changes, play it to the band, and that was it, really. It was just a great project and very fortunate for me to be involved in, we did a few overdubs, did some vocals, backing vocals, did the guitar solo on a live with Mike few other bits and bobs. I played a bit of percussion on it and it was just a remarkable project to be involved in, I’m very fortunate.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I mean, it’s Even Flow, Alive and Jeremy are still three of their biggest songs in their repertoire to this day. I think if they were to play 10 songs live, those three would be in there. So, it’s an amazing first album. Mother Love Bone was definitely a groundbreaking album sort of set up the whole scene really for me.

Warren Huart:

So when I started hearing obviously Nirvana, and then of course, Pearl Jam, it all sort of made sense. And Soundgarden, because of that band. Your career is really super varied. I cannot stress this enough. We went back earlier, were talking about John Lackey, how he’s genre-less, I would say that is you 100%.

Warren Huart:

I don’t want to gloss over some of these. I do want to talk about U2 because it’s obviously a huge deal for the 2000s that was like, I don’t want to say come back record, because they never went away, that’s not a fair thing to say, but that album was definitely a very powerful album. One of the best albums of the last 20 years by far.

Warren Huart:

But there’s a couple of things I’d like to talk about. Like you worked with Texas, for instance, now they’re a band. I don’t think many people will know in America, but a really, really great band. There’s a period I can see on your own music, which is packed with like 10 or 15 albums a year between like 88 up to like mid-90s, where it looked like you basically didn’t sleep.

Tim Palmer:

I lost one marriage due to it. This is the thing. If you’re passionate about what you do and you give everything to it, you have to be careful that you don’t give too much and forget about other things that are important in your life. And I definitely could be guilty of not being at home enough, that’s true.

Tim Palmer:

I’m fortunate enough that I met my current wife, and I’m very happy and I’ve got two children with her too, so I have four daughters to look after, and I’m a very lucky guy. But during those times, it really does take a lot of understanding from any partner to try and understand why you’re spending so much time away from them because it’s not the best plan, that’s for sure.

Tim Palmer:

And I still do, am very blessed to still love what I do. And I’ve seen the industry change from being an all analog recording scene, and then have a new career where you have to learn this new thing, which is Pro Tools, and this whole new way of working. And that I think keeps you young, because at first I was very against the whole idea of looking at audio. I went for a demonstration at Westlake audio of when it was Sonic Solutions, and how it was going to be the future. And I walked out and said, “Thank you for the demonstration, but I don’t think this is for me. I don’t want this, I’m happy with the way things are.”

Tim Palmer:

And a few years later I realized if I didn’t get a Pro Tools rig in my house and learn how to use it, I would have no career again. And like you said earlier, I learned from some younger artists how to use the Pro Tools. John Feldman and Goldfinger when I was doing their record, he was way faster than me and I was working with Mark Dearnley as the engineer, and we would watch him work the Pro Tools for awhile. And you learn a lot from the new people, but I was very fortunate to have that split in the environment that we make records. And that’s why, in a way, it’s kept it generalist because you can try different things. And I’ve always wanted to do that, I never wanted to be stuck in one area. I think that would be really boring.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic. So I don’t want to gloss over any of these moments, but yes, you’ve got, in that period, you’ve got Big Country, you’ve got Tears For Fears.

Tim Palmer:

Tears For Fears was amazing for me because that was the first time on a record, I worked with Roland for many months, and to follow up The Seeds of Love was always going to be challenging, but I’m very proud of Elemental and a lot of engineers comment on that record. And I’m just very lucky to be involved in that. We spent a long time on it at Roland’s house and he was the first artist to encourage me to contribute musically to stuff. And being such a great musician himself, sometimes I offered something that, I think to him, maybe he wouldn’t have thought of because I’m so simplistic or so basic about the way I hear music.

Tim Palmer:

I’m not a classically trained musician in any way, but if I hear something I can figure out how to play it and he would encourage that. And I got to play bits of drums and guitars on the album, and it was just a wonderful experience for me and a great opportunity to do something more than just the production. So the Tears For Fears thing was just great. And I’m still friends with Roland to this day.

Warren Huart:

Such an incredible song writer.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. Amazing.

Warren Huart:

And it’s interesting he, through so many people like you and Bob Clearmountain that I admire, he actually is a constant through that. Because both of you have worked with him.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. I did a couple of songs recently with Tears For Fears, funnily enough. They’ve been working on a new song, I did one that was a single that came out very recently, like a year or two ago. And then there’s another one that I’m hoping they’re going to release, which we finished fairly recently, which is excellent. So they still write, Kurt’s back in the band and everything’s good. So it’s fun, really fun.

Warren Huart:

Amazing dynamic. Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, Sisters, so many bands where the lead singer isn’t actually the main songwriter. But it’s that combination, isn’t it? Where you can have an incredible writer and, don’t get me wrong, Roland’s got a great voice. I mean…

Tim Palmer:

He has. He has a great voice.

Warren Huart:

He’s got an incredible voice, he had a massive hit single, obviously you guys did with that, Break It Down Again. But at the same time, there’s something special about Kurt’s voice. So the two of them together is wonderful. You’ve got some Cure mixing credits, that brings your stock up pretty fricking high. What was that like?

Tim Palmer:

I did a song called This Is a Lie and it was from the album, Wild Mood Swings. And Robert reached out and he was basically using different mixing engineers for different songs on the album. And he’d never done that before. And he selected me to do that song and I love that song, I love the lyrics. It’s very orchestral, but it still moves along. And, yeah, I was very lucky and of course Reeves Gabrels from Tin Machine has been in The Cure for a long time now.

Tim Palmer:

So when they played ACL a couple of years ago, I finally got to meet Robert Smith, who I’ve always loved, of course. And I’m also friends on Facebook with Dave Allen because we’ve crossed paths. Dave Allen produced a lot of The Cure records and we worked together and he was part of Dead or Alive. He produced some Dead or Alive and I mixed the first Dead or Alive single and our paths have crossed a lot. So it’s good. It’s one of the nice things about Facebook is meeting the people that you often didn’t get a chance to actually get to know during that period. And now we can have a little chat.

Warren Huart:

Robert Smith, for me, I had an old studio and Sirius satellite radio sublet from us. So they had a piece of … A couple of rooms in our studio. And Robert was being interviewed for Sirius, and I walked out of my control room and I have … There’s only two times in my life I’ve been unbelievably star struck, and it was Robert Smith and Brian May and in neither instance was I able to talk to them. I just became a kid.

Tim Palmer:

Robert is, I mean, he’s just a great bloke. I mean he doesn’t take any bull … from all the … this has been his path and he’s done it the way he wanted. And I love that. And when meeting him, and people were coming up, you could just see that he’s just a great, very genuine, great bloke. I liked that. And Reeves, Reeves and I have been friends for years and there’s a great quote, and I often mentioned it, and you may have heard it, but it really does sum up, I think … It really sums up what we do as producers and engineers is, to never forget that we’re not the word we’re merely a highlighter pen. And I think that there’s a lot of truth-

Warren Huart:

I love that.

Tim Palmer:

It is so true, because without getting too mushy about this whole thing, but one of the things that occurred to me during this strange time that we’re going through with the COVID-19 and watching musicians struggle to do what they do, which is to be out there playing music is, I’ve realized that … I mean, where the … would I be, my career be, without the music and the musicians? And that’s why I’ve spent so much of my time, these last few weeks, trying to do everything I can for Music Cares to try and raise money. But we are not the word, we are here to support them and to try and realize their vision in any way that we possibly can. I’m just very, very grateful to all the musicians out there who, I wouldn’t have had a career without any of them. Because I certainly couldn’t have done this on my own.

Warren Huart:

Mark Daniels, really nice guy who is big film and TV mixer, did the Colby Calais free mixing course with us. And we did it free. And we put a Music Cares link under that for everybody who watched it, so everybody watching now there’s going to be a link to Music Cares under this video. So please donate anything you can. A buck, a million, anywhere in between. Music Cares is incredibly important, it’s very important to me as well. My old company, we sponsored quite a few Music Cares events, and I, like Tim, know a lot of the people over there. And they’re all really, really incredible people.

Warren Huart:

When I worked on the second Fray album, I can’t talk about people’s names, it’s not appropriate, but one of the people involved in that had a horrible, horrible thing happened to them, to their family. And Music Cares, not only were they able to provide money to help, and this was somebody, this wasn’t a band member, this wasn’t somebody with millions of dollars. This was just somebody in the team. Not only were they able to do that, they were able to get hold of the hospital and leverage the hospital to bring this enormous, hundreds of thousands of dollar bill, down to something useful. So it’s something payable. So Music cares, in my eyes, are massive saviors.

Tim Palmer:

Absolutely. And you know, the thing about, as you know I’m currently serving as trustee of the Academy, and I know from talking to the other trustees and the members of the board that one of the main catalysts, apart from advocacy as well, is we joined because we love Music Cares so much. The Grammy’s is great. Music preservation’s great. Award shows are great. But it’s all subjective at the end of the time. I mean, the fact is that Music Cares is such an important thing to America, and I’m happy to do whatever I can for them.

Warren Huart:

So there’s going to be a link under there. I hear you. When we had a big birthday party for me a couple of years ago, we said no birthday presents everything to Music Cares. It’s like, we are so blessed, you and I and guys like us, girls like us that are able to make a living at music. And I mean, you’ve worked with so many talented musicians and not all of them became multi-millionaires. And a lot of them struggled and it had nothing to do with their talent why they didn’t make it.

Warren Huart:

And Music Cares is the kind of people that will come in and help those people. And it’s such a beautiful thing. So anyway, please, there’s a link down below. Please donate anything, if you can. At this time, there’s many people who can’t. So obviously … So I don’t want to get, so many things here that I could talk about. I mean, you’ve been so busy, worked on so many…

Tim Palmer:

Can I tell you I’ve just mixed a new Psychedelic Furs album?

Warren Huart:

Oh wow.

Tim Palmer:

I’m so excited, that’s coming out at the end of this month, I think. And it’s their first record in 26 years. Can you believe that? And they’re sounding better than ever. I mean, I know that’s a cliche, but if you look, if you look at what people have written … There’s three songs that have been released from the album so far, people are very excited. It’s fucking cool record. It was produced by Richard Fortus from Guns n Roses. So him and I are friends now and he asked me to mix it and he did an amazing job anyway. And I know Richard Butler, we’re both from the same part of Surrey, and it’s just such a great record. I’m very proud of it.

Warren Huart:

And I’m just going to shout out some things that I’m skipping over, because there’s some fantastic stuff here. You did a Sponge album. I don’t know if I want to skip over that.

Tim Palmer:

Two Sponge albums.

Warren Huart:

Because that’s a massively influential band, especially out there.

Tim Palmer:

Yeah. I love Sponge, still friends with those guys. They’re amazing. The first album was pretty big and the second album I thought was amazing. The single, Wax Aesthetic, was really cool. A second album, unfortunately for some reason, typical politics at the label I think, second album didn’t do as well as the first. But Rotting Piñata, which was the first album, did really good and that had the single, Plowed, and the funny thing is it’s Howard Stern’s favorite song, Plowed. So he’s always playing it and talking about it. And I met a couple of the guys that work on that show and I told them that I worked on Howard’s favorite song and we were laughing about that.

Tim Palmer:

But yeah, he’s always been a big supporter of Sponge, but what a great band. And I’m still friends with the A&R guy, Pablo Mathison, and yeah, that was a great project. The nice thing about that time, as well, was that when I’d finished a project, and I did this with most of the bands I worked with, whether it be U2 or Sponge or whatever it was, I’d say, “Look, I’ve worked on the album. If you ever do a TV, I’ll come and I’ll sit in the room with the TV guy and just make sure that it’s rocking as best I can.” And there was money in those days in the industry, so they would quite happily send you a ticket and you’d fly to New York and do the Letterman Show.

Tim Palmer:

And I did the Letterman Show with Sponge and I did all sorts of things, like the Oscars with U2, and various things. And I never would ask any for any payment, I wanted to do it because how fun can that be to go to the Oscars with U2 and do the sound backstage? I mean, they’re just amazing opportunities. And that was, sadly, part of that time when the industry was able to go, yeah, yeah, we’ll bring a guy in, just get him in. Yeah, no problem. We’ll get his flight. We’ll get a hotel room and some amazing times. Really were.

Warren Huart:

U2, tell us about working with U2.

Tim Palmer:

As you know, U2 are probably the hardest working band out there. I mean, to the point where they can almost drive you crazy. But what an amazing opportunity to be in the room with those guys. I first was given the opportunity through, strangely enough, through working with Michael Hutchence. I was working with Andy Gill on the album that was released after Michael died, and Sandy, my manager, in typical manager style said to me, “You’ve got to work on this Michael Hutchence album, there’s a song that Bono sings on. And if you do a great mix, he’ll hear it and you’ll end up working with U2.”

Tim Palmer:

And I was, “Okay, Sandy. Fine. Okay. That’s going to work. Right. Okay.” Anyway, so I went in and the song that Bono sang on came out really well and we changed it around a lot. And just as Sandy had predicted, Bono actually called me up in the studio and he said, “I’ve just heard the mix that you did of that song, I was so worried about it before. I’m so happy with it. Thank you so much for all that you’ve done.” And I was pretty shocked and I said, “Oh, no problem. I enjoyed it. Thank you.”

Tim Palmer:

And he said, “You’ll be hearing from me.” So I told Sandy and he said, “I told you that would happen.” So the next thing was, I mixed a song called The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I did that at Olympic Studios and I hadn’t met the band by this point. And it was one of those situations where they sent me all the material, but I hadn’t got any particular briefing. And I got a phone call on my little Sony cell phone, when I was driving into Olympic, from Bono. So I was obviously shocked and he said, “Thanks for doing the mix today. We don’t like the way the drums are.” And I didn’t really understand what he meant and he said, “The drums, the main drums in the front, we don’t really like them. So just do what you can.”

Tim Palmer:

And I didn’t want to look like I was confused, obviously, because you have to be positive when you’re dealing with an artist. So I was, oh, I’ve got it. No problem. I understand. No problem. So I thought, what the hell? So anyway, so I started going through the track and opening up the mix and I realized that obviously what he didn’t like was, at the beginning of the song, was some electronic type drums and at the end, Larry comes in for the big outro. But he was unhappy with the programmed electronic sounding drums at the beginning.

Tim Palmer:

So I thought, what do I want to do here? And this is an interesting lesson for a lot of engineers about taking chances. Because sometimes you really have to just be prepared to take a chance. Maybe it won’t always work out, but if you don’t follow your heart, you’ll never find out. So I thought, okay, well I want to put a Walk On The Wild Side type of groove on the drums, on some brushes. So I rented a snare drum and some cymbals, and I basically did the [inaudible 01:29:14] and then looped it up, put some cymbals on and all that, and just muted out the electronic drums altogether. Which was a different feel. And then kept segueing back, cutting the electronic drums back in, every few bars. And then mixed the song and sent it off and wondered whether I would be kicked out or whether they would love it.

Tim Palmer:

And luckily they really, really liked it. And so, once that was through, and that was for a movie called The Million Dollar Hotel. Beautiful, Daniel Lanois, pedal steel on that song. One of my favorite songs I mixed for U2. So once that was in the can, they asked me to come to Dublin and start working on their albums. So that’s how I managed to end up with Stuck in a Moment and Elevation and New York, which is my one of my favorites. But yeah, it was just pretty, pretty amazing. I mean, the thing about U2 is they have the luxury of being able to use someone to try a mix and then get someone else to try it, and then someone else to try it. So you never really know if your mix is going to make it until the very end.

Tim Palmer:

And it might make it at the very end because it literally, they’re always changing things and it could be at the mastering that suddenly someone might say, “Oh, I think I like the way that sounded,” and they’ll go back to your mix, so you really don’t know. And there’s so many people working on that record. We would have dinner at their studio and I would sit … It was like knights at the round table, round dinner table, there was a chef that would cooked for us every night. And you’d have myself sitting next to Lilywhite, sitting next to Mike Hedges, sitting next to Jimmy Iovine, sitting next to Daniel Lanois, sitting next to Brian Eno, Bono, Edge. I mean, it was just pretty … special. I got to say. And I was very honored to be part of that.

Tim Palmer:

But a perfect example, I did the mix and was working on Elevation for ages. And finally we got a mix and they were happy and I thought, oh my God, I’ve got one in, I’ve got one through. This is great. And they said, “We love the mix.” So I started working on something else. And when I came back to LA, I had a phone call from Sam, who looked after them day by day, and Sam said, “Oh, sorry, I’ve got some bad news for you.” And I said, “What is it?” He said, “Bono’s changed the lyric. So they won’t be able to use the mix.”

Tim Palmer:

And I just thought, oh my God, I can’t believe it. It’s the lyric change that’s … me. But what happened was, he decided to sing over the mix. So they just took the backing track mix and Bono sang the vocal over the top. And if you listen, you can see there’s some sort of … If you listen again, you’ll hear a slight disconnect between the fact that the vocal has been sung on top of the back of track, as opposed to being part of that. And anyway, it was still my mix so I still got the credit and I was lucky I scraped through with that one. But, yeah, you’re always on the seat of your … It was scary times, but yeah, wonderful experience and Edge was incredible.

Tim Palmer:

What a guy, what a memory that guy has. I mean, we can be recording and trying things out and Edge will say, “I have an idea for a part we recorded, I think it was in France a few months ago.” And he would go to his bag and he’ll dig out a cassette or ADAT or whatever, and we’ll load it in and he’ll remember a small part he had, and then go back to that part. I mean, his memory is phenomenal. And as I said, they work and work and work and sometimes it’s frustrating, but you could never take away from the fact that they’re amazing.

Warren Huart:

I’ve been blessed to see them live a few times. Luckily they had The Fray open for them on a tour, so I got to be live in that little … What do they call it? The friends and family circle thing right at the front, and we stood right at the front. And I will say, between a Bono, obviously he’s such an incredible performer live, but The Edge is just mesmerizing to watch live. He’s just so in it, he’s just there. It’s all about the sounds. And my wife, who’s not a musician, she’s a photographer, but she just … Afterwards was just like, if I wasn’t married to you I would want to marry him. You know what I mean? You can tell he’s so intense and so in it, I can imagine in the studio what that must be like.

Tim Palmer:

Oh yeah, it was great. I mean when I had the opportunity to record him playing guitar a couple of times. And I started some of the mixes, actually, in LA before I even got to Dublin. Some of the songs were very bare bones, like Stuck in a Moment just had a mono drum track. Always remember that and thinking, why on earth would you have a mono drum track? But very U2, they liked the vibe, so they wanted to stick with it. So I added a lot to that, percussion and things, to make that song … lift that song up a bit in the choruses. And they’re very open minded, I must say. Certainly a band you could never say that they only want to hear it one way.

Tim Palmer:

I mean that’s why they, once again like David Bowie, they allow people to do their thing and then have a listen and see if they like it. And often one of their mixes, you can inherit as a mixer. You can inherit something cool that’s been done by a mixer before you. I remember in the middle section of Elevation, there’s this whole trippy sound that was done by a mixer who they’d obviously tried out for the song and, in the end, only liked that particular treatment for that piece.

Tim Palmer:

But I inherited that into my mix, and if you leave a song, you have to leave it well-documented because some of what you do maybe be inherited in. And the person who gets the mixing credit is the person who finishes the song. So for instance, Steve and I, Steve Lilywhite and I, worked for three weeks on Beautiful Day. And then I went back to LA to work on Stuck in a Moment and Steve finished Beautiful Day and it’s his credit and I, unfortunately, my stuff has sort of inherited a bit into that one. But I got to work on that song as well, which was great. Really fun.

Warren Huart:

So thank you, Mr. Tim, I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Palmer.

Tim Palmer:

I always try and wear a fancy shirt, mate. If the mix is no good, maybe you’ll get away with it because of the shirt.

Warren Huart:

This morning I was like, what shirt do I want to wear today? And I was like, I bought this shirt in Rome and I really, really love it. And every time I wear it, I feel all continental. So I made a choice of, I’m going to interview Tim Palmer with my continental Roman shirt on. And he’s going to be wearing his Hawaiian shirt. We upped our shirt game today.

Tim Palmer:

That’s good. That’s important.

Warren Huart:

Thank you, my friend. This was a lot of fun. And thanks for giving us so much time and talking about so many things and to reiterate, I think your career is a career I think all of us would love to have. Something that is genre nonspecific. You’ve worked with everything, every kind of artist. I mean, you’ve been busy pretty much every year since you started, insanely busy. So my hats off to you.

Tim Palmer:

This is my fifth decade now, I’m entering into it.

Warren Huart:

That’s crazy.

Tim Palmer:

I know it makes me feel old.

Warren Huart:

You can’t be old enough.

Tim Palmer:

I know. I know, but listen, one thing that I must be grateful for, apart from, as we said, my gratitude to all the great artists that I’ve worked for, because we’re nothing without a great song. That’s my belief of what we do, is if you manage to work with great music and do a good job you’re going to do well. Because it’s all about the emotional connection of songs and things like that. EQ is basically, I like to think of it more as the emotional quotient. You’re trying to bring it out in everything that you do. The song is king.

Tim Palmer:

And I just want to say how grateful I am to all the engineers that have worked with me through my career, because I’ve worked with so many like Chris Sheldon, as I said, and Marco Donahue, and my assistant here, Travis Kennedy, and Mark Dearnley and Simon Vinestock, just to name some of them. And last time I did an interview, I thought, I should’ve mentioned those people because when you’re in a studio for so many hours a day, they’re right there with you. And they’re a big part of what’s happened to me and I’m grateful to them all.

Warren Huart:

It’s great to give back. And once again, there’s a Music Care’s link for anybody that can afford it and would like to give back. Music Cares is amazing.

Tim Palmer:

Thank you for doing that.

Warren Huart:

Thank you, my friend. Thank you.

Tim Palmer:

Cheers.

Warren Huart:

Thanks everyone. Have a marvelous time recording and mixing. Please leave a bunch of comments and questions below and we will come back with some more stuff with Tim soon, I hope.

Tim Palmer:

Cheers.