PRODUCTION
Read the story of how I got into record production here
Read more about the music I’ve produced by scrolling down the page. Or following these links to specific projects…
SUGARCANE – ART TERRY – BAKA – SOUVENIR OF ENGLAND – MARIANNE DISSARD – THE SILVER PANDA – MIKA MANN – TOM RODWELL – LUNATRAKTORS – AUGUST – JOY JOSEPH
SUGARCANE
I know Sugarcane’s Robin French from when we were both members of the group Mr Hudson & The Library in the early ’00s, and when he approached me in 2018 about a new project he was developing, and I heard the songs, I was very keen to get involved…
Sugarcane draws on Robin’s obsession with vintage Brazilian music, and his background in UK indie songwriting, and blends in influences from Caribbean music, French chanson & US soul music to create a distinctive sound which is also very accessible…
I came on board as producer, and we released a four song EP, One Specific Thing later that year, featuring lead vocals from actor Antonia Thomas on two of the tracks, and percussion from Brazilian virtuoso Alua Nascimento…
Robin spent some time developing a live incarnation of the group, and working up material towards a debut album, entitled Cats Eyes…
Since then there have been Sugarcane version’s of Billie Eilish’s ‘Billie Bossa Nova‘ and Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home For Christmas‘, the latter featuring Molly Graham on lead vocals, a collaboration with Parisian singer-songwriter Alex100, and a track on Clea Vincent‘s Tropi-Clea 3 EP, featuring Robin on vocals and myself on percussion & production on the track ‘Big Bad Wolf‘, an English translation by Robin of Clea’s ‘Mechant Loup’ given the Sugarcane treatment…
We are currently hard at work on a 2nd LP of original material, alongside a series of cover versions featuring the voice of Molly Graham…
ART TERRY
Art and I have been friends and musical collaborators for such a long time now that we’re practically family…
I was his bass player and musical director for over a decade whilst we were both still living in London, and so far we’ve made two albums together, Anutha Kinda Brotha (2008) and Sex Madness (2020), plus a string of singles, and we’re hard at work on a 3rd LP as we speak…
Read more about my association with Art on my ART TERRY page
BAKA
So far there have been two releases from enigmatic audio-visual artist BAKA, the Night Journeys EP in 2022, and the following year’s Pink Moog, a sci-fi deconstruction of Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’
More here
SOUVENIR OF ENGLAND
Souvenir Of England was a stage production conceived and performed by the mercurial Marianne Dissard, bringing together theatre, photography, performance art & music, with myself as musical director…
In the summer of 2024 we released a soundtrack album to accompany the show, released on Frizz Records…
Read more about it here
MARIANNE DISSARD
Marianne Dissard and I crossed paths when I was working at Arco Barco recording studio, which overlooks Ramsgate’s ‘royal harbour’, and Marianne was living on a wooden sailing boat a stone’s throw from the studio doors…
We struck up a friendship, & did some gigs together playing songs by Brel and Gainsbourg in local cafes, and eventually embarked on a project re-working favourite songs of Marianne’s, first at Arco Barco & then when the pandemic hit, working remotely, with various contributors (including Terry Edwards on sax, Naïm Amor on guitar & Art Terry on guest vocals) recording their parts from their homes and me assembling the pieces from mine…
We released a series of singles through 2020 & ’21, culminating in a duet on Townes Van Zandt’s ‘If I Needed You’, and I then collected these together as an album for Frizz Records entitled ‘Rappel‘ in April of 2022…
Another single, a radical re-work of Carly Simon’s ‘Happy Birthday‘ followed the album in Feb ’23, before we turned our attention to the stage, and Souvenir Of England
THE SILVER PANDA
The Silver Panda came into being as a lockdown collaboration between myself and vocalist-clarinettist Maree Choie, reworking noisy guitar records from the late ’80s & early ’90s as a mellow hybrid of Brazilian Tropicalia and UK folk, with generous toppings of jazz and surrealist punk spirit…
We made a run of singles, culminating in the album Freak Scene in September ’22, and followed up with Hallowe’en and Christmas specials before the end of the year…
More about The Silver Panda here
MIKA MANN
My daughter Mika is only 9 years old as I’m writing this (at the start of 2025), but she’s already proved herself to be a prodigious songwriter and an accomplished singer and pianist…
She released her first single when she was 6, a song called ‘Wild Flowers‘ that she wrote with only a little help from me… She’s currently work on a debut album, with my production guidance…
More about Mika here
TOM RODWELL
I met Tom Rodwell when he was sleeping on Art Terry’s sofa, and illuminating some of London’s shadowier nightspots with his unique brand of calypso-infected cubist blues…
After Tom escaped Brexit Britain back to Auckland, NZ, I was lucky enough to be visiting the Aotearoan capital as he was laying the basic tracks for his ‘Wood & Waste‘ LP, and he invited me to the studio to make sure that all the analogue grit and goodness of his live sound was preserved on tape…
Find out more about the artist at tomrodwell.com
LUNATRAKTORS
When I was working at Arco Barco studio in Ramsgate, on England’s Kent coast, Clair & Carli of Lunatraktors were living just up the beach in Cliftonville, and entrancing audiences with their radical reconstructions of traditional folk songs…
Arco Barco, a former boat-builder’s arch on the harbour, was a perfect location to capture their live energy on a recording, and their debut LP, ‘This Is Broken Folk‘ is essential that. A document of the duo, recorded in two or three takes with no overdubs, and a testament to their wild creativity…
Find out more at www.lunatraktors.space
JOY JOSEPH
Back in 2008, Joy Joseph and myself were both members of Mr Hudson & The Library, and in the midst of fairly torturous recording sessions for that group’s soon to be aborted second album…
Months had been dragging by, and there had been some brilliantly creative moments, but the sessions were marred by a mixture of record label politics, and drama in Mr Hudson’s personal life…
Kanye West had signed the singer to his own GOOD Music imprint, and was slated to produce the new album. Which ought to have been a positive development…
Ye never made it to any of our sessions however, to hear what the band was doing, and instead an album was eventually assembled, hip hop style, from beats provided by several outside producers, and branded as a Mr Hudson solo release; with several months of recording work getting shelved – much of it superior to what was eventually released – and the other band members written out of the story…
After this depressing turn of events we were in desperate need of some positivity, and myself and Joy, along with drummer Andrew ‘Wilkie’ Wilkinson, booked some extra time at Gizzard Recording, on East London’s Fish Island, where we’d been working on the Hudson album, and cut two songs, written & produced by myself, with Joy as lead vocalist…
We worked quickly and spontaneously, and put the tracks we’d recorded – ‘Our Love Is Taking Us Through‘ and ‘Out Of All The Boys & The Girls‘ – out as a 7″ single as soon as we could, as the first ever release on Frizz Records…
Off the back of the single release we put a live band together, and wrote the rest of an album (with contributions from former bandmate Robin French and Joy herself), but that record was also not to be, as The Library dissolved entirely, and Joy joined Mika’s touring band and eventually moved to NYC; and so this single stands alone as happy snapshot of a difficult time…
AUGUST
The group August was my main musical focus in the early 2000s, but only left behind one album, It’s Not The Wand, It’s The Magic, assembled from home demos and rehearsal recordings along with the couple of studio sessions we managed before the band dissolved and we went our separate ways…
This was my first ever album production, and whilst it has its flaws I was working with some brilliant collaborators… It was an interesting time, and the album is a fascinating document of what was happening…
You can read more about the circumstances that led up to it here
[July 2024] Record Producer...
I’ve always been somebody that’s inclined to tinker about with things to figure out how they work… And I’ve always been as interested in sounds as I am in notes or words… I drifted into record production initially out of frustration with never getting the sound I wanted elsewhere, and found it be a natural fit for my way of thinking about music…
The first ‘proper’ productions I put my name on – the first ones that made it onto vinyl at least – were the debut albums we put out in 2009 for my own group, August, and for singer-songwriter Art Terry, whose group the Fairys I had played with previously; along with a 7″ single in the same year for Joy Joseph, who at the time was my bandmate in the group Mr Hudson & The Library…
Those first releases do all have plenty of charm to offer, but I’ll readily admit in retrospect that as a producer I had no idea what I was doing. I was learning on the job, and very lucky to have the opportunity to do it in such good company. I was also dividing my time between production and various other commitments – I was bassist and bandleader / musical director at the time for August, Art, Joy, Mr Hudson & several other bands too, and I’d started my own record label, Frizz Records, for which I was trying to manage every responsibility from designing the record sleeves to making the tea…
Fast forward about a decade, and circumstances conspired to make me decide to focus on production more seriously… I became a father in 2015, and at the time was making my main living as a touring musician, but I wanted to be around to watch my daughter grow rather than be off on the road; and not long after she arrived the decision was taken out of my hands because I was hospitalised with a serious back injury, and told I’d never play on stage again… I was determined to prove the doctors wrong, and spent three years building my strength up again and got myself back to playing some local gigs, only to end up back in hospital in a worse mess…
So for now at least I’m an entirely studio-bound creature, and I’ve been making the very best of that predicament by producing a string of albums since 2019 for Art Terry, Lunatraktors, Sugarcane, Tom Rodwell, The Silver Panda and Marianne Dissard, along with numerous singles and EPs for these artists and others… (Take a look at my ever-expanding Discography for a detailed list!)