ASHLEY HOWE - An interview with British recording engineer, producer
ASHLEY HOWE began his career in 1970, and more recently retired. I had the pleasure of interviewing him this time about his career, where he began as tape operator, and becoming an recording engineer and producer, before relocating to the US to work in television & film sound (where he's picked up a few EMMY Awards!). Although many Uriah Heep albums will recognize Ashley's name for the many Heep albums he's credited on (including producing Abominog & Head First), we discussed a number of other bands Ashley worked with in the 70s and 80s, as well as what he got up to when he left the UK. Ashley has a lot of great stories, and I'm sure (and yes, I did ask!) they could make for an entertaining book someday!. Although Ashley might play it down, but I would say the man's had a legendary career in the recording business, having been connected to many classic bands and big albums.
We started off this conversation bringing up his recent appearance on Rock DayDream Nation's Youtube show, which was a 'reunion' show....
Enjoy the read. All photos were kindly sent by Ashley. I have also included images of albums he worked on over the years (click on the images too!).
You had a reunion recently!?
I had a little reunion with the wonderful Uriah Heep. I do want to just say one thing, a mutual friend of ours, Peter Goalby, that gentleman deserves so much respect, and so much acknowledgement, and the stuff he's putting out now is just as good as it was 40 years ago.
Yeah, there's a lot of what-ifs there with that stuff, right? There's a lot of Wow - if this had come out, what it should have.
Yeah, should have. But just a wonderful gentleman, and one of the best singers I ever worked with, and I was lucky enough to work with some great singers, Freddie Mercury and people like that. Peter's just, he's just way up there….
To kick off, I started when I was 16 and three quarters, or 17, in late 1969, with Uriah Heep, and the first project I worked on, and that has a history to it, 15 albums later, and et cetera, et cetera, …but there's a few stories along the line that people might find interesting.
How did you get into all the, to the technical end of the music stuff?
Well, actually, it's a good situation. I was in a school group with a guy called Peter Coleman and Richard Dodd. Richard Dodd is a very famous engineer, very accredited, Peter went in first of all, and he became famous very quickly, and he was working at CBS, and I went to CBS to record our little band and snuck in after the Hollies, and decided that this is something I'd like to do.
I actually applied to the BBC, because they were advertising for school leavers in the south, so I went there, and I got my interview, and the guy said, “Oh, absolutely fantastic. How many years experience have you had in television and recording?” I said, “Well, I'm still at school”. He said, “Well, we can put you in the accounting department, and when you're 32, we'll re-review you”.
Well, straight from that interview, I went to a studio, and I was greeted by the studio manager, who turned up about 20 minutes late. The receptionist had told me to sit down and have a cup of tea, so eventually he came down, and as he came off the elevator, he saidHi don't get up , and he said, “What's your name?” I said, Ashley Howe, and he said, “Don't F……g talk to me while you're sitting down. Let me just tell you that I fire people in 30 seconds.” And this is the first interview at a real studio.
I then went from that interview to Lansdowne, and at that point, I was feeling a little uncomfortable, and I walked in, and the gentleman that I met Adrian Kerridge, very famous, and he's sitting behind his desk with his suit on and everything, and I just, he said to me, “What exams do you have? And I said, well, actually, I'm pretty ignorant, really. I don't really have A-levels or O-levels, but I'm really willing to start at the bottom, be a tea-boy, and put everything into it.” and then I said, “but I think I need to leave, because I feel so intimidated with you behind that big desk.”
And so I'll never forget this, he took his tie off, took his jacket off, came down, pulled the chair up next to me, and he said, “What are your interests?”, I said, “Everything”, He said, “What are your hobbies?” I said, “I don't have hobbies. I'm just interested in music.” And that was it, then I started at Lansdowne. Just to cap this story off, years later, I was chief engineer. The guy that was nasty to me turned up to get a job at the place. I turned around to him, I said, “Don’t F….g talk to me while you're sitting down
That's quite the beginning. There was an interview posted with Alan Parsons, and he had a similar where he just showed up and took anything type of job.
So, what was the first album you worked on, the first Uriah Heep album!?
That was the first one I worked on. In those days, you worked on a lot of different clients that were coming in through the door, left, right, and center. You'd be doing four or five sessions a day. Yes, that was the first one I worked on. And I have some interesting stories about Lansdowne, some funny stories, but if you want band stories.
Yeah, a bit of both. Lansdowne, is that where you were primarily?
That's where I started off, and then I eventually moved over to the Roundhouse Studios, which Gerry Bron bought, and then took myself and Peter Gallen, the two engineers that pretty much worked on all of his projects, over to there.
When I went over to the Roundhouse, I became an in-house producer as well. I worked with bands like Hawkwind and Motorhead. I did Overkill with Motorhead, Overkill, and there's some fun stories from those sessions
When we started to do the album, we were using a drum riser, because the studio was a little dead. We brought in a wooden platform, but Phil was hitting the drums so hard, they kept moving off of it. We tried bricks and everything else. In the end, Phil got two nine-inch nails, and hammered them through his bass drums and into the platform. Another story happened during the first playback. They came upstairs, and Lemmy said “Stop the tape! stop the tape!” So, I stopped it. Lemmy said “There's something wrong.” And I'm thinking, well, I'm not that bad an engineer. There's only bass drums, guitar, and vocals. He said, “No, no, I can hear my bass.” And I said, “Well, of course you can, you're playing it.” He said, “I don't want to hear it.” I said, “Well, I really don't want to hear it either.”
The last thing was that I used to have to wake up Fast Eddie with a broom because he'd fall asleep on the couch. He'd wake up very violently, throwing punches, so I'd poke him in the stomach with a broom, and he'd wake up swinging.
One day I made the mistake of cleaning Lemmy's bass guitar, because it was so sweaty. When he came in, he couldn't play it anymore, so he had to go out and get some axle grease.
What music did you grow up on? Before you got involved, what were you listening to, and what bands were you going to see and such?
I was listening to everything on radio. In that era, there was so much great music, but more importantly, great songs. I always thought of myself as a song person.
I didn't really stick to one genre. There was a lot of American music, a lot of Quincy Jones, a lot of jazz, and of course Led Zeppelin. But really, all the commercial stuff.
Are you familiar with Discogs, the website?
I went into that because it'll have a listing of everything you're credited on. It's quite a thorough listing. A lot of the bands you worked with, I wasn't familiar with. I had to go back and listen to a few things that were kind of interesting, like Capability Brown, Rare Bird. You did a lot of different bands over there.
What were some of your favorite lesser known artists, that you worked with?
I loved working with Rare Bird. I actually did a little bit of percussion on one of their records. I thought they were very good.
One of my favorite projects was one of the first things I engineered - a band called Spiteri. I think they're still getting recognition for it today. They very Santana-esque.
I also enjoyed working on Spencer Davis. That was an interesting experience because I was actually told not to bother recording him. I recorded him anyway.
I had a very diverse engineering background. One day I’d be working on the Pink Panther movie, another day with Colosseum. Colosseum was another great band that I worked with.
That was the one with Mike Starrs on it, right?
Right. It was a lovely album to record because they all wanted to make an album that genuinely reflected what they sounded like. They told me that most engineers would start EQ’ing things before even listening properly to the drums. Nowadays, some people don’t even record drums—they fabricate them.
John Hiseman and Gary Moore both said it was the first album where they felt it truly sounded like them. In fact, I don’t think I used any EQ on John’s drums. It was a great collaboration between very talented people who wanted to make a record and connect with one another. That was a lot of fun.
Hawkwind was fun too, especially with Ginger Baker. There was plenty of drama. We recorded an entire album and then Hawkwind - who had a habit of firing people - fired the drummer! We had to replace the drum tracks. I think we were working on 16 tracks or 24 tracks, and I didn't have a way of preserving the original drums. So, we brought the new drummer in and he played the entire album in one go. One take. I had to wake him up between takes.(haha) But it was that was a good experience.
Babe Ruth were an interesting band. Very good. They never really got their due. I know they had some following in parts of Canada and UK and that.
A little story from those sessions: the producer would often want the guitar tracked six or eight times. We knew after two or three takes it was already huge and wasn’t getting any bigger, so we’d just pretend to keep recording.
It's interesting because the last one is where they had a lot of change in the band and new singer. I imagine that one probably gets forgotten the most. But you had a lot of name guys in that band that went on to other things.
Well, a lot of these groups—including Heep—went through many different people, eras, and styles. It was a learning experience for everyone at the time.
Thank God for Led Zeppelin not conforming and not following the norm. If you wanted “Whole Lotta Love,” you had to buy the album.
I've often wondered, like Zeppelin obviously is the biggest band of the 70s, but all these other bands that, like Deep Purple, even Black Sabbath, they end up going through so many changes. You kind of think that the whole thing about Zeppelin being so popular still is the fact that they just left it where it was.
I hate to make the comparison, but it’s a bit like the mafia. You’ve got everybody together, things are working great, and then everyone wants to be the boss. They can’t stay in their own lane, and eventually they all get whacked.
There are very few people who can leave a successful entity and make it on their own. Rod Stewart is one example. He had Faces and then branched off successfully. People can branch out, but in the end, many should stay as they are.
You’ve got to admire bands like The Rolling Stones. They simply are what they are. They do what they do, they’ve got their own clique and there’s a reason those things work.
You should never try to change something that works, because most of the time it won’t.
You did the first Angel Witch album, a little more metal there.
I think I was kind of branded, not branded, but nicely mentioned as the "man of metal" at one point. I could tell you a few stories about the Nugent album.
Yeah, you did Ted Nugent, Penetrator. You had Brian Howe on that album. Is it true you asked Peter (Goalby) about doing that album?
At one point, I'd asked Peter when I was doing it, and I think Peter was not free. And in actual fact, when I was trying to come up with a different person to do that, I was walking in the Atlantic and I used to go to Atlantic Studios a lot to get demos and that sort of stuff, and I heard a demo going on with Brian's voice. And I said, “That's it. That's the guy!”
It was difficult to convince Ted to use someone. In fact, one of the reasons I did the album is I said, “Ted, if I'm doing this, I'm not even using anybody you know as musicians. I'm going to bring in outside guys, get an outside singer, and use some outside songs.
The reason we arrived at that point was that John Kalodner had heard the Heep albums and stuff. I believe he was a very good friend of Ted’s—whatever the situation was—and he told him that he should give it a shot because of the way I did things at that time.
So I went in with Ted, and we sat down. I went to meet him, and he said, “I’ve got to tell you, I was just with a very big-name producer, and he told me all my songs were fantastic.”
He played them all to me, and I said, “Well, then you should use them because you’re going to be paying a lot of money, and you’ll have an album. But it’s not going to be what I think you should do. But that’s OK.”
I thought I’d blown it. As a matter of fact, I came back straight into the Uriah Heep album that I was doing in the middle of, got a call, and he said, “When do we start?”
He was the most wonderful man to work with. Huge—biggest ego ever. (Laughs)
On the first day, I had Billy Squier’s band in New York for a week rehearsing, and I brought in six outside songs that we were working on.
Funnily enough, Ozzy was next door. I went to Ozzy and said, “I’m going to be doing Ted next door. Do you want to meet him?” He’s like, “I don’t want to meet him—he’s crazy!”
But Ted was nothing like you’d imagine. I mean, he’s got a big ego, there’s no doubt about it. Long story short, he comes into the rehearsals after a week off. Everybody’s a little intimidated because he comes in with a big presence—no doubt about it.
I needed to know that I was controlling the band because I knew he’d be difficult to control. So he comes in, and I tell him to start the first song. He starts playing, and I stop everybody, but he carries on playing. I said, “Ted—stop, stop, stop, stop.” In the end, I went over and pulled the guitar out of his hands. “We need to have communication. That was me trying you out.”
So he said, “Well, I’m deaf in one ear.” I said, “Which ear?” He said, “Well, I always put my good ear to the amp.” It was a 200-watt Marshall.
So, I got the roadies to put the amp on the other side. And I said, “OK, put your bad ear to the amp and your good ear to me.” And that's how we started off.
I think there was a lot of respect between the two of us. He spent four days on the album. But on the first day that he went down to do the overdubs, he comes in and he didn't talk to me at all. I recorded his guitar in the control room . He started playing a song and I stopped him because it was a little out of tune.
So I said, “Could you tune the guitar, please?” He took his pistol out of his bag, dropped the bullets out, put them back in one by one. The assistant was now ducked under the desk. He flicked it around, rolled it in his hand, and held it up.
I said, “OK, asshole, you can load a gun. Can you tune a guitar?” He said, “Nobody speaks to the Nuge like this.” And I said, “I’m getting divorced—I don’t care.”
We got on great after that. It was really good. He did everything.At the end of it, he went away and came back three months later to hear the finished album.
He said, “I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t sound like me. Nobody wanted me anymore.” It was a calculated album, and it did him good. He was very impressed with that.
“Draw the Line” was a big hit. And that was, I interviewed Jim Vallance there last year or earlier this year, and that was one of his. That song got done by quite a few people.
Yeah, well, it was an interesting era at that time. And I was starting to get a bit of a reputation for taking outside songs into the situations, which I'd like to point out was not done because of the inadequacy of the people I was working with.
It was done because I think there are very few artists nowadays who can come up with ten or twelve songs that are all great. Adele can pull it off, but most people are always going to have four or five brilliant songs.
I kind of wanted to give everybody their best shot. And I think because of that album, his career took off again. It wasn’t a massive album—it might have gone gold, I’m not sure—but it was designed that way.
What I also found was that using outside songs increased the playing level and improved their own material because you’re trying to prove something. I actually prefer a couple of Ted’s songs to anything else because I think it made him try harder. It certainly didn’t do him any harm.
"Draw The Line" certainly suits him, it doesn't come off as a cover.
It shows his brilliance as a guitar player, which is another thing.
I’d never really heard Ted before. I’d heard “Cat Scratch Fever.” It’s like when I worked with Yes—I hadn’t really heard Yes before.
But I didn’t think that made any difference because it’s about what you’re doing at the time. It may even have helped in a way to change the model a little bit or give him a different direction.
My opinion of a producer is that he shouldn’t be telling everybody what to do. He should be capturing the performances.
That’s what’s difficult about being both an engineer and a producer. If you’re a self-critical engineer, you shouldn’t be worried about every little pop. There are pops everywhere and all that sort of stuff. But if you clean those up, you can lose performance.
Anyway, that’s my idea. Production should be about encouragement and then telling people when to stop.
I think Freddie Mercury, who was a perfectionist, would still be doing “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over again if someone had let him. But he nailed it. You won’t get it better than what’s on the record. I don’t care how many melodic changes you make—that’s the best it will ever be.
To me, a producer needs to tell someone when to stop. At least in my career.
Well, I discovered him and insisted that we put him on the Penetrator album. And the way I work is always kind of one-on-one.
The way I work is always kind of one-on-one. I don’t have other people in there because I find it’s difficult to put someone in a situation where they have to perform. And it’s even more difficult if you’ve got a bunch of people standing around waiting for them to perform. So I like to work one-on-one.
Anyway, on the first day of recording, we were at the Record Plant. I took Brian in, gave him the song, and we started going through it.
He absolutely would not cooperate with any of the ideas I had.
So I said, “Brian, you’re only here because of me. We can fire you and bring someone else in, but I really think we can make this work.”
And he said, “Well, I don’t want to sing it that way.” I said, “In that case, this is the way I want you to do it. If you don’t do it, then it’s not going to work.”
I got a little belligerent, and I actually locked him in the studio. I turned all the lights out and left.
I came back two hours later and said, “Are we ready now?”
So I turned the lights out again.
I think I came back about ten hours later. I turned the lights on and said, “Now are we going to do it?”
So we did it. He was a little reluctant, but I think he started to get into it.
To cut a long story short, we played it to Nugent the next day, and he went absolutely bananas.
He said, “Oh my God, this is fantastic!”
From that point on, Brian and I got on. Well, we didn’t really get on, but we got on well enough to make it through.
Years later, I saw on his website that he complimented me for doing it, and we became really good friends.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see him before he died. Over the years, we became friends.
I kind of kept that story back because I had a call from his sister and she wanted to know what had happened. To be honest, I didn’t tell her about that because I didn’t see any need to. But it was the truth.
And from that album, he got into Bad Company, which was not a bad move at all.
Now, the other album I thought was interesting was the Wishbone Ash Twin Barrels Burning. But there's two versions of it. The remix, I don't know why.
Oh, I didn't know there was another version. I didn't know there was a remix.
Yeah, there was a different mix for the U.S., I guess.
Yeah, the U.S. tends to do that. I really didn’t agree with Abominog being rearranged in the U.S. because it was a concept album. It had a meaning, and I really put it together for a reason.
It started off with the old “Too Scared to Run,” which was like, “Yeah, this is the ’70s Heep,” and then it went into “Chasing Shadows” and stuff like that—“Now we’re going to be the new Heep.”
Then the end of it was “Think It Over,” which was really kind of a message to the fans saying, “Okay, I’m not sure if I like this because I love what they used to be.” And to the new people: “Hey, you haven’t heard the old stuff, but this is a mixture.”
But they mucked it up, in my opinion, when they reformatted it.
There's a few albums like that in the 70s and 80s, where they just, you know, between the US. and the UK, they changed the running order on that.
Yeah, A&R people. In my opinion, there was only one great A&R person, and that was John Kalodner.
I’ll tell you a little story. I was at Atlantic, and they commissioned me to do an album with Lita Ford. We went in, and she didn’t want to be produced by anybody. So I was about three weeks into rehearsals, and she wasn’t cooperating at all.
I got paid by the record company and everything, and I said to them, “Well, now I’ve got time on my hands.”
They said, “Okay, we’ve got this other band called Malice.”
So I went into Pasha Studios and started recording Malice. To make a long story short, I kept sending them rough mixes—“Take a look at this…”—and they kept saying, “No, don’t worry about it. Carry on.”
So I carried on and finished the album.
Quiet Riot was next door doing the remake of “Cum On Feel the Noize” and that sort of stuff.
I went to play back the album for the A&R guy, and he said, “Oh, crap, I didn’t realize this was heavy metal!”
I said, “What are you talking about? It’s called Malice! I mean, it’s not going to be called Mary, you know.”
And he said, “Well, we didn’t sign this, did we?”
I said, “Apparently you did, because you gave it to me.” (Laughs)
That was a classic example of an A&R guy. And he was actually at my wedding.
I wanted to ask you, last time you had mentioned that Twin Barrels Burning had started out as a different title.
Well, what happened there was that it was originally called The Nature of the Beast—“It’s Just the Nature of the Beast.”
I’m trying to remember what it was… There was the April Wine album The Nature of the Beast.
So at the last minute, they changed the lyrics and everything to “You Make My Engine Overheat,” which, to me, kind of ruined the whole point of it. It changed the whole thing.
But yeah, that was the decision they made because they thought it would be too comparable to the April Wine album.
I know they still have the line in the song, "Nature of the Beast", but obviously they took, they changed the title.
And that was another interesting little situation.
We were recording at The Sol, which was Jimmy Page’s studio. We were working away one night, and all of a sudden the roadies or security guards came over and said, “We’ve got this guy trying to get into the studio.”
So we looked at the camera, and it was Jimmy Page—the guy who owned the place.
I said, “I think you should let him in.”
He came in, and I was trying to get him to do a little cameo, but he just spent a few hours talking and hanging out.
I learned something from that. I learned that you can have the same guitar with a different player and it’s totally different. Clapton could play a note on his guitar, and I could play the same note, and it just wouldn’t be the same.
So it was very interesting.
It was a fun album to work on. The studio was so dead-sounding that Trevor Bolder and I went to another studio in the middle of the night, and I recorded all the bass parts in one night because I just couldn’t get a bass sound there. Not to say someone else couldn’t have, but I couldn’t.
I didn’t end up mixing that album. I think I had to move on to another project because we’d overrun at some point.
I grew up on that band, so I loved it. Having the opportunity to work on a Wishbone Ash album was a lot of fun.
Yeah, it's a good album. It's kind of more of a straight forward rock album for them. The song Trevor wrote, “Hold On”, was probably the standout track for me.
I thought it was a good rock album, I think it stands up. I don’t remember, but as you know, with these recordings there’s always some drama going on somewhere. I don’t believe there was any drama on that album at all. It was kind of fun, and we did it as quick as we could because it was a limited budget.
Speaking of 'Drama', you were credited on that album as well! Was that a strange atmosphere with that line-up of Yes?
Again, I wasn’t that familiar with Yes beyond Fragile and that sort of stuff. Steve Howe is an amazing guitarist.
I did all the guitars on the album. They had four studios running at the same time. One person was doing keyboards, and they had six slave rooms.
It was obviously going to be the end of the band because it should have been five solo albums.
Funnily enough, the first time I met Chris Squire, I’d just been working on, I think, a Pink Panther movie or something. Peter Sellers was an absolutely wonderful person.
I said to him, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
And he said, “Actually, I’ll go make you a cup of tea.”
The next day, Chris Squire comes in and says, “I want a cup of tea.”
I said, “Okay, well, the kitchen’s that way,” because I was busy mixing.
And he said, “Well, I’m Chris Squire.”
I said, “Okay, I’m Ashley Howe. The kitchen’s that way.”
The drummer turned around to me and said, “Wow!”
But Steve was just a wonderful person.
I’ll never forget: he was in the control room working out a part, so I put the tape at half speed. He was doing this part with a lot of finger work.
They said, “Okay, let’s record it.”
So he goes downstairs, and I leave the tape at half speed, thinking we’re going to record it at half speed and then speed it up afterward.
He said, “Oh no, put it back to full speed.”
He transposed the entire thing and then said, “Now let’s do a harmony.”
I thought, okay, you might not like the guitar tone, but you can’t fail to admire the technique.
He brought in thirteen amps, and we tried about a hundred different guitars for every overdub. In the end, we wound up using the same guitar and the same AC30 combination we’d started with.
But he always said, “I need to try this.”
Unfortunately, it should have been a Steve Howe album because a lot of the guitar work was taken away. When everybody came together, they all played over each other. They literally let the keyboard player play over the guitar parts.
You had to take a lot of stuff out just to make room.
So it was obviously an attempt to solve a difficult situation.
I don’t know if it was one of their worst albums. It was certainly a pleasure to work on.
It's different, obviously. I kind of like it for being a little more modern...
“Machine Messiah”…There's a couple of great tracks on there.
But yeah, you got a lot of great things out of it. I mean, in time, you got the next Yes album and it's a different lineup, and you got Asia and all that.
One other thing I’ve got to show you, I picked this up a couple years ago, a very strange album, Mike Maran.
I recognize this, Mike Maran. He was a fantastic session keyboard player. In fact, he was very instrumental in a stage-show called Time, for Dave Clark. We had Freddie Mercury on it, Laurence Olivier, Ashford and Simpson, and a lot of other people involved. Mike was very much an instigator of most of the arrangements, and we recorded a lot of stuff in his studio.
At what point did you kind of get out of the kind of the rock producing in the UK and then coming over to moving over to America in that?
Well, between 1980 and ’85 or ’86, I was still doing a few bands. I worked with a band in Australia called The Angels, and I did a few other albums during that period.
But around 1986, I basically stopped doing as much.
To be honest, I was getting a little disenchanted with the way the music business was going. People weren’t using big studios anymore.
A little example of that is that I did an album with John Sinclair and a band called Estrella in 2010.
All done on Pro Tools. In fact, he would send me the files and the overdubs, and in the end I mixed the album on my MacBook—128 tracks.
The big studios weren’t being used anymore. It was becoming too easy for people to do this stuff. Then the age of plug-ins came in. We used to spend all that time trying to work out sounds and tape phasing with our hands, and suddenly it just became too easy.
I didn’t want to get into the disco era and that sort of stuff. I did a few disco records, but to me the music business was changing.
So, what actually happened was that I got married.
I did Time, got married, then came back and worked on the Time project, which involved doing all the films and mixing the double album with all the different artists for Dave Clark back at Lansdowne. That was a lot of fun.
Then I actually went into television on the post-production side. I was fairly successful. I won eight Emmys for post-production work—various long-form shows and things like that.
I also did a lot of live television. By moving into post-production, we ended up working on the Massenburg console, so I still got to do some good audio work. It was just a different genre and a different approach.
I went from 128 faders to five.
What exactly will you be doing as far as the sound goes?
Well, it depended. I actually ended up doing a lot of soap operas, where I’d be editing dialogue, adding sound effects and music, and balancing the entire show.
I also did a lot of live post-production for Monday Night Football, for example, where we’d do the opening segments.
I worked on a lot of 20/20 broadcasts and Primetime Live, along with various news broadcasts. Those were live post-production situations where material was constantly being brought in, and I was putting it all together and either airing it immediately or balancing it while it aired.
It was challenging. It was a smaller use of the skills I had, but it still incorporated many of the same processes. I think I managed to change things a little bit, and it eventually made me the highest-paid audio engineer in television, which was great.
I had a separate contract above the union contract. I won eight Emmys doing it, and it was a lot of fun.
With some of the long-form shows, I developed a reputation where producers would simply bring me the tapes, leave me alone, and I’d mix everything overnight by myself and hand back the finished program.
I developed a reputation where, if a project came to me—and I’m not trying to be big-headed; that’s just how it was—there were five other engineers, but they kept booking me. So I was highly paid, working constantly, and enjoying it.
Then, when Disney decided to shut down a lot of its operations, I moved out of post-production and into the live production area.
That wasn’t nearly as much fun. It’s like air-traffic control, but without the rewards.
At that point, they were trying to get rid of people through pure attrition. They even employed people whose job was essentially to watch for your mistakes.
There’s nothing quite like doing a live broadcast to 60 million people with someone standing over your shoulder waiting for you to open the wrong fader so they can write a report about it.
It wasn’t a very pleasant atmosphere, but I wasn’t going to let them use that as an excuse to deny me a full pension. I ended up with lifetime entrance privileges to Disney and things like that. So, I stayed with it.
I’d lost a little bit of enthusiasm—not interest, because I still loved what was going on—but I didn’t totally agree with the methods being used nowadays.
Maybe that’s because I’m old-fashioned. As engineers, we grew up with no second chances. Now you’ve got three million tries. Back then, if you screwed up, you screwed up.
The early Heep stuff was done on eight tracks. We’d be dropping in a bass solo on the backing vocal tracks, and if you didn’t come out of the punch-in at exactly the right moment, there were no more backing vocals.
There was no margin for error. I think that forced everybody to work differently.
You didn’t have computer mixing. You’d mark the tape with a Chinagraph wax pencil, and that would be your base level—not bass as in bass guitar, but your starting point.
You’d move the mix around manually. If you pushed the drums up, you’d probably have to push the guitar up a little too because the balance had changed.
You played the mix like an instrument. Once everything became computerized, it just became too easy.
And speaking of engineers, in those days we cut tape and spliced tape. I was taught by a guy called John Mackswith, an incredible engineer. He made me edit using bent scissors that looked like this.
Once you learned to edit like that, it wasn’t anything like using a splicing block. I kept saying, “Can I buy a pair of straight scissors? I don’t want to make a mistake.” And he said, “Just don’t make a mistake.”
That was the way I was trained. And I didn’t make a mistake. But it’s all changed now. To be honest, it’s become too easy.
And you moved into movies as well?
Yeah, I did soundtracks to a couple of the Pink Panther movies. And I did the recording to Time. Are you familiar with Time?
Okay, well, it was a theatrical production—a musical theatre project—with Cliff Richard and, as I mentioned before, Burt Bacharach, Ashford & Simpson, Freddie Mercury, and a lot of other major artists who appeared on the album.
The production itself was staged at the Dominion Theatre in England, which seated about 5,000 people. We had a live recording studio underneath the theatre, which was fantastic.
Richard Dodd, who is my best friend—we’ve been friends since we were five years old—worked on it with me. Richard and I later got to do Raging Silence together for Uriah Heep, which was great.
So Time was a concept project that Dave Clark put together. It ran in the theatre for years and featured Laurence Olivier.
We had to record Laurence Olivier, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease at the time, so we literally had to help him into a chair.
I’ve got a lovely story about him. His image was being projected onto a 15-foot holographic head that flew around the theatre.
A guy named Simon Napier-Bell was heavily involved with the theatrical side of things. At that point in time, the biggest productions had maybe fifteen hydraulic systems. His show had something like sixty.
The stage would actually tilt up vertically with performers standing on it. The amount of technology involved was incredible.
I also went to Laurence Olivier’s house to record him personally for some overdubs. Later, we needed him in the studio for filming.
Because of the Parkinson’s, we had to physically secure him in position. Even the slightest movement would become exaggerated on the giant holographic projection. A small shake could move his nose halfway across his face on the screen.
One day, a mailroom boy came in with a message for him. He looked downstairs and realized, “That’s Laurence Olivier.” He was completely starstruck.
Laurence noticed him standing there and said, “Please excuse me. I’m working at the moment, but I need to come upstairs.” He walked up to the kid and said, “Hello, I’m Sir Laurence Olivier.” The poor kid was practically shaking. Then Olivier said, “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting.” What a wonderful man. What a great human being.
That was the technology we were working with at the time, and it was a lot of fun.
I started out doing the first few performances live. We recorded the raw performances, and once the production got going, I think it ran for four or five years.
That was another collaboration with Richard Dodd because he’d already done half of the double album. Richard and I were fortunate enough to work together several times over the years, and it was always a lot of fun.
Were you on like set for a lot of any of the movies and stuff that you’d meet a lot of people over the years?
The movie work was mostly recording the music—a couple of songs here and there for each production. Even that has a nice story attached to it.
You had to be heavily unionized to work on those sessions, and I wasn’t part of the union. Dave Clark pulled a few strings because he wanted me to do the work. I said, “Great, I’d love to do it.”
But there were all kinds of restrictions. I wasn’t allowed to speak directly to the person operating the recording machine. I had to tell another guy what I wanted, and he would relay the message.
At one point I went out to mic up the musicians and tripped over a microphone cable, pulling the connector out of the wall. I went to plug it back in and they immediately said, “Oh no, don’t touch that!”
So we had to wait fifteen minutes for an electrician to come and plug it back in. Meanwhile, we only had about thirty-five seconds available to record a thirty-second piece of music.
I said to the guy, “Put it into record.” He replied, “You can’t talk to him. You have to talk to me.” I said, “Okay. Don’t put it into record.” He then turned to the operator and said, “The engineer in charge of the session would like you to place the machine into record status.” We just barely got the take recorded.
Afterward I asked, “What would have happened if we hadn’t gotten that?” And the answer was, “You’d have to book another twelve-hour minimum session.”
Then the same person proceeded to tell me, “I don’t understand why we’re losing all our recording business in England.” Dave Clark turned around and said, “Next time I’ll just record in Germany. It would be cheaper to fly all the musicians there. Why the hell do you think you’re losing business?”
It was a very strange atmosphere. But despite all the bureaucracy and obstacles, we got it done.
Not really, to be honest. Retired…Well, I say retired. I was let go—or they tried to fire me—from ABC, but I was a little smarter than they were. So I ended up with a pension.
I went back and did something with John Sinclair. I’m always open to doing things; I just don’t really need to do it anymore. And I don’t want to spend too many more days in studios. I mean, I spent most of my life in studios.
Have you considered putting some of your stories down in a book?
Well, it’s funny you should say that. I have a lady who contacted me. I believe she’s interviewed a lot of engineers—Richard has been one of them. I think she’s interviewing a bunch of engineers and putting them into some sort of “top” category or collection. So she’s going to come and talk to me.
I would love to do it. I don’t know. I mean, I tell people these stories, and they’re mostly nostalgic, but they also take me back to those moments. A lot of people have said, “You should share them because…”
There’s some interesting stories, not even just with the Heep stuff, but obviously like Motorhead and Yes.
Well, I think I’ve got enough stories to make at least a couple of pages interesting. So, in answer to your question, and ironically enough, she sent me a text yesterday saying, “I’m coming back up your way. Let’s get together.” I know she’s interviewed a lot of very, very accomplished people. I don’t consider myself a big name, but I think I’ve contributed something.
I’ve probably got my name on a couple of million records, but that’s not really the point. I think I actually helped some people, and I think that’s important. So yes, hopefully I’ll have something worthwhile to say and eventually make it into a book somewhere.
And then I’ve got the Uriah Heep stories. I used to be a bit of an idiot. (Laughs) Well, I’d always try to make everybody laugh.
There’s a story from when we were recording “The Wizard.” I’d set Ken up at Lansdowne under a spotlight with a chair in the middle of the room while he was doing his acoustic part. I’d also found a great big cardboard box and written “10 Tons” on it. I positioned it above him where nobody could see it.
As he started playing the intro, I dropped it onto him and covered him with a ten-pound weight, which was very Monty Python. Gerry Bron got pissed off at me and fired me—then rehired me.
I used to do silly stuff like that.
Gerry was one person I never got to interview.
He was an interesting man. I have to say, he looked after the people who looked after him. At the ripe old age of nineteen, he bought me a BMW, gave me a separate contract, and did things like that.
I was doing a lot of engineering work for him, and later Peter Gallen and I worked on the solo albums by David Byron and Ken Hensley. Then Gerry gave me projects with Hawkwind, Sally Oldfield, Motörhead, and various other artists.
So he was very supportive, and I certainly owe him a lot.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/81045-Ashley-Howe
https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/roundhouse-studios/6629
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0397777
Source: ASHLEY HOWE - An interview with British recording engineer, producer
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