John Leckie

John Leckie began his career at Abbey Road studios in 1970 and in the early part of his career worked with the likes of John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, and Syd Barrett. 

 

In more recent years he has worked on albums by Muse, Radiohead, My Morning Jacket, Spiritualised, and The Verve.

 

Yet despite such impressive credentials he remains best known for producing the debut by The Stone Roses, a record often cited as the greatest British album of all time.

 

John was involved with remastering and arranging the 20th anniversary edition, which is available to buy now. We caught up with him on the phone for a quick chat about this and, you know, some other stuff…

 

 

It's been 20 years since The Stone Roses came out. Did you know you were involved with something special at the time or does that only come with hindsight?
Well, it becomes special! We didn’t expect to be talking about it 20 years later; but at the time we tried to put as much positive energy as possible in to the record, so yeah we expected it to do well and its usually a disappointment if it doesn’t. When it did come out it wasn’t in the charts, and in those days there was a big thing about getting on Top Of The Pops, which we did do but not until Fools Gold which was the fifth single.

 

So what we were really looking forward to was being number one with the album and number one with a single. Fools Gold only got to number four or something, so it was exciting because it jumped up from 32 to 22, then got in the top 20 then got to number eight and then number four – we were expecting a number one but in the end it was four.

 

My memory of the charts then is that it was the dark days of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, so anything with any musical value breaking through seemed like a real victory for good taste.
But it’s not like that anymore because it’s not so focused on the charts, You just go on to another chart, so it doesn’t count anymore and that’s a real disappointment. And not having Top Of The Pops on the TV is a shame – someone must be able to do it right somehow. We can’t live with Jools Holland forever!

 

No, and as great as that show is, it caters to an older audience. Since you mentioned Fools Gold, is it true that it was actually the B-side to What The World Is Waiting For, and it got flipped over when it got the better reaction?
That’s absolutely true – it was worked on as a B-side and What The World Is Waiting For was considered the A-side.

So it just goes to show that the band and the people around them don’t always know best...
No, it might well have come from the band saying this is the song and Fools Gold is the groove – maybe they thought to have a hit single you have to have a song, not that Fools Gold isn’t a song, but it isn’t a conventional song like What The World Is Waiting For is.

When you where originally asked to produce the album did you know anything about the band?
Not really, but just before that I had done some tracks with The LAs in Liverpool and someone there told me about this band from Manchester called The Angry Young Teddy Bears who wanted to work with me, so I told them to ring me up. When I met the Stone Roses John Squire said, “You do know we used to be called The Angry Young Teddy Bears?”, so there was a vague connection before, but no, I didn’t know them. I had never met them.

What where your first impressions of them as people?
They were great, they way they are, or were, is the way they are all the time with everyone; they’re vibey, happy and fun.  I met them on stage at International 2 because Gareth who was the manager ran these two clubs called International  1 and 2 so the Roses could rehearse on stage in the morning until the sound check at four, but all day they got to rehearse on that big stage, which was good for them because it meant they could practice their poses! And that’s how we met, they were buzzing, everyone was buzzing and off we went.

 

Ian Brown was a fantastic front man, he had that attitude and swagger that influenced so many people – there would be no Liam Gallagher as we know him without Ian Brown. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say his singing voice was quite limited; did you have any concerns about that during recording?
No, I didn’t actually. I wouldn’t call his voice limited, he has quite a range but I think it was all about confidence. He probably sings a lot better on the first record than he does now.  But at the time I didn’t have a problem, no more than with any other band. We would wait until we got a good one and then say that’s the best one, that’s the way to do it, but maybe the second verse is better from another take, so there was a little editing going on but nothing like what you do today on the computer because it was all done on tape.

There was no auto tune in those days.
No auto tune, no editing, no copy and pasting really – you could with a lot of messing about but it was better to go and sing it again, which is still the way really!

Do you think it’s almost too easy now?
Yeah, it’s crazy.  It’s not any quicker and it’s not any better. The outcome you could argue is worse, but it’s just different, you get a different result using the computer than the tape. But there’s something about the 25 best records of all time and it’s probably because they were all made on tape.

To get back to the Stone Roses album, how did they work in the studio? Were the songs all carefully worked out in advance or did they improvise?
Most of the songs where rehearsed in advance, apart from probably Bye Bye Bad Man and I Am The Resurrection which we worked up when we went to Rockfield. We spent a few days rehearsing in the studio which is always a bit of a panic when you are meant to be recording but haven’t written a song yet. So yeah, pretty much all of the songs were worked out, as you will hear with the demos that are coming with the box set.

 

Sometimes there wasn’t a drum part because Reni was never happy with what he was playing, because he would play something different every time and that’s why he was never happy with what he was playing, because he would always improvise. If anything, Reni was the improviser, Mani was rock solid and John always had another idea.

I have heard the demos you're talking about and that very famous second half of I Am The Resurrection in the final version sounds nothing like the demo, so that was something that was worked on quite meticulously, I would imagine?
That’s right, usually it was the last number of the set and usually they would improvise the end, but when we got to Rockfield we decided we wanted to arrange it really tightly, like four bars of this section, eight bars of that section, Mani’s little bass thing, and it was all recorded in one go. I think if we had done it with a computer we probably would have done it all in sections and joined it together, but what we were insistent on doing was rehearsing it as a band arrangement so the whole end section is them playing.

So the end section is all one take?
Yeah, if you work and work and get a magic take what you get is something much better than something chopped together on the computer. It’s organic. None of the record, except for Fools Gold, is done to a click track, which a lot of people swear by now.

 

When the tracks got given out to DJs to do remixes, the DJs were coming back saying “I can’t remix that, there’s no click track” and we said, “well that’s because it’s music and they’re musicians!” That’s why I like to think Stones records last, like Beatles records, you can’t imagine them being recorded to a click track.

Do you ever listen to any of the albums you produce for pleasure or do they remain as work in your mind?
Well they do for a year or so after, but then I can listen to them.

We have to briefly touch on Second Coming. Not the most brilliant experience of your life?
No, it wasn’t.

What do you think went wrong?
To this day I don’t know really. I think things just got out of balance between them. Other things became more important than music and being in a band. It was difficult to get them all in a room together and get the flow of some tracks down they way we used to. It was always one step forward, two steps back.

My understanding is that John was very much in control of what was going on then and the partnership with Ian wasn’t in place as it was before. Would that be right?
Before I always saw it as the four of them, not just John and Ian, but they were all separate people. Mani and Ian always wanted to get them together and there was always a lot of positivity, it was always great fun but the work just wasn’t getting done and people where going off and having babies and had different domestic things happening, management things, all different kinds of things were going on, and right at the bottom of the list was writing songs and making a record. But they did have quite a few songs, but it’s how they were delivered that was the problem. There wasn’t a shortage of songs for the second album.

It just occurred to me that they may have been burdened with the expectation to match the first album and that could have made them freeze a bit?
Yeah, especially because it was a few years later and people grow up, it’s very difficult to recapture where you were when you were 21 or 22 when you're getting on for 30.

We talked about Fools Gold earlier, do you think that was a direction they should have gone in? Because they went for this retro 70s, almost Led Zeppelin sound.
After Fools Gold they did One Love which was similar to Fools Gold, but maybe the song wasn’t as strong unfortunately, and the B-side to Something’s Burning is a really good track as well and they were going to be the start of the second album. One Love was going to be the first track on album two for Silvertone, and that’s when the court case happened – it’s all Geffen’s fault really! Anyway, people have written books about it already.

Supposing Geffen hadn’t have come in and the court case hadn’t have happened, do you think the album would have been a lot different?
Yeah it would have been a lot quicker, and we would have kept it in Britain – what on earth where a LA record company doing snooping around our band! There is something distinctly British about the Roses. The American company never came to the studio and we never had any contact, they only met the band when they signed the deal, shook hands said thank you – there was never any creativity coming from Geffen.

Do you think there’s any chance that they will reunite, or is that pretty much it?
That’s pretty much it...Unless...I don’t know, I really don’t know.

If they did, and they asked you to produce another album for them, would you?
Of course I would.