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HUGH PADGHAM (co-producer): The Townhouse was one of the first studios to have a Solid State Logic console. All consoles allow you to talk to people in the studio, but the SSL guys invented a button where you could hear back from the studio. It had a massive compressor, so if you hung a microphone in the studio, it could pick up people talking anywhere. One day when we were working on Peter Gabriel’s [third] album, Phil was playing drums and I opened the reverse talkback mic. We heard the most unbelievable, distorted, crunching sound. And another feature of that console was the noise gate, where you could go from the enormity of a compressed drum sound to the nothingness of a closed-off sound.
I drove down to Phil’s house on a really nice day, with my car roof down, and we listened to his demoes and played Frisbee in his garden. He was there on his own; the wife had gone. He was very proud of these demoes and I think I endeared myself to him by saying, “Look, let’s copy the bits that we want to keep, and then we’ll just re-do the vocals and overdub drums in the studio.” That’s how we proceeded to record the whole album.
I can’t remember how the idea germinated to have the drums come in at the end of “In The Air…”. You were cutting on to vinyl in those days, so what you didn’t want was to have the drums sounding so loud that the bits before sounded too quiet, if you see what I mean. We deliberated for ages. But I guess we did a reasonable job at the end of the day.
Then we had to record some extra drums for the version that came out as a single, because Ahmet Ertegun, when we were mastering the album in New York, said: “If this is going to be a single, you have to make it clear to people where the beat is.” We thought, well, if the great Ahmet Ertegun wants us to do this, we better do it. So we went down to Strawberry Studios in Dorking and Phil overdubbed a backbeat on a tom. That was only for the single release. In the original version, the real version, it’s a Roland drum machine.
It’s not really a pop song, but you know, we weren’t interested in pop songs. We were much more interested in getting cool musicians on the record and making them sound good. Generally, in those days, you used to make an album and then someone would choose a single at the end of it. You made the album for the album’s sake. Today, unless they hear a single, they won’t even let you in the studio.