Elbow

The album took over two years to make, much of which was spent searching for a new record label after the band felt let down by V2's failure to promote its predecessor, Leaders Of The Free World. "We've had great reviews for all our albums," explains the band's keyboard player and producer, Craig Potter, "but we've never had the money behind us to advertise and promote them properly. That was what was very frustrating about the last album: we all loved it, still do, and we didn't feel it got the shot it deserved."

"It wasn't a big leap from the previous albums to me producing this one, because we'd all worked together, and we co-produced the other albums anyway. It was just that someone had to take that role, really. The advantage is that we've known each other for so long that if anyone has an idea, there's no time lost in having to explain what you mean, because we all use exactly the same language. We pretty much know what each other are thinking most of the time, so you can go straight from initial idea right on to tape, hard disk, whatever. There's not much to get in the way of that process, which is really beneficial."

"We've got a lot of experience with it now. A lot of people don't know where to stop adding things, but quite often we'll get to a point with the song and we've realised that it's working well, but the song is potentially much better than what we've done with it, so we'll strip it back, take off the initial idea, maybe just keep the vocal. Always, at some point we take a step back and think 'Are we really making the most of what the lyrics mean here?' We always have to take a step back, and quite often change the vibe of the song if the lyrics are taking a different direction. If it was played on the piano we'd maybe take the piano off, keep the chords and just build it again. So it's not a case of just adding and adding, it's re-evaluating all the time. It's pretty democratic. It's a good job there's five of us, or else there'd be a lot more arguments!"

"We record as we go along, and a lot of the initial ideas get used right from the very beginning. On 'Grounds For Divorce', for instance, there's a bluesy-type loop that goes right through most of it. That was just the very initial idea in a little room, we just sat around, set up, got this bluesy riff going, and that was recorded on an Edirol field recorder. It's good to have different textures, and sometimes that's what creates the depth in a recording. If you record everything at the same time, it's all got a certain sound, whereas it's good to layer things up, and then you've got stuff up front, stuff that sounds like it's coming from a hundred metres away. It all helps, I think, to use some demo ideas, just as effects. You just tend to build on a Session in Pro Tools. The names change, they gradually evolve, and two years later you've got a finished mix in Pro Tools, all in the same Session."

"We'll get a sound on the guitar but we'll think 'Well, it's sort of what we were thinking of, but there's no front to it, we need people to notice it a bit more when it comes in, but it shouldn't be that loud, so it needs more attack.' So we'll get the knock of a piano key or even just knocking on the guitar itself, I'll edit that up, and we'll play it back out through an amp. We get quite specific on the sounds we want, even on normal guitar sounds — there's a strummed acoustic in the middle eight of 'Mirrorball' that didn't have enough of the pick attack, so we muted all the strings and did exactly the same performance but with no tone, so it's just 'bdlip, bdlip', and put that on it. There was a lot of time spent on little details like that."

Likewise, the growling, portamento bass in 'Some Riot' was something that had to be crafted in the studio. "That was a harmonica sample in a Korg Triton. When we play 'Switching Off' live, which is off Cast Of Thousands, I use that with an organ sound to create this kind of wind-organ type effect, like the old wind organs that have got a fan in them. It's had all the attack taken off so it's a slow fade-in, and then I actually played that live in the big room, so it's very much a big, roomy sound. There were two Fender Twins 30 feet apart and two mics pretty much facing them, 20 foot back. I was playing it and I was using the pitch-bend on it, but every time it bent down I was pushing the volume up, so you only really get the gritty distortion when it's actually moving from note to note, rather than on the actual note itself.

"People say a lot that they can't tell what these sounds are, and I suppose that's because we think 'What does this song need?', someone will do an elephant impression or something, and we'll go and find what can do that. We might get the attack of a banjo and the tail of an organ percussion or something, and make a new sound, that's the sort of thing we like experimenting with. We just do it in Pro Tools."

"We've got our main room, which is just like a little bedroom-sized room that we do a lot of stuff in, but we've got access to the stairwell outside and there's a big room above their main studio that we record in, it's the size of a five-a-side football pitch. We've had that since Leaders Of The Free World, but we couldn't actually use the big room as much this time, because the main studio at Blueprint was up and running, and the soundproofing wasn't good enough when they'd got people in, it's directly above their studio."

Some singers like to stick to a particular mic that works well for their voice, but Craig and Guy don't sound especially fussy. "We mix it up, it all depends. We've got a [Neumann] U87 we use quite a lot — it's not particularly bright, though, so we use [AKG] 414s and sometimes just a [Shure] 58 in the studio, maybe to get some specific effect.

"Effects-wise, we quite often use room effects, but very subtly, maybe distorting them. We don't do much doubling, but if we do, we quite often do Guy singing a line 20 feet away, off the mic, distort the fuck out of it, and then automate that under the vocal, so it can be a close vocal, but it can sound like it's getting more powerful — you can give it an extra nudge by automating this gruffer, roomier sound up now and again. There's a hell of a lot of automation going on with effects and things like that, just to make it all fit together."

"Sometimes it's just a case of chucking mics up in the usual positions and moving them around depending on how the drums sound, and if I know there's a very specific thing, we'll just use one mic. The drum sound on 'The Fix' was actually two drum performances, with pretty much just an overhead on each one, the same setup played twice and split left to right. It's the same pattern, but shifted slightly in time. Because it's a shuffly thing, you don't really notice, but it makes it sound quite wide. It's the first time we've done double-tracked drums, I think we're going to do a lot more of it.

"There's quite a lot of loops going on, while some tracks are a completely live drum performance. If we're going to loop something up, rather than try and quantise stuff, I'd rather have a loop that's slightly loose than a quantised whole performance, in a way. There's just something about anything that's bang-on that doesn't have the right vibe. We loop drums up, but only if it's right for the feel, and not necessarily because they're not in time — just because it's a different feel."

Many of the songs on The Seldom Seen Kid also feature strings, courtesy of the band's three regular players. "Stella and Jyoti play live with us, and Ian's played live with us as well, so it's violin, viola and cello, just layered and layered. The main string arrangements were written by Guy. He just went in with them and stood there and sang part after part, and we just recorded it and recorded it and built it up, changing the position of the room mic every now and again. We're pretty lucky to have a nice room to record in, to build it up, I think it sounds pretty good considering it was just three of them. There's some keyboard strings sounds going on — 'Mirrorball' is pretty much synthesized strings, but it's supposed to sound like that."

"For writing an album and recording an album, sound-wise, to make the songs work next to each other, I don't think we could have done it any different way. Because even at the end of the recording process when it was all there and we were putting the album together, we decided to bring sounds in that would take an influence from a sound on the previous track — and at that stage you can still change it to make the album work as a whole. We mix within the box, it's just all there, and we don't have any outboard, and for me, that was a really essential tool to get the album working as one. Quite often we'll put the previous song in the Pro Tools Session, and every now and again while we're recording, we'll go 'Let's just listen to that song again all the way through, and see how it goes in,' and we'll hear 'Oh, it does need a bit of this and a bit of that,' or 'Let's base this sound on the backing vocals from the previous song.'"

The last stages of production were the ones that provided the biggest challenge for Craig Potter as producer and engineer. "For me, this time round, I'm most proud of the mixing side of things really, because that's the thing that I hadn't been confident about in the past. There's very specific technical things that you need to know when you're mixing, that I have just had to learn. I've been going on various web sites, reading up about it, and now I'm finally confident enough to do that, and I think I have the mixing skills to make a record."

He pauses, and then adds, smiling: "It's won the Mercury Music Prize, so I suppose that's been proven, hasn't it?"  0