Producing Atomic Kitten's 'Whole Again'

Bill Padley & Jeremy Godfrey

Published in SOS June 2001
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People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers

Number one UK hit 'Whole Again' took Atomic Kitten from the girl-band niche to a universal audience, and made an impressive first single release for co-writers and co-producers Bill Padley and Jeremy Godfrey. Sam Inglis hears the story.

It's less than two years since Bill Padley last graced the pages of Sound On Sound. Then, he was dispensing advice on radio editing and plugging, and putting together a new division of Wise Buddah, the company he co-founded, to break into the world of pop songwriting and production. This move has proved so successful that Wise Buddah Music's very first co-written and co-produced single crashed straight into the British charts at number one and remained there for four consecutive weeks — an unusual achievement in these volatile times. The single, co-written and co-produced by Padley and his colleague Jeremy Godfrey, was Atomic Kitten's 'Whole Again'.

"The last time we were in SOS, radio edits were the main thing that we were doing, though we always knew that the years of grounding as radio people and musicians/writers/producers would come to the fore one day. We were writing loads of stuff and said then that people would hear it shortly," explains Bill. "Well, basically me and him have been locked in a room for the last year and a half, just writing. We started off by spending a lot of time making our tracks sound like absolutely finished records, which was a mistake in retrospect, because by the time people got round to wanting to use them, things had moved on a bit — so what was a great production when we wrote it was no longer a great production when it got covered by somebody. So we took a conscious decision about six months ago to concentrate more on writing and spend less time on producing the demo, although our demos are still pretty comprehensive.

"We spent a lot of time writing and touting the songs around, and the two people in this country A&R-wise who understood and who got it were Colin Barlow at Polydor and Hugh Goldsmith at Innocent. They would always listen to our stuff and suggest things and give us help and assistance — a rare thing in A&R men! One day we were sitting in Hugh's office at Innocent, and he said 'Oh, I've got this track from Atomic Kitten which isn't quite finished yet.' He played it, and basically it was a half-finished song and a half-finished production, although it had already been put on their Japanese album. All the verses were spoken rather than sung, and the production had the right sort of feel, but it didn't sound like a finished record. And he said 'Can you go away and write a melody? You've got a week.'

Logic versus Pro Tools     Bill and Jeremy have always been firm believers in the merits of Pro Tools. Until about nine months ago, they used Emagic's Logic Audio for MIDI and Pro Tools for audio, but then switched to doing both on Digi's own Pro Tools software. "We have changed our working modus operandi quite drastically since Pro Tools 5, when they added MIDI sequencing properly," explains Bill. "Logic is brilliant at what it does. However, I cannot say that we ever used more than two percent of the features of Logic. The way Pro Tools handles MIDI is not elegant, it's not flash — but what do you want to do with MIDI? Record it, quantise it, move it around, change the velocities, transpose it. What else do you want to do with it? People use sequencer features as an excuse for not having any ideas. They'll go 'What are we going to do now? Bollocks! Let's groove-quantise it to a shuffle 32 waltz beat! Let's go into Cubase and use whatever that thing is called that generates notes randomly!' For f••k's sake, why not just play something!"

"We loved it as soon as we heard it. We said 'This is great, but it ain't Atomic Kitten!', but we decided to do it anyway. The original track was done by Stuart Kershaw and Andy McCluskey in Liverpool, who are intrinsically linked with the Kittens. Andy McCluskey of OMD fame, surprisingly, is the man behind Atomic Kitten! And one of the issues was that all the previous Kitten records had all been aimed at 'teenies'. They were quite successful, they had had chart hits, but they weren't actually selling that many records. So our task was to take this track which was nothing like Atomic Kitten, and turn it into a hit song and record.

"We decided to write a melody and change all the chords. It was quite difficult, because the chorus of the song was so hooky that the verse had to lead up to it but not overshadow it, which is why it ended up sounding as low as it does. We very carefully worked out what the vocal range of the Kittens was, because the last thing we wanted was to write a melody that was fantastic but that they wouldn't be able to sing. We couldn't change the key of the song, because the chorus was already there.

"So we wrote this rough thing, and I sang it, so it was me singing the verse and the Kittens singing the chorus, and we did a little bit of tarting up of the track, but not very much. We gave it to Innocent, and Hugh played it to the girls and to Andy and Stuart and to Martin their manager. To start with, they weren't sure at all, because we'd effectively completely changed the song, and they were so used to hearing the previous version. But after a couple of days they came back and thought it was perfect."

With the new direction for the track agreed, Bill and Jeremy set about making the demo into a record in their West Hampstead music studio. The first stage was to record the Kittens' new vocal for the verses, in place of Padley's own voice on the demo. As Bill explains, however, the girls' hectic schedule made the vocal session a hasty affair: "They were going on stage the same night for the first night of the Steps tour at Wembley. They were on stage at 7.30, and Natasha and Liz were supposed to be with us at 3.30. They eventually turned up at five. So we got Natasha and Liz to sing the whole song all the way through, twice, and I'd say it probably took 15 minutes each."

"In the middle of this, they've brought their wardrobe costumier along, and there are all these dresses in plastic bags being laid out in the living room," laughs Jeremy Godfrey. "So Liz would be trying something on, and then Natasha would come in and do her bit, and then she'd go out and try something else on, and then she'd go out and they'd bring Liz back in. It was like a relay race."

"What we did with them, which is what we generally do when we're working with bands as opposed to solo people, is to get everyone to sing everything, and then see who sings what the best," explains Bill. "They're both great singers. Kerry wasn't there — Kerry's bit was the spoken bit in the middle, which still remained, and she had done the speaking verses which had gone by that point. So Liz and Natasha did the vocals. Our way of doing vocals is just to get them to go through the song four or five times, not worry about stopping, get it all in Pro Tools and worry about it afterwards. You know what you can fix and what you can't. When we do backing vocals, if it's not over in two hours, something is badly wrong, even for 50 vocals. When someone's doing a singing session, we'll say 'Bob The Builder', meaning 'Can we fix it?' And we know what we can move and what we can tune. There is absolutely no point in making a singer go through hell to get a syllable exactly right, or a note that is 0.2 percent over a C sharp back down to a C sharp again. That's just a waste of time. Let the singer sing the song four or five times, and then you worry about it afterwards, that's what you're paid for. Don't make the singer go through agony. I am a singer, and I understand the psychology of singing, and there's no point in getting a singer there for 10 hours going over and over and over the same bit again. There really isn't. You get the performance out of them, get the feel out of them, and then you worry about the inadequacies of it afterwards. And, to be honest, there's pretty much nothing you can't do in Pro Tools when it comes to fixing up vocals."

"Auto-Tune's quite a nice failsafe," explains Jeremy, "but we don't use it excessively. It just catches things and pulls things in a bit, and then for syllabic timing we'll cut the vocals up and move them around."

"It really does happen very quickly, so you're not arsing around for hours doing the same bloody thing," adds Bill. "Jeremy will do stuff like putting 'S's on words where the S wasn't quite right without even thinking about it. It's like an automatic reaction."

"We also don't particularly like vocal booths, because they create a division," says Jeremy. "You're putting someone in a room with glass and they're isolated. We like to be standing around with them when they're singing."

"If we have to use a booth, I go in there with the singers," adds Bill.

Bill and Jeremy's secret weapon for recording vocals is an unusual American microphone, the CAD VX2: "We were offered a chance to try the microphone, which I'd never heard of," explains Bill. "It's a double valve mic, a big blue thing. Before it arrived we were using a Neumann U87, which we couldn't see past — it's what everyone uses. But we tried this and went 'Hello! This is the vocal sound!' This thing sounds amazing. If you track it up 40 times it just sounds glorious. And the Neumann doesn't get used at all, any more."

As well as recording the new vocals, Bill and Jeremy also took over the job of producing the track, although they were careful to preserve the good features of Andy McCluskey and Stuart Kershaw's original version. "What Andy and Stuart did had a real spirit about it, and we didn't want to lose that spirit," insists Bill, "but we had to cut their bits up and move them, so they'd work with the new chords that we'd done. We liked what they'd already got, so the bits they'd already played we just moved around and cut up and made them work."

Disk Housekeeping     "We're using a 9600 Mac, with a Mix Plus system, which is a Mix Farm card and a Mix Core, and one old Farm card," explains Bill Padley. "And we absolutely max out every available bit of DSP space and every available track. Pretty much all of our tracks go up to 64 voices, which is all it'll do. And Digidesign won't believe us, but everything we do comes of one old 9Gb SCSI drive. It's supposed to be split across two, and we started being very good boys by doing everything across two drives, and it became really unmanageable. By accident one day we ended up with 64 tracks on one drive, and it didn't cough. So we don't even touch the second drive. "We have folders on our Mac called Songs, Edits, Remixes, and so on, and we have Retrospect as a backup mechanism, backing up onto DAT. And after every day, it gets backed up to Retrospect and things that are no longer in use get cleared off the drive, and it gets defragmented. Disk housekeeping is a boring subject, but it has to be done. Otherwise you end up in all kinds of trouble. Touch wood, we've never lost a thing off Retrospect. We can go back to something we did two years ago and there's the Pro Tools session."

"In the original, the verse chords were exactly the same all the way through as they were in the chorus," says Jeremy. "It's in E major, but we wanted it to go to C sharp minor for the second chord of the verse, rather than B as it did, so basically we just kept the E chord, doubled it in Pro Tools and added a C sharp in the bass, thus getting a C sharp minor seventh!"

"We tarted the track up, as well," says Bill. "It was quite a job, because we had to take what came from Andy and Stuart — fortunately they're Pro Tools users, so they sent us the Pro Tools files. That's a revolution to us, where instead of having to get a multitrack you get a CD, burnt as Pro Tools files. In the old days when you had to use someone else's multitrack it would be the worst nightmare in the world. You'd get two 24-tracks, and you'd have to figure out what Dolby they had and how were they lined up — whereas with this you get a CD, bung it in, and there the session is."

"We kept the 'underwater' organ sound from the original session, which was part of the song, because we liked that and we couldn't really replicate it," explains Jeremy. "The majority of the bass came off the Roland XV5080. We used the same bass pattern as on the original, but because the chords had changed in the verses we had to replay it. There are two bass sounds — one of them's a sustained bass, just an ordinary drone, which runs in the choruses. In the verse, I hate to say it, but we used General MIDI sounds! I always thought GM sounds were a curse, but they're actually really helpful, because you can just go 'I want a bass sound', click, and it's there. The punctuated bass is a GM pop bass from the XV.

"The piano is from our Kurzweil K2500. We've got the piano board in it, which is a piano sound to die for, a big, lush stereo piano. We kept some of the original drums, and added a couple of additional loops from a sample CD called Vinylistics 3 — we just took applicable loops and then did the intelligent time-stretching to bars and beats in Pro Tools. Rather than pitching them in a sampler we just chucked them in and stretched them until they fitted, and then we added a couple of extra kicks from the Emu Phatt."

"When a loop goes in, Jeremy will tend to cut the loop up into bits and move it around in Pro Tools, so the loop becomes something entirely different," explains Bill. "Drums are never played in, we just put kicks, snares, hats and so on into Pro Tools and move them around. They're built in Pro Tools, as opposed to played."

Perhaps the most distinctive sound on 'Whole Again' is that of the tremolando string chords that punctuate the chorus. "When the track came from Andy and Stuart there was a sort of tremolando string thing in there, but it sounded more like some bloke scratching a violin with his arse, and it was out of tune," laughs Jeremy. "So we used Pro Tools to pitch-shift that, and we added our own tremolando strings from the Peter Siedlaczek Advanced Orchestra sample CD set, which is f•••ing expensive, but if you can afford it, worth every penny. There was also a thing that went 'dooo-eee-ooo-eee', which we renamed Doppler Rubbish. That was out of tune as well, so we put that back in tune. By the way, we are just as irreverent when naming our own tracks... we had one recently that we called 'Padley plays the guitar badly!' You may spot a few in the Pro Tools session page!"

The track was rounded off by the addition of an organ sound of venerable origin. "Our only surviving synths from the olden days are a DX7 and a Roland D50," says Bill. "The DX7's never used and the D50 is."

"We have a running joke that the D50 has to appear at some point on everything we do," laughs Jeremy. "Even if it's just a little thing, it appears on everything. On 'Whole Again' it's the organ, patch number 18!"

"At this point," says Bill, "We thought 'Well, it's all right, but it's not as good as it could be.' So we decided that we wanted a gospel choir. It's an old trick — if in doubt, stick a gospel choir on it. Obviously we weren't going to get a gospel choir, so we decided that myself and a fab singer friend of ours called Angie Giles would do the gospel choir. Angie came round, me and her tracked up about 40 vocals, and then we stuffed it all into Pro Tools, arsed around with it, put a couple of delays and a couple of effects on it, and suddenly it sounded like a gospel choir. There was a version that was delayed and shifted using DPP1 and a version using the Bruno plug-in, which was tuned to the notes to give a kind of vocoder effect. That was pretty much an afternoon's work, and it made the track really lift, and made it sound really epic.

"At the end of that, for the first time ever, we used our Focusrite Mixmaster. Before, when we used to finish stuff, we used to put it through every plug-in that was available and hope that it sounded right. But we heard the Mixmaster, and absolutely everything we do now goes through that. It's basically Focusrite's Finalizer, if you like, it's a mastering device, and we put it in an insert in Pro Tools. You put your track through it and it goes 'Hello, I'm now a record.' It was mastered again after us, but we couldn't actually detect the difference. The Mixmaster has been a really good tool for us, and it's not massively expensive. Producers always swan around going 'I've got the Manley this and the Avalon that,' but the Focusrite is aimed at domestic and semi-pro people, and it sounds brilliant. We do our mix, and then we switch it in. There's only two things we come out of Pro Tools for to use other bits of gear. One is that, and one is a Lexicon PCM80 — and to be honest, we don't actually use that properly, it gets used as a pseudo-delay kind of thing."

Since two sets of writers and producers were involved in the record-making process along with the band, management and record company, it's no surprise that more tweaks were called for at this point. "We gave the track back to Innocent, and they loved it, but weren't sure whether the girls had given their best vocal performance, because they were rushing around so much. So we decided to reconvene and try another vocal. This time we went to Wise Buddah's main studio, and on this day, the girls were not only coming to sing our track, they were also singing another track at the same time in Whitfield Street Studios. So they would come round in shifts. Liz would rush in and do her bit, and then she'd have to rush back to Whitfield Street, and Natasha couldn't speak, because she'd been working her arse off, and her voice was so throaty and low that it didn't sound like her. But anyway, she did her vocal, and Liz did her vocal. We put that vocal on it and sent it back to Innocent, and they said 'Naah, we don't like it as much as the first one.'

"So then the usual thing happens, which is that it goes backwards and forwards with people saying 'Well, I think the third word of the first verse was better on the first vocal than the other one...' So we did a bit of fiddling, sent it back to Liverpool, got it back down again, and then the girls went into Liverpool and did yet another vocal of 'Whole Again' in an attempt to get this magical verse. And what happened in the end was that we used the original that was recorded in West Hampstead! I'm not sure we told them that... (laughs). We got to the point where it's really about the song working and not about getting into the minutiae of whether that syllable is sung with more emotion, because frankly the song either worked or it didn't work. So we tarted it all up, stuck the gospel vocals on it, gave it back to Innocent, Innocent loved it, management loved it, band loved it, Andy and Stuart loved it, and all was well. And that was in June of last year. So we're thinking 'OK, now what happens?'"

"Innocent said 'This is going to be the next single, which is going to be out in September,'" continues Bill. "It came to August and everything changed, and there was going to be another single first called 'Follow Me'. So 'Follow Me' was released and did moderately well, but not spectacularly well, and then we heard in November that 'Whole Again' was definitely going to be the next single, and it really needed to be a big hit.

"By the time it came out on January 29th 2001, me and Jeremy had done 16,000 other things in between, and had really put it to the backs of our minds. The first midweek chart you get is Tuesday morning at 11 o'clock. Mark Goodier, who's the chairman of Wise Buddah, called me up on Tuesday morning and said 'Have you heard the Kittens' midweek?' I said 'No,' and he said 'Guess.' I started at 18, and he went through the whole chart saying 'Higher!' We went through this laborious process until we got to number one, and I thought he was taking the piss. We were both thinking 'They must have made a big mistake, there's no way this record's going in at number one,' because no-one was playing it. Absolutely no-one, with the exception of Radio Two, which had B-listed it. Independent radio had completely ignored it at this point, although it had been on TV a lot.

"It's become a bit of a phenomenon now, but it was Atomic Kitten against everyone, including radio, which for us was bizarre with our radio backgrounds. Our thing, really, is radio and pop, and that's what was panicking us, because when radio didn't play 'Whole Again', we were thinking 'Bollocks! We've been going round telling everyone how great we are at doing radio records, and these buggers aren't playing it! Even the people that we knew would play it are not playing it! What the f••k is going on?!' It turns out that it wasn't the record at all, it was the band. Radio had basically listened to the voices inside their heads telling them they didn't like Atomic Kitten, as opposed to listening to the record.

Import Restrictions Lifted     "In Pro Tools 5.1 you can import tracks without the associated audio," says Bill Padley. "So if you've got a fantastic guitar sound on a track you've done, you can import the track with all the plug-ins on it that gave you that sound, and then just use it. We have little templates made up — here is a good guitar sound, here is a good vocal sound, here is a good drum sound — which give you good starting points to move on instead of having to recreate them from memory."

"So we got to Tuesday morning and it was number one midweek, and the number two record was U2. And we're just going 'There's absolutely no way on God's earth that this record is going to beat U2. Whatever blip this is that's caused by all the Kitten fans rushing out to buy it ain't going to sustain it to the end of the week.' Wednesday midweek — number one. Thursday midweek — number one. Friday midweek — number one."

"By this point," says Jeremy, "it had become the longest week ever in the history of weeks!"

"What matters is what happens on the Saturday sales," continues Bill, "and it sold some ridiculously large amount of records on the Saturday. So on Sunday we learn that not only is it still at number one, but it has absolutely slaughtered U2. You could tell that radio stations had been getting really irritated, because by the end of the week they were absolutely hammering the U2 record, and doing anything they could to promote U2. So when it was confirmed at number one on Sunday, we were over the moon. Radio, of course, immediately shat themselves because they had missed this number one record, and started picking up on it the next week. That actually did us a favour, because people who'd never heard it before started to hear it.

"The next week, it was up against Wheatus' 'Teenage Dirtbag'. We thought that was a fantastic record, and thought we had no chance. Wheatus beat us (ha!) for most of the week, and then on the Saturday, again, the Kittens just sold shitloads of records. And the next week it was Outkast's 'Ms Jackson', which once again we really liked. We thought there was absolutely no way it was going to keep it this time. But by this point, it had increased sales in week two, and beat Outkast, and increased sales again. It sold 129,000 at number one, and it's the first record for a long time to increase sales for three weeks while at number one. By the fourth week we were away in Sweden, working, and we'd resigned ourselves to the fact that there was no way it was going to do four — but it did. And now it won't go away!"

So what is it about 'Whole Again' that allowed it to overcome the prejudices of radio programmers and remain at the top of the charts for a month? "It's about the song, not the production," insists Bill. "We do demos for Digidesign, we've been to Paris and Amsterdam showing Pro Tools and how to use it, and we've done all these really flash music demos. Then Digi asked us to go and demonstrate 'Whole Again', and we had f••k all to say. It's the most boring session in the world. You bring up the session and say 'Well, there's a bass. And some drums.' It's the least impressive Pro Tools session in the world, but it works, and that's actually a critical point. When you're producing records, you think about the song and what's right for the song, and don't throw in the kitchen sink. If it works, it works, and stop there.

"If you're a producer, you're not doing it to show off. You're doing it to make the best of somebody's song, whether it's yours or somebody else's. If you spend eight quid on a lobster, and you've taken it home, and you've boiled it up, and you've thrown shitloads of tomato sauce on top of it, going 'This'll be lovely!', you have not made the best of the lobster. Right? Identify what it is that makes lobsters nice to eat, and deal with that. So 'Whole Again' is a lobster. And all we've done is grilled it with a bit of cheese. And it's lovely."