Stephen Duffy

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Writing & Producing With Robbie Williams

Published in SOS September 2006
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People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers

Photos: James Cumpsty

On the face of it, Stephen Duffy and Robbie Williams are polar opposites. The introverted, critically lauded Duffy is often championed as the UK's foremost underachiever. He co-founded Duran Duran, only to leave the band before it made it big, then briefly enjoyed chart success as 'Tintin' in 1985, and subsequently disappeared into the margins with his band the Lilac Time and as a solo artist. By contrast, the extroverted Williams has become one of the UK's most commercially successful artists since leaving boy-band Take That in 1996.

Initially, this success was founded on a lengthy collaboration with songwriter Guy Chambers, which began with 1997's Life Through A Lens. Williams and Chambers generated four albums and innumerable hit singles, but the two eventually fell out in 2002, while Williams had also become increasingly frustrated that whenever he recorded music of genuine quality, it was usually ascribed to the talents of Chambers. So 2003 found Williams looking for a new songwriting partner, and eager to raise his musical profile. Around the same time, Stephen Duffy had completed a set of albums and found himself open to new things.

"I was working in a small recording studio in AIR Lyndhurst in what used to be studio manager's office," recalls Duffy. "I had recorded at AIR off and on over the years, and had mixed Looking For A Day In The Night there in 1999. Following that, the room became available and they offered it to me. I installed a Pro Tools Digi 001, and a G4 with Logic, and a Yamaha 02R desk and some bits and pieces I had collected over the years, and for the next three or four years I'd go there every day to work on music. Out of that time came Lilac 6, the Devils album Dark Circles [Duffy's collaboration with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes], and Keep Going [Duffy's most recent solo album].

"Literally a month after I'd finished Keep Going, Rob knocked on my door at AIR and said 'Shall we write a couple of songs?' So we worked there in June 2003 for a month off and on — Rob was rehearsing for Knebworth at the same time — and came up with maybe 10 or 11 song outlines. 'Radio' and 'Misunderstood' were written during this period, as well as quite a few of the tracks that ended up on Intensive Care, such as 'A Place To Crash,' 'The Trouble With Me,' 'Sin, Sin, Sin' and 'King Of Bloke And Bird'."

The weird techno-rock of 'Radio' scored a huge hit in 2004, and was quickly followed by the only slightly less victorious 'Misunderstood'. Both songs ended up as extra tracks on Williams' 2004 Greatest Hits album. Duffy and Williams went one up on this achievement in late 2005, with the gigantic hit 'Tripping' which was taken from Intensive Care. The duo's first collaborative album went to number one in 12 countries within a week of its release on October 24, 2005, and has to date sold six million copies.

Intensive Care Song By Song 'Ghosts' "This song started off by me messing around with a Linn Drum. I programmed something reminiscent of 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush, which ended up being completely changed. I think that the 'Electronic Sequential Keyboards' I'm credited as playing is a Roland JV5080." 'Tripping' "That was written in LA in the end of 2003, and getting it right took months. One of the first things Rob wrote when he picked up a bass was the bassline to 'Tripping'. We had this Daft Punk drum-machine line going on and he played this bass line, and immediately we had a song. I wrote the 'want you to love me' section, and I was thinking that it sounded really nice and melodic, but immediately Rob trumped me with the falsetto line, which was, of course, a much better hook. We used a Waldorf Q for the bubbling sequential thing underneath the track. It was the only time that machine worked. But it had served its purpose." 'Make Me Pure' "Together with 'Advertising Space' this was one of the two songs that we wrote on acoustic guitars in January and February 2005. We wrote the song in a couple of hours, just around a table, with me playing an acoustic, and then we started to record it, and I just put down an acoustic guitar, and he sang what he had, and said 'Let's have the drums come in here, and maybe it should have strings and a choir come in there.' We were sketching this stuff out, and then decided to just do it. So I went to [string and choir arranger] David Campbell, and sang him the bits of arrangement that we had come up with. It was the first time since all this electronic experimenting that we cut something virtually live, instead of it going on for a long time. Instead this was written and recorded in a matter of hours. It was just one of these rare occasions when nothing went wrong. We did not have to fix anything, it was quick and it was kind of perfect." 'Spread Your Wings' "We started that on a Juno 60 and a Linn Drum. We'd gone out and bought stuff that day and went mad on it, using every sound we had at our disposal. The transformation from that to what it became was amazing. In the end Jebin Bruni came into Henson for an afternoon and played ARP String Ensemble and Chamberlin. I met him working with Aimee Mann and Marianne Faithful. Robert and I had done most of the keyboards, so wanted to get a fresh player, and I thought it would be interesting to get somebody in who is used to playing these kind of cranky old keyboards." 'Sin Sin Sin' "This was the first song we ever wrote, and it basically started off as a bass drum doing fours and a bass sequence in eights over the top of it. He sang the whole of the first verse over the top of that, just like that. It was quite incredible. The sequenced section that you can still hear started off as a Reason sound, and then I added the Roland XV5080, and added an SH101 sound and perhaps a Prophet 5 to give it a little bit more of a gritty, gnarly texture. I messed around with that sound quite a lot. We changed the speed of the song many times, and the Reason sound became so strange and deconstructed that it became part of the song." 'A Place To Crash' "This almost ended up on Greatest Hits, but it changed so dramatically. What we started and what we ended up with were two completely different things. Just at the very last moment Rob wanted to go back to the very first demo, so we almost jettisoned two years' work. The 'electronic sequencers' are now buried at the end. I think we mainly used the Roland JV5080. At one point it was a completely electro track, and it was strange to turn it into such a Stonesy thing." 'King Of Bloke And Bird' "That song was begun at AIR, and we did not work on it at all for almost two years, and then we finished it the week before we went into Henson in March 2005. I'd heard Rob play this three-note guitar riff at AIR, and he went home and I thought that it was really good, and sketched out this whole song, and forgot about it. Rob likes to stay up late, and after we finished recording at three or four in the morning he likes to sit around and listen to demos. One day two years later he said 'What about this? Shall we finish it off?' I think it was the last lyric that he wrote. Greg Leisz does some amazing pedal-steel atmospherics at the end."

Creative Explosion

Williams and Duffy got on like a house on fire during that initial brainstorming session in June 2003, and have continued working together ever since. In particular, it seems, the partnership provides Williams with the freedom to explore aspects of music-making and recording that had apparently been hitherto unfamiliar to him.

"When we first started to write together we sat down with a couple of acoustic guitars, which is the way I normally work," recalls Duffy, "but Rob said 'Let's not do that. Let's work in ways that neither of us have worked before, and let's try to do everything differently.' So instead, most of the material was worked out of electro-jams. We would start with him saying 'Let's do something like...' and he would suggest a feel or a speed or a rhythm, and I would program a very basic drum pattern or loop in Logic, and we would just grab an instrument each, and start jamming. I'd play a bit of guitar or keyboard, he'd often play a keyboard, and we'd come up with riffs. Nick Rhodes and I had also worked to some degree in this way on the Devils record, which came in useful for me.

The keyboard rig Stephen Duffy is using on Robbie Williams' world tour is based around a Korg Triton Extreme workstation and CX3 tonewheel organ emulator. The keyboard rig Stephen Duffy is using on Robbie Williams' world tour is based around a Korg Triton Extreme workstation and CX3 tonewheel organ emulator. The keyboard rig Stephen Duffy is using on Robbie Williams' world tour is based around a Korg Triton Extreme workstation and CX3 tonewheel organ emulator.

"It wasn't a matter of crafting songs in the traditional sense — it was far more experimental and arty, really. 'Radio' was a prime example. Rob had never played synths before, but we had a drum-machine pattern going, and he came up with three or four lines on a Nord or some Korg synthesizer. We put these lines together, and he sang over the top of that. I think Rob appreciated that we just messed around with musical instruments until we came up with something. He hadn't played any of these instruments before, so there was this intensity that people bring to first-time experimenting. He approached each instrument part as if it was a top line — everything he played was hooky. He has a level of inspiration that's seemingly always there. It's the kind of inspiration that other people aspire to, but it's always there with him, and it's quite incredible.

"Rob is a hook machine. He just writes amazing hooks, one after the other. You're just left kind of with your mouth open, wondering which of these you are going to settle with because they are all equally great. It's amazing, you never know when the hooks will stop coming with him. So part of my job as a co-producer was grab things and make sure that nothing went to waste.

"We knew that the Greatest Hits album would come out in the end of 2004, and that there would be a good two years until his next album of new material would come out, so we could afford to do it just for music's sake and not think about it becoming a record. Writing the album was a very creative period. We'd start after dinner and would work through the night, until about three or four in the morning. Some nights we would come up with three or four ideas, some nights with nothing. With a lot of the stuff we weren't thinking of releasing any of it, we were just doing it for the fun of it."

Space considerations — Duffy's room at AIR was fairly small — dictated much of the equipment that he and Williams used during this early writing period. In addition to Duffy's guitars the duo mainly used a couple of keyboards, among them a Clavia Nord Lead, and Logic soft synths and plug-ins. "My little room wasn't large enough to have loads of keyboards set up," says Duffy, "so we used soft synths like [Spectrasonics] Stylus, Trilogy and Atmosphere, [NI] Reaktor, Logic's ESX24 sampler and instruments, mostly the EVP88 Rhodes. Other soft synths we used a lot were the Moog Modular synth and the M-Tron Mellotron plug-in."

Found Objects

Engineer Andy Strange, with whom Duffy had worked together since 1995, engineered the brainstorming sessions at AIR Lyndhurst. Williams used a handheld Shure SM57 or 58 during 'messing around', while Strange recorded more 'finished' guitars and vocals to Pro Tools via the Digi 001, using an AKG C414 and a Mindprint channel strip. Strange and Duffy had used the same equipment for the entire recording of the largely acoustic Keep Going album. "Of course," remarks Duffy, "with us being at AIR, we could always run down to get a top-quality microphone or a Fairchild compressor or so, and borrow those for a few hours. So we got a pretty good sound there for the things we recorded acoustically."

After a very fruitful month at Duffy's room, the trio moved to Williams' house in Los Angeles. They stayed at the singer's home studio, nicknamed Rockband West, from August 2003 until March 2004 and continued working in a similar manner. Judging that he had no more need for his studio at AIR, Duffy gave it up and shipped the elements he and Strange thought they needed to LA.

For the guitar-based songs, Duffy favours a Gretsch guitar through this Vox amp. For the guitar-based songs, Duffy favours a Gretsch guitar through this Vox amp.

"Andy Strange came with us to LA to build Rob's studio in the master bedroom of his house in Beverley Hills," says Duffy. "Rob initially wanted to have exactly what we'd had in my room at AIR, but when we arrived in LA we found that he already had a lot of gear. He'd once started to build a home studio, so we inherited a lot of stuff. We still brought a lot of stuff with us, so the studio really was a mismatched bunch of old and new gear. It wasn't at all designed. We were just using what was there, which was good in a way, because it gave us parameters to work with, rather than thinking that you can do anything. We weren't just buying anything you can get.

"In the end the studio consisted of a 48-channel Pro Tools HD system running on a G4 with one Prism AD8 converter, a Yamaha 02R96 desk, which we soon got rid of, plus things like an Apogee PSX 100, Lexicon 960, Eventide H3000 and other outboard equipment. There was another G4 for Logic Audio with an RME interface to connect digitally to Pro Tools. We transferred everything we'd done on my Digi 001 to Rob's HD system and, in the end, also everything that we did in Logic.

"We used quite a lot of strange old pieces of gear that we would not have chosen ourselves. We had, for instance, an ad hoc microphone set up, a vintage AKG C12, with Neve 1073 mic preamp and EQ, which often went through a valve Teletronix LA2A compressor when recording vocals and acoustic guitars. It was not a microphone I would have chosen, but it sounded good to me. Rob also had a Roland JV5080 and a Yamaha Motif that someone had once bought for him, still boxed up. These were not boxes I'd ever looked at before."

In addition, Williams spent a substantial amount of their time in LA exploring and coming to terms with music technology, and his investigation involved the acquisition of several vintage keyboards. "During our time in LA, Rob and I went out to junk shops and so on," recalls Duffy, "and bought a lot of vintage analogue gear, like a Juno 60, Prophet 5, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, and Linn Drum. I also bought an ARP String Ensemble on eBay because it has the sound of those early Roxy Music albums. Rob was really into having a kind of 1980s sound. People have suggested that it came from me, since I had a synthesizer hit record in the mid '80s, but Rob was referencing New Order and the Human League and bands like that. I would never have come up with those ideas. Of course, for me it was helpful that I'd had been working with Junos and Jupiters and so on with the Tintin records in the early 1980s.

"The sounds of those old machines inspired a different approach to music, which is why we gradually drifted away from the plug-ins. The plug-ins are only pretending to be old, and they are so easily recognisable that they will sound dated in a few years. We realised that we would have to work much harder to make the record sound unique. So it seemed easier to just get the original things. We also became dissatisfied with programming stuff on a computer, rather than having big buttons and old-fashioned knobs to twiddle with. So we slowly went away from Logic and towards all keyboards becoming analogue. We were struck though by how incredibly variable the tuning of these old synths is! I'd completely forgotten about that. The plug-ins at least had the advantage of being in tune."

Healthy Time

The album recording also took in several more places, including a surprise return to the UK; Williams first rented and then bought Whithurst Hall, the reportedly haunted mock-Tudor castle in West Sussex. His studio here was named Rockband East.

"In March 2004 we flightcased Rob's entire studio and moved it to this castle," says Duffy, "where we were until May. I can't really remember why did it, but it gave us a chance to pretend to be Led Zeppelin and record in this large castle room. Sadly it was one of these unfortunate English springs, during which it rained solidly for three months. After we finished 'Radio' and 'Misunderstood' there, we decided to go back to Los Angeles, where we continued working until September, when we had a break do to the promo for Greatest Hits. We went back to LA for more recording in January 2005, and finally there were two months of overdubbing and mixing at Henson Studios, also in Los Angeles. I think we finished the record in May of 2005."

As the sessions went on, the project moved more and more over to Pro Tools, and Logic was phased out entirely by January 2005. "We did not go to tape at any point," explains Duffy. "It just didn't occur to any of us that we should use analogue tape. I got into Pro Tools during the recording of Keep Going, mainly to try and see how analogue one could make it, and I found that it sounded very good indeed. I recorded Looking For A Day In The Night on an Akai MG1214 analogue 12-track, which had a Betamax-like cassette in it, as well as a built-in mixing desk. I couldn't tell whether Day In The Night or Keep Going was analogue or digital, or vice versa. Obviously HD offers a sonic improvement, but with people turning to MP3, that's quite meaningless. Yet you can't knock it. Everyone is so on love with their iPod, that it's bringing people back to music. So people are falling in love with music again, and this means it's a very healthy time for music.

"There's been a lot of prejudice against hard disk recording, but I think that was because people were using it the wrong way. Everyone had become so fascinated with the digital editing that you could tell that things were just getting a little bit too perfect. People were spending hours and hours moving things around for no reason. I think that those days are gone and people are using it just as a tape recorder now. Rob also became fascinated with everything that Pro Tools could do, and how one could transport a middle eight from one song to another or change key or speed, but that was a period of experimentation and learning. He'd never had time before to mess around with instruments or technology, and because he now had the time, he would spend three weeks messing round. But only a tiny bit of that ended up on the record."

Keeping Going Stephen Duffy isn't quite as dramatic an underachiever as some would have it. He garnered some hit singles in the early 1980s, among them 'Kiss Me', and his band the Lilac Time commanded a dedicated cult following, while his solo albums include Duffy (1995), I Love My Friends (1998) and Keep Going (2003). He's also been involved in collaborations such as Dark Circles (2002), a collaboration with Nick Rhodes that appeared under the name the Devils, and the Vanity Project (2005), a joint venture with Steve Page of Barenaked Ladies. "The Devils was me and Nick re-creating some old Duran Duran songs from 1979," explains Duffy. "There were a couple of new songs in there, but most of it was based on what would have been the first Duran Duran album if I had not left. The Vanity Project was a bunch of demos I did with Stephen Page in his basement studio that turned out to be very interesting." Duffy owes his first meeting with Robbie Williams to another collaboration — the 'supergroup' Me Me Me, featuring Alex James of Blur and Justine Welch of Elastica — who played on Top Of The Pops in 1996. "I first met Rob at TOTP when I appeared with Me Me Me and he was at number two with 'Freedom'," recalls Duffy. "I worked with [keyboardist] Claire Worrall in the Lilac Time, and she then also joined Rob's band, and she kept passing my records to Rob and he liked them. That is where we got our musical relationship."

Different Phases

While Williams and Duffy stayed with the electro-based writing format for a long time during the brainstorming Rockband period, in the beginning of 2005 there was a sudden shift. "We went into a completely different phase," explains Duffy. "Until then writing had been incredibly experimental, but in January and February 2005 we wrote 'Advertising Space' and 'Make Me Pure' in a more traditional manner, sitting around with acoustic guitars and recording what we were doing into a Walkman and doing things the old-fashioned way. The songs turned out incredibly simple, basically acoustic guitar and strings, and could have been recorded in the '60s or '70s. It was like coming full circle in a way."

This return to a straighter approach to writing preceded a move towards a more conventional way of arranging the entire album. "We moved over to Henson Studios in March 2005 because we wanted to give the songs a more 'alive' feeling," explains Duffy, "so we did many overdubs there. The record was incredibly experimental right until close to the end, with many songs having an electronic spine, and then we turned it into a more traditional-sounding record. Because we had worked on the record for such a long time, we went through many different phases, and the songs changed a lot. If it had been released a year earlier, it would have sounded more like 'Radio'. But I think it worked out better as it is, because there's nothing like the sound of a real drum kit played in a studio, which has a lot of energy. I was a lot happier when we moved away from the electro thing. Also, if things had stayed in the same vein as 'Radio', it would have been very difficult to play these songs live."

Robbie Williams' world tour getting on the road... Robbie Williams' world tour getting on the road...

Sessions at Henson were engineered by John Paterno, and involved overdubbing Matt Chamberlain on drums, Jerry Meehan on bass and Greg Leisz on guitars, plus several other guitarists, backing vocals, keyboards, percussion, brass and pedal steel. (Claire Worrall's keyboards were recorded at The Townhouse in London, David Campbell's strings and choir at NRG in Hollywood.) Overall, it has given the album a very full, but also quite traditional rock sound.

"It was strange," remarks Duffy, "because after nearly two years of experimenting, we suddenly had six to eight weeks of making an album in a very traditional way, working in a top-of-the-range studio, and overdubbing and mixing. I thought we'd do a lot of replacing, but in the end we didn't do a lot of that, because once bass and drums were on, everything sounded fine. You never know when you record stuff at home whether it falls apart in a professional studio environment. We were obviously playing over the electro-spine of the songs and my guitars that had been there for ages, and luckily what we had was mostly good, and what wasn't good we managed to slip and slide until it was. So all my guitars, and quite a lot of the electro stuff remained, as well as Rob's vocals. He only recorded two lead vocals at Henson, among them for 'A Place To Crash', because he changed the lyrics at the last moment. I took the C12 to Henson to make sure we had the same sound. The rest of his vocals were recorded at his home studio."

Intensive Care was mixed by the legendary Bob Clearmountain. "Bob had mixed my album I Love My Friends and I really liked what he did to it," explains Duffy. "I love the way he gets to the core of a song, and strips everything away that isn't necessary. There was so much going on Intensive Care that I felt it necessary to bring in a fresh pair of ears. After two years of listening to the songs, I didn't want to take final responsibility for the mix as well. He mixed 'Tripping' and it came out great, and he then mixed the whole album in one and a half weeks. Bob made the final choices as to where stuff went and he did strip things down a bit. He mixed from Pro Tools via a mixing desk back into Pro Tools."

Perfect Preparation

After the success of 'Radio' and 'Misunderstood', the way 'Tripping' and Intensive Care sped up the hit parades could hardly have come as a surprise to Duffy. Still, one wonders how it feels for a man who spent so long in the margins of the music industry to suddenly sell millions. "I suppose when I was in my teens I wanted to get to the top and play stadiums and have number one albums, but I'd forgotten about all those desires until it came to me. I'm glad it's happening now, as I have my feet firmly on the ground. I've achieved artistically what I wanted to achieve with my own work, so I'm able to work with Rob without ego, without having to imprint my own stamp on everything. It's also been interesting for me to see how everything I've done in the past, from working with electro and rock and folk to doing promo with Virgin when I had a couple of hits in the '80s, has prepared me for what I'm doing with Rob. Everything I've learned has been called upon."