Since UK garage emerged from the underground last year, record companies have been scrambling to sign up the stars of the latest Big Thing. Foremost among these is Mark Hill, who, as well as being one half of Artful Dodger, has also produced Craig David's hit singles and debut album Born To Do It.
In person, Mark Hill seems an unlikely candidate for the label of 'Britain's hottest dance producer'. A down‑to‑earth music graduate with no trace of attitude, he appears genuinely surprised at his commercial success in the vanguard of the exploding UK garage scene. As one half of Artful Dodger, he's seen tracks like 'Re‑rewind' and 'Moving Too Fast' crash into the top 10, and as a producer, his work has underpinned the meteoric rise of singer Craig David. In all, Hill‑produced singles have sold an astounding 1.5 million copies since December, and Craig David's number one debut album Born To Do It sold 225,000 copies in its first week — very nearly outselling the rest of the top 10 put together. Remarkably, all of these were recorded on Mark's own humble setup, currently squatting in a spare soundproof room at a local radio station following the demise of his Southampton studio ("We were on a five‑year lease, and it wasn't renewed because they wanted to turn the building into luxury waterfront apartments," he laughs).
Early Days
Hill set up his studio when garage was still a twinkle in drum & bass's eye, and his original ambitions were modest: "We were recording local rock bands and student bands for 10 pounds an hour. Me and my business partner Neil thought, when we left university, 'Wouldn't it be a great idea to set up a recording studio?' Er, no... We thought there must be loads of money in it, and we'd never done anything before. We had limited university experience — I did a music degree and his degree was in acoustics, but neither of us had any recording experience, we were bluffing our way through. We did all right — we had enough bookings to keep us afloat — but we got crippled by the fact that we had to go out and get huge bank loans to set it all up, which were there to the end. It was probably the worst business venture in the history of business ventures, setting up a recording studio and trying to make money out of it. It was ridiculous."
Craig David has become UK garage's first superstar.Faced with a less than full booking diary, Hill and his collaborators began to throw around some ideas for dance tracks: "Basically, we had so much free time in the studio when the students weren't around that we had plenty of time to experiment and write. We got together with Pete Devereux, the other guy in the Artful Dodger, and started doing some clubby stuff, because he was a DJ in a local club. We first started work on a couple of house tracks. I was ripping him off, charging him ridiculous amounts of money to use the studio just to do house tunes. I wasn't even a DJ at the time, I was just sitting and listening to it and enjoying the club atmosphere, and in the club Pete was in, it was around the time when the early speed garage stuff started trickling through. Some of the stuff Pete was playing was really interesting, and so instead of working on the house stuff we had been working on, we decided that I should stop charging him and we'd work together and put our hands to something.
"We did a couple of four‑to‑the‑floor kind of big bass line speed garage bootleg mixes of things like Olive's 'You're Not Alone' — basically nicking a cappellas and working on some music behind them — just to send them out and get a reaction and see if anyone would take a punt. From that we managed to get a publishing deal because on one of the bootlegs we did, we put a couple of original tracks on the other side — we worked with a couple of singers, and they got spotted by a guy from Wildpitch records in London. He was doing business with a guy at Warner Chappell, and managed to convince him it was a good idea to stick a couple of grand our way and maybe try to develop us as writers. So once we had a little bit of cash to take the edge off having to struggle and record bands five days a week, we got back in touch with Craig David.
"Craig had been in the studio about a year previously just as a booking. The group he was with were doing a 'Kick racism out of football' project for Saints football team — that's when we first got to hear his voice, and we kept in touch with him through a mate of ours who did production on that track. It was a year later when we started doing the garage stuff, and we bumped into him DJ'ing in a club. He was actually playing a garage set and had gone out and bought one of our records, not knowing it was us. That's when we first started saying 'Let's concentrate on original stuff and get off remixes and bootlegs and start writing.' A couple of the early things we did while we found our feet were dodgy — Craig was very much into US R&B, and it was a mish‑mash of trying to find the right sort of style, and then it just clicked and we carried on writing. We've written at least 50 songs since then.
"It was great, because it was all out of being mates and there was no pressure from record companies, because nobody was really expecting any hits out of it. We weren't signed to anyone, we were just doing one‑off white labels and punting them out round the record shops and they were getting picked up, which is why it's such a mess — the first single was out on Ministry, the second on XL, now we're with London, and then Craig's signed to Wildstar, so it's a bit interesting."
Modest Means
Roland's VP9000 Variphrase processor — so new it hasn't even found a home in a rack yet...
Although Hill's single gear rack is home to a couple of new toys, like the Roland VP9000 Variphrase processor (see 'New Tricks' box), he sees no need to radically change or expand the setup that's brought him success so far. "I'm not going to go out buying ridiculous loads of gear, 'cause every time I buy a new bit of gear I like to get really into it, and work out exactly what it does. What I've found when I've done things in big studios up in London is that you get lazy and use all the obvious sounds and obvious settings, rather than exploring anything in any detail. You can get some really interesting sounds once you know the equipment backwards — and we've got so little equipment it hasn't been too difficult to learn how to use it!"
The equipment scattered around Hill's temporary studio is, with a few exceptions, what was used to record all the Artful Dodger and Craig David tracks. "It's more or less the same setup as the old studio except that the desk's different — we've just got one of these new Mackie digital 8‑buses. The old one was quality," says Hill with some irony. "It was a Soundtracs Topaz — I think you can buy them for about 800 quid now. We had that for five years, and most of Craig's album was done on that, recorded on a Rode NT2. Even though we've gone out and bought a Neumann, we still use the old Rode NT2. We've bought a new one, though — this one's falling apart 'cause we kept dropping it. All of Craig's stuff was done on that, the Artful Dodger stuff was done on that; we just got used to the sound of it. Now we put it through the Focusrite Red, but before, it was just the Rode NT2, no preamp or anything, just flung straight into the desk. The room was quality as well, it had ridiculously bad acoustics. You'd sit in one corner of the room and it was just pure bass. It was really, really bad. We designed and built it ourselves — it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The battered Rode NT2 microphone used to record Craig David's vocals — and just about everything else."For at least 50 percent of Craig's album we ended up using the final mixes, even though they were mixed through a Soundtracs Topaz and recorded on a Rode — the actual vibe of it was there. Every time we wrote a track we just finished it and DAT‑ted it, not ever thinking that would be the final result when he went off and got his record deal.
"But it's amazing how many tracks we put through places like Metropolis and Strongroom and ended up using the original demos from the studio — all the hits we've had apart from 'Seven Days' and 'Fill Me In', which we did redo. Those two Craig David tracks were really the only things that got remixed and remastered. All the Artful Dodger stuff was demos that were two years old, that we literally just did overnight. It was raw, it had this thing of being 'street'. We've got the option now, if we want to, of actually going to somewhere like Metropolis and doing the full mix on it, but I still do it down here because I'm used to the room. Anyway, if I start doing anything that's far too polished it's going to stick out like a sore thumb on the album, 'cause the rest of it's so dodgy! It's amazing what we've got away with to date, and it's nice as well, because it means that it doesn't have to be too clinical and too overcompressed and overproduced to be a hit."
Hill's new Mackie D8b digital desk and Mackie HR824 monitors.
Rhythm Tricks
Among the most distinctive features of the garage sound pioneered by Mark Hill and his collaborators are the drum sounds, often clipped, pitch‑shifted upwards and used fairly dry, to create a rhythm track that cuts through but leaves plenty of room for the other elements of the mix. "I always like a definite, sharp snare," explains Mark. "Most of them are, to be honest, nicked from various people and then just processed — rather than just take an obvious sample from a sample CD, there always tends to be something I spot on a record that I really like the sound of, and if I can't get a clean sample of it I'll try to emulate it by using other things and putting it through ridiculous amounts of processing and EQ‑ing and compressing. We've done some stupid things like sample a table‑tennis ball — you know that really distinctive whack of a table‑tennis ball? We sampled that and reversed it and time‑stretched it or time‑compressed it so it was a really mad sound, then put that over the top of another snare. I've spent hours just working on one snare drum; usually I'll just think 'Oh, that'll do,' and whack it in, but it completely varies from track to track. It's fun, because you can really delve into it and come up with some new and weird sounds. I love playing with the sounds on the JV1080 as well: once you actually get into the processors you can get some really interesting effects rather than just using the standard ones.
Mark Hill's recording gear and synths, from top: MOTU Digital Time Piece, Focusrite Red channel strip, Digidesign 888 and 882 Pro Tools I/O with Opcode Studio 4 MIDI interface between them, Korg TR‑Rack sound module, Roland JV1080 sound modules (x2), Novation Supernova synth, Akai S3000 sampler, Tascam DA40 DAT recorder."A lot of the percussion sounds come out of the Korg TR‑Rack. It's got some amazing percussion sounds which are really crisp. I've also got one bank of samples that, over the years, every time I've come up with one that I really like, I've just stuck it on the same disk. I've got that loaded on the Akai S3000, so I've got a whole keyboard full of drum sounds that I'm used to using, and I experiment and use maybe three at a time and resample them and change the tones."
These drum sounds are complemented by some sophisticated drum programming which is, as Mark explains, partly a product of his background as a music student and session player. "I'm actually a drummer," he admits. "I was a classical percussionist for a while, I used to play for orchestras and stuff, and play in big bands and as a jazz drummer, so that's always been my basis. The rhythm and percussion is usually the thing I start with. I'm a mediocre piano player — funnily enough, I've probably got better over the last five years just from playing it a lot — but I always tend to be driven by the beats and the guitar. Some of the drum tracks are stupidly simple, just cymbal, hi‑hat, bass drum and snare — but then you get ones like 'Follow Me' [from Craig David's album], which has got everything in there. I put it all down on to ADAT to take it up to London to mix it down and there were four ADATs full of drums. I got a bit carried away on that one!
"I just record it like I would record an actual keyboard part — I know there are tools for programming drums on the sequencer, but because I'm so used to playing keyboards anyway, I just tend to use the three notes and treat it like I was playing a kit. In the old studio we had there was a kit set up all the time, but since we've been in here I haven't had a chance to have a go. I might look into getting an electronic kit, or a really nice drum kit but with good drum triggers. It would give it a nice edge, get a bit of a different sound."
Sketches Of Spain
Modesty notwithstanding, Mark Hill is also a more then competent keyboardist and guitarist, and the latter instrument in particular is prominent in Craig David's hits 'Fill Me In' and 'Seven Days'. Both are built around complex, multitracked riffs played on Hill's nylon‑strung acoustic. "I've only just bought an electric guitar," admits Mark. "I just had an old Spanish nylon‑strung guitar for years — I had lessons when I was eight years old and gave up after three lessons, because I was so lazy I couldn't be bothered to walk to the place where I had the lessons. Since then it's always just sat about in my room and I fiddle about with it. I'm technically rubbish at scales and all that sort of stuff, but mostly I play it by ear and I've got a few little licks that crop up in every single solo I ever play!
"The actual guitar I used on Craig's album was the old Spanish one, it was done with the Rode mic and put through a TC reverb. When I went to Spain last year I bought a nylon‑strung Yamaha semi‑acoustic, which has a really interesting sound, and I tend to use a bit of a mix between the mic and the DI. The riff at the beginning of 'Fill Me In' was all done on the semi‑acoustic.
"I'm not one for spending ridiculous amounts of money on really flash gear, because my playing always lets it down anyway! It's amazing what you can get away with — because I mix and engineer the whole lot myself, I can do a lot in post‑production. I probably give myself far too much work by not recording it properly in the first place and having to do so much afterwards to make it sound nice. It's amazing what you can do when you multitrack guitar to make it sound like you're a really incredible guitarist. I can't remember how many tracks went into 'Seven Days', but I think the only thing I managed to play in one take was the riff on top. You get some really good effects — there's some things in there that are physically impossible to play, because I was playing one bar at one end of the neck and the next bar's right up at the other. I can't wait until someone actually tries to play it live!
"It's nice being not particularly good at any instrument, but being a mediocre player of quite a few — you can get away with quite different textures. A lot of the tracks have got a Fender Rhodes in [from the JV1080], I'm just an absolute sucker for a Fender Rhodes or Wurlitzer sound, so we tend to cane that."
Artful Dodger's studio in its temporary home at a Hampshire radio station.
Lo‑Fi
Having had hits with tracks recorded on the most basic of project‑studio equipment, it's hardly surprising that Mark Hill is sceptical about the extremes of sonic purity demanded by some engineers: "To be honest, my ears are so f•••ed from DJ‑ing that the sound could be eight‑bit and I probably wouldn't even notice, but I think 24‑bit's a bit extreme anyway. What's the point of recording vinyl scratch noises on a track at 24‑bit? I like a good sound, but I think people spend far too much time just making it sound really nice and don't end up concentrating on the music. If we can get 'Moving Too Fast' to number two in the charts — that wasn't even done on an S3000, that was done on an old Akai S01. When we did that, we didn't even have any effects, we were just using the sequencer and we had an old ART guitar reverb, no Auto‑Tune, nothing. It was really basic stuff. Everything was put through the same guitar reverb, the noise was fantastic. And there's a sub‑bass in the track that for some reason I didn't bother to turn it off when it gets to the end of the break, and it carries on under the other bass line — but we thought 'Oh, this is never going to be released, this is never going to be a chart track, it's just something we did so we can play in a club on a Saturday night.' And then all of a sudden the record company go with the original version, and you think 'Oh no, how embarrassing.'"
Apart from the drums, all the other sounds on 'Moving Too Fast' came from Hill's workhorse Roland JV1080, among them the thin bell sound that plays the main hook: "That's just a General MIDI sound on the JV1080. It's called Music Box, General MIDI 011. I even think the organ might be a General MIDI sound — that was the bass line. [A quick stab at the JV's front panel confirms this] That's how basic we're talking. The drums were just on an S01 — I took an R&B kit from one of the old Norman Cook drum breaks CDs and sped it up and cut it up to try to change the samples. The only non‑GM instrument on there is the Fender Rhodes, which is also from the JV. I think that's it, that's the whole track. There's those four instruments, and then there's Romina's vocals, which were recorded in Italy and sent over to us on DAT.
"I still use loads of General MIDI sounds. The new single ['24/7'] uses a General MIDI sound called Kalimba, which is exactly the same sound that's used on Whitney Houston's 'It's Not Right But It's OK'."
Artful Dodger: Pete Devereux (right) and Mark Hill.
Artful Album?
Hill is clearly proud of the new single, scheduled for release as a trailer for the debut (and, at the time of writing, untitled) Artful Dodger album in October. "The new Artful Dodger single is completely not two‑step, not garage in any way. It's kind of at an R&B tempo, and it's got yet another different singer and she's got a distinctive voice, very different to all the ones we've used in the past."
Artful Dodger's record company has not been slow to cash in on the garage boom: those who couldn't wait for the Artful Dodger album proper could buy this double mix compilation.
Mindful of the fact that so many dance‑based artists have made great singles but disappointing albums, he's determined to prevent this happening by presenting a broad range of styles on the album. "I feel more pressure myself, creatively, to produce something really different, rather than just come up with an album full of 'Rewinds'. The first three tracks even as the Artful Dodger were quite different, even though they were all garage. Craig's album was quite simple, it was just me and Craig, but the Artful Dodger album's been a bit of a headache. Obviously things are quite hot with us at the moment, so we want to get it out there, but we want it to be a bit different. We don't want people to buy it and think that apart from the three singles, the rest of it's just album filler, because I've bought enough albums like that in my time. There's so many dance albums like that. If you haven't got stuff on the album that you can just sit down and listen to, people don't tend to buy dance music albums, they'd much rather buy a compilation. In any other album from any other genre you'd actually get away with putting light and shade on the album, but for some reason people who put out dance music records assume that they all have to be that same dance tempo. I wanted to prove that we weren't just about two‑step garage beats, that it was about writing good songs. It's difficult dealing with the record company as well — they've bought into the whole Artful Dodger thing and they're expecting something, and then you turn up and say 'Oh, actually I want to do something different.' But I think they're coming round, they quite like the stuff that's coming through."
The Future
Like other dance styles before it, two‑step garage seems likely to burn out through over‑exposure following its movement from the underground into the mainstream. As well as having the desire to produce an album with a bit more depth and variety than most dance efforts, therefore, Hill is wary of being pigeonholed as a garage producer and nothing else. "It's very difficult to know how long something like this can last, because the Artful Dodger is sort of fad‑based, which is why we want to progress with the next single. I think people are absolutely hammering the garage thing — when you find that something like the KJC mobile phones advert on the radio has now got a garage beat behind it, you think 'Oh, here we go.' It's going to reach overkill, like drum & bass did, and we're prepared for that. The three singles we've had out so far have been two years old, so we've progressed naturally anyway. So we're not going to just start going back and trying to regurgitate that to make hits."
The almost‑overnight transformation of Craig David into the UK's hottest pop star is also likely to have serious consequences for their working relationship, but Mark Hill has no desire to follow David into the limelight. "The way me and Craig used to work, I think it's going to be difficult to get that again, because of the stress that he's under — and the fact that now he can't even walk out in the street without getting mobbed.
"I've seen what Craig's had to do, and his schedule is absolutely punishing. He's doing several things every day, being driven round and flying everywhere, and in a different country every day. I'm like 'Naa, it's not for me — I'll come in here and sort out my studio tan.' I've had the fun and games of being an artist for a bit, and now I can think 'Right, I've had enough of that, that was good fun,' and just get back in the studio and carry on with what I was doing before."
Sequencing With Opcode's Studio Vision
The recording setup in Hill's studio is based around Digidesign's Pro Tools, running on a none‑too‑new Apple Power Mac, which is also used for MIDI sequencing: "We actually use Opcode's Studio Vision as our sequencer, which acts as a front end for Pro Tools," explains Mark. "Nobody else ever seems to use it — everybody else uses either Logic or Cubase — but it's what we used from day one, because Neil bought it when he was a student six or seven years ago. We used to hang around in his house at university, and he always had that on the computer so I learnt how to use that. Once you're used to using something it's usually a good idea to carry on — I know it absolutely backwards now after all this time. The only problem is that there's no customer support now and no upgrades, so we're looking into a few other packages. Neil's been experimenting with Digital Performer, so either we'll use that or Logic; a lot of the people we work with use Logic. I'm not a big fan of Cubase, I used it when I was at university and couldn't get to grips with it."
The eight outputs from the Pro Tools system now feed a Mackie D8b digital mixer, which Hill is clearly very happy with: "The old system we had, having the analogue desk, we had no automation on it or anything. Once we were doing a track we had to finish it, because if we went on to something else the next day we'd never, ever get the old one back. We were far too lazy to go round writing down all the settings and everything. Now it's fantastic — everything I do on that desk is fully automated, it's a brilliant piece of kit, and it sounds good, it's got quite a clinical, clean digital sound. Flicking between the channels you get 48 channels out of it, which is probably more than enough for what we use — I tend to keep things quite simple anyway. I'm certainly not going to record any orchestras in here. The actual inbuilt effects are brilliant on it as well, all the choruses and compressors and stuff are really powerful, and there are nice EQs."
Nerve Centre
Perhaps unusually, Mark Hill has gone from the studio to the turntables, rather than extending an existing role as a DJ into a recording career, as so many big names in dance music have done. Doesn't leaving the confines of his studio and playing out in front of thousands of punters make him a bit nervous? "Naah," he explains. "DJing, it's just a bunch of records, innit?"
Most of his public appearances have, in fact, been miming. "That's why I don't get nervous. In 'Rewind' I was playing bongos — which didn't actually appear on the record, so they couldn't be miked up — and then playing vibraphone on 'Moving Too Fast', when it's actually a music box sample. I don't even know what a music box looks like, so I couldn't play one of those, and then I ended up miming double bass in 'Woman Trouble' when it's an organ playing the bass line. The only thing I've ever got nervous in was The Richard Blackwood Show, because I actually had to play an instrument on that one.
"I'd love to get into something where I could play in a live band. When the album's out of the way and all that, we actually want go back to playing live. We've had a lot of offers from people like Andy Gangadeen who's drumming on Massive Attack albums. And then practically the whole of Jamiroquai apart from JK, they'd love to come down and play, so I think we could put a cracking band together."
New Tricks
As you might expect of someone who had a major hit based around an Akai S01 sampler and a guitar reverb, Hill is not a producer to use technology simply because it's there. As a result, he's wary of the current fashion for heavy pitch correction: "People are caning the Auto‑Tune on all the American R&B stuff, and we used it a couple of times when it first came out, for novelty, but working with people like Craig, they're so good that you lose something when you put their vocals through Auto‑Tune. I tend to just do ridiculous amounts of takes and comp it so that you get a really perfect comp, rather than cheating. We tend to track quite a lot of backing vocals, and you always tend to lose it if you put it through Auto‑Tune. It sounds like you've just done one or two tracks of it, because it makes it all so accurate you don't get the effect. So I've kind of eased off it now."
Likewise, although Roland's innovative VP9000 Variphrase processor is likely to be all over dance tracks in the near future, Hill has yet to explore its full potential: "I haven't had a good go with it yet. I did one thing up in London when we were doing Craig David's album; we had to replace one of the samples in the track, so I used a different sample from one of our other songs. It was in a different key, a totally different time and everything, and it was wicked — we just stuck it in there and it worked perfectly. It's really quite a decent machine, but I've not explored it fully yet."
Re: 'Rewind'
The biggest hit so far to bear the Artful Dodger's name is 'Rewind' — or, to give it its full title, 'Re‑rewind The Crowd Say Bo Selecta' — which proved to be a breakthrough for both them and Craig David, who provided the vocals. A startlingly fresh‑sounding blend of two‑step beat, soulful vocals and rapping, it also brings unusual sound effects to the fore, notably in the infamous hook 'Craig David all over your boink!'
The full title of 'Re‑rewind' was actually a reference to the fact that Hill had to record the song twice, as he explains: "The original version of 'Rewind' we did, we lost because the computer crashed — it had this bloody sign that kept coming up on the monitor saying 'End Of File', and nobody had any clue what was going on. It totally wiped the whole file, it was the only time we've completely lost everything. All the audio was corrupt, it was a nightmare, so we just left it.
"Craig had it on a tape, and that was the only record of it we had, and we just left it and carried on with other stuff for weeks and weeks. Then he stuck the tape on in his house, and he said 'We have to do that, it sounds wicked, I played it on my system.' And we're like 'Oh, we'll have to do it all from scratch.' I think we started early one afternoon, and thought we'd have a crack at it, and that time, rather than there just being the music, like there had been before, we had everything out — sound effects CDs at random, bits of news footage on the radio — we were just having such a laugh.
"The whole 'boink' thing came about because that passage of the song was taken from one of Craig's R&B tracks, a track called 'Last Night' which is on his album. He started humming it over the top, and we were like 'We can't use that, that's a different track,' but we tried a few other ideas, and nothing sounded as good as when he was singing that over the top of it. So he adapted the lyrics into a sort of garage style, and stuck our names in it to make a bit of a namecheck, 'cause loads of people who were playing our tracks before 'Rewind' didn't have a clue who they were by. We thought 'We'll stick "Craig David and Artful Dodger" in this one, so they can't possibly make any mistakes.'
"The way we did the lyrics, we were one syllable short, and we were just trying to pack words into it, and nothing sounded right, so we just thought 'Sod it, we'll stick a noise in there and let people make up their own minds about what it's supposed to be.' We tried to find the 'boink' again recently to do a re‑recording of it, but I couldn't actually find it. For the life of me I can't find any of those samples. I can't even remember how we did it. It was mainly from one sample CD that I think we've lost, that just had loads of sound effects and horror noises on. A couple of them were taken from a vinyl Craig had — when he used to DJ he used to do a bit of scratching, and he had a record with loads of samples and noises and weird stuff on it, so I think a couple came from that. It was completely random.
"Everyone in the studio at the time we did it was saying 'No, you can't do that' — they heard all the breaking glass and screeches and said 'Naa, it sounds rubbish.' And we were like 'Whatever'. We didn't have a deal anyway, so it was just something we did as a bit of fun. When we played it out, there were a few people who came back and said 'Oh, those breakdowns don't really work, we've played them in a club and nobody knows what to do with themselves in those breaks, I think you should take them out.' But I was like 'No, that's the best bit!' So we compromised, and out of the three breakdowns that were in there we got rid of one, and made a bit of a longer section in the middle for people to dance to before the other breakdown. Timmy Magic from the Dreem Teem was responsible for hammering it home, 'cause he loved it and played it quite a lot, and I think once people had got used to hearing it, and they really got into the whole 'Re‑e‑wind' bit, they just went nuts, but listening to it now I can't believe some of the stuff we put in there.
"When you're sitting down and thinking 'Right, we've got to write a single,' you tend to automatically restrict yourselves. You're thinking 'Oh, no, we can't do that,' and 'We've got to be serious this time, it's like a serious piece of music.' And it's funny that our biggest hit to date was done just as a laugh, and it's important not to forget that."
Radio Friendly
Sharing a studio complex with a radio station has its advantages, as Hill explains: "The best thing about being in this building is that you can play things to people who are used to hearing radio stuff, and all they think about is radio, so I can go to the people who do the playlists and say 'Totally objectively, what do you think of it? If it's a bag of shite, tell me it's a bag of shite!' Because it's so difficult for me to know — whether it's a song I love and whether it's got any commercial value are slightly different things. Some of the best songs I've done didn't even end up on Craig's album."
Songwriting Techniques
Mark Hill believes that the success of both Artful Dodger and Craig David is partly down to the strength of their songs. As he explains, these can come together in a variety of ways: "It's all sorts. There's quite a few different styles in the stuff I do, particularly with Craig. I play piano and guitar, and the actual styles of the tracks that we've done sound quite different depending on whether they're either piano‑based or guitar‑based, so there's an interesting mix of tracks on the album. Sometimes I'll just sit down on my own and work out a little guitar riff or a bunch of chords and whack it down on the computer, and he writes over it. Then there's other times he's actually come up with ideas when listening to instrumentals — if there's a track he plays out in a club, he'll actually play the instrumental version of it, then write his own lyrics and melody over the top, and he'll just come in and sing that to me and I'll try and write something underneath. I always insist that when he comes in that he just plays me the vocals, he doesn't actually play me the original track, because it's difficult to get that out of your head once you've heard it. So it's almost like doing a remix, because he just gives me the vocal and I build the track underneath it."