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Janet Denzel
Around the time that the Seventeen Seconds sessions began in late 1979, bassist Greg Dempsey left to join the Associates and was replaced by Simon Gallup, while keyboard player Matthieu Hartley was added to a line-up that also included Smith and drummer Laurence 'Lol' Tolhurst, fleshing out the group's sound and enabling it to be more experimental and... well, downright gloomy. This, after all, is what lyricist Robert Smith was after: creating a consistently dark and evocative mood by way of sparse musical arrangements and plaintive vocals buried deep within the reverb-laden mix.
"It wasn't something to elate you, it was something to really make you think," says Hedges, who would withdraw from the Cure fold after co-producing and engineering the band's third album, Faith, because, by his own admission, "it was so introspective and so depressing, it did us all in. It was a dark, dark, dark record, and when you work on something like that you're not laughing and smiling the whole time. You get heavily affected by the music, and by the time we finished it I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. God, was I depressed. I mean, we didn't fight or anything in the studio. It was just bloody miserable. You know, we'd have a drink and relax between sessions, but we took the recordings themselves very seriously. Robert had a cathartic outpouring of emotions on that album, and because of that it affected all of us."
That was in 1981, yet the previous year a little commercialism also wasn't out of the question, as demonstrated by the slightly more pop-edged Seventeen Seconds album and its breakout single, 'A Forest'. Although the Cure's first UK hit only peaked at number 31, it would go on to have a lasting influence, becoming almost a signature tune for the band. An exercise in minimalist entrancement, the song actually earned the Cure an appearance on BBC1's Top Of The Pops, while Seventeen Seconds made it to number 20 on the British album charts.
'Killing An Arab' was the debut single that resulted from his first collaboration with the Cure, and after leaving Morgan in 1981 to open his own facility, the Playground, in nearby Camden Town, Hedges continued working with the Cure as well as the Associates and Siouxsie and the Banshees. His subsequent credits have included U2, Dido, the Manic Street Preachers, Travis, Texas and the Beautiful South, while in 2002-2003 he took over the legendary Wessex Studios before property developers sadly created an apartment block out of it. While he is currently involved with 2kHz, Hedges' main domain is now Westside Studios, which houses some of his classic analogue gear including the 60-input EMI TG MkII valve console on which Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side Of The Moon in Abbey Road's Studio Two.Mike Hedges as he appeared in the early '80s. Photo: Barry Marsden
"It was a very large studio, high and rectangular," he now recalls. "The control room was up some stairs at one end, with the desk to the left of a window that looked down on the main room. For the backing tracks on Seventeen Seconds, the band essentially played in there as a live unit, with the drums in the centre of the back wall, bass to the left, guitar to the right and the keyboards immediately in front of us, under the window."
"The backing tracks weren't easy to record. To actually get the bass and drums very tight with each other was difficult, but again this was down to time. We were spending something like an hour on each backing track, not much more, and the time pressure didn't help. Saying, 'Right, this is it, we have to get the track down now,' obviously doesn't make for a relaxed session, and recording some of those backing tracks was like death by mid-tempo. There's nothing worse than doing a mid-tempo track that's got a lot of space in it. To get the feel right is really difficult to do."
Whereas Simon Gallup's bass was hooked up to an Ampeg SVT, Robert Smith's guitar went through a Roland JC120, close-miked with a Shure SM57 while a Neumann U47 was positioned about three feet away. Matthieu Hartley played a DI'd synth.
"When you record on a tape machine you have the sync [record] head and the safe head [ie. the playback head in safe mode, where recording was disabled]. You record in sync and turn back to safe for slightly higher quality when mixing, but while Mike Dutton was switching through them he left the hi-hat track in sync, so it was earlier than everything else. I can't remember which track we used that on, but I know it sounded fantastic."
"We'd run it off the tape heads, through the pinch rollers, about 10 feet away to a pencil taped onto a mic stand, then another 10 feet to another pencil and mic stand, and so on, all the way around the room," Hedges remembers. "You have to remember, we were running the tape at 15 inches per second, so when you have a 16-bar loop at 120 beats per minute it's going to be 30 or 40 feet long. A couple of the songs were recorded as a loop, and we then had these running as a loop, recorded them onto the 24-track and then overdubbed onto them using the 24-track.
"When you're playing with these very long loops you have to get the tension just right, because otherwise the tape flips and you'll get wow and flutter. The funny thing is, the barrels of Chinagraph pencils are coated with a slightly slippery paint, and that's actually better than using the metal of a mic stand. At the same time, up-and-down tape slippage wasn't much of a problem using this technique. We used to attach those little round plastic editing-tape boxes underneath, and the tape would rest on them and, so long as the pencils were at the right height, not really want to slide up and down too much. Also, the tension was quite high, so there was very little droop in the tape. It was fairly taut."
After the backing track had been recorded live, individual parts were replaced as necessary, Robert Smith laid down his vocal, and then it was on to the mix. "Practically the whole album was mixed on the second-to-last day, and then the mix for 'A Forest' took up a good part of the final day," Hedges recalls. "All things considered, that was very, very extravagant."
The track would, in fact, be subjected to several subsequent remixes, although not until much later, not with Mike Hedges' involvement and not even from the original recording. "For some reason the original multitracks of that particular song were stored for a while in the Fiction Records offices and at some point they were lost," he states. "The band therefore had to re-record the song."
"As it happens, Chris Parry was very, very relaxed. We said we wanted to do it on our own and he pretty much left us to it. He came in once or twice. Generally, in those days, when it came to recording the Cure, the Associates and Siouxsie and the Banshees, we just did it. We recorded it and we delivered it. We didn't actually know what the budget was, we were just told 'Right, you've got five days to do it,' or three weeks sometimes, and without the pressure of having to do a certain style of record we just did what felt right at the time."
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Guitar Part est un magazine mensuel de la presse musicale franaise des ditions Blue Music, spcialis dans la guitare. Il est ce jour la publication la plus vendue du genre sur le march hexagonal[2]
Il contient des actualits sur le rock, interviews, enqutes, dossiers, bancs d'essais de matriels et partitions pdagogiques (accompagnes de leurs playbacks sur DVD). Jean-Jacques Rebillard est, parmi d'autres, un chroniqueur rgulier.
This is a music festival held in Santa Clara. It is named after a well known trova song composed in 1918 by popular Cuban musician Manuel Corona. Corona was born in the Villa Clara Province, of which Santa Clara is the capital. One of the events of the festival is a walk from Santa Clara to the town of Caibarin to honor the composer's birthplace. Trova is a style of music that was very popular in Cuba and there are many very famous Cuban songs written in this style that are known around the world, and still very much loved and remembered today.
Despite having a successful career as a musician, Corona's had a hard life and fell on rough times. He was attacked with a knife by a man who was the pimp of his prostitute girlfriend. This gave him an injury to his hand and he was never able to play the guitar very well after this. From that moment onward his only income was royalties from his compositions, and the last years of his life were lived in poverty.
This festival is an internationally renowned event that consistently attracts an excellent line-up of jazz musicians - both local and international. Cuba has its own famous genre of jazz, and the importance placed on music by the Cuban Government and the Cuban society means that there is an almost endless supply of new and exciting local talent on offer. Performances take place in the Casa de la Cultura Plaza, Teatro Nacional de Cuba and other venues across the city. The next Havana Jazz Festival is scheduled for January 27-February 3, 2025.
This is a very popular event which attracts people from within Cuba and also from countries all around the world, especially Spanish speaking countries. Although it's called the Havana Book Fair, the event takes itself to many different cities around Cuba. In Havana the fair is hosted in the Cabana fortress, which has a dramatic location on a hill on the opposite side of the bay to Old Havana. The event is attended by book lovers, publishers, writers and celebrities. Apart from book sales, the event includes lectures from some of the authors, some theatre and dance performances, as well as film sessions.
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