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10 MusicWeek 15.06.12 THE BIG INTERVIEWSTEPHEN STREET


PRODUCTION  BY TIM INGHAM


E


ver since Morrissey and Marr handpicked their 20-something session engineer to take charge of Meat Is Murder, Stephen Street’s name has been synonymous with


the best in UK indie rock. Street also took lead engineer duties on classic


Smiths LP The Queen Is Dead, but it’s his production work that has helped define the past three decades of domestic commercial guitar music: from Blur’s Parklife to The Cranberries’ No Need To Argue; The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come to Babyshambles’ Shotter’s Nation; Morrissey’s Viva Hate to The Maccabees’ Colour It In; and The Courteeners’ St. Jude to Kaiser Chiefs’ Employment. His seminal work with Blur will be celebrated


with a special box-set released next month. 21 will contain all five Street-produced albums from the band, plus later efforts 13 and Think Tank – as well as five-and-a-half hours of previously unheard material. Street has spent many hours remastering Blur’s


recordings for the release – and it’s brought back plenty of memories for the man who first entered the music industry at Island Records in the early ‘80s…


What have you brought to the table in terms of the new Blur boxset? I’ve been mostly involved in remastering the five albums, B-sides and singles I made with the band – Graham [Coxon] has been unearthing old demos and unreleased material. He’s got a wealth of knowledge. It was a good team effort all round. I still haven’t heard the unreleased tracks. It’s well- known before I started work on the second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Blur had made an attempt at recording it with Andy Partridge from XTC - I can’t wait to hear that. I’m just as exited as any Blur fan, really. Don’t forget that Blur were so productive back then; for every single that came out, there was a CD single, a CD2 single, a 7” single – and we had to record B-sides for each format. That’s a hell of a lot of music.


STREET’S AHEAD


The legendary Blur and Smiths producer opens up on a life in music – and why indie guitar bands are struggling in 2012


Does the rise of the CD super-box-set bring you some cheer as a producer after seeing music sales tumble and move to MP3 over the years? Yes, I’m very encouraged to see it. In my side of the industry – i.e. the recording side – we create the music that people love and that inspires them to go and see bands live. But it’s been diminished. The younger generation are happy to spend £200-plus on a festival ticket, but they’re not so happy to spend their money on recorded music. That’s really sickening to people who put a lot of time and effort into working with bands. When something like this happens, you see the work you’ve put in being appreciated by people who want to listen to it at its best – not through a pair of iPod earphones. Recorded music does have a value, and it’s nice to see now and again that people agree with me


What’s your take on how digital music has affected sound quality? In recent years we’ve seen what’s been commonly referred to as the ‘loudness wars’. With 21, we were able to cut the remasters of the older Blur records much louder than they were originally. But we were


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