INTERVIEW
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Where Do We Go From Here?
Trained by the BBC in the 1970s Crispin Murray’s multi-faceted career in the audio industry, however, can be almost entirely credited to Meat Loaf’s iconic 1977 release, Bat Out Of Hell. Jory MacKay spoke with Crispin ahead of his keynote lecture at the inaugural Innovation in Music Conference about his career and what he sees as the future of the music industry.
You trained at the BBC but when did you first know that you wanted a career in audio? Music has always been a passion of mine and in my teens I got into electronics but it never occurred to me that I could put the two things together and make a living. I was sitting in someone’s garden in about 1978 when Meatloaf ’s Bat Out of Hell came out anyone could tell that the album sounded fantastic – there was something really special about it. I sat there and after listening to it the third time through and thinking about how years of work were cut onto just two pieces of tape I said to my friends ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to be there and be involved in doing that?’ I’d been applying to jobs at the BBC, mostly because I heard they paid expenses so I could get up to London and see some friends for free. To cut a long story short, I got the job and got some great training and worked there for seven years until I realised the department wasn’t going to last forever and it was time to get out and work in the independent world. But what got me into the industry, really, was that moment in the back garden, thinking how being involved in a project like that must be so exciting. Realising that yes, there is that process involved and that actually it could be really fun. And it is, I mean I’ve since sat in rooms with bands that have spent six months or a year making a record and then suddenly realise they’ve got people taking photos of them and people discussing all the press stuff they’re going to do next week and meanwhile we cut the album together and sit down for 50 minutes and listen to the whole thing
50 November 2013
through as one entity and it’s not unusual to have someone break down in tears at the end of that process after realising ‘my god, my life changes tomorrow’. It’s quite an emotional change to go through.
Does any particular band come to mind? Probably the pinnacle of it all was Urban Hymns, The Verve. The whole band was there and we’d spent two days editing with Chris Potter the producer. When we got the whole thing together as an album we all sat down but there were only enough seats for five of the band members in my mastering studio so me and Richard [Ashcroft] were sitting on the floor just listening to it and going ‘that’s it, that’s the album’. We’d all been aware for the
previous few months that this album was something really special. We knew it was going to be huge but it surpassed our wildest expectations and changed all our lives quite profoundly.
You’ve been involved in mastering albums for decades, how have you seen the process evolve? Well, certainly in the last decade it stopped being tape- based and moved to, let’s say linear audio-based, and now it’s become very non-linear – it’s almost entirely files now. At least if things are in the wrong part of the world it’s a lot easier to get ahold of them in a hurry.
In the past 10 years we’ve also seen the complete change from physical media to downloadable media. If you look at the blueprint for MP3s you see you’re dealing with a 30-year old digital technology – MP4 is 20-years old – and both of these are
defeated simply by the volume that some people insist on mastering at.
What about the higher- resolution audio formats being pushed into the consumer world? Sadly we had that opportunity tens of years ago with DVDA and SACD – the problem being that the marketing guys shot off and went ‘it’s surround!’ instead of ‘it’s super duper high quality’. Most people weren’t ready, or didn’t want surround and the market looked the other way and saw MP3 as being portable and the future as downloadability. That being said, how big is
the market for super duper high-quality audio? Not that big – maybe two percent. But look at BPI’s latest figures for vinyl sales and you can see that a lot of people have woken up to the fact that vinyl is a high-quality medium. It’s very encouraging, especially when the demographics of people who are buying vinyl is 45 and upwards and 15 to 25s, which is great, because the 45
and up know and the 15 to 25s are learning and realising what is a good investment for high-quality audio.
Lastly, tell me about your involvement with the Innovation in Music conference. Russ [Hepworth-Sawyer] asked me if I’d like to do a keynote, and I was probably drunk at the time so I said yes. It’s not going to be
one of those keynotes that INMUSIC’13
comes down to one sentence at the end and everybody goes ‘yes, this is the answer’ – I wish it was. I’m knitting together my whole story on where the industry is going with a focus on the idea that music needs to remain intelligible, pleasant, and high-quality. It seems slightly absurd that we have so much more advanced technology now and yet we still struggle to provide the mass market with high- quality audio.
Hosted by the University of York and York St John, the Innovation in Music Conference (InMusic’13) is a new European music industry conference that will take place on 4-6 December in York, England. Other confirmed keynote speakers include multi-platinum producer/songwriter Jake Gosling and TC Electronic’s Thomas Lund.
www.innovationinmusic.com www.audiomedia.com
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