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www.audiomedia.com Walk of Life: Dave Harries
Jake Young talks to recording industry consultant Dave Harries, whose nomination of Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios led to the facility winning the Studio of the Year category in the first-ever Pro Sound Awards.
Can you talk about the work British Grove Studios has shown in the last year? Noah & The Whale [Last Night On Earth] and Mumford & Sons [Babel] are the recent ones really. They’ve done that new Gravity movie and they’ve just been doing a lot of the music for Into the Woods, the new Stephen Sondheim musical movie. Mark [Knopfler] is in at the moment starting a new album.
How were you led to build British Grove Studios? I’ve known Mark for many years. I ran AIR Studios for 25 years and I got to know Mark really well then. David Stewart [studio manager, British Grove Studios] and I put the whole thing together. We started from scratch, searching around the whole of west London for a building big enough to house a decent
50 October 2013
sized studio. Whenever we found a nice old building that would be suitable we drove there and found it had been turned into a block of flats. Our agent came on the phone and said that there was a building in Chiswick up for sale in British Grove so we bought it. Then we converted the building by keeping the sidewalls and the back wall and built the studio inside that shell.
Why did you decide to go with the Neve 88R and ATC monitors? The ATC monitors were a preference of Mark and Chuck Ainlay who’s Mark’s producer. The great thing about ATCs is they’re good for rock ’n’ roll and they’re also good for classical and orchestral music. The main monitors here are used a great deal, particularly for the film
people, and we can do 5.1 or 7.1 surround. Mark and I have always liked the Neve sound. AIR’s had Neve since 1970.
“Until the right people are
rewarded the right amounts I don’t think pop music can develop as much as it should.” Dave Harries
You were there at The Beatles’ rooftop concert in 1969. How was that? That was fantastic. I’d been working with Glyn Johns, Alan Parsons, and Keith Slaughter. Alan, Keith, and myself were from Abbey Road and Glyn Johns was freelance. We started off the album Get Back [Let It Be] at
Twickenham, then we moved to the Apple studio. They had a chap called Magic Alex who built them some equipment, but for various reasons they decided to use Abbey Road equipment to do the actual recording. It was a bit of a last minute thing and we had to run all the cables up onto the roof at five o’clock in the morning. Then they came and did the set at lunchtime and stopped all the traffic. It was one song after another because they were getting cold up there. We made enough noise that they could hear it in Piccadilly Circus.
How do you see the recording industry moving forward? Personally I think at the moment it’s at rock bottom. I know that digital sales are on the up, but I’m not sure that the right people are being rewarded for that. And until
the right people are rewarded the right amounts I don’t think pop music can develop as much as it should, as much as it deserves to. And by the right people I mean artists, writers, and producers being properly rewarded for their contribution to the recording. It’s all down to music; it’s not down to equipment. I think we also need to get more quality going again so people can really hear what things should sound like. When you compress everything, 90 percent of the feel goes out of the bit of music. We’ve got to be able to get that feel back to people. The only way you can do that is to get the quality back, and get them to listen on decent equipment or at least some sort of device that can download 192kHz/24-bit audio into your phone, and wear a decent pair of cans.
www.britishgrovestudios.com
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