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When did you first realise that you wanted to be involved in music in some way?

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I think I realised at 13 that I specifically wanted to be a record producer. We didn't have a ton of foreign holidays when I was a kid, but we did have one five-day trip to Florida. On the plane on the way home, me and my mum were sitting together and on the third seat was a guy with really long hair. I was a bit precocious and leaned over to him and said: “Has anyone ever told you, you look like Sammy Hagar?” He said, “Oh, when me and Sammy are in the studio together, people can't tell us apart…”

Turns out he was a record producer that did rock records and he'd work with members of Van Halen and Kiss and Magnum and all these bands - and I just talked his arse off for the whole flight. To the point where my mum had to tell me to shut up and leave him alone.

I got off the plane and said that’s the coolest man I've ever met, I want to do what he does.

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First Experiences

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When I got my first tape up job at Power Plant Studios in north London, it was literally in the first two weeks of working there, and that same guy that I met on the plane at 13 turned up to work in the studio - it was the only time he’d ever worked in the UK, and as far as I know he never worked in the UK again either.

It felt like a sign & I just felt like I was on the right path. It definitely gave me confidence.

At school I didn't have the best time, but I did have a band and band practice at the weekend. We were really sh*t, obviously, every school band is, but that made my week work, if you know what I mean, those moments of making something slightly more than the sum of its parts. Just the idea of rock music and living vicariously through someone else, because your own life is a bit rubbish.

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It sounds like you got in the studio quite quickly. Can you remember your first day in a studio and how it felt?

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Yeah, absolutely. I had a couple of interviews. I had an interview with Air Studios when it was still in Oxford Street. It was Malcolm Atkin who ran the studio and he got me in for an interview. He showed me around all the studios and showed me the moving faders, and I just couldn't believe it; the feeling of excitement was just overwhelming. But it turned out that position was for someone in the maintenance department. He just said: "Well, you've kind of just told me that you'd spend your whole time trying to get out of there and into the studio, haven't you?" He didn't tell me that it was for that, so I didn't get that job.

But then, Robin Millar owned Power Plant and Maison Rouge; Maison Rouge in Fulham and Power Plant in Willesden. Power Plant used to be Morgan in the 70s, which is where they recorded ‘Alright Now’ and ‘Maggie May’ - the first transatlantic number one. It was a wonderful old studio with the control room upstairs and the big live room downstairs.

I started there, and they sent me down to Maison Rouge in Fulham. I think Blur were just starting to do their first album with Stephen Street, and they took me in to see the setup before they came in. There was an AC30 and the drum kit with all the old microphones on it, and I was just breathless with excitement, just absolutely breathless at the time.

My first session, where I literally just made the tea and sat in the room, was just an edit session for a record called Chad Jackson: Hear the Drummer (Get Wicked), which was number one. So the very first session I was on was a number one record, which was cool. I was 18 when it went to number one, having heard that whole journey.  It was amazing, and of course, at that age, you just think, "Well, that's how it is!" Yeah, of course, it’s number one!”

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You're obviously very well known for your work with Manic Street Preachers. I read about you first meeting them when you were 21, is that right?

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When I was 18 or 19, they were one of the first bands I worked with at Power Plant, as a tea boy. They wanted a Hammond on Motown Junk, their first indie single, and I knew where the D chord was, so they sent me downstairs to do that, and that was my first credit: ‘Assistant Engineer and Hammond, Dave Eringa,’ - I couldn't believe it!

Me and them hit it off because we were both outsiders. Power Plant was quite a cool studio where they'd done Terence Trent D'Arby and Sade. There was lots of soul and I just wasn't clued in to being a London cool person at all. I was turning up to work in Kiss and Van Halen T-shirts, and it never occurred to me that was dumb. I think the Manics looked at me and, you know, obviously from the Valleys, and mad spray-can painted punks in the second summer of love kind of thing, and they were like fish out of water (too). I think they had their first plate of spaghetti bolognese on that session. They'd never had ‘that exotic London food’.

So, they recognised another outsider, and we got talking about Guns N' Roses and Appetite for Destruction. It meant a huge amount to them as a record; the sonics, the musicality, the don't give a f*ck attitude, that’s just really impossible to fake. Every time you go back to Appetite, whether you like Guns N’ Roses or not, there is something on there that's really captured a moment.

James (Manics) always talks about lineage from Never Mind the Bollocks through Appetite for Destruction to Nevermind; all really different records, and all those bands would probably hate each other, but those are the records that distilled that kind of punk anger in their own way. That was just an undeniable kind of thing.

Because Guns N’ Roses became such a cabaret rock act later, you forget that for those six months where Appetite was first out, that was such a punk rock band, you know?

We just really bonded over that record, and their producer at the time, who was wonderful, a brilliant engineer called Robin Evans, was kind enough to have me on his sessions. (I was a noisy little pr*ck, and not every engineer wanted to work with me). Robin was really kind, taught me lots, and was brilliant. He did an amazing job on that first single Motown Junk; he was really great, but he didn't come from that world at all. Guns were like a terrible metal band to him.

So, me and (the Manics) just kind of hit it off. They used to send me postcards from tour and things like that, it was really nice. They came back (to the studio) and Robin was producing again, and they did ‘You Love Us’ – so I played Hammond on that again - I think there were three chords on that one!

Then they got their big deal with Columbia and did their first record with Steve Brown, who had produced The Cult’s Love. So, ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ and all of that. He was an absolutely brilliant guy. He was kind enough to let me come down and still do some keyboards on their first album, Generation Terrorists. They could have had anyone at that point, but they just had this romantic notion of pulling me along with them, you know?

The Manics’ manifesto, if you like, for their first album, was they would make wild situationist statements of things that could never possibly happen. So, they said that they were going to make a debut double album, sell 17.5 million albums, and then split up kind of thing.

So, in order to do that, they wanted to precision-tool it to the sound of the day, so, they were happy to make it really slick and FM kind of thing. This was before 1991, which is year zero in rock, or year zero in punk rock, and so they made a very slick FM-sounding first record.

The idea was the riffs of Guns N’ Roses and the politics of Public Enemy, and then during that period of time, Nevermind hit, and everything changed, and no one wanted slick FM-sounding records, certainly in America. So, I think they felt like they’d made a compromise on the sound deliberately, but now they didn't want to do that again kind of thing.

So, I'd lied to them about how much engineering I was doing, and they asked me to do a demo session. We demoed a load of the songs from the second album, Gold Against the Soul, and they went really well. I think they just liked the idea of having a bit more control and having someone their own age, rather than, you know, Steve, who was genuinely brilliant, but he was the kind of grown-up dad producer that would put his arm around them and say, "This is how we should do it, boys." They wanted to have that bit more control of their own sonic destiny, wanted to learn, with someone that was learning, I think, and so we went on a journey together.

I was so lucky to meet them, and they educated me. I was a blank canvas musically, I think. I would love to pretend that I'd spent the whole 80s listening to The Smiths and the first R.E.M. album and Joy Division, but I hadn't. They educated me with all of that. 

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How does it differ, or feel, when you go from being in the studio, listening to the tracks, producing them, and then hearing it live? Do you go and see bands live?

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my most recent experience of that exact thing was with an amazing singer-songwriter from Liverpool called Jamie Webster, who is absolutely enormous in the North of England and has just got bigger and bigger. I've done two albums with him, his second and third albums, and he is a real working-class hero. He's very political and super intelligent, and he's such a wonderful bloke. He really is.

He just played Sefton Park in Liverpool, which is 30,000 people.  He writes with such pride about being from Liverpool and also how politics effects real life. And so, to see 30,000 Scousers singing along to these words that you worked on with him, you remember each line of vocal when you were recording it. It just makes your heart swell. It’s just so lovely to see people affected by art that you've had a little hand in making.

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Is it emotional?

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It is. Yeah, I was bawling. With the Manics, it's very special because they do affect people's lives so extraordinarily. There are people that are only here because they've got through depression because of the Manics, because of the things that they write about.

In 2011, they did a gig at the O2, which was all of the singles up to that point, even the ones I didn't produce. All of them were like a moment in my life where they immediately took me back to a time and a place, and then you see 20,000 people singing and you'd see people with their eyes tightly shut, just with their hands crossed across their chest, with it meaning everything to them.

Of course, it's very proud and emotional. Also, kind of knowing that everyone's interpretation of that song is probably slightly different from the next person's. Because, you know, Design for Life is a song about working-class dignity, but if you want to just shout, "We only want to get drunk," at the top of your voice, you can interact with it in that way as well.

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Lyrics and Melody: Some people are very much about listening to the lyrics, others focus more on melody and frequency. Where do you sit with this?

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Well, the Manics have a lot of those people (on both sides). The Holy Bible, for instance,  can be quite a difficult trawl through anorexia and self-harming, but for some people who hear that, all of a sudden they don’t feel alone anymore, because if they’re having such a hard time, but suddenly they hear someone sing what’s in their head, but in words more beautiful than they could express, and that’s such a magical connection!

I think there are definitely some people that love the Manics with all their heart but don't actually like the music!

All the huge artists are elevated but their great lyrics. For instance, if you take the first Arctic Monkeys record and the first Futureheads record, both brilliant post-punk bands that were just as good as each other musically really… but, ‘I bet you look good on the dancefloor’ is such an amazing lyric for just catching you with couplet after couplet, Mardy Bum is also so universal & memorable! That's what elevated the Arctics and made it sell 7 million or whatever - as opposed to the Futureheads, who did brilliantly, but not millions! People connect with words that talk to them about their life!

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I love that you get emotional hearing the music in front of a live crowd. Did you go to the Havana gig that they did?

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No, that was when my son had just been born, and I’d just done that record with them. It's a regret that I didn't go. He was really little, when you're really tired, and you just think it seems like a lot to go to Cuba and do all of that.

You know the story with what Fidel said to them? Because he was old at the time, it was announced that Fidel Castro was coming in to say hello. So, in he comes, and it’s a sort of line-up type situation, and Nikki said to him, you know, it's going to be quite loud tonight, and he leaned into Nick and said, it's not going to be louder than war, is it?

And then the next day, they got invited to his compound and, you know, ‘invited’ - there wasn't really any choice kind of thing. So, off they went, and the first thing he said to them was actually, it was louder than war. Which was the title then of the DVD they put out, ‘Louder than War.’

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A studio can be a very small and intimate space. How do relationships and psychology, working with different personalities, play an impact in the world that you're in?

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It's the biggest part of it really in terms of pure production. I produce and I engineer, so it's left brain, right brain kind of thing. So, if you put the engineering to one side for a minute, the production is 80% psychology, really. It's just working out how to get the best out of people and what situation you need to create in order for that to happen naturally.

I try to create an environment where everybody feels safe coming forward with ideas, that, people aren’t going to take the piss. I'm comfortable with making myself look really dumb and stupid in order that other people are comfortable in that way as well. There's a lot of unspoken communication… I'll take with me bags and bags of fairy lights and dress the studio so it looks really nice and sort of womb-like, and it's a sort of unspoken way of saying, we're on the same team. I want the best result. I want to make your music the best it can be, and I want to put you in an environment where you feel that you can do that kind of thing.

Most bands aren’t a democracy; they're a benevolent dictatorship, and it's working out where the power lies and where the strong points are and the weak points and making sure you're helping the weak points and not letting the strong points take over too much. You're constantly working out personalities.

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What advice would you give to your younger self?

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My 20-year-old self - just think a little bit before you speak, sometimes. But you know what? There are not many regrets. There are times you think back, and you realise what you said, and you wince, just wince. And think, oh, what a little d*ck, but you know, it was all fun.  

I have been blessed. Very much; I've never had a band I didn't get on with. When you start that relationship, you set that up right, it's always going to work, it's always going to be good. I did a phone interview with an Australian band once that I ended up producing. It went to number one in Australia, and they'd spoken to a few quite big people. I said, why did you pick me? And they said you were the only one that came on the phone and just said, I love your band. Everyone else came on the phone and told us what was wrong with the demos and what they’d change. I still said what I thought we should do, but I opened with, man, I love your band, you know? And I think if you start your relationships on the right, respectful framework, then even when things get really heated and people are disagreeing, you're already at a place where it's comfortable doing that. The love is already there, isn't it? You know that it’s all coming from the right place.

With your actions, if you just show that you're on their team, then people are going to get it. And look, there's lots of other schools of production than mine that create great results. There was that guy that did all those new metal records, Rich Robinson, and he was all about taking the songwriter back to the place where they wrote that f***ed up lyric in that dark place. And I read one time he was going out and, like, punching musicians while they were playing to make it more angsty, and he made massive hit records, but that's just not my thing. 

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Quick fire round now, do you have a favourite sound?

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I think it's probably waves. I love the sound of the sea. Nothing winds me up more than dickheads on the beach playing f***ing music. The reason you want to be on the beach is that beautiful, meditative trance that you can just get into hearing that - because it's a very mantra-like thing, it's just going round and round.  

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What's your least favourite sound?

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I'm going to say 3.1K. That's always the frequency in a guitar amp that I just... it's that same thing, you know, that we had (picked up on) with the Immerse? You think there's nothing wrong with this guitar sound, then dip ten DB a tight Q out and 3.1K, and then click bypass on the EQ, you’re like, oh my gosh I didn't know there was that whistle in there! Every time

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Do you have a most impactful musical memory?

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Yes, I do. I can show you the bit of tarmac I was driving over when my wife put in a cassette of Nevermind and played me ‘Teen Spirit’ and everything changed. Yeah, absolutely. The bit of tarmac would be where the chorus kicked in. Nevermind really, really changed everything for me, sonically. I was just completely blown away, made me throw away all my records. I was just the right age for that to have an enormous, enormous impact.

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Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. We hope you enjoy Immerse!

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Dave E: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for sending me these (Immerse) as well. I might buy a random pair of sh*t headphones to take on this flight. What would you recommend? Use the E-Prototypes or a pair of sh*t headphones with Immerse?
 

Flare: The sound signature is very close! For a plane, though, maybe using Immerse with an over-ear (headphone). It's more fun because you can, it's more comfortable. Because whilst this is in your ears, it melts away and you don't have to take them out of your ears to hear. So I guess I quite enjoy that experience of messing around with cans.
These are the ones we've been using, these are the gaming headphones.  

Dave E: Oh, wow.  

Flare: They're super rubbish, super rubbish. We tried to find the most awful shell-resonant type rubbish headphones we could, and that was them. 26 pounds on Amazon, and now we're quite fond of them. We want our (Flare) sound to be a direct representation of what was produced. We don't want to boost anything, because that's not what we're about. That work's already been done. We're just here to play it back perfectly.

Dave E: Well, that's why I really like them, that's why I really love it, because we spend ages doing all that stuff, and then someone comes along and puts ten DB of f***ing 100Hz.

Flare: Yeah, that's awful. And I saw that, and that's the ego of the designers in that world. You’ve got to protect the art. If you listen to Simon & Garfunkel and stuff like that, you hear the natural reverbs again - or not again, for the first time - and you really appreciate the natural recordings, especially where they've done them inside rooms, you can hear the space that much more.

Dave E: That’s brilliant, I look forward to going on a little journey with them, literally and figuratively! Thank you so much.