Martin kindly took the time to chat to us about the past, present & the future, if you are unsure of who is he check the credentials below!!

Worked with artists from Shirley Bassey to The Human League – Check
Produced a ground breaking Electronic album – Check
Won a Brit for said album – Check

DS: Martin, your career spans almost 40 years, having engineered the likes of T. Rex’s ‘Electric Warrior’ and ‘Out On The Street’ by David Essex in your early years. How did you get involved with production and engineering back then?

MS: Well when I was a teenager I was in bands I went to do a demo with them in a studio in South London and I fell in love with the process of making records, it seemed to be more fun than actually being in a band. And from that point on all I wanted to do was become a record producer, I’d already wondered when I was looking at records by Buddy Holly it said produced by Tom Petty & thought ‘who was he’ and thought he must be the bloke that tells everyone what to do & that sounded like the job for me! Haha
So having drifted through a few jobs in school that were corporate in nature not in the music industry there were a few incidents that made me think this just isnt for me, working for a chemicals company is just not the life for me!! So wrote around just asking for jobs in studios & got taken on by Advision studios by mistake. They were looking for a projectionist & the manager doing the interviews got them muddled up and he thought I was a projectionist! So I turned up for work & they wanted me to make up this fucking projector! So I said look, just show me a few times & I guarantee you within a week I’ll be the best projectionist you’ve ever had. So I practiced hour after hour after hour till I could lay this projector up quicker than anyone in history that he’d employed before! So I kept the job but it was clear they knew I wanted to work in the studio I didn’t want to be a fucking projectionist & they transferred me as a tape off so I ended up working with Yes, Julie Driscoll, all sorts of people but at the tiny advision in new bond street & then when we moved to Gosfield street it was a much bigger studio & as an engineer I became quite popular & lots of people wanted me, so I was working with Yes, & t – rex etc, Jeff Wayne was a jingle writer in those days and I used to do a lot of his jingles cause no-one else wanted to do them! And then of course when he decided to produce records he wrote me in for David Essex his war of the World album & you just got to work with load & loads & loads of people.

DS: You have worked with all sorts of characters & so many established artists ranging from the stranglers to Shirley Bassey! And must know some interesting stories, is there one particular that sticks out in your mind for one reason or another you’d care to share?

MS: OK a Shirley Bassey one 1st, It was suddenly announced to me out the blue that Eddy Offers that had engineered Shirley up to then at Advision no longer wanted to do it as he was going off as front of house sound man with Yes touring America, so said ‘Martin you’re doing it’ now everyone was petrified of doing Shirley, she just has that way about her & I thought mmm do I really want this job! Cause I had only been engineering a year & hadn’t really done much orchestral work it was all new to me so I was shitting a brick. So the 1st time I had to work with her in the studio was the Monday lunchtime after she had headlined the Royal command performance in-front of the queen, anyway she came storming into the studios, straight through reception without a hello to anybody & disappeared straight into the studio, so I thought I better go in & introduce myself, so walked in & said ‘good afternoon Miss Bassey, my names Martin, I’m going to be your new sound engineer & she just through a mic stand at me & told me to get out! I thought oh fuck what have I said?! Anyway I found out later that what happened was Shirley quite enjoys a Brandy, trouble is when she has a few too many she swears like a fucking trooper! I mean really bad Bernard Delfont had decided not to invite her to the after show party with the queen incase she got pisssed & swore infront of the queen! Now Shirley happened to find out the following day, what had gone down and as you can imagine was a bit cross and as I was the 1st human being she saw after finding out & I copped the anger with a flying mic stand!! I mean can you imagine you are headlining the gig & don’t get invited to the party afterwards! So after that we got on really well & are still friend to this day.
There was also a time when we had a really good session and done loads & loads of vocals & she was in a great mood & Richard Harris the actor & Terrance Stamp were there as they were all great friends & a whole crowd had gathered & she said right I’m taking you all to Tramps for dinner, so about 20 of us arrive at Tramps & they lay out this big table for Miss Bassey & we all sit there ordering & she said ‘I don’t want a main course I’m not that hungry I see you have asparagus on the menu I’ll have that, but can you serve it as my main course & you guys if you want some starters have your starters I wont bother & bring me my asparagus when they have their mains’ so quite simple. So anyway, we had our starters & Shirley sat there nibbling on breadsticks then our main courses turned up & she said ‘don’t worry you start my asparagus will turn up in a minute’. Anyway we’d finished our main courses but still no asparagus so Shirley calls over the waiter & says ‘excuse me I haven't had my bloody asparagus yet’ so he says I’m terribly sorry Miss Bassey there must be a problem bear with me & I’ll find out whats happened. Next thing the head waiter arrived & says I’m sorry Miss Bassey I hear there has been some sort of problem? And again she said ‘I haven’t had my bloody asparagus!’ Next thing the floor manager turns up & the SAME thing happened again & she said ‘look I’ve told 2 people I just want my bloody asparagus just sort it out’!! With that The club manager turns up, exactly the same thing happens again & by this time her voice is raising by the second, then the head chef comes out, then the commis chef comes out & I was thinking what the fuck is going on, is this a wind up? until finally this little young lad of about 19 who’s obviously the pot washer comes out shaking like a leaf & before he opened his mouth I knew what he was going to say, ‘I’m sorry Miss Bassey we have no asparagus’, so with that she turned the table over! & lost he plot as there is one thing she doest like & that’s being lied to, cause people are scared to tell her the truth. And that’s why we got on well as when she was shit I’d tell her & she’d do it again.

Right a Stranglers one, they were playing at Paradiso in Amsterdam, in those days it was pretty much run by the hells angels, it may well be now for all I know! And I was with them as it was being broadcast live on euro 1, or some channel like that. So I was supervising the broadcast trail. I get there before they do as I was flying in from London & they were coming in off tour from somewhere like Dusseldorf, so I was sitting there on my own in the dressing room which backed out to the car park & there was a door that leads you out to the car park. So I’m sitting there reading a book & there’s a ‘bang, bang, bang’ on the door & its Jean-Jaques Burnel, anyone there? I said ‘yeah, Jean its me Martin’, he said ‘well open the fucking door then & let us in’! and I said I cant the doors locked & theres no one about, and he said ‘well go find someone’, I said there is no one in the building, I’m the only one here so come round the front, he said he couldn’t be arsed & the next thing I know a boot appears through the breezeblock wall! He kicked a whole in the wall & knocked the fucking wall down. Absolutely outrageous, but hey that was Jean!   

DS: Talk to us about your label, Genetic, and the plans you had for it back in the early 1980’s.

MS: I built these studios in the grounds of my house because it was an attempt to save my failing marriage as well as business investment as I never saw my then wife as I was always in the studio in London or New York or somewhere, so I thought if I build one at home at least I’ll be at home & not travelling all over the gaff so people can come to me. The problem was though that it doesn’t matter if you’re a 1,000 miles away of 50 yards away, when you’re in the studio you’re in the studio! So the bit about saving the failed marriage didn’t work but it was a big success both commercially & artistically we made a lot of records there. So I did the Human League & did the homosapian album by Pete Shelley (from the Buzz Cocks) although homosapian was actually done before we got in there, we were punting it around for a deal & people were getting interested well the moment Dare took off everyone wanted Pete Shelleys album & literally a bidding war developed between Virgin, Island & EMI, but it came down to Island or Virgin & Chris Blackwell couldn’t match the money that Virgin were offering but he did say you can have your own label etc, so you can do some acts & put them out on your label & being young & impressionable with an ego that was getting out of control I agreed to do it, it was basically growth out of the studio, we put out homosapian, which was reasonably successful but has only now, years later gained the status but at the time wasn’t a massive hit, it did quite well in America. But about 2 years in, that was when my divorce was going through & everything fell apart really. So that was the end of Genetic records for a while. Although I’m just about to re-launch it, I’ve had people bending my ear saying look you’re back in the business now you’re doing good things, but now I’ve got a deal where I don’t have anything to do with the business or running the label at all, all I do it turn up with the record that I want putting out. And marketing & all that sort of stuff is not what I do but that was originally what I was expected to do on the Island deal & just didn’t have the time. Now I steer well clear of business, I have the studio in my house & just make records & write tunes all day because that’s what I’m good at & I’m not very good at planning marketing campaigns or managing bands!            

DS: When working with the Human League how did the production of their album, ‘Dare’ change things for you?

MS: It transformed my life really, I went from being a reasonably well known back room boy in the business to famous in my own right for being me which felt really, really weird because I never chased fame per sais it wasn’t in my plan to be famous, other people join bands & want to be successful & famous & admired for their music. I just wanted to be a record producer & write music & make records in the studio because I love it. So all of that became as a bit of a shock, all the television interviews, I remember I made a statement to Billboard as they did a little interview about Dare, they asked what ‘I thought of the significance of the record made with computers & synths was’ as it was the 1st commercially, hugely successful album made without any bloody guitars or anything on it I just said well I think it will change the way records are made in the future and producers & DJ’s are going to become tomorrows lead guitarist, you know if you go back to the 50’s the sax tenner was the sexy instrument then we moved into an era where everyone wanted to be guitarists, & we moved into the time where everyone wanted to be a producer, or DJ or mixer, so they said ‘you reckon the day of the guitar as a super instrument is dead?!’ so I said yeah effectively. But what I wasn’t saying is the day of the guitar was dead, just the day of it being the hippest instrument had passed! I then shot off to Canada for a few days & came back on the plane and as I was walking up to the gate you know as you come out there was a mass of cameramen & photographers & I thought fuck me there must be someone famous on my plane! So I’m looking around to see if I can see Rock Hudson or somebody & got through, it was me there were waiting for I nearly had a fucking heart attack! They were going ‘what’s this you saying that the guitar is dead & blah, blah, blah, its NBC news, CBS News’, so was thinking what the fuck is going on, but what had happened was they had published my Billboard interview with the headline something to the value of ‘Young oik UK record producer says the guitar is dead’ now you know what the guitar means to the Americans & so they thought I was basically telling the whole American Rock industry the guitar was dead which was not what I said! Talk about cause a stir it made all the news programmes everything! So fame? No not really for me.
The other way it changed my life was that it made me very rich suddenly, I mean I’d been earning a good living & wasn’t poor, but suddenly the amount of money I was earning, not only from Dare & the Human League but also all my fees to do new stuff went through the roof as well. So I had more money but unfortunately blew most of it, although I certainly wouldn’t make the same mistake again! And when I got divorced that really crippled me as I lost the lot & ended up a single dad to boot, so retired from the business for a few years & brought my kids up.        

DS: So that’s when things seemed a bit quiet for you in the 1990’s amongst other things had you lost touch with the direction electronic music had taken or did you feel that you couldn’t connect with it as much as you had done in the past?

MS: Yeah I worked until the end of the 80’s in the industry & did nothing through the 90’s but bring my kids up. Yes I lost touch for a couple of reasons really, 1) my kids weren’t in good shape as you can imagine & neither was I for that matter & 2) I guess I blamed the business for the failure of my marriage and all the bad things that had happened to me. So didn’t really want to know anything about making records and hardly listened to any music. But I did keep my hand in, helping out a lot of local bands in the Reading area, promoting a few gigs, built a club up on the common, called Gush that was an amazing place so I was still involved in the music, but in a different way, just more local & stuff. So yes, kept my ear to the ground a bit but wasn’t until I met my new wife & my youngest son from my 1st marriage really wanted to get into DJing & stuff like that, he asked me for some help & so gradually I was getting more & more sucked in & my interest grew & grew & totally re-ignited my passion so thought hey I wouldn’t mind making records again. So had to stop & think right, where are we with the technology? Because I didn’t know what Cue Base was or anything! But could see it was basically a leap on from what I had worked on & far more involved & far more complex & far more powerful, so I had to train myself up on that, get the money together to build my studio, and gradually started to ease my way back in. although looking back at it now I think my absence was fortuitous because I know lots of my old 70’s & 80’s contemporaries are still old stick in the mud’s they wont embrace new technology & think that all these modern electronic bands & DJ’s are a pile of shit and just not into it. And for me having an enforced break & coming back in was all fresh & new to me, so am now in it at a level that most of my contemporaries aren’t anymore & are either retired or making boring old stuff.
I think as the technology is getting more & more powerful & the software is getting more powerful & it’s opening doors that weren’t possible 5 years ago little own 20 or 30 years ago. You’ve got a new breed of youngsters coming through that are packed full of fresh ideas & were brought up on dance music & are moving on from dance music & are witnessing in a sense quite a hefty change & there is a lot of new stuff that I’m hearing that really interests me.   

DS: If there is anyone you could work with past or preset who would it be & why?

MS: I would have loved to have made a second album, with Joy division, I did some demo tunes with them that eventually got released. I really wanted to sign them but there were some business problems that stopped it happening. So yeah, I would have loved to have done that which unfortunately could never be because Ian died. But if I could wave a magic wand & make an album with somebody it would be the original Joy Division.

DS: You’ve signed up with Tirk, one of our favourite record labels. How did this come about, and talk to us about the single, ‘Itchy Hips’

MS: Well, my involvement with Tirk & the other labels that are associated with it is more all encompassing than just Tirk, Basically there is this guy called John Pitcher that runs a company called MRC that owns Tirk along with Hooj Tunes & a few others & they decided it would be a good idea if someone did a remix of ‘things that dreams are made of’ by the Human League because the original Love & Dancing was getting pretty popular around town. So thought fuck it lets get some more mixes of it, so they approached Virgin & asked if they had any objections in principle so said right lets do a deal, so they did but then Virgin couldn’t find the master tapes which was a bit of a problem! So there was this desperate net being cast to find these analogue 24 track masters! They got onto the Leagues management & they said ‘well, Martin did get copies of all the stuff he did with Human League on a DAT from Virgin in 1999 because at some point he’s planning to do a new updated Love & Dancing, so he may have a copy of it’ so Pitcher found me on myspace & sent me a message saying ‘can I contact you about it’ so he called me up & asked if I had them but there were 2 songs I didn’t have one was called ‘seconds’ & the other was ‘things that dreams are made of’ because Virgin couldn’t find the tapes & I remember the 2 tunes were on the same roll of tape! So I said sorry I cant help you & he said by the way the 70’s Neo disco track that is on your myspace page called itchy hips what is that? I said it was something I did with my wife for a laugh!! And he said we love it we want to put it out! And now I’m doing a whole lot more with that organisation & am producing a band called mama shamone who are fucking awesome (a rock band) and have just done a remix of ‘things that dreams are made of’ as Virgin eventually found the tapes at some studio in New York! What the fuck they were doing there I don’t know. I’ve done a sort of Giorgio Moroder Italo dance floor version & that’s all going out soon, so quite a lot happening & they are internet based which is much better for me. And not like the EMI’s of the World as I think they are a bit of a dying breed, middlemen really and as we don’t need the money from them to make the records anymore because people make them at home not much use!

DS: What else do you have planned for the future & do you have any interesting collabs in the pipeline?

MS: I’ve got my own album that I’m writing that is going to be an eclectic mix of all the styles drawn from all the eras that I’ve worked through so a bit of Glam rock, bit of progressive rock, bit of punk, bit of 80’s electro & a bit of American disco. So all these influences thrown in a pot to see what comes out, but what I want to do is get all my old mates to make guest appearances so Pete Shelley (from the Buzzcocks) to sing a song for me or Tom Wills to play a bit of guitar, maybe Phill (Human League) to come do a vocal or the girls to do some backing vocals. So that’s my main next big project, on top of that I’m doing mama shamone that I mentioned earlier, I’m working with ‘Killa kela’ finishing his album & exec producing the ‘Does it offend you yeah’ album they are signed to Virgin, they were the 1st band to get picked up big time by myspace & doing there 1st headline tour in September, they are in a similar vein to Justice & Daft punk.
I’ve also got to do some more tunes with my wife under the trade name ‘Disco Unlimited’ & still want to get my love & dancing remix #2 remix done & finally in tentative discussions with Human League doing some new material, so a lot on the calendar!

DS: Sum yourself up in 3 words

MS: Haha, OK, ‘a Nice bloke’ will that do? Or ‘Legendary genius producer’, haha, or ‘A Bit arrogant’

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