SESSION SHENANIGANS
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by session ace Mitch Dalton. This month: Hi-Tek with Low-Tech (1981-2021).
It was a bitterly cold Summer’s day, a few short years after the Wright Brothers had taken to the skies with their hairbrained contraption. And lo, Mr Bell’s invention burst into life with news of the outside world. For it was David Katz, a busy music contractor of the era. Sadly, his motive in contacting me implied no offer to my pecuniary advantage. Instead, he suggested that I contacted Richard Niles. “He’s a great arranger. I think you two will get on. He’s waiting for your call.” Which is how I came to visit his charmingly bijou apartment in London’s then affordable Belsize Park. There he sat, a quietly spoken American gent with an obscene beard and a goatee sense of humour. He appeared either to have dropped a value tab of acid or to have unpacked a parcel that had sent him as high as Annapurna. The explanation was the delivery of the Teac/Tascam 414, a quaint four-track recorder/mixer utilising digital audio cassette tape. Well may you smile indulgently while positioned strategically in front of your current Pro Tools mega rig, but this was a game-changing piece of kit. And thus we set to work. At which point I became aware within five minutes that this cove knew both his onions and his ostinatos.
Later, by undertaking covert research I was to discover that he’d recently arranged and produced Pat Metheny’s American Garage, arranged Sarah Brightman’s I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper and a great deal in between. A stellar career beckoned. But for the moment, we began honing his groovy, quirky and supremely musical tunes into demo-worthy items. Mr Niles liked me. Of course he did. I was probably the only gullible sap of his acquaintance that could play his charts. And for free. I would appear on an ad hoc basis in the months that followed and we would lay down a basic rhythm utilising a primeval drum machine, bouncing it down on to one track and adding guitars on the remaining three. And repeat to fade. We had decided at the outset that it might be fun to base the project around the guitar and do away with keyboards. The fact that neither of us could play the piano may well have influenced matters at that fateful fork in the fusion road. By now, the vogue for these new fangled stomp boxes, processors or 'effects pedals' as we fondly referred to them, was in full swing. Not a week passed without the announcement of new devices of increasingly desperate novelty and decreasingly probable reliability. Needless to say, I had succumbed repeatedly to the siren call of the marketing men and now owned a comprehensive array of such items, the majority of tenuous relevance when booked on a care home commercial. But here was an opportunity to experiment, innovate and come up with the occasional sound of surprise.
Well do I remember an early Boss Compressor of such ferocity that it was quickly dubbed 'The Clamp'. Then there was the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe, a mains powered box capable of producing an astounding variety of analogue echo effects. My favourite was the company’s MicroSynth, an intimidating device which, if provoked, could take the the instrument round the back of the living room and give it a serious processing. This thanks to its array of sliders that messed with the length, envelope shape and equalisation of the input signal. One must remember that the option 'programmable' had yet to enter the lexicon of stomp box manuals. This, and reliability akin to an Austin Allegro dictated that it was advisable to nail a particular take immediately or spend another fortnight failing to replicate the original sound.
Eventually, it was done. Richard had been introduced to 19-year old alto sax prodigy Chris Hunter, later to set sail for New York City and The Gil Evans Orchestra, never to return. We recruited Dill Katz on bass guitar and Peter Van Hooke on drums and electronic percussion. Chris recommended us to Original Records, an eccentric outfit run by two mavericks, Don Mousseau and Lawrence Aston. We met. They listened. They gave us a deal. We pitched camp at Red Bus Studios. They paid for everything. An undiscovered Duran Duran were working in the studio next door. We thought in our youthful naivety that this was all perfectly normal.
In hindsight it really was that easy. The album appeared with an innovative cover as 'Hi-Tek'. And duly sank without trace, as did Original Records a while later. However, we did receive some attention from our Jazz-FusionWith-Attitude fan base, even garnering a 'Sunday Times Album Of The Month' review. It still turns up online with kind comments from time to time.
Sadly it never graduated from vinyl and live to see the birth of the compact disc, thus making it almost impossible to find. Or 'collectible', if you will.
This year sees the 40th anniversary of Hi-Tek. The boy Niles has found the master tapes and is about to unleash it on an unsuspecting world.
I will stand slightly by.
“WE MET. THEY LISTENED. THEY GAVE US A DEAL. THEY PAID FOR EVERYTHING. THE ALBUM APPEARED. AND SANK WITHOUT TRACE.”