WORKING on both sides of the Atlantic, Craig Leon revels in producing records from almost any genre of music. With credits ranging from punk to country and blues, from industrial to folk and jazz, and from mainstream pop to esoteric classical, the only common denominator throughout his producing and arranging career is individuality. His roots lie in the R&B days of Criteria Studios in Florida, working with Alex Sadkin. In the early 1970s they built a small demo facility, while Sadkin was a mastering engineer at Criteria. One such demo was for Richard Gottehrer and Seymour Stein, who ran Sire, the seminal New York label. These sessions–with the Climax Blues Band–led to sessions in New York for the label, and by the osmosis of the industry Leon closed up in Florida and became Gottehrer’s full-time assistant.

‘In those days, especially in America, “A&R” and “production” were the same thing,’ Leon recalls. ‘You came to it from a musical background, whereas in the UK you worked your way up through the studios.’

As a case in point, Leon discovered Blondie while working as an A&R scout at Sire, having snapped up local luminaries Talking Heads and The Ramones. As an A&R man, he was in the thick of New York’s punk explosion. As a producer, he supervised the recording of every significant band of the era during the making of Live At CBGB’s for Atlantic in 1976.

‘Blondie lived across the street from CBGB’s, and became the ‘soundcheck band’,’ Leon recounts, ‘routining their set every week while we prepared for that evening’s recording. Richie Gottehrer and I had formed our own independent production company, and the soundcheck tapes prompted us to make a single with Blondie–a project which turned into a year during which I arranged and rehearsed every song they had.’

By the time the band was signed–to Chrysalis–around 40 tracks were ready. Although Gottehrer is credited as producer of the first two albums, it was this material–honed by Leon–that constituted Blondie and Plastic Letters, while much of what was left over–including ‘Heart of Glass’, known to Leon as ‘Disco Song’–was inherited by Parallel Lines producer Mike Chapman.

At a time of art-school idealism, with multitrack analogue recording established as the sensible way of making records, Leon’s production was characterised by an innovatory approach, in which he took unstructured ideas and pieced them together into songs. The method of tape splicing, which enabled him to dovetail grooves into pop structures, presaged today’s sampling techniques directly.

‘Most bands in the US were just trying to get their live performances represented on record,’ he says. ‘Blondie were different. They brought a layering, sampling approach: we’d do a riff, and work that into a verse; then we’d do another riff, and work that into a chorus. These would be chopped together into a whole track, and then Debbie would take that away and come up with the vocal.’

Most of these sessions took place during downtime at Plasa Sound, where Leon was making the first Ramones album. ‘There was a big rehearsal hall for the NBC Symphony Orchestra on top of the Radio City Music Hall, and we’d do stuff there at night. Another blag was Bell Sound–now Sear Sound–which was the old home of The Shangri-La’s, The Four Seasons and all those early sixties recordings.’

It wasn’t all punk, though. Country artist Rodney Crowell, Tex Mex pioneers Sir Douglas Quintet, and folky feminists The Roches were among credible clients, and there was even an album co-produced with Bob Marley and Lee Perry featuring The Wailers.

By the early eighties, however, the American music scene was losing its flavour for Leon and he was drawn to the UK, where he is still based today. Following his muse for idiosyncratic, original material (‘Those that want more of an arrangement approach’) he wound up producing several bands on an indie offshoot label at Virgin called Statik, including Gun Club, Flesh for Lulu, The Sound and his own wife Cassell Webb. From this basis he has become one of the UK’s most eclectic producers, with acts as varied as The Fall, Jesus Jones, The Primitives and Mark Owen benefiting from his touch. For good measure, Canadian noise grinders Front 242 and nutty Japanese girl trio Shonen Knife also figure on his CV.

Next month, though, a new Blondie album is scheduled to appear, picking up where Leon left off, piecing together Chris Stein and Debbie Harry’s arty ideas in that Warhol way. This time his multitrack recorder of choice is the Otari Radar, which allows him to continue his art of assemblage with the luxury of digital cut and paste. Where the Radar scores over other DAWs, according to Leon, is sonically.

‘The Radar doesn’t have a sound, that’s why I like it. When we were doing Clem Burke’s drums on the new Blondie album, we tried the Studer A827, the Sony 3348 and the Radar. I needed to get in to a digital medium because of the amount of editing I do during the work in progress, and the best sound out of those three–and the closest to the real analogue sound, without that change to the top end of the cymbals, or that loss of depth that you normally get with digitally recorded drums–was Radar. You would be hard pressed to play the analogue tape next to the Radar and hear a difference.’

Recall and last-minute editing equally suit Leon’s ‘work-in-progress’ approach. But there are no hard and fast technical rules in Leon’s domain, in which an old Neve console or a Capricorn can provide the solution.

‘Right now I like to take everything from Radar into a Capricorn digitally, just to check balances, but the mix may not end up that way; it takes 25 seconds to recall something on Capricorn. And needless to say we may be in Electric Lady working on an SSL, so there’ll be a different mix from that.

‘No gear is universally right; at the same time, the range of gear available for different sounds is fantastic. I love an old MCI sound, for certain analogue sounds, and I love old Neves, but if they’re not available I can make do with something else. To me, the feel of the actual music is a lot more important. I come from playing music; I learned engineering by the seat of my pants along the way–mainly because people wouldn’t make records as loud as I wanted. I watched Tom Dowd at Criteria, and figured I’d have a go at that and just make it a little louder.’

Leon chooses a studio by the quality of the live area and the atmosphere for the band. ‘Studios are right to emphasise their unique creative vibes over what gear they have. If you’ve got the right music and the right feel, it doesn’t matter if it’s recorded on one console or another, or one tape-disk format or another. I’ve done records entirely on MCIs. The Ramones record was done on a now extinct API console, with 550A EQs, mixed manually, 16-track to a 2-inch 3M 79–one of the worst machines ever made–and mixed down to another 3M, with a bunch of odd compressors and stuff. And you get other records mixed on SSLs which sound great, too.

‘Monitors are the most personal thing; you have to get those exactly right for you. Same with amps; if you go with a Hafler amp or a Dynaudio amp, they’ll sound radically different. But in terms of EQs and desks, well… Nowadays you can chop and change so much. If I don’t like the desk EQ in a place, I’ll bring in my own stuff, so I would never say I’ll only go to a studio which has, say, a Studer Mk.III 12-in, 4-out console. As long as your favourite records sound right to you in that room, that’s basically it. As long as the band is comfortable to be there, too, of course.’

Reacting against the decadence of albums by Steely Dan, The Eagles or Emerson Lake & Palmer, Leon drew upon the rootsy heritage of Florida R&B and his early radio influences when tackling mid-1970s New York punk.

‘All the pioneering producers of country, blues and folk were the guys that I thought were really cool. There was Alan Lomax and the recordings of Muddy Waters in The Library of Congress; the Chess brothers and Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’–one of my favourite records. I was listening to these on the radio when they first came out. Hank Williams, Chuck Berry… The appeal of these records was that they were very direct. Phil Spector blew me away; here was a guy who could make a little Wagnerian opera condensed into three minutes on a bit of plastic, using studio technology.’

Other influences were the record company executives who were the precursors to today’s independent producers. ‘Richie Gottehrer was one of those old-time songwriters from the fifties; he wrote ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’, and so on–again a primitive, rootsy style of recording.

‘Once I moved to New York, the fifties jazz producers really hit me. I wanted to make records as direct as Sketches of Spain [by Miles Davis], whatever the genre. As little interference with the music as possible. Even people like Tom Dowd had made very slick records, not raw at all. Because I did punk first, my first records were raw–because the music was raw. But I’m equally proud of some of the country records I’ve made, which had the same philosophy. Things like Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Sir Douglas Quintet. Take the Roches record I did with Robert Fripp–acoustic guitar and vocal, that’s it. Oh, Tony Levin plays triangle on one track…

‘We would switch the audio perspective between verse and chorus, again getting back to that art technique of cut-ups. We even toyed with the phrase “audio vérité”. You have to use little tricks and enhancements, but they shouldn’t be noticeable. You shouldn’t be able to pin-point any specific effect that you’ve done.’

Without pin-pointing, it must be said that the punk ethic was undoubtedly to avoid reverb. ‘It was seen as very slick,’ Leon admits, ‘and we were distancing ourselves from all those smooth productions of the seventies. And all the old country, jazz and blues records that I really liked were very natural-sounding, where you would only use reverb for a specific effect.

‘It’s a big mistake, for example, to think that Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound records were washed in echo. Sometimes there are overall effects on voices, but in general it’s pretty dry. There’s just a whole lot of things going on at once, and what you hear is the ambience of the room. I’ve always been fond of placing room mics in odd places to enhance that; you walk around the room with one ear covered so you’re listening like a microphone–sometimes I’ll move a couple of grand pianos near the drum kit, and put a mic into each one. I did that with The Ramones–you get a very dry sound, in fact, but a big sound as well.

‘Experimentation with what you had was the thing. Technology was very expensive in those days, and most of my records were on shoestring budgets. We had the Cooper Time Cube, which is all over the Ramones album, but that was about it. Level and tape compression were the keys: what it did to bass and drums was amazing. You have to remember that there were only a few primitive compressors and limiters in those days. Tape compression was a specific effect, it wasn’t just the punk ethic dictating loudness. You got a big, round bass drum sound from it. Even jazz producers would use it for the same effect.’

LEON ARRIVED in England to find that the producer was expected to have a lot more on his palette. Just at that time, high-end sampling systems from Fairlight and Synclavier were becoming established in British recording, and he quickly found himself taking stock of the changes.

‘My main concern was to avoid sounding like those very obvious “Fairlighty-sounding” records, with a certain frequency and a certain sheen which made it sound like the technology was in charge, rather than the other way round. I was using Fairlight at that time, but in the opposite way to, say, The Art of Noise. In retrospect it was more in the spirit of Jesus Jones or The Fall, using the equipment but trying to make it sound like it was part of the band. I’m not saying it’s wrong to make statements with that technology: I think Propaganda’s album was one of the defining albums of the decade. But it was contra to my own philosophy–unless of course I was working with someone like Front 242 or Cobalt 60.’

Indeed, Leon collaborated on albums and 12-inch mixes in the pioneering days when industrial music was banging on the doors of house–puzzling for Ramones fans, but reflecting Leon’s paramount sensitivity to the needs of the artist. ‘No, I’m not a luddite; I’m just saying that to me technology has to serve the purpose of the record. If it’s important for the project, I love using it. A lot of eighties records were mundane soul records made entirely with technology, which I didn’t like, but if you take those sounds and mutate them, so that they sound totally different to anything else, you have a meaningful record.

‘Working with Blondie and Suicide, we were very interested in the hypnotic effect of loops. Kraftwerk were a great influence on all the punk bands. We were even more partial to Can, which sounded like Kraftwerk but played live. Muddy, lo-fi recordings with that real techno vibe of the modern world.

‘The biggest influence on The Ramones’ album, sonically, was ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind–a total techno-noise record, recorded live with a wall of synth. One of my greatest joys was working down at Rockfield in the eighties, and borrowing a synth from Hawkwind in the next studio. They said, ‘don’t touch any of the presets’–so we had to find out what was so important about these presets. And every single one of them was that wooshy noise from ‘Silver Machine’–slight variations of the same sweep. I thought, yeah–this is my kind of band.’

All recording is sampling, according to Leon–it’s just that the mechanical means to do it have become more efficient.

‘Recording is a manipulative process in the first place. When they put a mic in front of Robert Johnson sitting in a hotel room playing guitar, the result was not just Robert Johnson. It was Robert Johnson caught inside a medium. Something was changed. You can try to duplicate as much of the input as possible, but you’re making a transfer. You’re just trying to package the spirit of what’s being expressed in the most suitable way for the final product, whether you start with a bottleneck guitar or a Fairlight.

‘People in recording get hung up on analogue or digital, one kind of reverb or another. Anything which improves thepicture is okay. But you can’t do it to the point where you overwhelm the sound. It has to come through on its own.

‘One thing that makes the modern era so much better than when those guys were making those old records is that the sound of the nineties can be the sound of anything. You have this whole storehouse of information to draw on. The way that dance music samples antique sounds and incorporates them into modern recordings has been really positive. The world is not so structured any more.’

It is arguable that the role of the producer is to find a structure in this confusion–but if the producer, like Leon, is a good A&R guy too, things should fall into place naturally.

‘Every time you go into the studio you should hope to bring out the most individual characteristics of what you’re doing. Producers don’t make the music; you’re working to bring out the vision of the artist on a mass communications medium. Sometimes artists are attracted to you because of some old record you made. And while I’m very glad to have worked with The Ramones or The Fall, I have to say to them, well, I really like your music and I want to make your record, not theirs again.’

ON INITIAL meetings with bands Leon won’t talk about studios or records, least of all his own records. ‘You’re going to spend a lot of time with someone, and you’ve got to establish some common ground. But I’m only interested in them, and what’s happening now. With this new Blondie project I was very keen to document what they’re doing now, and have none of that, ‘gee, wasn’t it great in the old days’. We did that already, and it documented those ideas perfectly well. The new record should not refer back to that period at all.

‘Sometimes the guy in the loudest band in the world will tell you that his favourite album is a Nick Drake, or something like that. It’s very important to focus in on personal details like that. You can take it as given that you like the band’s music once you’ve heard the tape or seen them live and you’ve agreed to work with them–and later on you can get to the specifics of each individual sound, but in between, you’ve got to establish a general understanding of what they’re trying to say.’

A new project with Ray Cooper, Elton John’s percussionist, is already underway. ‘It’s going to be live drum loops with various ethnic drums, with Ray directing, then using these loops as a basis for tracks with invited musicians. Maybe a string quartet on one, a vocal on another, Eric Clapton doing straight country blues on another… Then we’ll make a ‘Ray Cooper Project’ band and do some live shows.

‘It goes back to an album I made in 1980 using a prototype Linn drum, on which I made up a load of North African rhythm loops and fused these with simple, ancient Greek music on synthesisers.’

For trivia buffs, this was called Nommos, released by Chrysalis in 1981. But to find out where Leon’s tireless search for originality may lead him next, you’d better just keep an open mind.

‘I’m not averse to having different engineers at different stages, because different people are good at different things–even for different songs on the same record. It’s an ongoing process, and there are always people that you’d like to work with if you get the chance.’

And just to prove his eclecticism, Leon answers the obvious last question with a less than obvious choice…

‘I’d really like The Prodigy to do some remixes of this new Blondie stuff.’

Wouldn’t we all?