my studio - the lavalounge
While working in studios in the 80s, I started buying bits of equipment which I would drag around with me.
The first was a Trident compressor which was central to the sound of the Strawberry Switchblade album. I accumulated more and more, sometimes on trips to New York, mixing albums with Michael Brauer. I love compression, so I bought more and more compressors. Summit valve compressors, a Valley People Dynamite and the 610, which was used heavily on the Red Box album for all the ambient drum tracks and the studio mics for everything...our corrugated iron wigwam which we constructed in the middle of Eden studio 1, and the posse of singers crammed into it.
Then there was the Aphex Compellor which we used on lead vocals and for strapping over the whole mix. There was such a pile of compressors and processors that it became known as The Tower of Power.
There came a point when I only needed a desk and a multitrack and I had a studio. That point came at the end of the 80s with a Trident Fleximix. Three chunks strung together by Smudger, the tech wizard at RAK who went to Videosonics. The top floor of our house off Chiswick High Road became the studio.
I ended up doing the programming and vocals for Gangway's "quiet boy ate the whole cake" album up there. Also some Japanese artists like Chara and Mimori Yusa and Tosho from The Alfee.
There were songwriting projects with Davy Henderson of Win, John Millarky, Tom Morley and Catherine Buchanan.
Our financial crash took me into Soho, thanks to my friend and recording engineer Nick Rogers, into the basement of the former Trident studios in St Anne's Court. This became known as "The Dungeon" (20). It was a tiny L-shaped space, a former workshop off the main studio. This began my main Dance music era. Puro Sesso, Underground Turbulence, remixes....then the beginning of my career in advertising and the movie Orlando. The current owner and benefactor Richard had fallen on hard times, my mate Nick had moved on. It was time to move on. I moved into Berwick Street. Painted one room in orange, blue and yellow in 3 hrs, stapled baby blankets to the walls to take the splash out of the top end (21). Jesper Siberg rented a room next door for his studio until he went back to Copenhagen. By that time, well into my commercials career, my finances were healthy, so I knocked the partition wall down and it became the Lavalounge...pretty much unchanged to this day.