New HAMISH STUART
Hamish Stuart productions
Hamish Stuart productions
HAMISH STUART PRODUCTIONS
MEJAmellow
Richard Ogden, who was Paul McCartney’s manager at the time I was working with him, got in touch with me about producing a Swedish artist MEJA for Sony records. The idea was for Japanese release and would be a collection of Brazilian flavoured music including a couple of Brazilian classics like Agua De Beber, Leonzhino and Dindi plus some of MEJA’s songs and a couple of other covers. It was the perfect project for me given my love a Brazil and it’s rich musical culture. Mellow was the perfect title for this collection and the musicians delivered of course and i had the opportunity to work with Julian Jackson who added some beautiful colours with his Toots Thielman style chromatic harmonica. Meja has beautiful tuneful sound and did a lot of the backing vocals herself pitching everything just perfectly.
GORDON HASKELL
I’d known Gordon Haskell and worked with him on the album which contained his huge Christmas hit How Wonderful You Are and when he said he asked me to produce an album of Michael Franks songs it was another great opportunity to work on something I felt an affinity for. I was familiar with Michael’s work from the 70’s and had actually worked on one of his albums back then. We pushed the envelope a little on a couple of songs with beautiful string arrangements by Pete Murray and John Gallen did a magnificent job of recording everything so that the album was practically mixed by the time we finished recording. The musicians Steve Pearce, Ralph Salmins, Robbie Macintosh, Pete Murray, Tony Omalley, Bosco De Oliviera, Neil Sidwell, Paul Spong, Nigel Hitchcock, Julian Jackson and the string section, led by Gavin Wright all played superbly and Gordon delivered a unique and excellent performance giving his own identity to the songs which Michael Highly approved of.
THE ALL-STARS
The All Stars are a collective of many musicians, some of whom I know and when they asked me to produce their first album I didn’t know exactly how difficult it would be as there are at least six different vocalists in the overall group. That was the most challenging part of the gig and I think the result is a solid representation of where the group was at that point. It’s an R’n’B, Jazz, Soul kind of thing so it was easy to relate to the music and the players were all a joy to work with. With a group that size you have to deal with many opinions and you have to make sure that every voice is heard yet still keep a steady hand on the vision of what the end result should be. I’ve been lucky enough to work extensively with one of the master producers of all time Arif Mardin so I learned a lot about trying to help the artist reach where the want their music to go.
TIMEMACHINE
The Time Machine are arguably Russia’s ‘Beatles’ as I found out when visiting Moscow to work on pre-production before we moved to London to fulfil their dream of recording at Abbey Road. We moved in to Studio 2 where a huge portion of Beatles tracks had been recorded and as we were setting up George and Giles Martin stopped in for a quick visit, much the band’s and my delight. They’d been mixing the 5.1 tracks in studio 3 for the upcoming Las Vegas premier of the Love show.
Pete Henderson who I’d known formany years engineered those sessions and we had a lot of fun despite a little bit of a language barrier.
JAMESBROWN ISANNIE
James Brown Is Annie had supported my band on a couple of shows so we’d become acquainted and when they invited me to produce their second album I said yes without hesitation. It was good to be in on the ground floor of their initial ideas as it all begins with the song. The guys had various writing sessions together and sent me updates as they worked on things and it was stimulating to hear the germ of a good idea and see where it could go. That’s an essential part of record making and I love being involved in the whole process as you see a couple of chords or a bass and drum groove turn into a finished song, something I have had plenty of experience of from my AWB days.
The guys were a joy to work with and the whole process was a lot of fun, the way making records should be. I think their songwriting made a lot of progress from the first album. Definitely a good result which bodes well for their next album.