Continuing with the ‘Angels Co-Conspirators’ series, lets move on down to James Hallawell who played the Hammond A100 on Magical Mystery Girl
After a piece of news… the CDs went to print today in Hong Kong!!
I had met James a number of times. Firstly in a little border town in Northern Ireland where he was playing hammond for Brian Kennedy. I asked him at the end what unit he was using to do all his sweeping filter sounds and he said ‘No man, thats just using the drawbars’ – ie. some serious organic hammond organ trickery!! Awesome stuff… later that same year we were quaffing champagne at a big celebrity bash and vowing to hook up in London, listen to each other’s stuff, throw some ideas around. He’s a very accomplished songwriter and producer, as well as being able to play every instrument and sing like a demon if need be!! Bastard.
When I called him to see if he would play hammond on the record, he was very enthusiastic about it. I brought a demo round to his studio in Kensington, the hammond played (badly) by me on a software B4 organ…
James put the disc on, sat between the speakers, and furled his brow into something of a ‘wing-commander’ expression. He sat through a couple of minutes of the song, saying nothing, not looking round once and I thought ‘He doesn’t like it. Bollocks.’
But then, and with great weight, he turned slowly to me, eyebrow raised, and said, “Oh yeah… I’m going to rip the SHIT out of this!!” It was one of the defining moments of the album-making process for me, I can tell you.
The thing about James is, he will make a statement like that, and then do exactly what he tells you. What may seem like arrogance from your average bear is merely a promise from him. So when he pitched up at Intimate Studio in London’s docklands, my engineer Cai Murphy had the A100 revved up and ready to receive the mighty fingers of doom. He blew us to bits with a single pass containing every sound that thing could make, all perfect for the context of the song. Amazing!! Everyone who dabbles with hammond that’s heard the track is completely awestruck.
There’s a great little MPEG video clip of him doing his stuff with a big vibe and checked trousers which MUST go somewhere soon…