Editor's note: This post is part of a series of unpublished interviews from the personal research archive of noted guitar writer Tony Bacon.
Previous installments have featured artists like Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Tom Petty, and Chet Atkins, as well as interviews with guitar industry veterans like Gibson's Ted McCarty, Fender's Don Randall, and pedalboard godfather Pete Cornish.
Explore all of Bacon's Archives here.
I interviewed Chris Thomas and Bill Price at the end of 1984 about their work in the studio with the Sex Pistols. This was for a book about recording classic records that I planned to do with my colleague John Morrish, but the project got no further than a small number of interviews, including these about the making of Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols.
Chris and Bill worked with the band at various stages from 1976 and the first single, "Anarchy In The U.K," through to the album released the following year.
Chris, had you seen the Sex Pistols live before being approached to record them?
Chris Thomas (CT): I'd known Malcolm [McLaren, Pistols manager] for some time—he was interested in getting me involved with the New York Dolls, doing them. Then I didn't see him for a while, and he contacted me about the Sex Pistols at the time that they'd signed for EMI [in October 1976].
Previous to that I had seen them because Chris Spedding was in contact with them—there were a lot of people who sort of knew each other at that time. I was doing all my work then at Air [studio, central London] and I'd been working with Spedding. He got me down to see the Pistols—they played at the Screen on the Green [August '76], which I think was the same night that The Clash played for the first time. Spedding was going on about the Pistols—he'd done some demos with them, had put them into RAK [studio, north-west London].
The Sex Pistols did loads and loads of sessions with different people, they were always popping into studios. Then it came to the point to go into the studio to do their first single, and that was with Dave Goodman in Wessex [studio, north London]. I didn't know anything about Wessex, I'd never been there before. I knew Bill [Price] from when he used to work at Air.
And then Malcolm McLaren approached me about producing them. So they sent me some demos, I heard loads of stuff: Dave Goodman demos, Chris Spedding demos. I heard the stuff and I liked the material, it was as simple as that. So Malcolm fixed up for me to have a meeting with them, they came round to my house—minus John[ny Rotten]. Apparently Malcolm thought that meeting John might put me off the project.
Bill Price (BP): Chris was a very successful producer of rock records, and of bands that were not necessarily avant-garde, but were new things. When he was first involved in, say, Roxy Music, they were quite a futuristic thing. So I would have thought it was quite a logical choice.
Chris, did it seem a logical choice to you?
CT: I've always taken on a job if I've been interested in what I've been asked to do, you know? The thing was: What are the songs like? And listening to the demos of stuff like "Pretty Vacant," they were great. That was the reason I decided I wanted to do it. If I'd heard stuff and I'd decided it was a load of rubbish, I wouldn't have done it. Once it comes down to that nitty-gritty of who asks me what I want to do, it always comes down to the same sort of thing in the end.
At the time, some people seemed surprised to see your name on the Pistols album, when it eventually came out, considering you'd worked with The Beatles and so on.
CT: Yeah, I can see that, because obviously people's ideas of what you are come purely from what they read on the back of record covers, and they put you in a certain bag. Later on in that year, I was doing Paul McCartney in the afternoon and the Sex Pistols at night. Real chalk and cheese, but I love that. That appeals to me.
So the first time you two worked with the Pistols was late in 1976?
CT: Yes, and the reason for working with Bill, simply, was that they had been working in Wessex, I think they'd been doing that with Tim Friese-Greene engineering and Dave Goodman producing. They were there, they seemed comfortable with that, so I said if you want to stay there, in that case I'd like Bill to engineer it, because I know him and I don't know the studio. That was the reason that I started working with Bill.
BP: I have some notes here, because I've gone back over our tape-library records [at Wessex studio]. So, on November 6 and 7, 1976, Chris and I recorded "Anarchy In The U.K." for the first time. Then we recorded it again a bit later, and my note says we did 19 takes of it [laughs].
Interestingly enough, it had been recorded at the same studio [Wessex], but with Dave Goodman supposedly producing, which was paid for by EMI Records. That was on October 16, 1976. Dave was their sound guy, to a certain extent. He was a part-time producer and engineer and was involved with the band from their earliest days. He was very good, I think. They tried recording in cheap studios, in home studios, in clubs with live equipment, so they'd already tried recording their stuff. But I think they just discovered that it's not going to produce something more credible just because it's a backstreet recording.
Dave Goodman recorded this very interesting bunch of songs in October: "I Wanna Be Me," "17," "No Feelings," "New York," "Anarchy," "Stepping Stone," "No Fun," "Problems," "Substitute," "Pretty Vacant," "Satellite," "No Lip," and "Submission." That's virtually their entire repertoire, and possibly with the addition of "Bodies" and maybe one other song remained pretty much all they ever produced.
So Chris and I recorded "Anarchy" twice, and also on that batch of sessions we recorded "No Future," which is a song whose title changes quite a lot [it became "God Save The Queen"]. There was "No Future," "No Feelings," "Pretty Vacant," and "Stepping Stone", as well as "Anarchy"—that was the first batch of sessions. "Anarchy" was then released as the single on EMI Records [on November 26, 1976, with Goodman's "I Wanna Be Me" as b-side]
.CT: When we did "Anarchy," in other words the first sessions, that was like real—what's it all about! Specially when it came to the point of actually working with John. We put the backing track down, and I still hadn't met him. It was all getting a little bit strange, shenanigans going on already. He came in to do his vocal and he was really disgruntled—because he'd been sort of left out of things, and he didn't know about it. So already there was a bit of an atmosphere.
Bit by bit I think we managed to sort it out. I know at one point we went down to Ramport [studio, south London] and we tried working on the vocal there a bit as well—it was like, "Where's available?" Found Ramport, went there for an afternoon, and I think did another couple of odd guitar bits, too.
Was Johnny aware of your track record?
CT: Oh, very much so. That came out at that very first meeting, when we came to do those vocals. I remember saying, "Shall we try doing the vocal now?" And John said [disgruntled tone]: "Well that's what I'm 'ere for." Then we went out into the studio, and he started howling his way through this, just a yell from beginning to end. It's like, "Christ almighty, how do we sort this one out? The fun really starts now."
We'd already spent a long time putting the track down and overdubbing. So I went out there and said something to him, and he said, "Well, you're the one with the track record—you sort it out." I thought Fucking hell. I think he—and everybody—they were a bit bemused by what was expected of them by this time.
Once John had had a go at the vocals, he then became very involved in it all. They were really into making a great record, definitely. All this thing about being told to do the track without the singer, it made him out to be some fucking monster or something. It turns out he's totally into it. We ended up having to mix it through the night, pretty much. A lot of them were kipping upstairs. And John came down about five in the morning, he's listening to it and he's absolutely knocked out. "That's great," he said. "That's our anthem."
Did it seem special to you, or just another session?
BP: Chris and I were working on other projects at the same time. It was ostensibly like any other session, in that with any session you have to do whatever is required by the musician, by the band. Every session is a special case.
Johnny Rotten was sort of anti-establishment—well, that was his guise. I don't think his true feelings were. But the whole image of the band was anti-establishment. And on a smaller scale, they were against the recognized process of recording. They were against the way the old fogeys went about things. They were against the institutions of major recording studios, of experienced engineers and good producers like Chris with his track record. Those things were part of the music business establishment, and it became Sex Pistols philosophy to be against it. They made that quite obvious, in no uncertain terms.
How did you know what they wanted? Did you have any preliminary discussions with them?
BP: I hadn't seen them live, but as he said, Chris had. I'd heard a few demos, and I knew a three-piece always requires a lot of work with the sound, just because it can sound so small, so empty. The first time they came in the studio was the first time I'd met them.
Who played bass on those first sessions?
BP: I believe Glen [Matlock, bass] was there on the first recording we did of "Anarchy." I'm a bit vague if he was there the second time we did it. Basically, what used to happen a lot of the time was Steve [Jones, guitar] used to play bass. So quite a lot of the time it was a two-piece. Quite often they used to play with just Steve and Paul [Cook, drums]. Steve would overdub the bass part as if it was another guitar part.
When Sid [Vicious, bass] joined the band [in February 1977], I think he came for one session, and then I think he had hepatitis or jaundice for maybe a two-month period, which coincided with most of their recording period. So there weren't a lot of occasions when Sid was available to record anyway.
The Pistols were sacked by EMI in January '77, after all the fuss in the press about swearing at Bill Grundy on TV and so on, but they move on, and the next single is "God Save The Queen." They were signed and then sacked by A&M in March, and signed to Virgin in May.
BP: Yes, my notes say Chris and I did that single here at Wessex on March 4, 1977. We did "EMI," "Did You No Wrong" [the b-side], "No Future" [a.k.a. "God Save The Queen"], and "Pretty Vacant." Glitterbest [Malcolm McLaren's company] paid for that. So that obviously represented a change in record company structure, shall we say [laughs].
The earlier sessions were paid for by EMI, presumably.
BP: They were direct EMI sessions, yes. EMI paid for the Dave Goodman recordings, as well, and for our original pair of "Anarchy" sessions.
I remember I had to go down to Pye studios with [mastering engineer] Malcolm Davies to re-cut "God Save The Queen." When seven-inch records are pressed, the master they're pressed from isn't seven inches—it's originally cut on to either a 10-inch or a 14-inch lacquer and reduced down at the factory. Some factories require a 10-inch lacquer and other factories require a 14-inch lacquer. Because of something like that Bill Grundy incident, the ladies at the factory had gone on strike and refused to put the record into the bag. So we had to go and re-cut to a different size lacquer so that it could be shifted to a different factory [laughs].
CT: I remember we did those four, including "God Save The Queen," in one afternoon. It was just Steve and Paul—and it's difficult to tell when you've got just drums and guitar. No mistakes there, but you need the bass in there, or some more stuff, to find out if there's anything dodgy going on. But it just seemed fine, so we went on to the next one, and then the next one. Then I said to Steve, "Do you fancy putting the bass on, just so we know where we are?" I said to Bill, "Take this, in case there's a few good bits."
Steve just played the root note of the chord all the way through, and it was great! I thought, That's it. And we did four backing tracks in an afternoon, literally in about two hours. Paul and Steve used to knock around together, and they'd go through the set probably five times a day, just the two of them. So they were completely locked in to this original guitar part and the drums—it just never altered, you know? That's why it was so fast. Bang! Done!
BP: The band came here to Wessex around that time, I think the same day as the A&M signing party, maybe to mix "God Save The Queen." They arrived in an A&M limo when the school-kids were on their break [at the school next door to Wessex studio]. Soon as the kids saw this limo, they clung at the fence trying to get over it—they didn't recognize the band, it was just the sight of the limo.
The school mistress came out, started screaming at the kids to get back in class. Johnny got out the car and told her, "Fuck off, you fascist old bastard!" She rang the police. She recognized the band! She must have used the word riot, because a Transit [van] full of about 14 police pulled up and bailed out.
"So I entertained these policemen in number one control room for about half an hour—I'd been told to keep them occupied for a bit—on the premise that absolutely everybody is interested in how a 24-track recording desk works."
We tucked the band in a little studio round the back, and they fell asleep. They'd arrived with handfuls of sandwiches, half-drunk bottles of vodka in their pockets, sat down on the small couch in the studio and promptly fell asleep. So I entertained these policemen in number one control room for about half an hour—I'd been told to keep them occupied for a bit—on the premise that absolutely everybody is interested in how a 24-track recording desk works [laughs].
They appeared to be quite interested, so I just went down the channel strip, starting at the mic gain control, and explained to them how the desk worked. After about half an hour, six of them were still interested and didn't want me to stop. Eventually it was, "Well, doesn't seem to be much happening here," and they shuffled off.
The credit on the Bollocks album says "Produced by Chris Thomas or Bill Price." I don't think I've seen an "or" credit like that before. Why is it like that?
BP: That's to be taken quite literally.
CT: We'd mixed "God Save The Queen" and that didn't come out, and we had "Pretty Vacant" and it was obvious that that wasn't gonna come out, so then I was going off to work on something else. That's when I suggested that Bill could carry on without me, because it had got to the point where they could just go in and record it, especially if it was minus Sid.
So I thought that Bill could do that—and he did about four or five songs on his own. That was the "or" credit. See if you can spot the difference! I don't think it would make any difference one way or the other.
BP: I used to work a lot with Chris, and still do, as an engineer. What happened in this case was that in April '77 I started recording the album tracks, without Chris. Initially, there was absolutely no complication or difficulty about it at all.
Chris had been contracted to do however many singles, and he wasn't in a position to be able to record the rest of the album. So Malcolm had a meeting with the band and myself and it was decided that I would record the album. And then Chris's singles tracks would be added to that. So it was very simple—initially.
Looking at my notes, I did "Problems," "No Feelings," "Liar," "17," "EMI," "Satellite," "New York," "Submission," and "Holidays In The Sun." Paid for by Glitterbest, and we worked for two or three weeks on those. And then Virgin started paying for things, after they signed the band [in May]. Chris then came in, and we started recording a new single, presumably to go out with the album. And this is when things started to get immensely complicated.
When did you record that potential single?
BP: That was June 11, 1977, for "Holidays In The Sun" and "Bodies." "Bodies" was different in that it's a song that was written after everything else—it was a new song, as opposed to the set that had been in existence since the band started.
CT: With "Bodies" I remember mentioning an orchestra, and maybe trying to do it live. I thought that would set the cat amongst the pigeons, to have the Royal Philharmonic. And then of course later they used strings on "My Way," which Bill did. But I was very happy with the way "Bodies" turned out, it was actually one of my favorites of the lot.
Bill, you said the album started to get complicated. What happened?
BP: The album still had not been compiled. From that session in June until October, as well as making that single, I did versions of tracks that Chris had rejected as singles, which Chris had made as singles and hadn't been released, I'd done album versions of them. Some of the songs that I'd done on the album Chris had decided to record as potential singles.
And then this argument started between, I suppose, Johnny and Malcolm as to what should go on the album—how many tracks it should have, whether it should have all their previous singles on it, which versions, whose version, which recording of what songs.
I must have made up that album about eight times. And I cut it three times with different running orders. I've got the test pressings, all with different orders, and I can't even remember which is the one that went out [laughs].
I remember arriving back from holiday, there was an announcement over the speakers at Victoria Station for me—it's a call from Malcolm [imitates Malcolm shouting:] "Have you got a pen and paper there? What we want is 'Anarchy', '17' … !" And the lady who is now my wife wasn't at all pleased, because I had to go straight into the studio and work all night to put it in yet another order, and then go down the next morning to cut it. Again.
After that, we did some overdubbing at Air in London on "EMI," "Submission," and "Satellite," between August 8 and 12, 1977, with Sid playing bass. I seem to remember we did quite a lot of recording without Sid, because generally he was ill. Now he reappeared on the scene, so we put him on a few songs where he hadn't played on the original recordings—he wanted to be on it, being the bass player in the band. It became slightly arbitrary as to who was on the finished record, because the sound was a blend of something Sid had played and something Steve had played—you couldn't really credit either of them as the bass player on it.
CT: I remember the first time Sid came down to the studio, we had something set up, and he went up to the board, moved all the faders, said, "Is this where the music comes out?," or some stupid comment. Even the band sort of went, "Oh, fuck," you know? Not funny. That was the thing, you almost had to tolerate him.
"He went up to the board, moved all the faders, said, 'Is this where the music comes out?'"
What do you remember in particular about the process of recording?
BP: Steve's guitar sound was very special, but I can't really give credit to anybody but Steve for that. He had a Fender Twin Reverb and he had a magic way of setting it—he turned all the knobs full up—and he had some very respectable Gibsons indeed, very good guitars. He had his own novel way of tuning a guitar, and his own novel chord shapes, and he instantly produced the Steve Jones sound. It was very easy to record.
Steve had an immaculate sense of timing, and a lot of the Pistols riffs were his riffs. I'm not a guitar expert, and a lot of guitarists will say oh, I know where Jones got that one from or this one from, but they were always very obscure sources which I couldn't be sure about. As far as I was concerned, in terms of general music that most people had heard, they were all fairly original riffs. And Steve deserves a lot of credit for that.
Did Malcolm get involved in the recording?
BP: At the start, Malcolm would be running to and fro, closeted with alternate members of the band quite frequently. But he was normally concerned about the vocals. He criticised the end results in a very non-technical and very helpful way, in that he would purely think of it as Johnny singing with a noise. And if there was a good point in the lyric, he didn't want that being missed, but neither did he want Johnny to sound like an arsehole stuck out on the top of something. He thought of it as singer and accompaniment. Which is a very good way to think of most records, actually.
The guitars and the drums sound especially good on the Pistols records.
BP: With the drums, we did something that's fairly routine now but was maybe a bit special then. It relied on putting the drums fairly central in that big room at Wessex, separating everything else, and staggering mics at different distances from the drums. That means the sound of the drums arrives at successive microphones later in time.
And in order to tighten up the front edge of that line, we then gated all of those microphones together. So you've got an instant attack from all of them, but a very muddled decay. It's a fairly standard technique now.
We arrived at it between the two of us, not consciously copying anybody. There were a few David Bowie tracks we'd heard that on, that sounded as if they'd used that technique. It's one of those things where six different people invented it at about the same time. We sort of invented it ourselves, but I'm sure lots of other people were inventing it themselves, as well. You had to use a lot of elements, and you had lots of little things to fine-tune which were all interactive, until you got the sound you wanted. Changing one thing changed everything else. And it suited that band.
Did Paul appreciate that technique?
BP: Paul started off almost totally incompetent, but very willing. He ended up like a fine rock drummer—by being really forced to work hard. It wasn't easy, that's for sure, getting drum tracks. Paul wasn't an experienced drummer, and he learned a hell of a lot in the course of being in the band. By the time I worked with him in The Professionals [Steve and Paul's post-Pistols band], Paul was a really superb, tight, rock-steady drummer.
At the start, he had all these ideas, knew what he wanted to play and what he wanted to do, and that didn't change terribly much. But his facility to do three minutes of that, correctly, wasn't very good to start with. The hard work of the earlier sessions was getting a drum take together. Chris and I would do a lot of multitrack editing. That's how the drum tracks were achieved, with multitrack editing.
"The hard work of the earlier sessions was getting a drum take together. Chris and I would do a lot of multitrack editing. That's how the drum tracks were achieved, with multitrack editing."
For example, the 19 takes of "Anarchy," plus occasional injections of tandoori chicken and Heineken and TV and pool—I think we spent longer editing it than the band took playing it. We would sit playing it back over and over and over again, three or four reels of tape—Chris and I would sit there making notes, trying to get some ideas.
In a three-minute song, we could do upwards of 20 multitrack edits on a two-inch tape. Sometimes there might just be two or three, depending on how good Paul was on that occasion, but sometimes it would be a very large number.
CT: That's exactly where I thought the problem lay on "Anarchy," with the drums. But it wasn't, because I think that was the only track we did with Glen. Then, when we jump ahead to the future stuff, when we started to work with Steve and Paul on their own, it was suddenly, "Hang on a minute, they played that and there was nothing wrong, take one—what?" In other words, the problem was between the bass–drums interplay.
So, we got a backing track down, then we did a lot of guitar overdubs, because I was interested in arranging the thing a fair bit. Steve already had a few ideas, and then we added a few more. There were a lot of guitar parts on "Anarchy," about 16 or something.
It seems the combination of Steve and Paul playing together formed the initial structure for a lot of the recordings you did.
BP: Yes, for more or less everything. We'd probably start off using about 12 tracks of drums and one track of guitar, as a backing track. As the thing developed we'd shrink those drum tracks by mixing down to, say, six tracks, or discarding drum tracks that had been recorded that we didn't want to use.
Steve would add on a couple more basic guitar tracks to his original guitar track, maybe the same, maybe with subtle variations. Then we might do tracks picking out certain elements of the song, tuning the sound to suit those elements. So if Steve had some damped eight-in-the-bar sections, they would be laid down on the basic track, and then we would add an overdub where that very harmonic-y, damped sound was emphasized, in order to pick that element out. If there were any very open-chord sections, we might do single-note sections to pick out the bottom line. The elements within the original guitar part would be picked out and recorded on separate tracks, with the sound adjusted to suit that particular part of it.
Chris, it sounds like the band in general were becoming more interested and involved in the recording as time went on.
CT: Definitely. In the studio, Steve, John, and Paul approached it quite seriously. If John wasn't doing anything, he might go off and get pissed, but if he came to do his vocal he wanted to do it good, and he took plenty of care over it. He was great to work with, actually. By this time they were a very frustrated rock 'n' roll band. They wanted to get out on the road and play, and they wanted their singles to come out.
It was at that point that I started going off the boil a little bit as well, it just seemed pointless to make records, dash in, got to do this, got to do that—and then the thing doesn't come out. And the band were really cheesed off as well. Underneath it all was a very straightforward thing, where they were working hard to make a great record, enjoying that process, and wanting to see it come out and do well.
BP: At the start, Johnny in particular was more or less determined not to like anything, he'd listen to any playback and say, "Well that sounds a pile of shit to me." He definitely wanted to be like that. But I do think his attitude wore off when he realized the band was being recorded and it was sounding quite good, and it was coming out of record players sounding like "Anarchy"—the job was being done. So I assume he sort of grudgingly accepted it.
Chris is a very good vocal producer, very good at getting performances out of people. I think possibly Johnny genuinely began to appreciate that he was in the hands of somebody who knew what he was doing when he started trying to get vocals down. I think that might have mellowed him a bit. It was all a little bit of a game, anyway.
CT: And it's funny, because in some circles they're a very under-estimated band. Steve's great—he basically did everything. By the end, Steve was roaring, he definitely wanted to be a rock star by then. He was away, and he was doing a great job.
BP: Johnny did accept that he had to have professionals doing it. And that amateurs needed to be recorded by professionals. By the time we ended up putting the album together, I think his fight was with Malcolm and not with us, anyway. Things had changed a lot, I think, for Johnny over that period of time. The conflict was a bit more real. It was all a bit theoretical when he started.
But as soon as the money started rolling in, I think the conflict had brass tacks involved. To be quite honest, I'm sure it was all about money. Malcolm started off as the jolly Svengali, and was somewhat shifty by the time they parted company.
Did you get paid?
BP: We got a certain amount of money, but because it was so chaotic it was not payment in the way record producers normally like to get paid, by auditable accounts, at all. An arbitrary sum of money changed hands.
You said amateurs need to be recorded by professionals, Bill. How much of your work is with musicians who don't know much about being in a studio?
BP: The majority of the studio business revolves around beginners. Most definitely. There's a hundred thousand bands in this world, and any recording studio, I'd say 90 percent of it is devoted to people the general public's never heard of. There's not many people that spend their time doing Elton John. I mean, I've done a lot of work with Elton, but that would be maybe six weeks of the year. The rest of the year I'd be working with people you've never heard of.
The majority of money made by recording studios is on things that don't sell. It's unfortunate, but fair enough. I mean we're not all recording Fleetwood Mac all the time [laughs].
Being good with people who aren't used to a studio is a very important part of working in a studio. To a certain extent, Johnny Rotten was right in having this attitude of not wanting to be shoved through a sausage machine like the regular process.
When you record people, you have to treat them as people. and if they're inexperienced, you have to take them through things gently. You don't want to go: "Ha ha ha, don't you know what that is? Oh, everybody knows that!" That attitude just doesn't work. Some people do that, but it's unprofessional. If a band walks into a professional recording studio, they're not expected to be experts in recording. They expect a service, and professionalism is a part of it.
Was it a happy experience, on the whole? Would you want to do something like that again?
BP: Funnily enough, I was doing something almost exactly like it until about five o'clock this morning [in October 1984]. I'm working with a band called Ellery Bop, from Liverpool, who are fairly punky. They're looked after by Bill Drummond, and this is his latest signing, to WEA.
The Pistols, though, it wasn't an unhappy album really. There's always personality conflicts in studios. There were no really heavy ones. I've had a lot heavier. Sid was never any great problem. I used to worry about him, not eating and stuff. I'd bring in pork pies, because he looked a bit skinny. Johnny wasn't too bad, either. A bit arty, a bit posey. The rest of them were fairly straight up Londoners.
About the author: Tony Bacon writes about musical instruments, musicians, and music. His books include Fuzz & Feedback, The Ultimate Guitar Book, and London Live. Tony lives in Bristol, England. More info at tonybacon.co.uk.