There were the sessions when I produced the group Sex Gang Children. I loved the name (I found out later it was Malcolm Mclaren’s idea, damn him, he was always to haunt me with great ideas!). We recorded their first album in a studio out in the country in Farnham called Jacobs. I indulged in my "great producer" fantasies making them record in candle light, attacking the microphones with power drills, spray canning huge murals on the walls to create atmosphere. It was the Guy Stevens school of producing. Ian Hunter had told me years before, when he was producing Generation X’s second album, that when Guy had produced Mott the Hoople in the 70’s that one evening in Wessex studios they were doing a take and looked in the control room to see Guy smashing chairs up and even trying to smash the control room glass. It was to create that magic, to create atmosphere that somehow goes into the music that touches the listener - true Rock and Roll. Aaaah the fantasy - but great lessons nevertheless....
Andreas the singer and I still speak a lot... but really, I never liked being a producer of other bands. I wanted my own band, my own fantasy, my own movie where I could write the script, and like Tarantino, I could be in my own movie too! I had a lot more dreaming to do yet.
3 Pindock Mews in Maida Vale, the house that Magenta had bought from Malcolm McLaren when Sid Viscious had died, became the centre of madness for the next six years. Steve Jones stayed there for a while and we did some recording together but Steve was too scary for me in those days, a bit TOO out there. I remember him turning up one day in a really beaten up, old, black BMW. He’d been stopped by the police the night before and arrested for drinking and driving and having no tax or insurance on the car. As soon as he was released the next morning, he got back in the car a drove round to see me. I admired the ethos but didn’t especially want to live the life.
What I knew was that Steve had the most incredible taste in music, even then, show him a record collection and he would pick out all the hits, I mean, straight away select the BEST track on the album, eclectic, wide ranging, from Frank Sinatra to Iron Butterfly, he just had this instinct and you can still see that today on his radio slot in L.A. Steve, cleaned up but still fabulous has become a huge success in L.A. and he deserves it all because he is the real thing.
