Looking Back with Hindsight
Barnesy celebrated his 30th anniversary as a working class solo artist by getting a bunch of mates together at his house and jamming on his hits. Producer Kevin ‘The Caveman’ Shirley reflects with pristine 30:30 Hindsight.
By Mark Davie
18 January 2015
Artist: Jimmy Barnes
Album: 30:30 Hindsight
Photos: Stephanie Barnes & Scott Hull
There are two occasions where you’ll find an Aussie bloke screaming his lungs out and hugging other blokes — at the footy, and any time Khe Sanh comes on the radio.
Barnesy has been the pied piper of Aussie rock sing-a-longs for decades. Even today, 30-something years after Cold Chisel recorded the song, you’ll still find pockets of boozed-up yocals arm in arm singing ‘the last plane out of Sydney’s aawwlmost gone’. When Barnesy’s hoarse rebel yell is tearing off like a Mack truck, blokes who usually wouldn’t mutter more than a couple of words get behind him like he’s the pub rock William Wallace.
It’s why an album like 30:30 Hindsight makes sense. It really doesn’t have to exist; for one, there’s no new songs on it. But if Barnesy was ever going to celebrate a 30th anniversary of any kind — this one to mark his solo debut — it was sure as hell gonna have a bunch of sing-a-longs.
Being a top fella with an enduring working class spirit, Barnesy has a lot of mates, and they’ve all joined in to rework some of his classics. The list of musical friends includes Keith Urban, The Living End, Journey, Shihad, Tina Arena, Steven Van Zandt, Bernard Fanning, and of course, pickings from his abundant family tree. His daughter Mahalia, who quite possibly could have a bigger voice than her father; son David Campbell, a musical theatre star; and his brother-in-law Diesel.
HOUSING ISSUES
Barnesy’s Freight Train Studios is in his house, which technically makes it a home studio. But like everything Barnesy does, the whopping analogue Quad Eight Coronado console at its helm was larger than life.
In the lead up to recording 30:30 Hindsight, Barnesy realised there were two things that needed reworking if he was going to house a parade of musicians. Firstly, he needed more space, and secondly, the console had to go. The Quad Eight wasn’t really the right fit for Barnesy. He’d picked it up from BJB Studios when it closed down. Sonically, it was the right choice, but it wasn’t the sort of console you could flick on at 3am to get an idea down, which is the kind of workflow you want when you have a studio in your downstairs living room. And with recording sessions bound to be a patchwork of whoever was available at any time, recall was a must.
Jean-Paul Fung had engineered plenty of sessions at BJB on the Quad Eight, and had unintentionally followed the console to Freight Train. Barnesy’s daughter Mahalia had asked Fung to record her album Mahalia Barnes + The Soul Mates, Volume 2 at Barnesy’s studio. The clan liked how Fung went about his work, so ever since he’s been a part of the Barnes extended family; their ‘in-house’ engineer.
Fung is used to carrying his mobile rig to sessions, and knows what flexibility requires, having engineered sessions with Eric J on The Voice. So when Freight Train needed a makeover, he brought that experience to bear. And despite his affiliation with the gorgeous Quad Eight, he knew it had to go. “It’s a beautiful machine and it’s great on everything,” said Fung. “It just didn’t make sense in this situation. The old setup was very analogue based, with an old tape machine too. All beautiful pieces of equipment, but he doesn’t want to have to hire a full-time tech. From what I hear it’s going to a safe home where it will get many more years of love.”
Another Barnesy associate, producer Kev ‘The Caveman’ Shirley, was called in to wrangle the sessions, and both he and Fung agreed they needed a more flexible, recallable system. Shirley’s only real stipulation was that it had to be ProTools. His current preference being version 8, but Fung managed to coax him into using version 11 because it was going to make turnarounds a lot faster.
The setup is still evolving, lately they’ve been working out how to integrate anyone’s laptop that might be running a different DAW. Barnesy has a few UAD Apollo interfaces, and they’ve been using those to bring external computers into the mix. As it stands, it’s a hybrid system, still with plenty of analogue gear, but centred around an Avid C24 console and a new Mac Pro with ProTools HDX. Fung admits the computing power was a little overkill, “but we just wanted everything to be as fast, reliable and easy to use as possible. Especially with people coming in to write songs, the Mac Pro comes into its own if we have lots of virtual instruments.”
The system is a pretty close replica of Shirley’s own tracking setup in his Malibu studio. “They didn’t need it to be a mixing facility because that’s a whole different kettle of fish,” said Shirley. “You don’t even need a console when you’re tracking as long as you’ve got good mic pres and a clean signal path from microphone to storage, whether it’s analogue or digital. And what you hear is what you’re recording because you’re monitoring through the converter all the time — no surprises.
“I didn’t see the point in spending $350,000 on a console when you’re going to have other people mix your stuff somewhere else. At the end of the day, an average album takes you about maybe 10 days to mix and three months to record, depending on how deep you want to get into it. But if you’re going to spend $1500 a day in the studio to mix it, you’d have to spend a long time mixing to make that back on the console. And that doesn’t include all the outboard gear, the maintenance, speakers, acoustic treatments and what-not.
“I made Joe Bonamassa’s last record on analogue. People who romanticise analogue, as I do, tend to forget there’s special characteristics with analogue you have to contend with: leaving aside the editing for a moment, if you’re recording to tape, you have to listen to tape playback and adjust accordingly because tape compression will take the top end away or make the bottom end a little fuzzy. On the other hand, when you’re listening to what the converter is doing, I would venture to suggest you’re getting a much more accurate representation of the sound you’re looking for than analogue.”
To offset any analogue losses, Fung spec’d a 24 I/O Burl Audio Mothership AD/DA system as the front end for ProTools, with a couple of additional Avid interfaces to make sure they never ran out of inputs.
A new Furman HDS-16 headphone system was also put in place, which had eight mono and four stereo channels so the musicians could sculpt their cans mix on the fly.
Fung also had the chance to try out a bunch of new gear, and ended up buying some Chandler TG2 and LTD-1 preamps and a Manley Reference Cardioid microphone, which worked a treat on Barnesy’s voice. “It’s super clear, but not overly bright. It’s got warmth and body, and it can also handle Jimmy’s very loud levels. That worked quite well going in to the Chandler TG preamps and a Tube-Tech compressor.” But according to Fung, Barnesy wasn’t the loudest. Farnham had his moments, and Mahalia definitely had the pad on with a very low gain setting to make sure the compressor and ProTools had plenty of headroom.
With so many guests, it was inevitable some of the contributions would be phoned in. Tina Arena recorded her vocals in France; Bernard Fanning hooked up with Nick Didia at 301 in Byron Bay for his parts; Keith Urban and Journey recorded their songs in LA; and Fung carted the Manley mic down with him to Melbourne for a session with John Farnham. With all that happening, they could often work on several songs a day, and the new system didn’t miss a beat the whole project.
FREIGHT TRAIN LOUNGE
The other major change was working out how to fit everybody in. It wasn’t Band Aid Christmas carol-cramped, but it could get busy at times. Freight Train has grown over the years courtesy of a gradual space-shifting regime. The studio now occupies about a third of his house. Initially there was a control room, a larger live room and a couple of booths — all isolated.
To get a bit more space, everything was reshuffled. The control room became another booth, the live room became the control room, and the lounge became the new live room. There were a couple of adjustments to the new control room — a storage box skirting the room was resonating, so they got rid of it, and carpet was laid down to take a bit of the liveliness out of it and help tame the speakers.
The lounge still functions as a lounge, so no major facelift there. The major addition was a big box built to isolate guitar amps. It didn’t entirely negate the spill, but it brought the level of the amps down in the drum mics, while still keeping a little bit of interplay. Overall, everyone was happy with the way the lounge sounded. Fung reckons Barnesy’s lounge room makes for the best drum room in the country. Fung: “One half of the live room, where the couches usually go, has a really low ceiling maybe a bit more than two metres high. We put the drums there and captured a really tight, close sound and utilised the other half of the room with its seven metre-high ceilings for the big, roomy sound. I made sure to put enough room mics around the place to try and capture that as much as possible and it really added to the energy of the recordings.”
It’s a working environment Shirley is comfortable with too. “As a guy who owns his own studio, it’s fantastic,” he said. “I love the low ego that’s involved in a situation like that. When you’re going into commercial studios in LA there’s always someone famous in the room next door. Whereas there’s no pressure on us at all. When it comes around to eight o’clock, Jane [Jimmy’s wife] walks in with a glass of wine in her hand and says, ‘you should go take a break for dinner.’ That’s really nice.”
GET IN EARLY
Fung engineered 30:30 Hindsight, with Shirley giving him a loose rein to get sounds. It was as much about necessity as Shirley’s way of working. Each day there could be an entirely new artist, with a different setup, so each night Fung and his assistant would prepare for the next day, line check everything and be ready to push record as soon as the artist landed.
Fung: “Once the sounds were pulled and everything was working then Kevin would come in and work over the arrangement with the artist. We’d do a few takes, but not many, because we were going for a very raw, organic sound and all the artists that came in could definitely play. So it made our life and job a lot easier. Once everything sounded good, we had a few takes and had done a little bit of editing, we’d just wrap it up and start getting ready for the next band.”
It’s Shirley’s MO, even if he has a lot to do, he won’t get sucked into long days. He’s always viewed producing and engineering as a job that shouldn’t require overtime. It also means there’s no time-wasting when Shirley’s on the clock. “He likes to move really quickly and we ended up working shorter days than I normally would,” said Fung. “When you’re working with bands of that calibre you don’t really need to mull over those little details to get it right. We got more done by squeezing more quality into a short amount of time as opposed to dragging it out and people getting tired.”
Shirley: “There’s no reason to work quickly, but there’s no point in losing the performance. So one of the things I was on at JP about was to make sure you’re running, because it doesn’t cost you to have the machine running. You’d be surprised at how many times you get an inspired performance early on. Once people get to know the songs, they settle in and become a little more rote. Happy accidents are the things that give bands and music the character.
“Anyone can do a record like the Foo Fighters and ProTool or Auto-Tune it to death and put samples on everything. But that’s not something that a) I enjoy or b) want to be part of. I love when instruments go backwards and forwards and nothing has to be super tight.
“We’re human beings and we have an emotional response to the way music is performed. That’s really what I’m about, it’s got nothing to do with haste or speed. Sometimes when I’m cutting a track with Joe Bonamassa, the consummate studio musician, we’ll cut a track all day long and at the end of the day he’ll say, ‘Look, I’m sorry. People’s hands are bleeding and we’re just not getting there.’ So it’s not about haste, it’s about getting to the place where the song has some emotional integrity you can feel will transmit beyond the medium of the mix.”
I love the low ego that’s involved in a situation like that. When you’re going into commercial studios in LA there’s always someone famous in the room next door
GET IN EARLY
Fung engineered 30:30 Hindsight, with Shirley giving him a loose rein to get sounds. It was as much about necessity as Shirley’s way of working. Each day there could be an entirely new artist, with a different setup, so each night Fung and his assistant would prepare for the next day, line check everything and be ready to push record as soon as the artist landed.
Fung: “Once the sounds were pulled and everything was working then Kevin would come in and work over the arrangement with the artist. We’d do a few takes, but not many, because we were going for a very raw, organic sound and all the artists that came in could definitely play. So it made our life and job a lot easier. Once everything sounded good, we had a few takes and had done a little bit of editing, we’d just wrap it up and start getting ready for the next band.”
It’s Shirley’s MO, even if he has a lot to do, he won’t get sucked into long days. He’s always viewed producing and engineering as a job that shouldn’t require overtime. It also means there’s no time-wasting when Shirley’s on the clock. “He likes to move really quickly and we ended up working shorter days than I normally would,” said Fung. “When you’re working with bands of that calibre you don’t really need to mull over those little details to get it right. We got more done by squeezing more quality into a short amount of time as opposed to dragging it out and people getting tired.”
Shirley: “There’s no reason to work quickly, but there’s no point in losing the performance. So one of the things I was on at JP about was to make sure you’re running, because it doesn’t cost you to have the machine running. You’d be surprised at how many times you get an inspired performance early on. Once people get to know the songs, they settle in and become a little more rote. Happy accidents are the things that give bands and music the character.
“Anyone can do a record like the Foo Fighters and ProTool or Auto-Tune it to death and put samples on everything. But that’s not something that a) I enjoy or b) want to be part of. I love when instruments go backwards and forwards and nothing has to be super tight.
“We’re human beings and we have an emotional response to the way music is performed. That’s really what I’m about, it’s got nothing to do with haste or speed. Sometimes when I’m cutting a track with Joe Bonamassa, the consummate studio musician, we’ll cut a track all day long and at the end of the day he’ll say, ‘Look, I’m sorry. People’s hands are bleeding and we’re just not getting there.’ So it’s not about haste, it’s about getting to the place where the song has some emotional integrity you can feel will transmit beyond the medium of the mix.”
GAIN, SET, MATCH
With so many artists coming through, rather than trying to get the perfect gain setting for each new band or singer, Fung just tried to find a happy medium. Fung: “As soon as the band hits the first chord or sings the first note, Kevin wants to be able to use it. So it doesn’t give me a whole lot of time to make sure levels are right. If the singer is going to randomly burst out into a louder part halfway through the verse, I don’t want that to be clipping. So we generally went with a pretty safe level for everyone. Not out of laziness but purely because we just didn’t have much time and wanted to be able to use every little bit.”
Fung is a perfectionist by nature, so not drilling down to the exact click on the gain knob could sometimes be frustrating. Any time he was tempted to lean over and give it one more turn, Shirley reminded him, “It doesn’t matter if the gain could be one click better. At the end of the day that’s not going to make the performance of the song better, and if that is the wrong click it could ruin the vibe or the take. Just go with the music, the vibe of the situation and embrace it.” With vocalists often nailing it in the first three takes, Shirley’s wisdom prevailed.
Everyone also had a crack with the Manley mic, except for Mahalia, who used a Neumann U67. Fung’s reasoning was he wanted the album to have as much continuity as possible, and because the Manley mic was so clear, he didn’t want to have to try and match Barnesy with duet performances on other mics from verse to verse.
CAVEMAN GUITAR SOUND
For the most part, Shirley was happy for Fung to do what he liked as far as his mic placements. But he’s particular about how he mics his guitars. Shirley was involved with a South African microphone company called TUL, helping develop the G12 microphone to his tastes. It’s essentially a combination of his two favourite mics for guitar cabinets — a Shure SM57 and a Beyerdynamic M201. “His previous go-to guitar setup was those two microphones at 90 degrees,” said Fung. “This microphone is basically those combined, so we had one of those on hand and had to get the other two mics out for the other cab or guitarist. Having recorded so many heavy rock bands, he’s pretty picky about making sure the phase between the two mics is as close as possible. It sounds good in the end.”
“Tully McCullagh, who makes those microphones, said to me he really liked the guitar sound I was getting, particularly on Bonamassa’s The Ballad of John Henry album,” recounted Shirley. “He asked me what my technique was for recording them, which is a combination of microphones. So he took the miking system I had and put pink and white noise through an amplifier to get the readout of it. Then he built the microphone by tuning the diaphragm himself and manipulating the electronics until he got the same readout as we got using the two microphones. He’s a really obtuse genius. It’s quite amazing the microphone. It’s got an SPL level that’s super high; you can hit it as hard as you like and get no distortion.
“It sounds amazing on a guitar amplifier when you put it next to the cone, though it doesn’t sound so good on anything else. But he’s got a whole host of other microphones that he’s developed and they’re all brilliant.”
LONG TERM TENURE
McCullagh was actually one of Shirley’s earliest mentors; the owner of the studio in South Africa from which he started his career. Shirley has a knack for long haul artistic relationships like that. He talks regularly with Joe Bonamassa, having made an album almost every year with the guitarist since 2006. He’s still Iron Maiden’s go-to producer, and he first met Barnesy back in 1998 when he mixed Chisel’s The Last Wave of Summer.
“It’s a really tough industry where people expect to see immediate returns,” said Shirley. “The trouble is the only business model that operates that way is one of instant gratification, where you can go down as quickly as you go up. And that’s long been the motive of the singles-driven record companies where their budgets are determined by the quick profits they make. I’m interested in longevity.”
Having worked with both Chisel and Barnesy in solo mode, he sees them as completely separate entities where Barnesy plays different roles.
“When I look at Cold Chisel, whether anyone likes to say it or not, I see a ship that really has Don Walker at the helm,” said Shirley. “Even to the point where he makes sure to get input from everyone, but he could easily write the entire album himself.
“As a solo artist, Jimmy doesn’t have the constraints of fitting into a genre with one group of musicians. He really manages to access all of the intricacies of so many different genres, from country music, to rockabilly, to rock ’n’ roll, to soul, to blues, to funk. He’s done it all. He and Mahalia did Stand Up on 30:30 and it was funky as you could get. They’ve taken what was essentially a rocker and turned it into a really funky sound and it didn’t take any work. Then Love and Hate with Shihad is so f**king heavy it’s ridiculous. It’s just what Jimmy can do.”
And that’s why 30:30 Hindsight works, rather than just a covers album, it’s about hearing the different spins and interpretations Barnesy’s mates take on his classic hits, without missing out on that Mack truck scream.
RESPONSES