Pete remembers...
"This session (The Price Of Love) was done during our first lengthy trip
down to London. We were squatting in an enormous mansion block apartment in
Sloane Street, and the polluted London air gave Adele a very bad bronchial
reaction. She lost her voice, and went through hell getting a vocal down in
the studio. She was coughing up these revolting black and brown fibres - very
nasty! Peter Carr was great in helping Adele get through the great anxiety
she felt because her ability to sing on the track was looking decidedly
dodgy for a few days. These sessions cost a lot of money, and when your time
is up the next band's waiting to get in to do their own session, and I think
she really felt the pressure to deliver. In the end she managed a good
enough performance, given the circumstances.
"It was a blistering hot Summer that year, and there was no fridge in the
apartment so all the food went bad within hours. There were no chairs
either, and we were sleeping in a mixture of air-beds and army-surplus camp
beds. It wasn't very comfortable, but the walls were so thick that our
frequent drunken, raucous pillow-fights never bothered anyone else.
"We were the first band to try out the Roundhouse's brand new Solid State
Logic Digital Automated mixing desk in the Summer of '82. Probably half the
session was wasted whilst Trevor Hallesey (the engineer) worked out how the
fuck the damn thing worked, and several times had to call in other engineers
to sort out the wiring. The end result sounded way too bright and digital,
and the track suffered for it, we think.
"The Roundhouse session pics also show producer (and Grizzly Adams
look-a-like) Peter Carr, who had previously produced Eddie & The Hotrods. I
don't think he really understood where we were coming from, even though he
was a really nice bloke. I think the new-fangled digital recording desk was
a bit overwhelming. Complicated, and not very warm-sounding, it was very
easy for your ears to burn out. Peter also tended to monitor at very high
levels in the control-room, which didn't help.
"Our abiding memory of that session was lots and lots of anxious hanging
around whilst other people tried to get things working.
"Also in the Roundhouse Studio whilst we were there were the rest of Haircut
100, who had just been sacked by Nick Heyward. Nick Beggs also turned up
with all his hair extensions, dressed in that awful Kajagoogoo style, and
none of us could look at him without sniggering! What a total fanny he was!"
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