I’ve just come back from New York where I was mixing Moby’s new album. And he’s actually left some of the mistakes in. I never realised what a genius the guy really is until I got the chance to work with him.

You see nowadays everything in music is kind of looped and replaced or whatever. In the old days they were still just catching a sound, yet the Beatles recordings, for example, were fantastic.

In the David Bowie era everything was about getting great sounding records, which took time, but when punk happened you had to just catch the energy and performance. You had to get the recording quickly, because they didn’t want to spend ages hitting a bass drum or a snare drum. They’d simply want to come in and get on with it. You had to treat the overall sound, you couldn’t say: “Hang on, let’s spend two hours on the snare drum” – you’d just get what you were given, which gave it that young, fresh feel, I think.

Sometimes you were limited, but you had to find a way of getting around any challenges and that still holds true today. When we did Sigur Ros’ Agaetis Byrun, we recorded it really quickly. The drummer wasn’t particularly good but his parts and feel were perfect, so I spent ages just putting clicks down and making him play to them with the band.
You can’t have a long song and vary the speed too much – no one can play to it. As soon as we’d finished the album he just collapsed, he was completely exhausted. But sometimes you have to grab the kite and not let it go too far.

The arrangement of the song is one of the most important parts of the production and usually less is more. You’ve got to play to your watch – in the punk days the guys would hit every cymbal and every note, so you just had to bring it all back, so if the drummer was going to do it all wrong on the toms, he couldn’t do too much. I suppose that when you’re dealing with young energy they always try to do too much.

Moby’s drumming is just like that of a punk; he might be a little out of time but he doesn’t care. I just thought it was great; I’d tell him the drums were slightly out of time and he would say: “No, I like that”.

He also wanted everything panned really hard left and right, drums and everything, the old fashioned way. He knows what he likes, he takes chances and he’s not scared to try new things. We didn’t autotune any of the vocals, which keeps them sounding natural. His production on this record is very spontaneous and alive and mixing was very much in the same vein with no rules. A lot of people in his league find this quite hard.

We mixed the album at a rate of two to three mixes a day, which is really quick, the kind of speed you do rough mixes at. I used to work with Chaz Chandler, who is famous for producing Jimi Hendrix. He told me that when he recorded Hendrix, some of the rough mixes were used as the masters, because often you’d come back to mix it and start gating things and so on and mess about with it too much. He found that some of the rough mixes were perfect first time. Overthinking things sometimes destroys them. Getting a bit deep now, aren’t we?

I apply a similar approach to processing. I always compress the bass quite hard, and the vocal as well, but I won’t always use compression, particularly on guitar – because you can lose the dymanics, which are important. If you listen to some of these American engineers, they normally compress everything and ride the faders, so when the chorus comes in they push things up, but everything is still compressed very hard. That’s one way of doing it, but I like to leave it a bit more open. I’m into feeling as well; I don’t want everything to sound like its too ‘sheened’. Riding the faders is a ‘sheening’ job, which is good for some bands – like My Chemical Romance, for example. It sounds expensive.

This is probably down to my experience working with producers such as Chandler. A lot of it was just pushing everything up. If you listen to the Hendrix records, they’re not very compressed but the feel of some of the songs is so good.  He was just catching a moment and he wasn’t scared to push  the guitars. When I worked with him he used to say: “I want  to hear the guitars in my face; see them on my nose”. He  wanted it that loud. He said if you’re going to play it I want to hear it. It wasn’t about just compressing everything to make it really tight.

Pitchin’ in: The sound of a successful career over the years...

Starting his pro sound career with events heavyweight RG Jones in the late ‘60s, Thomas would set up early PA systems at cricket matches and other sports events. This led to sound reinforcement jobs for the BBC and summer concerts, where he would experiment with delayed horns.

His ambition to ditch the field in favour of the recording studio was formed as he walked past prestige London facilities such as Trident early in his career. He recalls: “I used to think: ‘God, if I could work in there it would be amazing’. I still do – just because of the atmosphere when you walk past a place and it says ‘recording studio’.”

With a good grasp of electronics, a willingness to learn and a proficiency for making hot drinks, Thomas soon bagged his first job at Trident, as the ubiquitous tea boy. He immediately made it his business to master every aspect of the recording process, and learnt from some industry legends such as Ray Staff, the cutting engineer responsible for making the world's first three-sided album.

In the early ‘70s Trident had acts such as David Bowie and Elton John regularly passing through its doors. As such, few of the studio’s employees really wanted to work with a relatively unknown band called Queen. However, they had little choice as the band was signed to Trident’s production company. Unbeknown to Thomas, this was to become one of his most famous credits.

Showing an early taste for slightly less mainstream music, Thomas left Trident and moved on to Advision studio, which was known for its progressive rock recordings.

It was here that he worked on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. Thomas gave over two years of work to the project, yet was never credited. In the end, however, he left Advision to work with an emerging form of music known as punk.

Thomas went on to work with such recognised acts as Public Image Ltd (PIL) during the punk days and has since then continued the theme of young, fresh and sometimes esoteric music throughout his career. He has recently worked with electronic and alternative acts such as M83, Sigur Ros and Moby.