Stu Epps – Golden Ears

Stu Epps: Golden Ears
Engineering Jimmy Page & Led Zeppelin

By: Brian Tarquin

Stu Epps is a British gem that bolsters an illustrious musical career as a recording engineer, producer and manager. He has worked with some of our favorite British invasion artists as Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, George Harrison, and The Firm. He started his career during the later part of the 60’s in London when the magic of music was at the height of its creative spirit. He began his musical journey in 1967 at Dick James Music (The Beatle’s first publisher) on New Oxford Street in London. He was only 15 years old, getting a job as an office boy. He found himself right in the middle of an incredibly vibrant and growing industry at one of its most exciting and formative times.

He moved on to work in the demo studio at DJM and was lucky enough to be able to produce his first record with a band called Birds of a Feather. He recorded it at Trident Studios with Elton John as the session pianist and Rick Wakeman on the keyboards. Stu went on to take a management role working closely with now legendary producer Gus Dudgeon at Trident Studios. At 20 years old, Stu was part of the ‘Rocket’ team. Not only serving as an A&R manager and co-manager for Kiki Dee, but also as Elton John’s personal assistant. Most notably culminating some four years later in 1974 with John Lennon’s legendary appearance on stage with Elton at Madison Square Garden, which sadly marked Lennon’s final appearance live.

BTQ: How did you get started in music?

Stu: So, at age 15 through my mate Clive Franks, who subsequently in later years became Elton John’s front soundman. During 1967 in London, was a bit of an amazing time. We were in bands, and I wanted to be a singer-songwriter in a band.  Clive was being promoted and there was a job available at Dick James Music as the office boy. It was like £6 a week pay. But compared to what I’ve been getting, it was amazing. And just to be in London, you know, I might be asked to go and take some stuff to Paul McCartney’s house. It was very, very glamorous, to be honest, even though it wasn’t a glamorous job. We had a demo studio there but as the office boy I wasn’t allowed in. It was quite a strict regime there in some respects and then in other respects it was very laid back. But there were a lot of characters in this place, and one of the characters I met early on was a guy called Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who was a pretty outrageous dresser. But we became sort of friends. We all know him as Elton John, but he was completely unknown then. He was just writing songs really for the publishing company.

BTQ: How did you get involved with Elton John?

Stu: You would go from office boy to Disc Cutter which was cutting demos. I cut demos for The Beatles and for Elton John. We had an amazing band there called Hookfoot. Caleb Quaye was the guitarist in Hookfoot and was the most amazing guitarist. He was actually Elton’s first producer, so pretty much every day was just amazing to be honest. And so, I went from Disc Cutter to then studio engineer in this little demo studio we had. And we’d have all sorts of bands coming in, people off the street could booked the studio. But Elton was making demos, piano and voice demos. After hearing his music, I was totally mesmerized by what he was doing. So, although I got the job as engineer, I had my eye on working in the office in A&R, promotion and getting into that whole thing.

A guy came to work named Steve Brown, who got along with Elton very well. He convinced Elton to write fewer poppy songs. And Steve Brown produced the first single with Elton and the Empty Sky album, which was Elton’s first album. Steve and I got on very well, even though he was a lot older than me. He was an old man; I think he said he was 26. I couldn’t quite handle it all. I thought I can’t imagine knowing any one of that age apart from my parents. I was only about 17. We started DJM records, and I was assistant to Steve Brown, who was head of DJM Records. You know, all I was doing was working. We were working on the record company, we were working on Elton John’s career, releasing records. I booked the studios for that first Elton album, which was a mega undertaking. It was going to be the best album ever made. We were given, I think £12,000 to make it, which was a ridiculous amount of money for those days. We had Gus Dudgeon as the producer, with Paul Buckmaster as arranger, and all the session guys that were on it. It’s a very, very structured album and the result we thought was just quite incredible.

Gus became this big hero who had transformed Elton songs into these amazing productions, sound wise, production wise, everything really was just ahead of its time. And so that continued. And then there was the Tumbleweed Connection album, that was different cause it was a band rather than session guys. While this is all going on Elton went to America, played the Troubadour, which is the historic start to Elton’s rise to fame. Elton, as we know, started to do rather well. In fact, I toured with Elton, I was only 18. I went on the second American tour with Elton as his personal assistant. So yeah, this is not engineering. This is definitely in management that I was involved. And in fact, it was the 1974 tour that I did with Elton, where we had Kiki Dee as the support where we played Madison Square Garden.

BTQ: Tell us about The Mill studios

Stu: Coming back from the Elton tour I’d had enough, really. I thought I’m 23 and I was gonna retire. But I went to see Gus and he told me he was building a studio in Cookham, Berkshire. So, I started working for Gus as his assistant and then we built The Mill Studios. When we built The Mill, which was the most sophisticated, probably the most expensive studio on the planet at the time I got back into recording. We had all this incredible gear, so I then became Gus Dudgeons, assistant engineer at The Mill. And we produced Chris Rea and started his career. We did an album with a band called Voyager that had quite a lot of success and then we did an American band called Shooting Star. It was mainly for Gus to work with new artists, to be honest. So, there weren’t any Mega stars that we did at that time, this was a five-year period.

Gus wanted The Mill to be the most up to date amazingly equipped studio on the planet. So, he wanted an MCI desk because he used them before. Basically, he wanted to make everything correct that he thought was wrong in any studio he’s ever been in. So rather than having the off the shelf MCI, he went to Florida and had one designed. And it had other little features on it, but basically it was an MCI 42 channel desk – beautiful desk.

BTQ: How did you become Jimmy Page’s engineer?

Stu: Gus ran into financial problems, had to sell The Mill and sold it to Jimmy Page. I didn’t know him, but he obviously thought he should keep me on in the studio. I became Jimmy Page/Led Zeppelin’s engineer and studio manager.

BTQ: What projects did you engineer for Jimmy Page?

Stu: That was a new period for me, and I started producing more. Because through Jimmy, Atlantic Records brought bands into the studio as Vandenberg a Dutch band and then Twisted Sister an American band. In that time, I also engineered the last Zeppelin album Coda. I also did the soundtrack to the film Death Wish II with Jimmy. I mean, Jimmy and I did quite a lot of stuff. We also did the The Firm album with Paul Rogers, who I had worked with in the past. So, you know, it was a great period. I wasn’t a massive Zeppelin fan, but I was quite happy that he bought the studio. I was thinking that we were going to record a new Zeppelin album. It was like an 80’s type studio. It wasn’t a big live room like Abbey Road, but very dead. I was wondering how we were gonna do that technically. However unfortunately it was not long after Jimmy bought the studio that John Bonham was found dead in Jimmy’s house.

The first project I got to do with Jimmy was the tribute to John Bonham, which was the Coda album. And that was the first time I really worked with Jimmy. He was pretty eccentric. You know, there were other things involved in his personality, as you might imagine. But he was very gentle, very nice. The first track we worked on was “Bonzo’s Montreux”. It was difficult because we had to edit that down. Jimmy reckoned it was too long. And that was bloody difficult cutting. Because it’s not an easy track anyway because it’s all drums. It’s like 24 tracks of drums and each drum track is live. There are about 4 takes of drums. It’s all these crazy noises, he’s got drums going through harmonizers and he’s got a timpani and congas. They went through all sorts of different effects. And it’s a mad track. Yeah, it’s about 6 minutes long. And I mean, it was the first thing I did with Jimmy. It was murder, really. I mean, I just thought. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I wish we were doing something a little bit easier. I thought, well, obviously, he’s Zeppelin’s producer and he’ll tell me what sort of drum sound and what to do with the cymbals. But he didn’t. He really just let me sort of get on with it.

Then we did the Death Wish soundtrack after that, which was, quite a hefty project. You know it was pretty off the wall stuff he was doing with the guitar synth. When Jimmy does something, you know, he puts a lot into it. For the soundtrack his ideas were very inventive. We would do backwards piano and record with the theremin and the Roland guitar synth. He played all these swooped down notes. Highly inventive. I shouldn’t tell you this, but he was very out of it most of the time. He would turn up at 3:00 in the morning. And he wasn’t in the best shape physically, but one way or another, we did these projects. With the Death Wish II film, he would  watch a scene, which was some horrible rape scene or whatever it was. And then, think of the music to put in which he was writing. So, what he would do is record four guitar solos and then he’d say put them up on the speakers. I thought he meant obviously one at a time, but he didn’t. He meant put them all up at once. Then he worked out the solo in his head. He would take a bit from here. A bit from there. Sometimes he’d have two going and I must admit, when we were doing it, I was thinking this is terrible. This is going to be a mess but then he’d say right. That’s it. And then we listen to it. I would think “Blimey, it sounds amazing; it sounds like one solo.” And he got Chris Farlow in to do a bit of singing on it as well.

Jimmy is thorough and passionate with everything he does. It was a tough time for him because he lost his drummer. That really did him in. He’s an inventive guy and obviously wanted to keep playing and loved being on stage. I think people were trying to help him. He did put another band together. I think they were called XYZ which was Chris Squire on bass and Alan White on drums. There are some tracks out there that we did. They came in for a week. Some of it was Chris Squire material. I suggested a keyboard player. We had the keyboard player come in. So, all they really needed was a singer. And then we’d have a great band. But a singer was never really found.

I suppose the best project we did was The Firm because Paul Rogers, is like my favorite singer of all time and I had worked with him on his solo album. Jimmy formed this band with Paul, and it was just totally brilliant! Tony Franklin on bass, Chris Slade on drums. Amazing! Jimmy on guitar and Paul Rogers on vocals. I pretty much set them up live in the studio. They just went for it like the old traditional way. I think the guide vocals became the final lead vocals. So, The Firm album was probably the highlight of the time with Jimmy at The Mill.

BTQ: How did you record, and mix Led Zeppelin’s Coda?

Stu: When Jimmy bought the studio, he was quite happy to use that MCI desk. All he did was bring in his own 3M tape machines and a lot of Eventide Harmonizers because there weren’t many effects around in those days. Also, it was crazy because there was just one Vox AC 30 amp that he used, and we couldn’t seem to get another one that was better. He would just turn that up to 10 and we’d all sort of run into the next room because you couldn’t be anywhere near it at that volume. And he never used a Les Paul in the studio he always used the Tele. He used a string bender. It sounds a bit country-ish when it’s got that bend in it. His rhythm playing was amazing. When he was doing rhythm guitar, bass and drums he’s got such a great feel for rhythm playing.

You know, they’re great tracks. I had a great time putting that album together. I really did. The track on that Coda album called “I Can’t Quit You Baby” was a live track from the Albert Hall. Later I realized that they owed Atlantic another album and it had to be recorded tracks. So “I Can’t Quit You Baby” was going to be on the album but we couldn’t use any of the audience mics or the ambient mics. So, I hired one of the early lexicon reverbs and I must admit it was an amazing piece of equipment. I recreated the ambiance from the Albert Hall with this giant machine for “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, and for the tracks we used for the song “Wearing and Tearing”. And then there was a track called “Poor Tom”, which there was something missing on that song. It was either Robert’s voice or a harmony. Robert came in and recorded some tracks along with John Paul Jones, so it was nice meeting them.

Thinking back, they were quite posh, you know? It’s not like some big hairy rock band who sort of swore all day long. I mean, they’re all very together, guys. And you could see why they did so well. They knew what they were doing. Professional musicians, one way or another. It’s awful that we didn’t have John, and obviously that he died cause it’s terrible. I would have loved to have worked with that whole band. I suggested a drummer for Jimmy, Dave Mattacks, who played on the on the Death Wish soundtrack. Jimmy was very much into playing with the drums because of Jimmy’s percussive rhythm playing. But I understood that, Bonham wasn’t replaceable because they obviously had this great feel between them. And I think that was Jimmy, Bonham and John Paul Jones, they were just a great unit. I’m amazed now talking about it. We’re talking about a three-piece band that just about every band on the planet wants to copy. It lasted all this time. It’s hardly been bettered, you know?

BTQ: What other artists did you engineer at The Mill?

Stu: We had Nick Fleetwood come in and I worked on his solo album. George Harrison popped down during these sessions. And Stephen Stills came over because he wanted Jimmy to play on his album 50/50. I mean, I just couldn’t believe I was there, doing something with these guys. I mean, unbelievable legends! In this period as well, I recoded this crazy album Ice on Fire by Elton John which had George Michael on it with Queen’s rhythm section. Bill Wyman was another one I worked with for 20 years. Jimmy obviously must have told Bill about the studio. And then Bill came in. Bill was extremely methodical even when his wife would ring up, he’d enter it in a diary somewhere. But he’s a great bass player, though his heart wasn’t really in The Rolling Stones any longer. He was more into Blues. He formed this band, the Rhythm Kings with Georgie Fame and Gary Brooker. I engineered all their albums. And so that was a great period working with Bill at The Mill.

BTQ: After leaving The Mill where did you continue your career?

Stu: I then found this amazing, absolutely amazing place called Wheeler End which had been Alvin Lee’s private studio. There was a Helios desk in there, but I moved that out. And I moved the MCI in and built this a brilliant studio. A great place, because it had a lot of space. The control room was quite big, the studio was very big. It wasn’t a commercial studio, so I had to really work on putting the word out, but eventually I did, and was lucky to get Bill Wyman in to record. Then Oasis came in and we worked on an album with them. Robbie Williams came in to record as well. John Leckie a famous producer from Abbey Road came in as well.

Afterwards this is when a thing called the Internet was being invented. It was when people started recording on computers. And I started doing that and was editing albums for Billy Connolly the comedian. I was also doing African tribal albums and all sorts of different projects.  I started using a studio in Stoke-on-Trent in the north of England. To be honest when I’m producing, I don’t really like to engineer any longer. For producers, it’s good not to be concerned with switches, dials, limiters, compressors and equalizers.

For More information about Stuart Epps, visit https://stuartepps.co.uk/