Adrian Sherwood on Life in the Music Industry

i mean a lot of times you think you know um you spent a lifetime making disco change and you've died with nothing done you could do something make a difference in people's lives but i think in a way looking back on it i'm very happy i'm proud of what i did i i've been very lucky i've worked with absolutely amazing people and still am doing um and i'm blessed i really you know people do come up and say oh look you know like that that you know changed my life or you turned me on to this that any other and those things you just say well okay i might not be fantastically materially successful but i'm cool i'm not just i'm i'm sitting on this fake chair here and i really like it i'm not worried about i'm not particularly worried um now when my life's at i'm i've got lovely kids loads of um friends and um now people they come up to you and say oh you know wow you know that did it or musicians like the f but you know i went on the premise that you've got to create your own sound a name for things i've got my own way of doing stuff and i work with you know um i've always got a very good young engineer my current engineer dave mcewen is brilliant um and what tends to happen is they then go on to something else and set their own selves up as producers or their own company and nearly all my previous engineers have all gone on to do very well i think i think people gotta help themselves up on their careers i'm not like a kind of charity you've gotta want it and i think with the music game it's like if you're a singer or even a fool in footballers you know it doesn't mean you know roy keane wasn't the best footballer but very great football don't get me wrong but his desire and his determination was 10 times stronger than somebody who maybe had more natural talent than him you know liking a footballer too it's like musicians as well you if you want to be a singer you've got to go rehearsals you've got to go and sing with other people and improve your art or if you're you know whatever your instrument you play you've got to push yourself and what i do you have to put the hours in working with bits of equipment to learn how to how to kind of fracture the equipment so not in and abuse it and make it you know almost sound like it's i don't mean you know it's one word you know mangle it make it um jump out at you and you have to find your way by practice and um now what people are doing obviously they're going through the route of learning the digital stuff and the programming and that side and hopefully if they look at what what i've been doing today with you you see the live analog side and what you can do when it's your turn as the engineer to be mixing when all the work's been done all the musicians and singers have done their job it's your time when you're doing dub mixes well i think it's best to look on uh the positive side every time things change um really there's no point bemoaning how things are now i might just i've been lucky enough to be able to have the side where i am playing out so i can justify spending large amounts of money recording things that might not come out for years knowing that i've got some things i can play out um i feel sorry for a lot of people i work with who are quite old now and i find it very hard to make a living and they're like genius players or mixers or engineers that makes me sad and i feel frustrated that i can't really do more to help certain people but but that's the whole nature of the world at the moment the arts and music has been basically sabotaged in my opinion and and stolen by a lot of you know nearly everything i come there's very few young people able to get uh lessons only in music most of the bands i come across are very there's nothing wrong with their fault but quite middle-class people who've mum and dad have had a bit of money bought them a guitar bought them the piano bought them guitar lessons and coming up with stuff it's not quite those things i find more frustrating i do my own uh any problems that hit me you also you've always got the situation where you know people think a drum machine is a drummer and they don't realize that it started with somebody actually you know as a brilliant player like style scott or keith leblanc or work with um where's the new keith for blank or style scott around you know that they are there but they're you know instead of there being that many of them there's like this many of them and it it i just find it sad that there's not like um an encouraged uh um ambiance of like let's all get down and play music together let's do that because it is really good for people they've got it much more in the states they've got a much more of a heritage of uh playing than we have but i think in this kind of one of the things i find quite sad just where i am around here my my youngest daughter couldn't get couldn't do a music gcse was it just not available well the take-up wasn't very big because the people the phone was quite a poor area yeah and a lot of people couldn't afford to buy instruments for their kids they weren't encouraged youngster wasn't a music programmer in the years prior to the last two and when she went to do the gcse they just canceled the course that's just one example but all around the country they've slashed the arts budgets to you know which are all um you know their developed future you should have a look at the amount of musicians that come from art school backgrounds in this country a lot of them are middle class twits but you know they're very good you know they come from that background of creativity but um it's uh it's shocking it's shocking what i think's going on but another home well the only advice i can give to anybody is do as much as you can while you're inspired to do it as much as you can while you can that's all because if you um and if you want to get good you have to be amongst other people who are better than you so the key really is get if you want to do like i did mixing try and um come you know try and come to me when i'm mixing or try and blag a few hours visit to a place like ours or go and watch dennis bevell or mad professor or somebody just actually physically doing it so you know what i can do that as good as them or better i'm going to learn to do that if you want to do that for example or if you want to be a singer like i said go and um join a choir please sing with other people just push yourself because a lot of people tend to just be sat in their little room on their own but you know yeah that's like wanking in bed sitterland you know you haven't got like you gotta just you gotta interact with other people and push yourself you can stay in there you could be like burial and stay hidden under a blanket and nobody sees you and come out with really good records but for every burial there is there's probably a hundred thousand really boring people who haven't um you know haven't got out of their uh their beds enough each to their own i think if you know i personally am a bit stuck in a rock i'm a fan of uh primarily jamaican music like people turn me on to jazz or other things and i like it i'm a bit somewhat really equip i think if you want to do a live band you need to go and see if your people are going well check that check that go and check them and you get you get ideas you can adop adopt so that's whatever for yourself you get inspired your standards are set that you've got a rise to i think everything like that's healthy um for me someone like me it's that i should do that more because you end up resting on your laurels and saying okay i've done this i'm okay i'm okay i do what i do in reality if i made a bit more effort i'd make better records myself so on that one i can't really advise except to say i'm too lazy i should get out more and see what what what you know where people are at well i i think the important thing is you've got young people coming along i i need to have a young engineer i've got my son coming on now at the moment who's who's hopefully gonna get run things as well he's he's um he's very good with the music he's coming on with the productions lead from leaps and bounds now he produced some of den's record as well denise's record um you've got to have young people because if i'm there and i'm just doing the same old stuff i need someone to push along some things and some of you also get on with you sympathic with so i think for people when you reach admired you need you've got to surround yourself with youngsters or or keep trying to bring on your young younger people when dave goes off into when dave writes off on his on his pony into the into the future hopefully it's for you know to make some um things for himself and do better for himself i'll have to bring somebody else along or call somebody but i'd miss dave a lot that's a fact but it's life and then you you um you know i can go anywhere um any studio in the world and work with an engineer and i'll still get a result but i'd much rather have him with me so that's the that's the bottom line because it'll get a better result i'll enjoy myself and i can be lazier you

Channel: Soulsound

Views: 7,122

Rating: 4.9069767 out of 5

Keywords: Adrian sherwood, biography, on-u, adrian sherwood childhood, record producer, producing records, DJ, career, interview, dub, reggae, music industry, Disc Jockey (Profession), soulsoundeducation, On-U Sound Records

Id: Cnr9dpqA5Nk

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 22 2014