Cameron Craig: Rack ‘Em Up

It’s safe to say that a lot has changed since Headliner last caught up with Cameron Craig, although one thing that can be relied upon as a constant is that wherever he goes to record – his rack of Neve 33135s usually go with him. The two-time Grammy award-winning producer, mixer and engineer reflects on a last minute project for Adele’s 25 album, working with a young Amy Winehouse, and on discovering his 33135s by chance in a secondhand shop.

Craig moved into his own personal studio in Battersea just prior to Christmas, and practically hasn’t stopped working there since.

“Ironically, last year was pretty much all mixing,” he says when asked what kind of projects he’s been working on. “And since December, I've been producing a fair bit for three different artists – working remotely.”

I hate to use the phrase “new normal”, but has Craig adapted to this new online way of working? It turns out, like most producers, engineers and mixers, he’s been training for it for years:

“There was one funny meme going around when this all started and it was just like, ‘come on guys, this is what we trained for!’ It’s kind of idiotic, but it was funny because it's true. I was doing a lot of mixing anyway, which by its nature is quite remote, so it just seems like a bit of a logical extension. But having said that, after a year of it, it will be good to get back in the studio with people.”

Having started out in his native Australia, he achieved great success, racking up many multi-platinum albums and a nomination for ARIA Engineer of the year in 1995. Craig then decided to move to the UK to further his career, although he would have preferred to go to L.A. at the time.

“It was down to visas,” he admits with a chuckle. “I knew a lot of people in L.A. at the time, and that was my first choice. And other than not being born in the UK, I am actually very English! For me, it was always about music, really – the technical side of it was secondary.

"Then I started reading articles about English producers, and that combined with the fact that the Britpop stuff was just starting to kick off just made it seem like it was the right place to be.”

He got a job at a few UK studios and met UNKLE’s James Lavelle at Chiswick Reach Studios, although Craig says that he doesn’t think Lavelle wanted to work with him that day:

“I think he'd been double booked somewhere else and had to go to this studio instead. He didn’t know the engineer, and Chiswick Reach was a very unique studio and not everyone could work it. But we got on really well, and I've been working for him ever since.”

Scanning Craig’s credit list, (Adele, Annie Lennox, Bjork, Baxter Dury, Brett Anderson, Grace Jones, Joe Strummer, Duffy, Paulo Nutini, Amy Winehouse, to name a few), it’s hard to know where to start in terms of discussing notable projects – there are that many of them. For Craig, he says the magnitude of many of them does not sink in until much later:

“They just sneak up on you, and you look back on them and go, ‘oh my God, that was actually quite major!’ But that doesn't happen until a couple of years after. Amy Winehouse was one of them [Craig mixed Help Yourself from her debut album, Frank). That was a Jimmy Hogarth production.

"I was just in the room next door and he said, ‘do you want to mix it?’ I think I met her in the hallway – she was unknown at the time. So we mixed it, Jimmy came in to do some little tweaks, and that was it. I didn't really think much of it, and then it obviously kicked off a few years later and she went onto greatness.”

Craig also engineered the strings on Adele’s Love in the Dark from her third studio album, 25. It won a Grammy award for Album of the Year, debuted at number one in 32 countries and broke first-week sales records in multiple countries.

The album later went on to become the world's best-selling album in 2015, making it the fourth-best selling album of the 21st century, the second-best selling album of the 2010s (behind her previous album, 21), and one of the best-selling albums of all time.

“Well, that's another one where obviously a lot came from that,” he says modestly. “But for me, it was a couple of days' work. The song was already written and the basis of it was recorded. Sam Dixon wrote and produced it, and he got the call saying that Adele wants to put the track on the record, and that we just needed to replace the orchestra because they had guide orchestra parts on it.

"He rang me and said, ‘can we get on this? It’s being mixed on Thursday’. This was a Sunday night, so on Monday I was straight on the phone trying to find a studio, but we couldn’t find one anywhere that was capable of doing what we wanted to do.”

With UK options non-existent, they struck on the idea of going to Prague because Craig had used the orchestra out there before.

“We rang them and they said, ‘yep, we can do it tomorrow, literally between sessions’. We got on a plane on Wednesday morning, flew there, did the orchestra session, came back, went to my other studio in West Brompton, edited it all up and got it ready, and uploaded it overnight to Tom, who mixed it on the Thursday.

"It was mastered on the Friday and was out soon after that. So there wasn’t really any time to think about what we were actually doing. I find that interesting though; it keeps me on my toes!”

One of the things Craig is never without is his trusty rack of Neves; he takes his 33135 modules with him to every studio he works in if they are not equipped. He first came across them in the early 2000s when his girlfriend (now his wife) did the accounts for a secondhand shop.

“They knew I was into gear, and they rang me and said, ‘we've got these Neves that have come in; do you know anything about them?’ He said they were a bit of a mess and were racked badly in these dodgy little racks and that they didn’t sound very good. I just said, ‘put them under the counter. I'm coming up’.”

Craig recalls that he had to spend “a bit of money” getting them racked correctly due to their external transformers, which were in some other racks at the time.
“They sound great. If you see any pictures of me in the studio, they're there lurking in the background somewhere.”

Craig has always favoured quirky studios with weird and wonderful gear:

“Collecting all the weird stuff came out of working in major studios; they would be very nicely set up, very well maintained and clean, but never have much in the way of weird or interesting-sounding things. That's where my collecting microphones came from, so I had to start carrying around the preamps to drive these microphones.”