2. George Harrison – Cloud Nine
I didn’t know George at that time. I got to know George because of Dave Edmonds. I did a song with Dave Edmonds in Holland because I was doing an album over there – an ELO album – and he rang me up and said, "do you fancy writing a song for me and I’ll come over while you’re there and I can sing it?"
So he came over and we recorded this track together and he played this big six-string bass. We recorded it, finished it and a few weeks later we’re having dinner, finished dinner, went our separate ways and he shouts down the street, "by the way, I forgot to tell you: George Harrison asked me to ask you if you’d like to work on his new album with him!"
I said, "what do you mean, ‘by the way’?" [laughs] As if that shouldn’t be the first thing you’d say over dinner! But that’s what happened.
I got invited to George’s and I went there, we got on great and we went to Australia to the Grand Prix together to see if we were going to be pals. And we were. We were great pals and we got on great and we worked together for about 13 years or so.
I love Cloud Nine because it was my first outside production that I’d done; it was a big album. And producing a Beatle wasn’t lost on me. It was like, “fucking hell! This is good, this, innit?”
You know, it was great because I’d just had a year off and playing in my own studio in England and learning to be an engineer, believe it or not. I’d never really mastered engineering; I’d always been a producer and always had to tell the engineer what I wanted because I couldn’t do it myself. I taught myself how to do it myself and I was much more in tune with all the knobs. You know, I knew exactly which little tweak I needed to do because I’d been there doing it in my own studio for about a year.
