Strawberry Switchblade: Not underrated, but overlooked. Maybe it's their sense of fashion. This duo (trio including David) are well represented by their catchy melodic hooks and vivid synth sounds of the 80's. If I had to chose three groups that clearly defined what the 80's sounded like, it would be Sophie and Peter Johnston, Strawberry Switchblade and Wang Chung for the simple reason that they were all an extraction of the decade. David Motion has been kind enough to explain the tools he used to accomplished this iconic pure sound:
"I've been gently thinking back to those sessions in 1984 and here's what I remember. Software sequencers in the modern sense didn't start appearing until 1985, so it was all a bit fiddly. We'd lay two codes on two tracks of the 24 track tape, one which ran the Linn drum machine, the other which we could fire other machines from - we did a couple of tracks with an Oberheim synth which had an internal sequencer after which I have a hazy recollection of a tiny grey rectangular Roland sequencer for the later tracks. Although we used the Linn, you very rarely heard it. Maybe some of the hi-hats here and there and the track called “Being Cold”. The Linn was used to trigger single drum sounds that had to be sampled one by one into the AMS delay which had almost a second of memory in it...cutting edge technology at the time! It was labour intensive - programming the Linn for the whole track and then substituting each sound individually. Usually we would have the Linn code pre-delayed so we could shiggle the samples into time.
Good example is the Who Knows What Love Is reprise. Each brush tom was laid in separately.
You may notice that there aren't any cymbals on my tracks on the album at all. I remembered reading something at the time by Abba’s recording engineer saying that cymbals would always mess up a great drum sound and it got me thinking. I thought it was funny to have a drum fill and expect a cymbal crash on beat one which never came. Subversive...perverse? By the time I did the Red Box and Win albums, I had passed through that phase... Synthwise, we'd use Prophet, Oberheim. Some sound effects/overdubs on Another Day were played in from an EMS Synthi AKS. The little Roland sequencer had an internal synth, so sometimes we'd use that. MIDI was fairly new at the time and sometimes we would layer sounds from a couple of synths “Secrets” for example. Very influenced by YMO. No sound went to tape without manipulation. Loads of compression. Treatments with delays and chorus, some room ambiance, Eventide Harmoniser. The other thing that was a feature of the album was something called an EXR Exciter, a version of the Aphex Exciter, that I preferred. Seemed to make the top end very present. Some would say hard, but hey, it was the 80s and we tended to reference mixes for radio compatibility through a tiny Roberts radio. Another key piece of gear was the Drawmer noise gate. We would often hold down chords on a synth and trigger the gate to open with a pattern on the Linn drum. Since Yesterday and Another Day are good examples of this. Also the sonar type sounds on 10 James Orr St. Filtered noise on the Prophet through a gate, triggered by the Linn. With the vocals, whenever they repeated, we'd "spin them in". We'd mix the chorus vocals onto a stereo machine and then play them in further along the multitrack. Our engineer Trigger was great at this. Chinagraph marks on the back of the tape, Trig hitting go on the two-track machine and I'd bang the multitrack into record. This is all got much quicker and easier by the late 80s with developments in sequencers and samplers."
Thanks David,
We appreciate this !
