Sweet Dreams Are Made of This by Dave Stewart

Author:Dave Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER:11

SAVAGE

Our next album, and adventure, was Savage. We were trying to decide where to make it. I knew that to rent a big recording studio would cost about forty thousand pounds. At the same time, I had sent my ex-wife Pam’s husband, Olivier, on a mission to find a country house or an old château in France not far from Paris, and he discovered the Château Dangu, in Normandy. It would cost the same to rent for three months as a big studio, except in the château you could do many things that you couldn’t do in a studio.

The château had been moved stone by stone from Paris by Napoleon’s political adviser, and it was stunning, with a beautiful long driveway. It was surrounded by woods and the view from every window was magnificent. It had twenty-eight bedrooms, massive drawing rooms, dining rooms and a sweeping staircase that went on and on.

Most of the château was beautiful and well preserved, but upstairs it was kind of ramshackle and falling apart, perfect for the photos and video that we shot in those areas. All the album cover and all the artwork photos were shot there. It was a perfect location. You could do everything in this château, and we did, using every different part of it.

I brought our drummer Olle Romo, who I knew was a genius. I really needed him because I had already purchased a Synclavier from the producer Jack Nitzsche and Olle was one of the only guys who would know how to program the damn thing. It was immense and quite an amazing new kind of synthesizer, which had a polyphonic digital sampling system. It was also a lot of trouble to use it.

I couldn’t comprehend a thing about it, so while Olle worked out how to use it, I would ride around the château on a bicycle and have the window open into the fumoir, or smoking room. Olle would put speakers on the window so I could hear. For ages, it seemed, there would be nothing, and then I could hear something working. I’d pull up to the window and go, “Anything happening yet?” It was like trying to start an old car. It could take eight hours to just get something going.

Suddenly Olle would go, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got something.” We’d fed in some sounds that Conny Plank and I had recorded in Japan, tapping on bamboo trees and all that kind of stuff.

We made all the tracks for the album Savage right there in the fumoir. Once the Synclavier and mixing desk were in there, it was tiny, with hardly enough room to swing a cat. Annie didn’t really like coming to the château much. She came a few times, but she was really settled in Paris and working through a relationship that I didn’t feel she should have started in the first place. She couldn’t really concentrate on making this album right then. So I worked without her for the first time ever in our recording career.

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