RS: Very cool. I'm thinking about some of your remixes now. In my mind, M People's "Sight for Sore Eyes"--classic; Diana Ross when you did "Love Hangover"--classic; Pet Shop Boys when you did "Before"--also a classic. What's a remix of yours that you're very impressed with or what are your favorite remixes you've done?
Dave Lee: "Love Hangover", Diana Ross. I used to really like that because it's just a nice record and I loved getting the multi track for something like that. It never came out but I did the Trammps’ "Disco Inferno." That's something I bought--one of the first records I ever bought was the SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER soundtrack. So I listened to that record Christ knows how many time as a teenager. Then ten years later you've got the multi track in the studio and there's the strings on their own, there's the vocals on their own, it's quite a buzz. It's the same with "Love Hangover" because that was a record I was very familiar with. So things like that were really good.
There's loads of different ones for different reasons. I did this remix for a guy's track, Benjamin Diamond, "In Your Arms," which I was personally pleased with because all the musicians who played on it put in a really good performance that particular week. But it can be different things, like when I think the mix sound is sonically good. Something like that I'm just as pleased with because I like the end result. Sometimes you feel you did a good job on it because on other records you didn't have to do as much.
Erro's "Change for Me," a record I did a remix of, was something I'd have licensed to my own label. I didn't really change it much when I remixed it. I changed the drums, I changed the arrangement--the original didn't have a bassline so I got a bass player in--just subtle things. It was a record that sold a thousand to fifteen hundred copies in its original form through an American label called Yoruba. Our version of it ended up selling a lot more and it was on loads of complication albums, and it's become a real anthem. From that point of view, I suppose I was the A&R man as well as the remixer, since I took it from being something that would have slipped away and been forgotten into something that became a record people used to sing along to in clubs. So there's lots of different reasons why you'd be pleased with a remix.
RS: I heard you just remixed Tears for Fear's song "Change."
Dave Lee: That's right, yeah.
RS: Is that one of your favorite songs of all time, or how did you get it?
Dave Lee: Not really. It's not that I don't like it, but I was asked to do some Tears for Fears remixes. The one I really wanted to do was "Pale Shelter," but they didn't want me to do that one, so I did "Change." I thought I did pretty good, I tried to do sort of a punky disco like Was (Not Was) --an edgier sort of disco with a white band doing something that would have been played at the Paradise Garage even though it's not the sort of thing that Salsoul would have released. That's the direction I took. It came out as part of a double pack, and to be honest with you I think it got missed a bit. There was another version of it which didn't get on there. But maybe it'll get revived. There's a dub version I'd like people to hear which has less of the song. We only used the full vocal. But who knows?
I've got a few different multi tracks by Tears for Fears and the amount of stuff they had on that one was incredible. It was a lot of work going through it because they really got into the forty-eight track recording. There was just loads and loads of stuff on different tracks all over the place. Quite exciting from a technical point of view, and also interesting hearing how people recorded stuff ten years ago or thirty years ago. I remember reading that Tears for Fears really got into it to the point where they lost the plot. They recorded like forty-eight tracks and bounced that to twenty-four tracks and recorded another forty-eight tracks and went over the top on stuff. You can hear it when you listen to it, but it's so complicated. How did they hope to get all this stuff audible in a finished mix? Because a lot of it's good, but there's just too much of it.
