An oral history of Lewis Taylor’s debut album.

Ali Staton first met Andrew Taylor a few weeks after being employed at Island Records:

I was the in-house engineer at Island Records’ studio The Fallout Shelter. I worked exclusively for the label and their artists, signed and being developed…Over a period of a year or so (Lewis) would come into the studio with his band and record demo tracks and experiment, over this time we developed a good working relationship initially alongside Paul O’Duffy.

Far from emerging overnight, the sound and style of Lewis I was only discovered after weeks of trial and error in the recording studio. Staton says that many of these experimental tracks lie unreleased in the Island vaults, “…although some songs did make it on to the final release albeit in a very different form.”

It wasn’t until writing Lucky, (apparently inverting an ‘eastern’ riff from a Led Zeppelin song) that the style of the project would emerge, and Lewis would establish his home studio, now notorious among his fan base, to record Lewis I:

… at this point the process changed, the band was not used any further and LT persuaded Island to invest in some equipment that he would set up at home to continue writing and recording by himself…

During the time that Lewis mostly worked on his music at home, Ali had little interaction, bar “a few overdubs or vocal tracks… I can’t honestly remember how long this period lasted but at some point around 1995 he started sending me tracks to mix at the studio.”

Ali mixed the album while Lewis provided feedback and worked to achieve “…something close to his vision for the track… LT had developed his style, the layering and soulful vocals and guitar bursts were all there, and my job was to help shape that on the record.” Describing the mix process as “fluid”, Staton says that despite Taylor’s strong vision for the project he remained “…happy to hear ideas and be guided to achieve the best result.” The mixing process was, however, made considerably more difficult by the complicated nature of the nineties era home recording technology Lewis utilised:

Technically it was quite a challenge as he was working on a notoriously quirky early consumer digital recorder called an Alesis ADAT, 3 of these machines were required to be synced to provide 24 tracks to record(on VHS tape! 8 tracks on each machine). They would often drift out of sync or randomly eject one tape during mixing.

The development of Lewis I’s atmospheric soundscape benefitted from the wide range of reverbs, EQ’s and compressors available in Island’s studio, which had previously appeared on “classic Island recordings including by Bob Marley and PJ Harvey amongst others.”

We had Pultec valve EQ’s, quites a few Urei 1176s both Silver and Blackface, API 500 EQS. We also had a couple of very desirable vintage Plate reverbs that we used extensively to create the dramatic shifts in the mix. The studio had a chimney that I used for a very characterful natural reverb too. I also did some tape editing on the mixes to create some of the dynamic changes. The console in the studio was a 4000E SSL with mix automation, this was also used extensively to shape the sound of the mixes. Many of the mixes were done several times, each one getting closer to the final version. The desk automation and ability to recall mixes was central to our workflow.

Like Staton, Cally Callomon’s first encounter with Lewis was facilitated by his role as the creative director at Island, and while Callomon says he could have “farmed out” the Lewis Taylor project, a shared love of Yes solidified his desire to work on the project: “I could recite the opening three verses to the album ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ to Lewis and so this clinched the deal.”

Viewing Taylor’s music as “…sideways off-camera glances at a plethora of influences he had”, Callomon sought to depict the sum of the man as greater than his parts: “I went off into nighttime London to see if I could find his song titles in off-beam low-fidelity photographs. I even found a shop called Lewis Taylor.” Each track has a corresponding image in the liner notes, bar Damn which occupies a place on the front cover. Originally, Lewis’s debut was entitled Damn, thus the cover, but concerns over distribution in the US ended that plan:

Damn was thought to be too strong a title for the US and they would want to just call the album Lewis Taylor. I saw no point in having two different titles so we dropped the term ‘Damn’ even though it was meant to be an outburst of appreciation Damn rather than a reference to The Holy Father in a Christian sense. I had to change a few sleeves to suit America at the time, including a naked baby on the front of The Cranberries third album, George Bush Senior was holding sway at the time.

Callomon also made the decision to shorten all the song titles to one word, having enjoyed this stylistic pursuit on previous projects: “I had just made a ‘The The’ album and we joined all the two-word names together (like Shrunkenman) so this game on Lewis’ seemed like as much fun.”

The popular narrative maintains that Lewis Taylor was a victim of misguided expectations from the record label, that Island wanted a blue eyed soulster of Simply Red’s ilk, and that Lewis rebelled against these expectations, sabotaging his career. But according to Callomon, the folks at Island vehemently believed Lewis would be successful, putting a great deal of work into supporting his career:

Island worked their socks off on Taylor and ploughed deep cash into his touring and single releases and marketing and advertising. We all thought we had an artist of International Standing with Lewis, as did Elton John, a great champion of Lewis Taylor. Taylor was also managed by Alan Edwards at Outside who managed David Bowie almost to the end. Edwards was a tireless champion of Lewis and an incredibly adept Radio and TV promoter. He worked hard, admirably.

It’s difficult to concretely ascertain the reasons for Lewis’s departure from Island, and while it is likely that the lack of commercial success played a role, Callomon maintains that Island believed they “…were making great progress and that the fruits would come on album 5, 6, 7, it didn’t matter when.” Nevertheless, two year or so after the release of Lewis II, Island and Lewis parted ways.