How I Started

How I started
Original article from Sound on Sound 1998

How do you become a record producer? Well you have to start somewhere and this was the question put to various producers in this issue. This is what Paul had to say..........

Paul Gomersall has recently enjoyed the privilege of engineering George Michael’s new CD, Older, where George, as usual, is his own producer (for the full story, see the sound on sound article Paul’s other credits include work with producers Trevor Horn, Phil Collins (as a producer), Stephen Hague, Stephen Lipson, Thomas Dolby, Chris Porter, Laurie Latham, and others.

Working with producers who are also engineers
“Producers like to distance themselves from the desk, as long as they have an engineer they can trust. It’s one of the joys of production. If they have a problem, they might dive in and try and sort it out themselves, but usually there won’t be a problem.
You are the interface with all the technical stuff so the producer doesn’t have to think about that. If the producer comes up with an idea you make it work for them.”
What should an engineer do If a producer appears not to hear a problem? “Point it out. One of the good phrases is ‘I think we should listen back to that’. He will be listening by then. There are ways of getting your point across. Diplomacy is a big part of the job.”

Gomersall goes to Hollywood...
It was while attending a music electronics course at the London School of Furniture in Whitechapel that Nottinghamshire lad Gomersall first set eyes on a recording studio - SARM East in nearby Osborm Street, E1- and decided an engineer’s life was for him.
He recalls: “A group of us from the college went there on a day trip, and I saw all these buttons and knobs, which immediately impressed me. As a kid, I had a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I’d always played around with cutting up bits of tape and doing my own version of editing, as well as fiddling with short-wave radio.I knew deep down that this was something I wanted to do, so I applied for a position there. At the first interview, I was faced with Trevor Horn, Jill Sinclair and Gary Langan, sitting in a row in front of me like the hanging committee!
Even when I got the job, nobody ever told me what was expected of me, so I literally played it by ear and learned 80% of the job within the first three months just through enthusiasm and askingpeople things.
Gomersall joined the SARM team in 1984 and was almost immediately posted to a session with Trevor Horn and Yes after accidentally nudging a flight case and crushing the original assistant engineer’s foot. “I filled in while he went to hospital!

But I must have done something right, because I continued as an assistant, and went on to work with Steve Lipson and Trevor on Frankie Goes To Hollywood.” His training was fortified by working alongside Horn and also a fresh-faced, 21-year-old George Michael. The differences between the approaches of the pair were at the time, he says, worlds apart. “I worked with Trevor on ‘Two Tribes’ for about a month, trying lots of different variations of a song. Even when he was mixing it, he still wondered what it would be like if it was done in a slightly different way.
Digital recording was just coming in, and it allowed him to save a lot of alternate takes and compile them with the computers. Of course, having lots of options means it takes longer to make decisions."
Meanwhile, when George did Wham!‘s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, he walked in with everything clearly planned in his head and completed the task within a day and a half.
I had assumed through working with Trevor that three months was what it took, so it was quite a shock to discover the vastly different approaches to creating Number One singles. I quickly learned that there are no rules in record production!”

Working for SARM may have been an excellent starting point for Gomersall, but after five months, the long hours became unbearable. “As a young assistant, you are out to prove yourself, and you go out of your way to do whatever is asked, otherwise you feel you are risking your job.
But, in the long term, it is a very negative, self-perpetuating situation, and one that I had to get out of."There were a couple of people who had gone freelance as assistant engineers, so I thought I’d break away and try my hand as a freelancer.” Twelve years down the line, Gomersall has engineered for some of the most successful names in the business, including Kate Bush, Phil Collins, Blur, and Eric Clapton.

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