What’s the indefinable thing that makes a pop song less disposable, somehow timeless? Cameron McVey knows, sometimes, at least.
An Adam Faith/Budgie pop-music-Zelig, somewhere in the studio, in some production/writing/advisory capacity during the creation of Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Sugababes’ Overload, All Saints’ War of Nerves plus associated albums, including Portishead and more since. He has also pursued his own musical career dating back to the early 1980s as well, he's made promo videos and shot photographs.
Having met him the first time some ten years ago I placed him in the, actually quite small, box of London’s 80s hipsters-who-successfully-made-something-happen. The club runners, DJs, journalists and artists who were the 1980s/90s equivalent of Colin McInnes’s Absolute Beginners, albeit, generally a little older and a bit less absolute. The kind of people who introduce people to people who go on to do something remarkable. A tastemaker in a floating salon.
For those, like me, who are curious about how pop legend is created, the McVey’s of the popverse are crucial. He can chat but I got the feeling he’s not used to speaking about himself so much as the famous people he has worked with. Time traveling, sometimes mid-sentence, it’s not always clear how he got from A to B.
Sitting down in the kitchen of his newish gaff in northwest London I just started recording at a random moment as he talked….
Cameron McVey: “I think a lot of the music business back in the day was set up, a bit like lawyers, where they liked to pretend that things were more complicated than they were. There’s an awful lot of the business where people were told things had to be done in a certain way. And budgets require that you can’t always afford to work with a Tom Elmhirst (top music engineer) every time and so you might have to have more nerve to do things yourself. And a lot of the big records I’ve been part of tend to be where we cut new ground by just basically having a laugh and not paying too much attention to the way that things are s’posed to be.”
“A lot of the big pop records that I got involved in were kind of easy to make because record companies would spend loads of money, run into trouble, not know where to go, didn’t want to drop the act and they would come and ask me to sort it out. And because I’m kind of multi-level I can help write the tune with you, help produce it, help pick the single, help you work on the video.”
“You try to help people make good choices but just not let them make cunts of themselves, you know?”
OL: Tell me about your background.
Cameron McVey: I grew up in Cockfosters on the end of the Piccadilly Line. My parents were quite poor so it was quite a struggle. There weren’t many people of colour my way… well my mum really liked Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole. My mum was blind. So sound was very important. I grew up with Gigli, the amazing tenor opera singer. Sam Cooke. They were all playing in the house. My father was an amazing singer. When he moved down from Scotland… in those days, people would only bathe one day a week, on a Sunday. And when he found out that there were loads of people standing outside the bathroom window listening to him, because he was singing, he was such a shy man that he never sang again.
OL: What were you listening to back then?
Cameron McVey: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Slade, Desmond Decker. But the first thing that really blew my mind was Innervisions (Stevie Wonder) and, simultaneously, Bob Marley. For a white boy from the suburbs it was mind blowing. I didn’t understand the cultural implications, of course. I just knew it was mind blowing.
OL: So how did you end up in music?
Cameron McVey: When I first came up to live in London I was an assistant at Condé Nast studios - I worked for Bailey, I worked for all those guys, then I became a photographer in my own right. I did brides-wear for a while, I did all the fashion for The Observer, and then Terence Donovan suggested that I start to make commercials. The first commercials I did were rostrum commercials. You would take photographs and then film the photographs and they would show in a cinema, in the olden days.
A guy from Beirut had a company called Punky Jeans. And he had a small budget and I wrote the script for the film and I forgot about the music. I didn’t want to compromise on the visuals so I thought, fuck it, I’ll just go into the studio. So I went into the studio to record the music with Jeni Innocent, who’s now married to Paul Cook, the Pistols drummer, she sang this (singing) ‘O yeh, yay, Punky’ and I made this thing and the guy that ran the studio offered me a record deal!
“It was like taking heroin, I should imagine. I became addicted to music.”
I bought a four-track cassette recorder and I bought a Casio PT50 Autochord and I started making tunes.
[Time Jump!]
“I worked at PWL for a sec. I met Madness. Ended up becoming their road manager. Then someone did the picture for their first album cover and it was shit and I said I could do better than that and I went in and did the record cover for One Step Beyond. I had a mad juxtaposed life.”
Then I remember them (Madness) coming to see me play at the Hammersmith Palais. I was in this group (called Bim). (OL-Bim made a sound very much of their time, when funk and post-punk were being applied to basic pop principles, giving birth to bands like Haircut 100, ABC and, eventually, Wham! And Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Bass players tended to slap and it was suddenly cool to be a pop star. A fellow traveler would have been The Haines Gang who seemed to release just the one track, So Hot. Bim managed an album.)
There was a guy called Charlie Gillett. He introduced me to this musician from Scotland called Bobby Hendry. But two of the group were taking a lot of smack so it was always a little difficult to make things go along. I was thinking to myself, I wonder if I really want to be the front person. It felt like the least place to be creative.
One of the issues I’ve always had. When you’ve got a record deal you have to make music that they think, in those days, will make it on to Radio One, make it on to Capital (Radio).
[Time Jump!]
“That’s why, even when I made Sugababes, I always used the wackiest people, all my mad programmers; that record was a bunch of freaks. That schizophrenia was always interesting to me. Same with Massive Attack - I put someone who was really into Talk Talk into work on the main record: Johnny Dollar.”
Even in the early days, when I was making Bim I was always trying to make it…
OL: Were Bim produced by anyone?
Cameron McVey: We (Bim) were produced then we started producing ourselves and making some really good stuff, but even when we were working with Mick (Jones, of The Clash) it’s got Mick’s sound, and I took that influence and went on to do other things.
We did one video which was directed by Dave Robinson who owned Stiff records. When I looked at it I thought to myself, cos i was a good looking young kid, and it was all about me and how I looked and getting girls. I don’t mind all of that stuff but that wasn’t why I was interested in music. It didn’t feel like we were breaking any new ground.
We were signed to Arista. I don’t think my heart was really into being famous.
It was me and Ray and Jamie Morgan who started Buffalo (a highly influential creative collective based around street fashion). Then I did a record with Jamie. A project called Morgan McVey. We were like a prerequisite to Bros. We were like two good-looking guys. But, again, it felt a bit… we were in Japan, seeing all the girls and I remember thinking this feels a little perverted.
(We are interrupted as Neneh Cherry arrives home. Which prompts Cameron into describing how they met...)
Cameron McVey: I’d seen Neneh play a gig with Rip Rig and Panic underneath the flyover at carnival. (I thought) wow, she’s really interesting. And then Buffalo, Ray Petri, organised a trip to Japan and we were all going out to be street kid models for this menswear company and Neneh got invited. And she explained to me how they (Rip Rig and Panic) made music and it didn’t seem to involve her writing. So I bought her a Dictaphone for a present and I told her to put some tunes on it and about a week later she came back with these tunes and that’s how I got involved working with her.
“The reason I’ve made more than one record with Neneh is because it’s our personal music that we make together. Neneh’s the front person for the family thing.”
(We take a diversion and talk about Cameron’s bandmate in Bim, Stephen Street, later a very successful if traditional music producer with an enormous list of artists he’s worked with. Then we get on to production styles)
Cameron McVey: He’s (Stephen Street) got old school training. Most people listen to records now on the run. You’re thinking about mixing in a totally different way. In the way that he was trained… he worked with Chrissie Hynde, who’s a good friend of ours and she loves him for that reason. Chrissie’s a fantastic songwriter, amazing voice and a lovely person, them making records together, it’s fantastic.
“I made a tune with her for Massive Attack, five years ago? Couldn’t get them to chill out, put it out. The track I did with her was incredible. She was on holiday with us down in Spain and she bought a local donkey that was getting mistreated. Except she left it with us to bring up. (Is it still alive?) Fuck knows…”
“I listen to a lot of weird demos and things, and I always prefer the demos. And then when people go in to make the records, I always think it's a shame that people don't just release demos because it's so sophisticated now, the kind of home recording process. I've been working on the iPhone and getting people that are going in and finding it really difficult.”
“The thing that makes it stick out is what I do. I’m no good for the second record. I’m only good for the first records…”
There’s one girl called Atlantis. She’s really lovely. Very talented. Married to the drummer in her group. She was having trouble, doing loads of sessions and I said, why don’t you just start writing about all the difficulties, but just do it over, either plucking the guitar or write over a Frank Ocean track or whatever you want. Do it on an iPhone.
And then, when she sent it to me, we found an AI free on the internet. And we managed to strip all the music out and just expose the voice. It’s fucking amazing. It’s a really interesting process. People keep trying to re-record the demo and I’m going, why? Why can’t we just put this out? Wouldn’t that be a great way for music to go?
OL: We talk for some time about Cameron/Neneh’s kids, all of whom have gone into music as artists, and about how he has kept himself available but not too intrusive, even when he sees them navigating an unsympathetic industry.
Cameron McVey: You can't get involved, really. So like, if I ever suggested anything, we've got a pact: I was never there, and it didn't happen! So if I did suggest something, it would never, ever come to light.
I think that with your kids, you know, like my boy Marlon, writes and does top line and has been quite successful, and Tyson is really doing very well with her career. And Naima, our oldest, is making really amazing music. We try not to… I just think that you bring so much baggage to something if you go and start standing on their thing.
So I tend to just bail them out if they run into trouble. I might say, look, hang on a second. Have you really thought about this? And if they can justify it. And so we have those kinds of discussions. All of them have made decisions that I wouldn't have made.
OL: Careers or music?
Cameron McVey: Yeah. Both. Mabel’s had a lot of bad, overzealous record company and managerial bullshit put on her that's really cost a lot of time for her and a lot of energy, and quite difficult for her to manage. And in the end, she had to fire people involved, and had to have it off with the guy from the record company and say, Look, this is not how I want to go forward. And so we've had to help her build a structure, which means that she can defend against that.
It’s always been difficult to break through. There’s always going to be people out there on a mass level listening to things that are more mainstream – Taylor Swift, or Raye, Harry Styles… I find Harry Styles quite interesting. I like the way he’s gone from being in a really successful band, from a quite girly orientated situation to working with Kid Harpoon, he’s like a fucking hard core, left field record producer and they do everything together. I find that quite interesting…
OL: And there we will leave it, although Cameron talked on, covering ground from Kendrick to Curtis Mayfield, still, obviously an un-dulled music fan, despite decades of the music business, Spanish donkeys and a musical dynasty who will never let him relax.
