‘I try and stay out of business conversations. I go on my instinct and my musical taste.’

MBW’s World’s Greatest Producers series sees us interview – and celebrate – some of the outstanding talents working in studios across the decades. Here, we speak with British super-producer James Ford about his role as a key creative collaborator with Arctic Monkeys, a crucial link in Blur’s reunion, and much more. World’s Greatest Producers is supported by Hipgnosis Song Management.

James Ford is well-known for producing Arctic Monkeys. But he could just have easily become notorious for not producing Arctic Monkeys.

In 2005, Ford was just breaking out as a producer. He’d grown up in Leek, Staffordshire as a music obsessive. His dad played in local bands and, after flute and piano lessons at school and encouragement from a music teacher that would let him bunk off rugby to play the drums, he too joined the local pub circuit.

After years of “cider, magic mushrooms and playing in weird funk bands”, he went to Manchester for university and formed Simian, who caused quite a buzz on the Noughties indie scene.

They moved to London but, according to Ford, “fell into the classic thing of trying to keep the label happy on our second record… We ended up cracking under the pressure and splitting up.”

Simian went on to have a huge posthumous hit with a Justice remix, We Are Your Friends, but, at the time, the rest of the band got “proper jobs”, while Ford and keyboard player Jas Shaw formed DJ/dance music spin-off Simian Mobile Disco. Ford also started producing “anyone and everyone who would have me”.

The names he was producing slowly got bigger until he met Laurence Bell at Domino, who introduced him to Arctic Monkeys.

He and Mike Crossey decamped with the band to Liverpool’s Motor Museum studio to work on some “pretty gnarly, punky, quite aggy” versions of songs that would feature on the band’s iconic debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Ford, however, did not feature on the finished record, having been replaced by Jim Abbiss.

“I was absolutely gutted,” Ford says today, speaking to MBW in his home studio in Clapton, East London. “I could see what was about to happen to them: their star was in the ascendant and the hype around them… It was a pretty heady time. But we got word that the Americans didn’t like the recordings. It was the biggest opportunity I’d ever had, and it didn’t go the way I intended.

“But I still felt like I was in the right place,” he adds. “I was gutted, but I wasn’t like, ‘Back to the drawing board’. I was just going to have to pick myself up and carry on, I felt something else would come along.”

“IT WAS THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY I’D EVER HAD AND IT DIDN’T GO THE WAY I INTENDED.”

He was right not to worry. Since then, Ford has become the UK music industry’s go-to producer for… well, pretty much anything, really.

His deliberate avoidance of a ‘trademark sound’ means he can add edge to pop stars (Kylie Minogue, Jessie Ware), reinvigorate legendary bands (Blur, Depeche Mode), or give new artists the sonic armour-plating they need to weather today’s hostile environment for breakthrough acts.

And, as it turns out, he can produce Arctic Monkeys after all. After a ‘no hard feelings’ chat at an awards ceremony soon after the debut album came out, he’s worked on every AM album since, forging one of British rock’s longest-running, most productive relationships. He even plays in Alex Turner’s spin-off band, The Last Shadow Puppets.

And beyond the Arctics, Ford is currently on the sort of roll most producers can only dream of. In the last year or so, he’s helmed Depeche Mode’s Memento Mori, Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good!, Blur’s The Ballad Of Darren, Pet Shop Boys’ Nonetheless and The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude To Ecstasy, amongst others.

But, while his phone is running as hot as that streak of smashes, he’s decided to make 2024 “a fallow year”. He’ll be playing in Portishead singer Beth Gibbons’ touring band (having produced her recent album, Lives Outgrown), looking to work on the follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut solo album, 2023’s The Hum, and enjoying “a little ‘saying no to things’ phase”.

Before he can put his feet up, however, there’s the small matter of talking MBW through studio bust-ups, industry plants and why he doesn’t even think about TikTok…

WHY DOES YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ARCTIC MONKEYS WORK SO WELL?

We share a musical language now, we’ve grown up together. I have so much respect for them and for Alex’s writing. I just try and help them develop in the best way possible and be honest with them.

I don’t know why it’s lasted so long – it’s like a friendship or a marriage at this point, where it’s hard to see [a way] out of it! It’s more than just a producer-artist relationship.

It probably would be good for them to work with other producers with a more objective view of it. But, when you’re working with Alex and then go and work with another band you’ve never worked with before, you notice how much explanation there is. We don’t need to talk about references or snare sounds anymore. It means you can push on to the next phase without having to go over loads of old ground.

I love working with new artists and having that fresh energy – and there’s a respect you can command with new artists that you can’t with someone you’ve known for knocking on 20 years! You don’t have that same power or whatever [with Arctic Monkeys], but you also have this very different, deep knowledge and love for what they do that informs it in a different way.

YOU SEEM TO HAVE A GOOD RADAR FOR NEW BANDS THAT ARE GOING TO MAKE IT. WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR NEW ARTISTS TO BREAK THROUGH AT THE MOMENT?

I try and stay out of the business conversation. I go on my instinct and my musical taste; if I hear a demo that’s interesting and doesn’t feel like something I’ve heard before, and I can imagine that going over well, that’s about as far as my analysis goes.

You can tell when people have got momentum behind them, even in terms of their attitude or the people that are around them, and sometimes that can influence it. But it’s really hard to second guess what is and isn’t going to work. I just go with what’s exciting and what I would want to listen to.

HOW AWARE WERE YOU OF THE NOISE AROUND THE LAST DINNER PARTY BEFORE YOU PRODUCED THEM?

The industry plant thing? When I heard their demos, there was no [record] industry around it. That being said, the way I heard about them was through [Tara Richardson], a manager who I worked with on a Foals record. She’s working with Q Prime, one of the biggest heavy-hitter management companies in the world.

They’re quite a formidable bunch of people so that obviously factored in my head: these songs are great, it’s creative, the girls can play the shit out of their instruments and they can write, this is interesting. And they’ve got Q Prime behind them, that’s even more interesting, because people are going to hear it.

Because they are heavy-hitters, they got me involved, they got a big label involved, they got them on lots of bills early on, probably before they were really ready… So, from an outside point of view, it maybe looks like this industry conspiracy, but it’s not.

It’s an old school big management push, the same as I saw with loads of bands. But those bands were all guys and now it’s a bunch of girls, people are very quick to jump on this, ‘They can’t have done it all themselves, it must be this industry plant thing’.

There’s a hint of misogyny in that. Their styling and ostentatious approach was their idea from the beginning. They had the crazy ideas for music videos on our first meeting in the coffee shop round the corner. It’s very much all from them, but people for some reason can’t believe that, partly because they’re girls.

DO YOU HAVE TO BECOME A DIFFERENT TYPE OF PRODUCER FOR A NEW BAND VERSUS AN ESTABLISHED ONE?

One of the things I really like about being a producer is it’s a totally different process every time. I’m lucky that I’ve got lots of strings to my bow; I can play and write, do the technical stuff, I mix – I can take the process from the beginning to the end if needs be.

“ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT BEING A PRODUCER IS IT’S A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PROCESS EVERY TIME.”

But, sometimes, it’s going into a room and not doing any of that stuff – it’s just about managing the situation and trying to get people in a state of mind where they feel comfortable enough to come up with ideas in front of each other.

I used to get pretty freaked out if there was tension, like, it’s all going to fall apart. But now, I find that really interesting. I love the dynamics between different people and trying to navigate that. If you go in open, honest and not trying to be too Machiavellian about it, trying to help people get the best out of themselves, you can’t go too far wrong.

YOU’VE HAD A COUPLE OF INTERESTING EXPERIENCES IN THAT AREA IN RECENT YEARS…

Yeah, Depeche Mode’s Spirit was a real baptism of fire. It was at a point where their interpersonal relationships were pretty strained, to say the least.

There was just this tension with Martin [Gore] and Dave [Gahan] that you could cut with a knife and poor Fletch [Andy Fletcher], bless him, got caught in the middle.

It got to a point where Martin was going to leave the band. I got a phone call at 3am from the management, ‘Can you cancel the session tomorrow, we’ve got a problem’. We ended up in this big empty studio, everyone had been sent home and it was like a marriage guidance counselling session with me, the managers and Martin and Dave talking to each other. Eventually, they patched it up and we got through the record, but it was stressful.

AND YET YOU WENT BACK FOR MORE?

We left on quite weird terms, there were a few arguments and stuff, so I was quite surprised when they asked me back to do another record [2023’s Memento Mori]. I agreed to go around one more time, but I was slightly apprehensive.

Then, really unfortunately, a few weeks before we were due to start, poor Andy passed away. It turned out they wanted to carry on and, weirdly, because of that, the whole thing totally flipped on its head.

A brush with mortality meant that Martin and Dave were actually speaking to each other directly for the first time in years and reconnecting. It was a really lovely, easy record to make, and it came out great because of that. It was a very odd, touching experience.

AND THEN YOU DID BLUR’S REUNION ALBUM?

I was always Blur over Oasis. I always respected their writing and liked their melodic choices. I’d worked with Graham and Damon individually and got on with them both, but I know the history: Graham left the band and the last few records have been a bit fraught, so I was like, ‘We could be in for a bumpy ride’. But you can’t turn down the opportunity to be in that situation.

“I WAS ALWAYS BLUR OVER OASIS. I RESPECTED THEIR WRITING AND LOVED THEIR MELODIC CHOICES.”

We had some meetings before we started and they were really tense, you could see a lot of the old bad blood between them; they hadn’t really been in a room together for 10 years. It had the potential to spiral and the first few days were pretty intense, but I took the strategy of trying to plough forward as quickly as possible.

It only took a day or two for it all to start clicking into place. The energy was suddenly really high; it was just about getting through that first bit, and after that, it went really smoothly. By the second week they were all laughing and joking, taking the piss out of each other and reminiscing over weird old stories. I was loving it, I was like a fly on the wall.

DO YOU, LIKE MANY OTHER PRODUCERS, BEAR TIKTOK IN MIND WHEN YOU’RE PRODUCING?

I’ve never thought about it, no. I don’t even know if the 20-second TikTok [clip] feeds into people listening to the music properly.

I definitely don’t cater for the TikTok world, sometimes things get on there that I’ve worked on, but it’s not by any design of mine. It seems like bending to the will of the consumer too much, there’s something a bit icky about it that I find disingenuous. I just don’t think it makes for good art.

SO HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE POTENTIAL THREAT FROM AI?

Music is going to be so easily generated in the future. The only thing that’s going to hold its value will be the top tier of great art, people making great stuff that is human. I can’t believe you’re going to have an AI Leonard Cohen. Maybe that’s me being an old guy, maybe a new generation won’t care, but that human-to-human connection is what drives most people to consume any art or music.

My way of production is very hands-on, physical, about real things. There are so many micro-decisions for better and for worse in the making of music and music production. You might get a facsimile of something someone’s already done, but I defy it to do the same as I would do in
the moment.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE TREND FOR HAVING MULTIPLE CO-WRITERS AND CO-PRODUCERS ON A TRACK?

I’ve been through those situations and, even just doing one or two tracks on a record, if it’s going to be like that, I’m not that interested. I want the whole record to hold together and, if you’ve got different people pulling in different directions, I try and stay away.

All the best records, and the best songs even, are one person’s vision – ideally the person singing the song – and you’ve got a collaborator or some facilitators who help that one, guiding vision go forward. When you’ve got loads of people pulling in different directions, you get this weird, grey, middle bland thing, just by the nature of it.

A lot of those writing rooms are just people trying to get their chords into the middle-eight. It’s about who’s the best salesman in that moment and who’s got the loudest voice. The whole thing just seems a bit marketing [oriented] and that comes across in the music. Those committee writing camps lead nowhere good.

IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, RIGHT HERE AND NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

I’d find a way of getting artists paid more. I’m aware streaming might work if it was going directly to the artist, but it’s this old school music industry model where most of it’s still going to the labels.

We are going to reach a point, if we’re not careful – and we’re probably already there – where the quality of music goes down, because new artists can’t survive. It’s almost impossibly expensive to be in a band at this point in history and where’s that going to leave us in 10 years? We need to find a better system to get artists, especially young artists, paid.

DOES THAT APPLY TO PRODUCERS AS WELL?

It applies to everybody. I’m not complaining, but I’m in a very fortunate position. There are a lot of people struggling to make ends meet.

It also forces people to make music based on commercial decisions. People hark back to the glory days, but there was much more room for manoeuvre when there was more artist-facing money in the music industry. Now, some tech billionaires are making billions and the people actually making the music aren’t getting paid. We’re creating a weird two-tier system.Music Business Worldwide