ClashMusic's Ten Best And Worst Producers

Welcome to Polls Apart, the Clash barometer of the best and worst facets in music.

At ten, the antithesis of cool – the worst perpetrators of musical crimes. At one, the most influential and heroic saviours. Let count down commence!

This month: PRODUCERS!

10. Phil Spector

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Indiglo rich kid La Roux brazenly stated that “I’m still going to listen to Gary Glitter’s records even though he’s a kiddie-fiddler”, adding for good measure “don't let his problems ruin your life. You’re not buying their personality, you’re buying their music.” So, to summarise; whatever an individual gets up to in their spare time has no bearing on their artistic output. Fucking brilliant. Despite raping minors and callously removing a child’s fundamental right to have their innocence preserved without question, Glitter’s shitty hairspray appropriation of glam rock can nonetheless be enjoyed guilt-free, according to Junior Ackland, as the person who made the music has no emotional bearing on their output. Ignoring for a moment the distress his victims are subjected to every time they unwittingly come into contact with some of his tawdry output, as a society are we really willing to grant artists a free pass to indulge in whatever indiscretion or facile fantasy they desire without it negatively impacting upon our interpretation of their work? Of course not.

Art is the articulation of human emotion and to ignore that would be to remove all subtext and interpretation from its inception. To arbitrarily ignore this past is immature. To acknowledge it and incorporate these personal bruises into any assessment you make of their output is sensible. All of which brings us (eventually) to Phil Spector - a producer who defined much of what we consider modern pop music through his Wall of Sound technique and girl group schematics, was feted by four decades of musicians (The Ronettes and The Beatles through to The Ramones and, erm, Starsailor) and is currently nineteen years deep for murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. So, does the last element make him a shit producer? Nope, but it does retrospectively taint everything he’s done with the grubby smear of a homicidal, egomaniacal, bewigged cunt.

9. Calvin Harris

Fancy seeing you here. It’s old lanky chops - lurking in the background like a crippled daddy longlegs, turning everything he touches into tracing-paper chart fodder so ephemeral its anaemic synths expire halfway down your cochlea. He’s a faecal Midas! Having first emerged with his god-awful appropriation of Eighties culture, Bomber Harris then castrated national treasure Dizzee Rascal through the gashtival of ‘Dance Wiv Me’ before metaphorically lacerating his tongue on the appalling ‘Holiday’.

Should you be suffering day-glo-vu, then it’s probable you endured the late-Nineties boom of garage producers such as MJ Cole; wherein an exciting musical genre is filleted for bones and presented as a bland facsimile intended for the kind of people who use the word peng whilst wearing keffiyahs. Digested read; Calvin Harris is dog eggs.

8. Stock Aitken Waterman

Pop (pp) Informal - Noun; of or for the general public, popular or popularized music. A lively barometer of youth culture turned pejorative in 1986 at the behest of Stock/Aitken/Waterman. See Aryan twins John and Edward Grimes for legacy... Should you be under the age of twenty-five, it’s likely that pop music has always been a debased art-form which functions primarily as a tool in the media planner’s arsenal. Yet hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when a single release represented something more than a multimedia spoke in their journey from soap stardom to Loaded cover shoot.

Despite some early success with the likes of Dead Or Alive and Bananarma, the SAW triptych soon settled into a malignant schematic that valued celebrity over any notion of artistic merit or musical substance. With a litany of aural crimes stretching from The Reynolds Girls and Roland Rat through to Rick Astley and half the cast of Neighbours, this was production line conformity wherein music represented nothing more than a column in an Excel worksheet.

7. Mark Ronson

Fuck about mate. Stop pressing the pseudo-Motown button on your laptop. Stop it. RONSON! STOP IT. You posh wanker... Having tried his hand at gentrifying hip-hop through the trite ‘Here Comes The Fuzz’, Ronson hit pay dirt in 2006 producing Amy Winehouse’s now ubiquitous ‘Back To Black’, giving a chewy appropriation of soul for the iTunes generation.

Rather than revel in his successful coercion of a beehive into Britain’s favourite fuck-up (permanently supplanting smack-oik Doherty), Ronson instead sought to sprinkle his magic (read: wank) all over other people’s songs through the dreadful ‘Versions’. With his Motown-lite coating everything in a thin veil of irrelevance, the horns parping jauntily throughout soon began to sound distinctly like a rape alarm being repeatedly sounded by yet another cover version succumbing to Ronson’s aural rohypnol. Does exactly what it says on the twat!

6. Trevor Horn

In the red corner we have ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Paul McCartney. In the blue, Robbie Williams, t.A.T.u and Charlotte Church. Somewhere betwixt is Trevor Horn’s reputation - daisy-chaining itself to confusion in an attempt to understand why the svelte pop of ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow’ garners critical acclaim, whilst ‘Bodies’ by Gobby Williams is (charitably) not quite so bad as cancer.

As synonymous with the Eighties as cocaine, Dogtanian and the systematic dismantling of our welfare-state by a toff government, Horn is best when joyfully encouraging his charges to jizz their ambitions up the wall. Yet where this creates moments of pop greatness (see 1983’s ‘Relax’), it is also prone to egocentric noodling which Buggle Trev seems worryingly happy to indulge.

5. Basic Channel

Faceless and enigmatic, Basic Channel treat production in a manner that would likely baffle every other fucker on this list. ‘Shun the limelight you say? Retire behind the glass and let the music speak for itself?! But what about the groupies?!! I want my underage blow-job and I want it now!’

The pseudonym of Berlin blokes Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, Basic Channel wove minimal tech into spacious tapestries that were released over a yard of extremely limited vinyl that acted as a clear inspiration for the dubstep hauntology of Burial (both in sound and visibility). Alongside luminaries such as Carl Craig, Richard D. James and Mika Vainio, Basic Channel took electronic music and expanded its boundaries with a lightness of touch that left fingerprints all over contemporary music without recourse to manu stuprare.

4. Timbaland

Question! Timbaland. Kanye. Pharell. What do they all have in common? Answer: they don’t know when to say no... Confusing prodigious talent with prodigious output, hip-hop producers seem more prone than most to merrily churn out releases with little recourse to an effective quality-control filter. So, whilst Timbaland (real name Timothy Zachery Mosley) can list stone-cold classics like Justin Timberlake’s ‘My Love’, Missy Elliot’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ and Jay-Z’s ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’ on his CV, there is a shit-load of fiscal filler oozing throughout his discography. But do we care? Frankly no.

Timbaland may have an unappealing egotistical streak that sees him mugging away in videos and muttering his way into countless performance credits, yet his production peaks are of such unfettered clarity it would surely nullify bestial incest when negotiating guest-lists with St. Peter. Fidgety, broadminded and oft understated, Timbaland’s place on this list would have been assured if he had nothing other than Aaliyah’s ‘More Than A Woman’ to call his own. Or Justin’s ‘Cry Me A River’. Or Missy’s ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’. In other words, he’s earned the right to be shit.

3. Rick Rubin

Looking like a cross between Karl Marx and the chap who hawks The Big Issue outside Manchester’s Arndale Centre, on a purely aesthetic level Rick Rubin is not your stereotypical producer. But then neither is his client list. Bringing with him a sonic genealogy that introduced hip-hop to the mainstream through the Beastie Boys’ frathaha, Rubin has a remarkable ability to highlight an artist’s defining trait then bring it to the fore in a fashion that seems retrospectively obvious but notably absent in previous forays.

Two recent examples of this are Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems’ and Johnny Cash’s rendition of Trent Reznor’s ‘Hurt’ - wherein arguably the regents of their respective genres tackled emotionally blunt subject matter that explored the entwined notions of mortality and legacy. Whilst lesser producers could have struggled to rein in these egos and become cowed by their formidable reputations, Rubin deftly folded their XL personalities around pristine distillations of what people expected to hear; resulting in two songs that on first listen appeared stereotypical but soon revealed a portmanteaux of texture and emotion.

2. Quincy Jones

Being a good producer requires patience, encouragement and a willingness to sacrifice your creative output to someone else’s career. Being a great producer requires the ability to admit you were wrong. Having slagged ‘Billie Jean’ off to high-heaven and attempted to get it shanked clean off ‘Thriller’, Quincy Jones eventually recognised its unfettered greatness and set about getting it mixed ninety-one times to achieve what became possibly the greatest pop single of all time.

Already an artist in his own right, Jones earned his production stripes tweaking the desk for Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Andy Williams and Ella Fitzgerald - but only came to indelibly mark Western culture with his work alongside Michael Jackson. Chronicled across three albums (‘Off The Wall’, ‘Thriller’ and ‘Bad’), Jones guided Jackson from broiling funk and strobed R&B through to agit-pop and saccharine ballads, whilst ensuring those who delighted in denigrating and vilifying the man would always have to negotiate a formidable body of work that will long outlive the callous sterility of a toxicology report.

1. George Martin

When The Beatles first auditioned for George Martin he was not impressed. Christ no. To paraphrase; ‘You, my chaps, are gash wipe - fire laughing-boy on the skins and speed things up.’ They did, and now we have The Beatles: Rock Band... Accurately referred to as the fifth Beatle, George Martin can legitimately lay claim to having helped define the cultural landscape in which we currently reside - acting as a musical Sat-Nav to McCartney and Lennon’s raw combustion of talent.

Examples of Martin’s overt influence include his insistence that ‘Please Please Me’ should be cluster-fucked from a soppy ballad into its teeth-rattling incarnation, the introduction of a string quartet to further blush ‘Yesterday’, and firing up ‘A Day In The Life’ through a breathtaking orchestral dynamo. Yet for all his tacit musical contributions it is the backroom machinations that establish Martin as the peak of production fitness, taking two separate takes of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and through meticulous deployment of vari-speed creating something that is nigh on perfect. That’s right; perfect. And if you don’t agree, we’ll set La Roux on you.

Words by Adam Park