Marc Almond

"Then we moved on to a U87 with a new capsule in it, which Marc felt more comfortable with, and recorded the rest of the album on that — I'd say about 70 percent — straight into Logic with a Digidesign 001 interface."

"Then we moved on to a U87 with a new capsule in it, which Marc felt more comfortable with, and recorded the rest of the album on that — I'd say about 70 percent — straight into Logic with a Digidesign 001 interface."

"Then we moved on to a U87 with a new capsule in it, which Marc felt more comfortable with, and recorded the rest of the album on that — I'd say about 70 percent — straight into Logic with a Digidesign 001 interface."

Quotes in this article show that Marc Almond's vocals on the seminal "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" were "just" recorded through the Trident Fleximix Mic Preamps, which he apologizes for.

"It was at Mediasound, in Studio C, that recordings for Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret subsequently took place. This time around, Don Wershba was the engineer, and he sat alongside Mike Thorne behind what was, undoubtedly, no run-of-the-mill console.

“At that time, the Studio C setup was, in a word, hideous, but it was also the only one available for Mike to use whenever he wanted,” Wershba explains. “Located in the basement, it had some horrendous tube equipment because it was really just a voice-over room. It had a pair of Trident Fleximix PA consoles that were not set up for recording — they had no monitor section. However, since Mediasound was then one of the best studios around and Mike intended to do a lot of work there on a long-term basis, it actually hand-built a 24-track monitor section with pan pots, aux sends and no EQ. It was beautiful and the two 12-channel boards were stitched together.”

A 24-track, 3M tape machine was used for the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret recording sessions, while Wershba usually monitored on Yamaha NS10s, even though he had the option of listening through Altec 604Es.

“It was a very small control room, but it was loaded with gear,” he continues. “This included [Teletronix] LA2As, [Urei] 1176s, Pultec and Lang EQ, EMT plates, some outboard Neve compressors, [an Eventide] 910 Harmonizer and an early Lexicon digital delay modulation device, which we used a lot because Mike liked it and he was always looking for unusual sounds. Then again, because we weren’t really into outboard mic preamps at that time, I probably just used the mic preamp in the console on Marc’s vocals… and I now apologise for that. Who knew?”