The Recording

The album was recorded at Strawberry Studios, 3 Waterloo Road, Stockport, Cheshire and at The Manor, Shipton on Cherwell, Oxfordshire. It was produced by Godley & Creme. Martin Lawrence engineered and mixed it.

Peter Cook wrote all the dialogue and performed most of it - with help from his wife Judy Huxtable (Lulu), Peter Wheeler and Andy Peebles. Sarah Vaughan sang on 'Lost Weekend'. Mel Collins played sax on 'When Things Go Wrong'.

The album used the then-fashionable Sennheiser Dummy Head stereo system in some scenes, most noticably the 'burial' sequence. In order to create the impression that the listener is inside a coffin during a burial, a Dummy Head mic was placed behind a board at the foot of a flight of stairs, and Kevin Godley shovelled sand on to it. It should be remembered that Consequences pre-dated digital audio gear like sequencers and samplers; this makes the achievement all the more impressive. For example, to quote from Paul Gambaccini's sleeve notes:

Getting a guitar to sound like a saxophone seemed like an impossible task, but it was achieved after three days in the studio. Each note of a guitar solo was recorded separately and faded in on the track so there would be no percussive element. The track was sent through a speaker and out of a rubber hose with perforated cigarette paper at the end. Enough pressure was displaced by forcing the sound through the holes of the cigarette paper to give the rasp of a saxophone.

© 2008 Giles Booth / OtherMachines