The Spotlight: Interview With Neil Hudson (Interview By Paul Hutchings)

Interview with Neil Hudson of Krysthla & Initiate Audio

As guitarist, producer and main writer for Northamptonshire powerhouses Krysthla, Neil Hudson is a man in demand. Not only have the band dropped their third album Worldwide Negative this year, possibly the best extreme metal album of 2019, but they stepped out on the main stage at Bloodstock on the Saturday of this year’s festival to a huge response. Alongside that, Hudson runs Initiate Audio and Media, a recording studio in Wellingborough where he adds the experience of over 25 years in the UK music industry to a range of bands and their material. This year Neil has produced new material from Ashen Crown, Blood Oath and Ashborn, to name but three. Krysthla had just completed a three-date tour of Scotland when I caught up with Neil to have a chat about his career, his progress and his plans.

Neil has always lived in the same area of the UK, along with his current band mates and his first memories of music were of his dad and his love of big bands and jazz. “He loved drums. He always used to say “the music’s all well and good boy, but if you’ve got a good drummer, you’ve got a good band. You can have rubbish music, but a good drummer makes the band”, and that stuck with me for all these years”. Alongside the big band music, Neil’s mum loved Barry Manilow and the like, and with his sisters also into the 80s music of Duran Duran and A-Ha, there was always music in the Hudson household. “It was a good melting pot, a good influence really” Neil adds.

The first record Neil ever bought for himself was Talk Of The Devil, the double live album by Ozzy Osbourne. “My sister’s boyfriend at the time, he rode a motorbike, had the mullet and tattoos, and he listened to Black Sabbath and I thought, “oh, this is pretty cool”, and then he introduced me to Iron Maiden, Ozzy (who shares his birthday with Neil, fact fans!). I used to listen to that album non-stop, it terrified me, and I loved it at the same time. My next-door neighbour had just moved in and one Saturday morning I was lying in bed and I heard this clean, plucky Fender guitar coming from his house.” Being the curious type, Neil wandered round and knocked the door. “This guy in a Pink Floyd T-shirt with ripped holes in it answered it with his Fender in his hand and goes “alright”. And I said, “was that you playing the guitar? Can I come and see what you are doing?” Two hours later Neil had learnt three chords, G C and D and had spent his time strumming those chords whilst the Floydian neighbour jammed away over the top. “And that was it” Neil said. From there, he borrowed The Song Remains The Same, the Led Zeppelin video from 1976 filmed at Madison Square Gardens and having watched that alongside Talk Of The Devil, the love of the guitar had been fully cemented.

Talk Of The Devil featured Brad Gillis, who stepped in after the tragic demise of Randy Rhoads, and he, along with Jimmy Page were influential but when it comes to other guitar heroes Neil doesn’t really have that many. “I never found Zeppelin a riff heavy band”, Neil noted, “it was a mix of everything that made the band”. Interestingly Neil cites Mark Bolan. “My brother in law had T-Rex albums and Life’s A Gas, that was the first track I really learnt to play by myself, and when I’d figured that out, I was thinking, I can do this. Then you discover Ozzy and it was more difficult. Growing up, Dimebag, and Pantera, Metallica in general, the clean riffing. I like their approach, simple, not particularly complicated but effective. But I don’t really follow guitar players that much, I tend to write my own thing and don’t pay attention to what others do”.

As Neil has played more extreme music with Violation, Gutworm and of course Krysthla, I wanted to know how he got to that section of the genre. Neil explained that some friends and he used to have a tape player at school, and they’d play mixed tapes at lunch time whilst kicking the ball around. “The heaviest thing we had was probably Pantera”, Neil recalls, “and a guy we didn’t knock around much called Raymond came over with a tape and asked if he could put some music on. We were like “what??” but we let him, and it turned out to be Arise by Sepultura. We heard the intro, and all stopped playing football and went “what the hell is that?” to which Raymond said “I thought you might like this! We spent the rest of the lunchtime ignoring our lunch and the ball as we huddled around the tape player as this next level brutality blew our minds. We became friends with Raymond straight away!”

Neil was 17 when he started in Violation, around 1994, and recounts the day he started the band. Having passed his driving test, Neil found himself at a house party where everyone else had arrived in fancy dress. “There was a guy there in a black thong and a black basque with his hair up and loads of make-up on and it turned out to be Ade!! (Mayes – singer of Krysthla) That was my first introduction to him. He saw me air guitaring in the corner to And Justice For All on my own and he came over and said “you play guitar?” and we talked about thrash and music and then he said “we should start a band” and on the back of a paper plate in lipstick he wrote down his phone number! It could have gone two ways, but we started Violation and it went from there.

Whilst Neil acknowledges that Violation “did alright” on the local circuit and certainly got some decent gigs (e.g. Terroriser Christmas bash with Iron Monkey), Gutworm was another beast altogether. “Things moved a lot faster” says Neil, “I think we were a lot more of our time, more current back then. It was simple, low tuned and noisy. I think a lot of people got into it straight away”. Gutworm’s 20th gig turned out to be in LA, at a festival which Neil now admits “we had no idea what was going on”.

The band didn’t know too much about the festival until they joined the artist accreditation line and started looking around. “I’m pretty sure that’s Testament” he recalls, “and I’m pretty sure that’s Converge. Oh, and there’s Mortician, there’s The Haunted. We were like, “Oh my god, what is going on!” It turned out to be a much bigger bill that the band had expected and as Neil described it “a huge wakeup call”. Having been offered another festival in New Jersey off the back of their performance, Gutworm experienced similar moments of disbelief!” The band went on to tour the UK relentlessly, adding in shows at the likes of Hellfest along the way.

Looking back Neil acknowledges that Gutworm may have been a little too independent at the time, “we decided to row our own boat a little too much” he says, “a little bit insular you know, so we maybe shot ourselves in the foot, if we’d maybe looked at getting a little more help on the professional side, which is something we learned in Krysthla, because there are people that are experts doing certain jobs, and we do the music, but we didn’t do any of that back then. We ended up signing a couple of record deals, one with Cultural Minority/SPV who had some big bands like Motörhead, and then we spent six-eight weeks in Germany recording an album that never saw the light of day. That went horribly wrong for about two years which prevented us from playing or recording for about two years”. The band then signed to Anti-Culture Records who put out the first Gutworm album. “Gutworm was definitely a learning experience”.

There is a love hate relationship for musicians with the studio and what I wanted to know next was what sparked Neil’s interest in recording and producing. Neil explained that many years ago he had a hernia operation and whilst recuperating on his mother’s sofa Neil asked Lee (Mason, who had already been with Neil in Violation and Gutworm) to lend him his old four-track recorder so that Neil could record some ideas. “I’ve always been interested in why a record sounded a certain way, so why Obituary would sound one way and why Sepultura sounded a different way. It contained the same kind of thing, distortion, drums, screaming, yelling whatever, but they sound slightly different and I was always intrigued as to why. Then you get into recording things at home and you go, ahh, okay, so this does this when I put that effect on or whatever”.

Neil really enjoyed this passage of discovery and it helped with the development of demos. Of course, when Neil then went to the studio to record, he wanted to know more from the engineer he was working with. “I was really keen to learn, and about 20 years ago, I got my first laptop with a digital audio workstation with sonar on it and a little interface and ran it from there. Once I could work in the computer a bit more, then it went crazy because you had 64 tracks to work with, it was a lot easier to make the sounds I wanted to in a way I wanted to.” This then spiralled as Neil realised that if he could do demos for his bands this way, then he could do other bands as well.

Although the hernia recovery was the catalyst, Neil is sure he would have got into this field anyway. “I’m too much of a control freak not to be at the core of what’s making the sounds. Standing back and watching someone else turn the dials absolutely grinds my gears”. He adds “I’m glad I learnt to do it way before anything digital though, because you had to learn everything, you had to be efficient with tapes, because of course the more you record over tape the worse the sound gets. Each time you add effects and move to a new tape to add more stuff the quality gets worse, so you had to focus on the quality control and write something that was good and nail it early on with your ideas. I think I learnt a more efficient work ethic; it makes you a better player and engineer when you have had to struggle a bit to get what you wanted. It has certainly benefited my work approach. I learnt to do it properly even though it’s easier with digital”.

I asked Neil how receptive the engineers he pestered in those early days were. Neil was keen to give credit and cited Greg Chandler from Priory Studios in Birmingham. “He’s a really good guy, we’ve got a lot of time for Greg; he’s a great guy and a good engineer and plays in Esoteric, a doom band who play all over Europe and he really knows his stuff. He was forthcoming with information”.

Neil is keen to know what bands influences are when he works with them these days, so that he knows where their vibe is. “Some bands prefer energy over quality, whilst others prefer quality over energy. You must then find the middle ground as you want it to sound good. Is it raw like Converge or polished like Killswitch? A lot of bands use similar software and techniques and whilst the quality may be good, they are stating to funnel themselves down an alley very similar sounding to each band, even though they might play slightly different sounding music. The sounds are the same. It’s a little shallow and it does bore me a little. You can listen to a band you like on Spotify and then listen to another band and it will sound just like the band you were just listening too. Sonically it sounds the same. I try to give each band their own ‘sound’ and hope they understand what I am aiming at.”

I wondered if bands were receptive to that approach and Neil was happy to confirm that most of the bands do get it. “The older bands, those that have been doing it for a while, they understand a bit more, they want to have that individuality. As a band in the modern age you must stand out somehow, and unless you are prepared to do ultra-shocking things on stage to get noticed then you have to rely on your music”. Neil will focus on the bands a band likes, what era and what sounds the like when he first meets them, in order to have an idea about snare sounds, guitar tones, gear etc. This helps him to establish what will work and what won’t before the band even gets to the studio.

Bill Snide was the first band that Neil recorded, using his laptop and some minor bits of equipment and got the band in at a rehearsal room and did their demo and it turned out well. “I found it was easier to coax players to deliver better performances than they did at practice. You can’t smash through it all when you are recording like you would when you are at a gig with minor errors. You must be more stringent about what you let through the net!” Neil says he felt it was a natural thing for him to be able to sit there and encourage, correct and support “Having your eye on the ball for performance and things it was pretty natural for me”. The next band Neil worked with was Black Ink Sun, who were local to Northampton. They approached Neil after their first demo hadn’t delivered what they wanted. Neil then moved to Big Noise Studio and rented a room there, picking up work from the bands who were rehearsing upstairs. That was about six – seven years ago.

Neil has upgraded his equipment although he is quite reserved about what ‘toys’ he does pick up. “If you have a good signal, good amplifier and guitar, good microphone and good set of preamps then the rest will all be in the performance. You can spend thousands on amazing gear but if the players don’t play well it will still sound terrible. I try and capture the character of the player. That’s past of the task. I have a lot more gear than I actually need, and you have your core elements that you always use which tends to forge your sound as an engineer”. Neil is happy with how things are sounding in the studio now, and if you’ve listened to any of the bands, he has recorded this year you’ll see why.

Unsurprisingly the conversation turned back to Krysthla. With Neil having produced all three of the bands albums I was keen to know what the learning curves within the band across the three releases had been. Neil confirmed that from the debut release they had released that Ade has what Neil described as a ‘golden hour’, when his voice hits peak quality for the band’s sound. “It takes him a lot longer to warm up for a recording that for a live show, as the tone has to be so much better when you are recording. We figured out that it takes almost two hours for his voice to switch on fully. We will be recording a track, and I like to have lots of layers to choose from, so he’ll end up doing the same song all the way through six or seven times. We figured out after doing all these takes that out of nowhere his voice would sound twice as big from out of nowhere. And so, we’d pick specific verses and then I’d go, “sorry mate, we need to go back and do it all again as your voice is on fire”.

So, we figured out early on that we had to bash his voice in for about two hours. But it’s more fun recording other bands rather than your own because there is always an element of over criticism of your own work. For me it’s the extra 5-10% which makes a good record become a great record. You kind of get a little stuck with some of the nitty gritty and it’s easy to get too far away from the vision of the song. I’ve learnt to be more efficient with the demo stages before you get to record the real thing. You get to go to town on all your demos and listen to them for a couple of weeks and then when you do the real thing it’s a really stripped back, efficient, perfect version”.

Neil won’t listen to the newly recorded music for about six months as he always listens out for the negative things about the production. So, whilst he can listen to A War Of Souls And Desires and Peace In Our Time it will be a little while before he can enjoy what we already do with Worldwide Negative. Neil notes that there was less of the issues on the new album. “I always tell bands I work with not to listen with a critical ear; go away and listen to it and enjoy what you’ve got. I can put on the Black Album (Metallica) which is one of the best recorded metal albums ever and I can still find flaws in it and what I’d have done it differently”. Whilst Neil is super critical of his own work, he reassures bands that if he is happy, they should also be happy. “All bands should be critical in some ways, because they are passionate about what they do and they care about their songs and they spend a lot of money on equipment and time on rehearsing and gigging and you want that song to be the ultimate representation of your band. I understand that because I am critical. I am better at listening to it now than I was”.

Of course, the test of a good producer is how the music sounds in the final product and we discussed that with the current trend to listen to music through less traditional equipment, if a release can sound good from a phone through earbud speakers then you now that the job has been done properly. As Neil pointed out, there is a sad irony of a band spending lots of money on recording and taking time off work only for their music to be listened to via MP3 and tinny headphones. “No one has nice stereos anymore. It’s a bit heart-breaking for me. However, a good engineer will ensure that if you are listening to something through a good system, then there is a payoff there and there will be some stuff you can pick up”.

As our interview meandered to a close, I asked Neil about his wish list for the future. “I’ve said this many times, and if it doesn’t happen, I shall be very upset, but I want it to happen one day, by absolute fluke, I want to record Metallica. I think there is something inherent in Metallica that is in so many bands. Over the years, with the different productions they have had, I don’t like their production sound. We were listening to Hardwired on the way to Scotland in the van last weekend and I was listening to it saying that snare is doing my nut in, and Ade said, “I think it sounds really good” and I said, “yes, it’s good quality, but it doesn’t sound like Metallica, it sounds like someone has remixed it on a laptop. There was something about it I don’t like”.

Ironically, the Blood Oath video had just been released and Neil continues “I said to Ade, “stick Blood Oath on” so he did and we put it through the same speaker and as soon as the beat kicked in Ade looked at me and screwed his face up. So, I’d really love to get Metallica in my tiny little studio and do an album with them that would shock everybody. Something that is super heavy, rather than something heavy hard rock which is what they have been doing. If they did that album, then they could quit whilst they are on top. Haha!!”

And what about the immediate plans? “It would be great to get a couple of bigger bands in, maybe those a bit higher up the ladder than Krysthla, that would be good. When you get that level then the proficiency of the players also gets better, so then you have more time to try ideas and produce things rather than worrying about the time and getting the takes down. If you get a band in and they struggle with some of the parts, you are clock watching a little bit. When bands can really kick out the performances you can work with them a bit more. So, getting a few of those type bands in the next couple of years is the immediate goal”. With most of the work coming to Neil via word of mouth, music being shared through social media etc, it’s Neil’s own work which is the advert. “I can’t say I’ve pushed the studio that hard if I’m honest” he admits, “I share the videos and tell bands to share their stuff. I like the organic flow which is happening with it”.

Neil isn’t resting on any laurels though, as he told me he is currently mixing and mastering the final stages for an EP with From Eden To Exile. “They are a top band, one of our favourite local bands and their EP is brilliant” says Neil. “Always good to work with them”. Next month Neil also has Coventry Metal To The Masses alumni Djinova in the studio and following that he reveals that he is planning album number 4 for Krysthla. “We never really stop, I’m always writing, at rehearsal, when sound checking, and when I get a break, I’ll take a bit of gear home and smash out some stuff”.

A genuinely fabulous guy, this was an interview which was great fun to do. Neil clearly knows his stuff, has the experience and grounding to give bands the quality that they need and with a set-up that is both professional but also relaxed and welcoming. My thanks to Neil for his time. If you want to get in touch with him, then the webpage is https://www.initiateaudioandmedia.com/ where you can find all the necessary contact details.