Kerry Hopwood -Touring the angle

Can you tell us a bit about your musical backgrounds? The early years? Did you receive formal musical training in school?

Kerry: I actually didn't do music at school properly as I asked the music teacher about learning piano and she just responded "go and buy a piano" which as my family couldn't afford one didn't exactly help so I used to sneak into the school hall and play around with that one when she wasn't around haha! After school I got a loan through a friend of the family to buy a Minimoog and just absorbed myself with this wonderful device and then I started to build things for it i.e. sequencers, effects, drum machines so this started me off really.

I eventually went to college in the east end of London, in Whitechapel, to the London College of Furniture to learn all this stuff properly. It had a musical department dedicated to teaching the making of most instruments, for example piano's, harpsichords, violins, woodwind as well as guitars etc. They were one of the first institutions to have a musical technology department and so I went there and did acoustics, electronics, maths, music theory and physics plus they had a studio with EMS synths, RSF Kobols, tone generators and a Fairlight which simply switched a huge light on in my head. After college I was torn between going to do a Tonmeister degree at Surrey University as some of my college friends did or rock 'n' roll - the latter won after a trip to Sarm East Studios near the college and when they played me the "just mixed" album that Trevor Horn had made with Grace Jones, Slave To The Rhythm, it became so clear where I wanted to be.... working for BMW perfecting the sound of car door slams or with my head between a huge pair of speakers driving an SSL console....

I, along with countless other youngsters, just tried to get obtain employment in studios, you started at the bottom then, cleaning toilets and making endless tea for no money but even that was hard to find so I took up being a cycle courier in London to make ends meet, it paid really well if you worked hard so I just started to supplement my home made projects with buying equipment so was able to get into Atari's running Pro-24 at an early age, buying samplers and anything else for that matter.

My flatmate, who I was also at college with, had found a job at Paradise Studios in West London and a producer that often worked there had asked him if he knew of anyone, young that could program, build and work a studio AND make tea. My friend suggested me and this was the lucky break I needed so I jumped off my bike and into work with Zeus B Held, a German record producer who had done lots of work in Germany and the UK.

You did the programming for Depeche Mode's album Ultra, was this your first experience with Depeche Mode?

In some ways my first experience was from the Some Bizarre album when I heard Photographic and just went crazy about this new band and sound - I just was a fan since day one, saw most tours and avidly listened to the state of the art production and sounds. Eventually through my work with Bomb the Bass and being on a division of Mute (Rhythm King Records) I worked on a remix of Enjoy The Silence with Tim, he had actually done a couple remixes before too for Depeche Mode.

During the recording of Ultra, you were a part of Bomb the Bass with Tim Simenon, and later 1/3 of the TOY production team, can you tell us a bit about your work with Bomb the Bass and TOY?

Well that came about as Tim really wanted an all rounder to work full time with him so I left Zeus as this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with a promising young artist and producer who was very much in the ascendency. In the early years it was very much a case of just the two of us working in the studio and getting ideas together for numerous projects, i.e. Bomb The Bass, other artists, stuff for visuals. Tim was getting a wide range of projects which was just so interesting to be involved in, truly multimedia I guess. I would program, record, engineer, play, pretty much do anything to help realize Tim's idea's as he was very much into pushing for new stuff all the time so I learnt so much, we both did I think.

As we went on and made Bomb The Bass albums and either remixed or produced tracks for artists like Seal, Björk, Sinead O'Connor, Gavin Friday etc. etc. the workload increased so we eventually took on the amazing engineer Q, whom we had met when he was an assistant engineer at Matrix Studios in London. He stood in one day for our usual engineer that couldn't make the session and we never went back to him as Q was so amazing. We also met and worked with the equally fabulous Dave Clayton and again he pretty much worked full time with us for the couple of years prior to making Ultra.

TOY was post Tim and post Ultra, it was formed as Q, Dave and myself just enjoyed working together and my working relationship with Tim had ended soon after the Depeche Mode album we all made. It was both a great time but also a frustrating time as although we started off well, making an album with a great singer, the music industry was changing and the bottom line was that album projects could no longer afford to employ three people to make an album, we cut back and cut back and eventually Q and I even built a studio in my back garden so that we would never have to pay rent but even then it was hard to financially keep going.

Highlights of TOY, making an album with THE HUMAN LEAGUE working with FLATZ and KARL BARTOS, a project with IVA DAVIES from ICEHOUSE in Australia and a few other things. Low points was the critical acclaim that the Human League album received, stating it was as good as DARE but the record company going bust so it was never promoted. That pretty much spelt the end of us as a going concern. We did start doing some tracks for CAMOUFLAGE as they had been very supportive of what we wanted to do and had liked our work on Ultra and the Human League album but we just never felt we were making them happy and reluctantly called it a day with both the project and the production company

Some of the songs live are quite different than their recorded versions, is this something that comes out of rehearsals with the whole band together trying new things out, or earlier in the programming stages of putting the show together, or both?

It is really a combination of the two things and also sometimes when you literally have to start again with some songs. Some tracks have to be updated like Everything Counts for example and to a degree Photographic which is a hybrid between the original Some Bizarre version and the Speak and Spell version but for 2006. The tracks in rehearsals, even the new ones from Playing the Angel, take on a different flavour as soon as we hit the rehearsal room as Christian has such a unique oversight to playing this stuff. He will have thought long and hard about each track, we'll have talked but he always just blows me away by what he does, he has this ability to change his sound and weave his way through any programming and make it all sound as one, which is fantastic. Obviously The remaining players come into this too but as their parts have been agonized over in the studio there is less room in some ways as Depeche Mode parts can be a very exact science, hence really working on sounds and constantly going to the front of house mix to check all the dynamics and sonics are there.

What other hardware/software is involved in making the show happen from your station?

Well all life as I know it starts with Logic Audio, that is where I prepare everything so I have a rig permanently rigged up on the road as well as a couple of laptops for the hotel room. The road rig then feeds one of the Radar hard disc recorders that we use to run the playback of bass parts, click tracks, cue tracks, sequences etc. I then have another one as a back up and a switcher to switch between the two if one fails mid show. During the show this programming Logic set-up on my G5 becomes the drum processing unit for Christians drums and also it also sends midi patch changes to Martin's guitar rig. The Logic system is slaved to the Radar via MTC. I also send out Timecode to the video department so that their show control software can fire off the screen moves, video playback etc. On the keyboard front I have a bunch of Apple Mac Mini's running Logic Audio as a host for the soft synths, both native to Logic and third party i.e. ImpOscar and Ivory, the piano plug-in. These in turn are connected to MOTU 828MKII's for the audio and midi connectivity. These are controlled by the keyboard controllers on stage. The only synth on stage is the Virus TI!

How have the Depeche Mode tours differed from other tours that you have directed, for example Massive Attack?

Not a huge amount is different, the preparation is pretty similar whatever show you undertake and the actual day to day show running aspect is also quite similar. With Massive Attack I was more involved with the other departments like video and sound than this tour I think just because of the size of the tour and that a lot of the people have history with the band so they don't really need somebody like me interfering haha!

What was it about the TIK that led you to decide to include it in the show? What types of sounds are you using the TIK for?

Well my initial thought was that it is the only synth out there that is good enough for Depeche Mode, with their well documented sound manipulations on the albums over the years you need something very, very good and having had a Virus C in TOY and getting one for the Massive Attack tour, I knew them very well and was the only synth I could honestly put forward for Pete to try out. You can get pretty much anything you want quickly and for live manipulations it is superbly laid out in my opinion.

When you all sat down the organize the patches you would be using for this show, did you find that you re-created sounds from the recorded material with the synths you would be using live, or did you find the need to sample the original recordings or transfer the old samples into the new samplers?

Again it was a combination of the two, some sounds are just so signature that you have to go with a photocopy almost but say with the recent albums where synths sound like guitars and guitars sound like synths the Virus became a useful tool to have at our disposal to get into these sounds.

As Music Director for Depeche Mode, you are running the lives sequences for probably the biggest electronic band world - what is running through your mind every night when you hit the "go" button and start the show?

1). Is it the right song
2). Please Radar God, be kind to me tonight

(and yes we have had operator error on my part and the Radar God has been less kind to me on occasions)

How much flexibility do you have to change the show if the band wants to try an alternate set-list on certain nights?

We have total flexibility, every track is discrete, I did initially ask the band if they wanted to go discrete to an arrangement level i.e. using Ableton Live but Dave made the interesting point that they are not the sort of band that "jam" on tracks, they see it as a whole show and frankly have used tape machine and hard disc playback since day one really so it is part of their live sound.

If you had to pick one show from the past year that you would have wanted every single DM fan on earth to see, that you felt had a special vibe or magic where everything just c licked, what show would it have been?

For me two shows stand out from a lot of great shows, Bremen on this 4th leg and Erfurt on the 2nd leg - just magic and the crowd made the shows along with an amazing performance from Dave and the band. Dave is just top notch every night and I simply do not know how he puts so much into the show each and every gig, truly a great frontman.

What are your plans when “Touring the Angel” comes to an end?

Sit in club class and have a vodka & tonic on the trip back from Israel. I’m either heading for an institution of some kind or onto the George Michael tour.

Thanks a lot for the great interview, Kerry.