‘The vision of Daniel O’Donnell’s velour tracksuit is hard to dislodge’

Paul Brewer remembers his first music moment of his life when his friend Alan played him The Jam's Going Underground as a teen in Tullamore.

“I can still see the tape going round in his little Ferguson machine and thinking ‘OK, that’s different,’” Brewer recalls.

“Let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow,” sings Paul Weller on his band’s 1982 hit. Brewer’s career in music has a forward-looking outlook, a fascination of a craft that lead him to work with musicians singing far from the underground.

As many teens do, Brewer picked up an instrument, settled on bass guitar but wanted more. A Fás course on electronics in Athlone in 1981 was his way in the world of music. Brewer hung around a local studio until he was given a job. The studio was booked with country bands such as Ray Lynam and The Hillbillies. For one period of six months, the two in-house engineers didn’t have a day off – alternating between day and night shifts.

Learning the ropes
Brewer was surprised in that time to discover that the artists on stage were not always the ones in the recording studio, as they hired session musicians.

“That was a complete eye-opener to me in the country scene, but I learned an appreciation for someone who is super-quick, skilful and has great gear.”

Brewer credits those session musicians with accelerating his music knowledge.

“Some of the country and Irish stuff was not very three-dimensional but those guys were skilled and I learned an awful lot from them. Had I taken a rock’n’roll route, it might have taken me a lot longer to get that same information, because they have an appreciation for the whole Nashville thing which was very technical.”

Brewer was also in the studio when Daniel O’Donnell was doing his first recording session. “The vision of the velour tracksuit he wore is hard to dislodge,” Brewer chuckles.

By 1988, Brewer had expanded his work into Dublin, working in Westland and doing front-of-house sound in the Baggot Inn as well as working with Something Happens, Christy Moore, Christy Dignam and Donal Lunny. All the while, he kept up the country gigs, working as sound supervisor on 10 Daniel O’Donnell RTÉ TV programmes and doing sound for Ray Lynam in Bad Bob’s.

The touring lifestyle
Brewer began to get booked for jobs out of the studio and went on tour with That Petrol Emotion at age 27, touring in the UK, Europe and the US. It was his first taste of life on the road.

“We had two buses - one for the crew and one for the band, which turned out to be one for the sleepers, one for the partyers, as it does. I only started drinking when I was 27.”

While back in Dublin, it was a chance meeting on Ha’penny Bridge that took him on the Something Happens tour. It was Sunday and they needed a crew member to fly out with them on Wednesday. Brewer ended up doing two tours in the US that year. As well as an opportunity to see the world, touring was also a way to save money.

“I remember some of the bands were on £150 per week per head from the record company,” Brewer remembers. “We were getting £80 a day plus per diems. We were also getting paid every day you were away from home, so the travel days, off days too.”

Madness and myths
Work with one of his favourite bands, Madness followed with Brewer tasked with looking after stage equipment and instruments. In 1992, Madness staged the Madstock comeback gigs in Finsbury Park in London to 72,000 a night. Brewer remembers it being responsible for another memorable music moment.

“I remember being on stage and they came out, there was 10 or 15 minutes of intense intense roaring from the crowd. I’d never experienced anything like that. It was a major event.”

A myth developed around Madstock that claimed the gig was so loud it caused an earthquake.

Back to the studios
With those experiences no doubt ringing in his ears, Brewer returned to studio work. "I had done my bit of travelling," he says. "The important thing is that the work is done rather than it's difficult."

From the mid 1990s onwards, Brewer reopened a studio in Tullamore but wore himself out again. In 2003, he was managing the music technology floor in Dublin store Musicmaker and working for the equipment supply company Audio Warehouse.

In 2011, Brewer started working as an audio consultant under the Genius Move Studio name (named after a That Petrol Emotion song), supplying and installing studios and working with Munro Acoustics and Level Acoustics Design, and it’s a field he has stuck to ever since.

Most of his construction and design work has been in the UK, including studios in Tileyard Studios in London, Tape Studio in Edinburgh and clients such as Basement Jaxx, Mark Ronson, Temper Trap, Starsmith, Biffco and, in Ireland, James Vincent McMorrow and Gavin Glass’s Orphan Recording Studio. Next up, intriguingly, is building a studio for “a guy who’s dad owns a world-famous record label in the UK”.

Last year, Brewer completed a Masters in Creative Music Technologies in NUI Maynooth with the goal of getting into teaching, but whatever he's pursuing, Brewer still feels the indelible impression of Going Underground on his life. Last year, he met the engineer of that single, Roger Bechirian, and ended up going to see The Jam's retrospective show with him.

Brewer keeps that link to his musical spark in the midlands too. He's still in a new wave covers band called The Fanzines, "playing bass enthusiastically", with his old friend Alan, who first played the song for him. Yes, Going Underground is in the set.

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