Chappell, who has been working at Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the U.K. for almost 20 years, came to St. Petersburg by invitation from local musician and producer Viktor Sologub, who first gained underground fame with ska pioneers Stranniye Igry, or Strange Games, in the 1980s. Sologub’s other bands include indie rockers Igry and, most recently, electronic band Deadushki.
The two met at Real World Studios in January when Sologub was doing some production work for an upcoming album by award-winning Uzbek world-music singer Sevara Nazarkhan.
“Viktor came to the studio to do some more production work there with a friend of mine, Bruno Ellingham, who is another producer there,” said Chappell, who was working on mixing a Robert Plant concert for release on DVD at the time.
“He kept coming to my studio, listening to what I was doing, and there we’re very friendly, and there’s many rooms to use in the studio, and you walk in and out, say hello to people. So Viktor came in and we were talking, and he said, ‘Come to St. Petersburg.’ He kept saying that, and he came back again, maybe last month, and again he said, ‘You need to come to St. Petersburg.’ So I came.”
Chappell joined the staff of Real World Studios, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on June 28, early in its history. The 20-year milestone was marked with live performances by various artists including Plant and Gabriel.
Chappell started at the studio in 1987, when he was 17, initially as a tea boy.
“I took a recording class at school, and it was a little four-track machine, and it was a two-year class of learning about sound and how to record things, it was the only one in England at that time” said Chappell.
“We would listen to The Beatles and to Steely Dan and all these amazing recordings, and we’d have to sit in the dark and listen and analyze, like, all these different records and get to talk about them. It’s a very inspiring class, very interesting, so at that point [I decided that] I’d like to be a recording engineer.
“And basically I found that I wasn’t clever enough, I wasn’t getting the right exams that would take me to the right university to do the proper university recording course. So I left and I joined a band and that didn’t work out, and I went to college to study some more. In college you have career advisers in England, and my career adviser said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘I still want to be a recording engineer.’ He said, ‘Find a recording studio in this area.’ So I found a studio called the Real World Studios in the phone book and I called them up and asked, ‘Are you looking for anybody to come and work, you know, just making tea and being a runner?’ And they said, ‘Actually we are right now. We’ve just been built and nobody knows about us, so come for an interview.’
“So I went for an interview and a guy there, Mike Large, who is one of Peter [Gabriel]’s managers and the general manager of Real World gave me a job! So I stayed there on trial for a few weeks, and then they kept me on and I’ve been there ever since. So I learned basically all my skills within that environment.”
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Richard Chappell in St. Petersburg this month.
Now Chappell is Gabriel’s full-time engineer, rarely having time to work on anything else. Always a perfectionist, Gabriel takes a while to work on an album, with his most recent, the 2002 album “Up,” being seven years in the making.
“It takes several years, and sometimes there are breaks, so you might get a month to do something else, if you want to, but generally it’s Monday-to-Friday working just on whatever he’s got going,” said Chappell.
Sometimes Gabriel can be somewhere in the building, but then he has a musical idea and comes to the studio, where keyboards and microphones are always on, waiting for him.
“The immediacy of recording is really important,” said Chappell.
“You need to have everything ready all the time to be able to record, because otherwise you’re going to lose the moment. You’re going to lose the instancy of somebody getting an idea. And my boss, particularly, is quite random in his approach to music, so he will suddenly come up with an idea, and maybe he’ll be in the office, and he comes running over and sits down, and he wants to be recording straight away. So yeah, generally all his keyboards and all his microphones are always open, so at any time, he can hit ‘record’ on something. It’s always very important.”
Real World Studios was founded by Gabriel for his world-music projects as well as for his own work in June 1986. The studio, built in a well-lit 18th century watermill and surrounded by water, is special a place for music making.
