John Leckie on Record Production

John Leckie sits down with George Shilling in Abbey Road's Studio Three, in front of an audience, where many of his early sessions happened. He says he started on 15 February 1970, at 19, after Ken Townsend interviewed him and rang weeks later to ask if he could start on Monday. He turned up in loon pants and a market-stall T-shirt among engineers in suits and ties, and took the place of a tape operator, or tape op, sacked on the spot for having his shoes off on a session at three in the morning.

Classical and pop engineers never crossed over, and the first thing a tape op learnt on a classical date was never to cough during a 20-minute playback. He spent most mornings of 1970 on Sir Adrian Boult's Beethoven symphonies and his nights with Pink Floyd. Mickey Most, whose sessions in Studio Three could be number one the next week, taught him the song was everything, with 24 musicians cut on eight tracks, four songs in three hours.

Studio Three then faced the other way, and its control room had the building's only window, onto the zebra crossing. While he was making XTC's second album there, someone from Virgin asked the former prime minister Edward Heath, conducting a choir in Studio One, whether he would like to meet a punk band, and Heath spent his lunchtime with XTC. The new Neve desk was switched on for the first time the night before Pink Floyd began Wish You Were Here and hummed deafeningly, and the staff stayed up fixing it in time for the first take of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. The record he is proudest of is the Dukes of Stratosphear, XTC's 60s psychedelic alter ego, made in about 12 days at Chapel Lane in Herefordshire.

One reason he left in 1978 was that Abbey Road would not hire him out to Virgin. On the day he left he had three albums in the top 30 and a top 20 single.