Dave Meegan
When a young Dave Meegan was at school in the late seventies, his heart was already set on having something to do with music. He ran his own pirate radio station, playing mainly punk but Rush was ever-present. “My best mate had a few bands that he just tried to jam down my throat and one of them was Rush,” he says. “I couldn’t be found dead with a Rush tape, even though I was tempted to listen I would always refuse to!”
Having set up his own recording studio in his dad’s garage, Dave got a job as a tape operator at Sarm East Studios in London. He worked mainly for Peter Collins, assisting Peter’s engineer Julian Mendelson. “I was Julian’s assistant of choice most of the time,” says Dave, who learned a great deal under Peter’s wing. “Peter let me do things that I felt confident enough to do,” says Dave. “He had a Fairlight at the time, he used to let me borrow it at weekends, and I would try and learn on it. I never wanted to be just a tape op, I wanted to get into as much as possible.” Dave needn’t have worried. “One evening I asked Dave to come up with some ideas for the basic groove of Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’, he came up with an amazing programme,” says Peter Collins. “I am very aware he was much more than just an assistant.”
Peter was Dave’s mentor. “I was three years working on sessions for him,” says Dave. “He could give you a hard time over things as well, like smarten yourself up. He acted like my dad a couple of times, but at the right time, and he sorted me out otherwise I would have fucked things up in my career if it wasn’t for a couple of things he said.”
Most of the projects Dave was involved in were pop- oriented, despite the occasional opportunity to work with artists such as Gary Moore and Phil Lynott. “English pop things was not where my heart and soul was really,” says Dave. “When something like Rush came in, it’s just exciting when you love the music just as much as the work and it sounded great as well.” When Dave started working with Rush, he was just starting to pick up engineering roles. “That’s why, half way through ‘Power Windows’, Heff Moraes took over from me, because I had to go engineer for Trevor Horn,” he says. “It would have been to do an in-house, ZTT project.”
Dave’s portfolio went from strength to strength from this point on, with his big break coming with engineering U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’, back in Dublin. He earned his producer’s stripes in the US, and more recently has been working with Marillion in the UK where he has a “sixth member” reputation. He is still in touch with his roots, developing new acts such as Carrie Tree and Pave. “It’s all down to home production, luck and hard work!”