Stephen Tayler
Despite an in-depth musical education, Stephen Tayler decided he’d rather be a recording engineer than follow a directly musical career. “I didn’t want to go into the recording industry and be perceived as a frustrated musician, so I actually played it down,” he says. “I never wanted to come across as the know-it-all musician!” All the same, he could not help bringing his musical knowledge into his engineering. For a number of years he worked at Trident Studios as a staff engineer, which at the time meant being very much tied to the studio. “There was the Trident school of thought and the Air Studio school of thought, each had an identity,” says Stephen, who was on occasion assisted by Reno Ruocco and Mike Donegani. Unknown to Stephen, Rush also worked at Trident during his time there, mixing ‘Hemispheres’ in 1978.
Having worked with such artists as Brand X, Bill Bruford and Peter Gabriel, Stephen formed a lasting alliance with musician/producer Rupert Hine. “He knew that I was very musical,” says Stephen. “Our first collaborations were testimony to both sonic and musical experimentation.” These included Howard Jones’ ‘Human’s Lib’, released in 1984 and the first of many chart albums for the pair, including for Tina Turner and The Thompson Twins. In the late eighties and early nineties respectively, Stephen worked with Rupert on ‘Presto’ and ‘Roll The Bones’ for Rush, at Le Studio in Morin Heights. “He was very, very important to those albums,” says Rupert. “He is an astonishing engineer.”
While continuing to engineer, Stephen started to consider once again how he could make his own music, in particular as technology had started to lower the bar for production facilities. With his partner, Canadian-born Sadia, the pair released an album ‘Equa’ in 1996. “We are talking the early days of sampling and assimilating different styles of music,” says Stephen. “I started to realise that there was going to be more and more integration, it wouldn’t do to just be a blinkered specialist anymore.” His experience diversified into a wide spectrum of world music and fusion styles, notably working on the soundtrack for the film ‘The Fifth Element’.
Today, Stephen runs a production company Chimera Arts with Sadia. In 2003 the pair worked on music for the documentary ‘The Noon Gun’, and they have recently recorded a live DVD for Howard Jones, and visited Australia with Sadia’s video and sound installation ‘The Memory of Water’. Despite the levelling aspect of technology, Stephen is sanguine, indeed positive about the future. “At some point all things are possible to everybody,” he says. “What do you have to offer any more, other than your specific talent – it is coming back full circle.”