CEO Secrets: 'I smashed my platinum discs - then rebuilt them'
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Sir Robin Millar displays his platinum and gold discs in his home studio to inspire artists
Sir Robin Millar is one of the UK's most successful record producers. He helped mastermind some of the biggest hits of the 1980s, working with the likes of Sade and Spandau Ballet. He lost his sight in his mid-thirties and this has shaped the way he works with artists.
"Singers who are very pretty or handsome, without knowing it, are quite disarmed by me," says Sir Robin.
This suits his working method. To encourage artists to sing with emotion, he invites them to "sing ugly", he tells me, as we sit in his south London home studio.
"I want them to adopt mannerisms and facial expressions that reflect what they are going through."
They need to do this so he can capture the emotional turmoil they feel inside.
It's easier to not care what you look like when you are working with a blind producer, he reflects.
Sir Robin grew up in north London and loved music from an early age, showing an aptitude for playing the guitar.
However, his world changed at the age of 16 when he found out that he would progressively go blind, because of the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa.
It was a stroke of luck that gave him his initial ticket into the music world. His sister married Mick Taylor, who joined The Rolling Stones in 1969. He toured with the band and observed the magic of the music-making process.
He tried a range of jobs, including being a solo musician, before setting up his own music studio in London. Possessing a nose for business, he created a record label and management business in parallel to his recording work, which over time has made him millions.
Sir Robin originally released his own music. Here he is pictured on the cover of his 1974 album Cat's Eyes, produced by Mick Taylor
His biggest hits came in the 1980s, from his recordings with Fine Young Cannibals, Boy George (who nicknamed him "Golden Ears"), Terence Trent D'Arby, Spandau Ballet and Everything But The Girl. But the record that cemented his reputation was Diamond Life by Sade, one of the best-selling albums of the decade, containing smash hits Smooth Operator and Your Love is King.
It was during the recording of Sade's follow-up album in France in the mid-80s that he finally lost his sight completely.
Rather than tell the band though, he started an argument as an excuse to leave, then phoned his wife, asking her to come out and take him home - which is where it hit him.
Hung on the walls of his house were his gold and platinum discs.
Sir Robin found his greatest commercial success producing Sade
"I thought, 'I can't even see these wretched things anymore. What's it all for?' Smash, smash, smash.
"But I think it's important to note the next day, my wife and I put them back up and pieced them together and got them reframed.
"When a person's got a disability, you have this feeling you are trying to crawl out of a big hole. You've got to the point where your elbows are on the grass, but your feet are still dangling. Every day you are focusing on trying to get out of that hole, but sort of knowing that you can't, then every now and then you lose your footing and fall back down. In France I fell down the black hole. But pretty quickly you want to scramble up. There is a natural buoyancy in our human nature."
With his discs restored to pride of place, he got back to work in the studio. Artists like Laura Marling and Emeli Sande have enjoyed his services since.
Artificial intelligence
Many in the music industry fear the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens the very essence of authentic songwriting, but not Sir Robin.
"Artificial intelligence is in the news, but it is not new for the music industry," he argues.
Computer-generated music was used by The Who and Pink Floyd, and even the autotune technology in Cher's 1998 hit Believe is another example of AI in action, he says.
The music industry is perfectly able to adapt, he reckons, and his own label Blue Raincoat Music, which bought Chrysalis Records, will work with AI and the opportunities it brings.
But what AI cannot do is replace humans in the recording process, or replicate the "real emotion" that is the key ingredient in hit songs, says Sir Robin.
He has tricks to test whether his studio alchemy has distilled that magic quality.
He plays the song on small speakers that distort the sound. He plays the song in the background while holding a conversation with someone. He plays the song and listens to it from a different room, imagining it is "playing faintly in the distance from a Greek taverna".
His ears are straining to hear "real emotion" that will "catch people deep down" and let listeners feel compassion for the singer.
He sees his job as a producer as akin to that of a psychologist or mentor, helping the artist explore the true feelings behind the songs, which often involves discussing their childhoods.
Another band Sir Robin has worked with is Everything But The Girl
A good example of that was Wonderful Life, by Black, he recalls, which drew on many of singer Colin Vearncombe's early experiences and his relationship with his mother.
He heard the same pure emotion in Adele's Someone Like You, when he first heard it.
"I stopped in my tracks in the supermarket because I'd had an emotional reaction to something and I didn't know what it was. After 40 seconds I had tears in my eyes. It was compassion for her [and the story told in the song]."
Music generated by AI will be able to simulate emotion, but it won't have what Sir Robin calls "that lovely chain" - the genuine human backstory that powers the voice in the song, which producers like him strive so patiently to coax out of the artist.
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