ED BULLER

“I It’s about more than just asserting dominance,” says producer Ed Buller. “It’s about saying, ‘Look you’ve hired me, I know what I’m doing and I’m telling you that you don’t have a chorus’. It’s like going to a lawyer for legal advice. You have to be straightforward.”

Here, Buller is unequivocally making the case that producers should be more than shadowy behind-the-desk figures. Within the world of UK guitar bands, in which Buller has worked for the bulk of his career, he has administered this fearless approach with the likes Pulp, Suede, and Slowdive, all in the constant pursuit of perfection. “Sometimes, for the good of the song, you just have to go back to the drawing board.”

ELECTRIC DREAMS

Hailing from Mickleham, Surrey, Buller fell in love with the wonder of sound at a young age. “My dad was a composer, so that interest was sort of pre-programmed in me,” he says. “A little later on, when I was a teenager, I started getting into bands. T. Rex were a particularly big influence.”

“Suede can be high maintenance but with good reason. The whole band wants the result to be good”

Though Bolan’s brand of fey chartbothering pop had its hooks in the young Buller’s heart, it took the arrival of a new breed of electronic instrument to reveal to him the creative potential of music. “I got into synths in a big way,” he says. “It was a very early period for synthesisers though and, again, part of this came from my dad. He was an early user of synthesisers in an orchestral setting. The EMS synth designer Peter Zinovieff had a studio in Putney and my dad became friends with him, along with the composer Harrison Birtwhistle, who used