In a true existential moment that combined both his intrusive enthusiasm and curiosity with the chance element of being in the right place at the right time, Bottrill stepped into a vehicle that would take him on a life long journey.

“The first session I was involved in at an assisting capacity was Brian Eno and Dan [Lanois] doing the ‘Apollo’ soundtrack. That was a major influence in how I was to work ever since.” It was no question that at that precise moment Bottrill knew he was on and in the right avenue.

Next he participated in many a session “in eclectic-land” by Teenage Head (an infamous local punk band), The Parachute Club, Luba (Secrets and Sins) and yet another Brian Eno soundscape opus, Ambient #4/On Land.

By 1985, Grant Avenue studio had earned the status of fame due to its comfortable atmosphere and the aura left by reputable artists that had channeled their souls onto tape there. That year the brothers Lanois decided to sell the studio, and explored many options including the possibility of dismantling it and selling off the equipment. “We felt it had a heritage and didn’t want to see the studio die,” he recollects. “We began to rip out and dismantle the board and at the 11th hour Bob Doidge [current owner] came up with the money to buy the entire studio and we spent the whole night plugging it back in. Without any prior experience, what I ended up doing was finding the way the wires had been bent into each connector and tried to line it up again - it was very funny.” Having been once again blessed with a continuous electrical current running through its wiring, Grant Avenue ended up as Bottrill’s official place of work for the next few years. Eventually, he became promoted to official conductor of the studio’s MCI console and JH-24 tape machine beginning with the recording of Roger Eno’s Voices, which was followed by avant garde producer/guitarist Michael Brooks’ debut, Hybrid.

West Meets East Meets West…

The second step in the evolution of David Bottrill, the engineer, involves British Airways and Peter Gabriel. In 1986, Daniel Lanois asked Bottrill to fly to England to aid in the recording of Peter Gabriel’s ground-breaking album So. The session was taking place in a cow shed near the town of Bath. This session was the first where equipment and time were unlimited, thus allowing everyone’s creativity to run rampant. “At the end of ‘So’ [Dan Lanois and I] were supposed to do something with the Psychedelic Furs, but at that time they didn’t have the songs written yet.

Dan had just spent a better part of one and a half years getting songs out of Peter [Gabriel] for ‘So’ and he didn’t want to go through that process again,” bares Bottrill.

“Dan is a man of the moment and likes to capture the performance and excitement and doesn’t like to dwell for long periods of time, I don’t think. He wanted to work on the development of the music and not on the songwriting, which he would have to drag out of people.” Gabriel, like any tour-de-force, had his own eccentric approach to creation. Whether it is always compatible with an outside party is a different story.

Bottrill explains the friendly clash between the two giants. “Peter likes to take much time to get it as right as he can because he has a lot of things on the go that distract him from writing lyrics. There was a time when Dan got so upset with Peter he ended up nailing the door shut from the inside of the studio where Peter was writing lyrics so he wouldn’t be able to leave to make another phone call!”

The faltering Psychedelic Furs project posed a question mark that lurked over the immediate future of Bottrill’s career. “Dan didn’t have any more work for me and he suggested I either stay here in England and look for more work or that he would help me find some back in Canada. I decided to stay.” By making that bold and fearless leap, Bottrill quickly ended up working for Peter Gabriel. He accompanied on the subsequent So tour not as a live sound engineer, but as his keyboard tech. The choice led Bottrill down a passageway which soon led him to help develop a concept called Real World, an edifice in which he deeply immersed himself for nearly a decade.

Situated in the village of Box near Bath, the idyllic Real World recording facility was the brainchild of Peter Gabriel. He converted an old mill into a hi-tech shangri-la for musical luminaries from around the world to record at. The Real World concept also grew into to the Real World recording label. Gabriel is a pioneer in incorporating obscure unconventional and unique instruments into his own music. Influenced in part by ‘world-music’ artists, he felt that the rest of the world should be enriched and exposed to this wide spectrum of music too. Sadly, without such a label, most of these artists would not be heard outside of their own domain. Initially the studio was armed with the equipment dismantled from the cow shed. “Peter had an SSL desk and two Studer A-80 [24-track] machines. One [of the Studers] was customized with electronics built by Colin Broad. It could have been a revolutionary machine except for the fact that it didn’t work very well. Like an SSL, you could set up a gate on the output of every channel because each channel had one built in it.”

It was there that Gabriel’s eastern-influenced, instrumental breakthrough album Passion [1989] was executed as the label’s flagship release. The album was conceived specifically as the soundtrack for director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ - an acclaimed and stunning feature film depicting an alternative portrayal of the life of Christ.

A plethora of musicians from all walks of life and styles of music were invited to play on the album, including percussionist Bill Cobham, vocalist Youssou N’Dour, double violinist Shankar and guitarist David Rhodes. Many of the artists involved hailed from exotic locales where their music is ensemble-based, non-electric and where the English language is non-existent.

Bottrill had to innovate in a way to make sure things would work. Unexpectedly, he wound up validating the virtue that extols music as language unto itself. “The most important thing at the time was to make sure the musician playing in the studio was feeling their most comfortable in how they were able to do their performance,” Bottrill explains. “We’d get them into our good-sized control rooms and turn it into a performance space. They couldn’t speak English very well a lot of the time so communication was really important. We had to get Peter’s musical point across. We would have to use every communication technique available. Sometimes it was using handsigns, or we were pointing. Anything like that is easier when you’re in the same room. We record almost everything in the control room. We were trying to make sure we could communicate and you could look at someone and that would make as much sense as it would trying to talk to someone on a talk-back mic. Giving a look does a lot more than a mic with headphones.”