Madonna Tribe had the chance to meet Mark Saunders, the multi-platinum English record producer who has worked with some of the most influential artists and writers of the 21th century and who had a close encounter with the sound of Madonna working on the still unreleased 12" Mix of Now I'm Following You from the "I'm Breathless" album that you can listen to in its original cut at www.marksaunders.com.
Now living and working in the Big Apple, with a unique understanding of rock music, electronic dance floor etiquette and everything in between Mark also shares his thoughts on the sound of the 80's and the 90's, and pays homage to Madonna's ability to pick the right people to work with to produce something that's just ahead of the curve.

MadonnaTribe: Hello Mark and welcome to Madonna Tribe.
Your life seems to have always been filled by sound and music. Can you tell us about how did all that start?

Mark Saunders: Music became an important part of my life when I saw Deep Purple on TV when I was about 9 years old. They'd been booked really inappropriately on a early evening live summer TV show in the UK alongside bad comedy acts, dance routines and extremely middle-of-the-
road solo musical acts. I was watching with my parents and as they complained about the raucous, raw rock sound of Deep Purple, I was blown away by it. I hadn't heard or seen anything like it and I was extremely impressed when they proceeded to smash their equipment up at the end of their set (no doubt in disgust at their booking agent for getting them such a crappy gig). The Who had already been doing this probably but this was my first exposure to real rock n' roll behaviour.

MT: There's a sort of striking "timeline similarity" between your career and the one of Madonna, especially in the early years.
You both started playing drums in bands and you got your first engineering credit in the mid eighties, at the same time when Madonna was making her way into stardome.
How was it like for you in the beginning?

MS: Ha ha! I wish my time line had kept up with Madonna's! I'm sure my
accountant would be really happy.

I lived about 50 miles outside of London in a rural area until I was 25. I was playing drums in (mostly crappy) local covers bands hoping that someone like George Martin or some other hit producer or record company executive would be happen to be in one the lame clubs that I was playing in and I'd be "discovered". This of course didn't happen but eventually I got into a band in London which was playing original music and things got a lot more exciting. The singer and writer In the band was a Guinness, of the fabulously wealthy drink family. The band, Panic, played at all the london dive bars and small venues including the famous Marquee. We weren't bad and we had quite a bit of record company interest but ultimately Valentine Guinness didn't really need to take the band that seriously. He already lived a rock star lifestyle with the help of his trust fund money and I left the band. But contacts made whilst in that band led to me getting a short stint as a professional drummer playing for Carlene Carter (Johnny Cash's step daughter). This enabled me to quit my job as a truck driver so I was happy about that. After that ended I was just wondering how I was going to make enough money out of playing music to avoid going back to "real" work when I was offered a job as a sort of odd job man at Elvis Costello's management office.

At that time, I'd started recording demos on an 8 track reel to reel tape recorder and played them to guy at Elvis's office called Lew Difford (Chris Difford from Squeeze's brother). He played them to Jake Riviera, Elvis's manager and a while later Jake summoned me to his office. He told me he liked what he'd heard and said "You've got to decide whether you want to be a drummer or a record producer... if you want to be a record producer I can help you". I sensibly opted for record producer and Jake picked a song demo cassette off his desk, played a few seconds of the song and said "Ok, I want you to produce this song and I'm going to get Paul Carrack to come and sing on it". Paul is a phenomenal singer and keyboard player who sang on one of Squeeze's biggest hits "Tempted about a year before. Needless to say I was terrified at the prospect. I said to Jake "Where do you want me to do it' and he replied "Wherever you did your other demos." I didn't have the guts to tell him that I did those in an old cow shed on my dad's farm in the middle of nowhere about 50 miles from London! There was still dried cow shit on the walls and broken windows covered with plastic bags. But sure enough, Paul Carrack drove out from London to sing a demo for someone (a nobody!) he'd never met and it turned out really well. It made me realize what a difference having a really good singer meant.
The cheap crappy mic that I owned sounded a whole lot better with Paul singing on it than any of the mediocre local singers I recorded!