when I interviewed David Motion, a producer who'd worked on David Van Day single, he described him as the least musical person he'd ever met.
I love the anecdote, so here it is:
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Wang Chung had written a song for him. They got me in to engineer this thing, we did it at Marcus studios. David Van Day is a very very nice bloke, very amusing person, but he really could not sing to save his life. We were recording his vocal and he just could not get it, just COULD NOT get it. At Marcus there was a vocal booth with a piano in it which you couldn't see into from the control room, which was very very necessary. We had to have him off to one side out of sight, because he would've found it demoralising had he seen the efforts we were going to. It was in turns exasperating and amusing.
What we resorted to doing was running the tape, take all the backing track out of it, and at a particular moment Jack would play the piano and sing the line before and I'd bang it into record and David would try and mimic what he just heard. It took days and days and days to get four lines of vocal which were really not that hard. It was scary. I'd be punching in on individual syllables.
The amazing thing is that once you did actually piece one together out of sixty odd takes it sounded a million dollars. But god it was hard work.
At the end of doing this track we went to a Japanese restaurant and we all got quite drunk and David was saying he didn't want to be a singer anyway, he wanted to be an actor. I can't remember if he said he'd been to RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] but he'd certainly been to some acting college. And then proceeded to spout Shakespeare at volume. Just before we asked for the bill he gave it the whole 'now is the winter of our discontent', doing a good thirty lines of it.
http://www.strawberryswitchblade.net/interviews/motion_01.php
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