Background
BrickBeat Recording Studio is owned, managed and operated by engineer and producer Maurice Mulligan who has spent a lifetime working in the music business as a musician, engineer, producer and manager.
Starting his professional musical life back in the 1970s Maurice learned the ropes the hard way through bad management and constant changes in taste forcing bands to split or by record company policy ‘allowing bands to go’ or simply by falling foul of inter-band arguments. ”I had been playing with my own band in West London and was starting to get bored with the guy was writing with – too many chords and not enough substance – so I answered and ad in the NME for a new band looking for an original Bass player. The band turned into Killing Joke and from the start we knew there was something special going on. Although Jazz, Geordie and I all used to live in London and Big Paul in High Wycombe we rehearsed in a basement over in Cheltenham during the week and slept on the floor of Jazz’s parents bungalow. Unfortunately BIg Paul and I simply could not get on at all with massive ego and personality clashes so one weekend I decided not to return to Cheltenham, one of my more celebrated errors of judgment!”.
Finding more work in the studio and on the road as an engineer and production manager he ended up at EeZee Studios in North London learning the trade from the resident producer and designer of EeZee, Tom Newman. ”One of the first lessons I learnt from Tom was how not to do it the hard way. At the start of our first recording session Tom asked me to mic the drum kit up which I did in pretty much the same way that I would have done in a live situation with one mice for each drum – and a couple of others for good luck dotted around the room!. What a mistake that was, in my eagerness to please the great man I found that in this situation less was probably (certainly) better than more. When I walked back into the control room to say we were ready to start getting the drum sounds up he just smiled and said “that’s a lot of mics Maurice, I don’t care though you’re the engineer for this session” or something along those lines. He then went onto ‘chunter’ something about only using four mics for Tubular Bells and he got a platinum album for that one – ouch!
Mixing studio time with live engineering and management he has toured and worked in the studio with many top acts of the time from Queen to Philip Lynott, Paul Young, Kirk Brandon’s Spear of Destiny and even Charles Aznavour amongst others. Finally meeting up with Stiff Little Fingers where he would stay for many years as engineer, stage, production & bar manager and finally for short spell manager, still remaining good friends to today.
A few years ago while working as bassist and mandolin player with the Band From County Hell Maurice had to locate a suitable studio where they could develop their (then new album) Ghosts & Spirits. Finding that the best deal they could come up with (Claycastle Recording Studio) was actually all the way over in County Cork, Eire, the upshot of all this was to start to build one of his own slightly closer to home.
It took about a year to find a suitable location which had to be in the centre of town with all the local amenities nearby and large enough to accommodate bands as well as provide a meeting and workspace for other projects.
The Refurbishment to make BrickBeat Recording Studio what it is today.
