Inside the Studio

You could say that Jerry Ragovoy was quite the songwriter. It was he who penned 'Time Is On My Side', the Irma Thomas classic immortalised by The Rolling Stones. 'Stay With Me' was his too, the top-notch Lorraine Ellison belter. So were 'Cry Baby' and 'Piece Of My Heart', both of which Janis Joplin subsequently made unforgettable.

Some time in 1985, so the story goes, Dave Stewart of British pop duo Eurythmics had been working in Los Angeles with Bob Dylan and invited him to stop by his recording studio any time he found himself in London. The studio, which was called The Church, was in Crouch Hill, N8 and a few months later Dylan did just happen to be in the UK, so he decided to take up Dave on his offer.

Over there in the corner is a teetering tower of folding chairs. On the chairs are sheets of glass. And around the tower are something like 100 microphones, all set up and ready to capture what comes next. And what comes next is cacophony as the band hurl cinder blocks at the tower in an attempt to simulate the sound of a car crash.

We could begin at 8.54pm on the 25th of June 1967, when the cameras cut to the studio about 40 seconds earlier than expected to discover producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick scrambling to hide a bottle of Scotch whisky beneath the mixing desk. They'd been taking a tot to calm their nerves before the tricky task of mixing the audio for the live worldwide broadcast of The Beatles' contribution to Our World, the first ever live global television link.

There were pieces of me laying all over the floor.' That's how David Bowie remembered 1976. Living – though that's hardly the word – on a diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine, every successive alias he ditched – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, The Man Who Fell To Earth – had been like shedding a layer of skin. And now, what's left of him is a skeletal ghost, a fading shadow of his former selves.

Ithink I was born in the wrong generation. I probably should have been around in the 1800s, or 1930s. I am a lost soul in this time period, with the Internet, with digital technology and so on. This is not my place to be.'

What's the worst album ever made by a great band? I used to think it was Thank You, the cover versions LP released in 1995 by Duran Duran which, somewhat hilariously, found them stumbling through cack-handed versions of Melle Mel's 'White Lines (Don't Do It)' and Public Enemy's '911 Is A Joke' among its many abominations.