Knowing when to stop

One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney M. In the punk years and afterwards, ‘overproduced’ was often used to describe any record that had been produced at all. In the late 1980s, though, overproduction became the norm. Bands like Tears For Fears were famous for spending weeks perfecting a computerised drum sound, when really a long holiday on a beach somewhere would have done them more good. More recently, overproduced has become a euphemism for ‘this band is using considerable quantities of cocaine’. The mid-period records of a certain Manchester band bear this out in particular. But the term can mean almost anything you want it to, which is useful.