The producer behind some of the most important records of the past four decades began studio life carrying cups of tea.
Mark Ellis was a junior staffer at Morgan Studios in 1978 when producer Chris Tsangarides, watching one runner keep the tea coming while the other vanished, named the pair “Flood” and “Drought.” The nickname stayed with the man who kept coming back with the cups and spoons. He is now one of the longest-serving producers in British music, and the list of bands whose sound he has shaped runs from Cabaret Voltaire to U2.
Flood had already been the vocalist in a band called Seven Hertz and the tape operator on Rick Wakeman’s album, 1984, before he became Morgan’s house engineer and went freelance in 1981. His first album credit was as assistant engineer on New Order’s first album, Movement. A series of assignments for Stevo’s Some Bizzare label followed, with engineering tasks for Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, and Marc and the Mambas. That experience delivered him to Daniel Miller’s Mute Records, which kept him busy as one of the label’s go-to producers for Depeche Mode, Erasure and Nick Cave.
The scale of Flood’s credits since then is impressive: the studio bands of the eighties gave way to the stadium acts of the nineties, and a second career in the 2000s brought Sigur Rós, Orbital, and Interpol into the his workspace. In 2006, he shared the Album of the Year Grammy as co-producer of U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, who made three albums with him, described him as “very masterful with the sonics.” His secret skill, according to Corgan, is that he knows how to find “an ambiance of the song that you don’t necessarily see.”
10. New Order – Dreams Never End
Movement, the first album New Order made after Ian Curtis’s death, credits Flood as assistant engineer under Martin Hannett’s studio leadership. The tea-carrier from Morgan had become the second pair of hands on one of the 1980s’ most scrutinised records.
Movement was a difficult album. Hannett was trying to keep the band in the box he had built for them as Joy Division. Movement suffers from a claustrophia that is impressed into every groove. It was also beautiful in the way that a butterfly struggles to emerge from a chrysalis. The band’s wings wouldn’t reach their full magnificence until “Temptation,” but the colours could just be seen.
9. Cabaret Voltaire – Just Fascination
Flood’s first full production credit of consequence arrived with the Sheffield duo, Cabaret Voltaire. He co-produced their 1983 meisterwerk, The Crackdown. It was the album that carried Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder from industrial experimentation on Rough Trade to a major label (Virgin) and a harder dancefloor posture.
“Just Fascination” signals the change in approach: clipped samples over a sequencer with no give; Mallinder half-chanting on top. Flood’s part in the record began the pattern that recurred for decades: the studio man who could make machines groove like a band.
8. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – From Her to Eternity
Flood engineered the Bad Seeds’ debut, From Her to Eternity. It was the first project of a relationship that ran through The Firstborn Is Dead, which he produced, and on to mixing work for the band until the late nineties.
The title track is all forward lean – piano hammered in runs above a drum stomp that does not vary, with Cave in full cry over the top of it. The record put Flood on the desk for a band playing as if each take were the last of their lives, and he kept the levels honest through all of it.
7. Erasure – Sometimes
Mute paired Flood with Vince Clarke and Andy Bell from the start. He produced Erasure’s first two albums, Wonderland and The Circus, building the glossy half of the label’s 80s output, while Daniel Miller’s other acts darkened the other half.
“Sometimes” gave the duo their first substantial hit, and the production is key: bright programmed bass under a chorus that opens on the first line, with Bell’s voice carrying the melody. The warmth of the programming did the label proud without softening the synthpop.
6. Nitzer Ebb – Hearts and Minds
Flood produced the middle run of Nitzer Ebb’s career – Belief, Showtime, and Ebbhead – and returned decades later to finish Industrial Complex. No other producer worked the EBM seam so thoroughly from the inside.
5. PJ Harvey – Down by the Water
To Bring You My Love credits Flood as producer, engineer and mixer – the fullest control he took over any record of the decade. The album widened Polly Harvey’s writing from guitar records into slower, stranger material.
“Down by the Water” turns on its organ figure and the small, drowned vocal on the bridge. The mix keeps the low end loud and the voice dry, so the nursery-rhyme menace of the words never softens. Flood returned to Harvey for Is This Desire?, White Chalk, Let England Shake and her later records – one of the longest partnerships of both careers.
4. Smashing Pumpkins – Zero
Flood co-produced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness with Alan Moulder, the double album that carried the Smashing Pumpkins from clubs to arenas.
Corgan’s verdict on their working method is instructive: Flood would “really fight with us”, in Corgan’s words, to find “another vibe” the band could not yet see. “Zero” shows the band being forced out of its comfort zone: the downstroked riff; a taunting chorus; and a cheap keyboard line given teeth. The production argues with the songs until they stand up straight.
3. U2 – Numb
Flood engineered and mixed Achtung Baby alongside Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite; and then took a full production credit on Zooropa, with credits for loops, engineering, and mixing with Eno and The Edge. Thirteen years later came the shared Album of the Year Grammy.
“Numb” is the clearest case for his hand in the band’s sound and success: The Edge’s flat, deadpan vocal over a mesh of loops and percussion, with the guitars held back until their impact was really needed. The track showed a stadium band taking its electronics seriously – and the producer’s credit sat at the front of it.
2. Nine Inch Nails – Head Like a Hole
For Pretty Hate Machine, Trent Reznor assembles his dream cast. Flood produced and engineered the album’s opening pair of songs, “Head Like a Hole” and “Terrible Lie”, alongside Keith LeBlanc, with additional synth programming scattered across the rest. He joined the sessions late, after finishing Violator for Depeche Mode, which made “Head Like a Hole” one of the last tracks completed – partly at Blackwing, the studio Depeche Mode and He Said had made alluring to Reznor.
Reznor built the drums from samples lifted out of his record collection, and Flood’s production gives the track its shove: the churn of the synth bass under guitars broken out for the refrain, and all of it carrying the aggression Reznor wanted. Flood came back for Broken and The Downward Spiral, where his credits extended to hi-hat and synthesizer. He had engineered Ministry’s synth-pop debut, With Sympathy, years earlier; with NIN he built the industrial mainstream that followed.
1. Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Silence
Violator credits Flood as producer alongside the band, Daniel Miller and Alan Wilder, and his fingerprints are on the whole record.
“Enjoy the Silence” is the concentrated case: Gore’s demo was a ballad; Wilder proposed an up-tempo version; and Wilder and Flood assembled the new arrangement while the rest of the band were out of the room. Gore came back, gave in, and played the guitar riff that rides the single.
Gore acknowledged that, “Flood in tandem with Wilder was a great team.” That’s a conclusion that holds across the album. “Enjoy the Silence” became the band’s biggest single, and it required the composer to be out of the room. What Flood helped the production team to do was lift an absorbing demo into a song that will live long after them.