ven if you've spent the past two months living in a cave. You can't have it. 'It' being the sight (or sound) of Phil Collins talking about his latest album to every sector of the mass media that would listen. As one-man publicity machines go, Mr Collins is pretty damn efficient. But, like him or loathe him, there has been one theme running consistently through his interviews that should have caught the eye (or ear) of every home-studio owner.

Phil, you see, recorded much of the album, Both Sides at home. Nothing new there, you mav say. Thousands of pro musicians do exactly that these days. The difference with Both Sides is that for the most part the demo takes have been retained rather than replaced by commercial studio overdubs. While most demo parts end up being re-recorded in the sterile (but noise-free) atmosphere of a pro studio, Phil's early musings have made it all the way to the master. And not just rhythm tracks either, but whole performances (Phil played all the instruments on Both Sides), reverb patches, vocals...you name it.

No man is an island, however. and Phil needed the dedication and expertise of at least one partner in crime to turn those bedroom babblings into something sweet and subtle. Enter Paul Gomersall, a seasoned professional engineer who lists George Michael, Prefab Sprout, Kate Bush and Trevor Horn among his previous engagements. If there was one man who could tell us how Both Sides really made the transition from demo to disc, it must be Paul Gomersall. So, armed with Walkman, camera and lights, I cruised down to the Genesis private studio, The Farm in deepest Surrey, to talk to PG about PC...

Lets begin at the beginning. How did the Both Sides project start out?

"What happened was that Phil did demos at home using an Akai 12-track and we transferred it to the digital 48-track [a Sony 3348]. Phil went on holiday and I spent a couple of days on his home-recorded vocals just so I could hear the words better, you know, get into the feel of the songs.

"I used a Dolby Spectral Enhancer to re-process all of Phil's vocals; if there were any pops I could filter them off for just a syllable. Working digitally, you can just drop in for syllables without hearing the drops. The Enhancer's really good: it's got three knobs on it for low, mid and top with crossovers, but the theory is it brings up low-level frequencies. I put some mixes through it and when the tracks started fading it started to lift all the frequencies back up, so you lose the fade. It sounds really weird with all these frequencies moving around. It tends to boost things that are low down."

Perhaps not what the designers had in mind. But if you're taking the home demos of one of the world's biggest-selling recording artists and trying to polish them without losing the feel, anything goes. To find another example of such control -room esoterica, we need look no further than the ancient Allen & Heath compressor through which Phil Collins processes his vocals. Over to you, Paul...

"When Phil did his first solo album, Face Value, the approach was very similar to this one. He did a lot of demos on his eight -track at home and then transferred it in the studio. And ever since he's had his first home studio, he's had this cheap little Allen & Heath compressor which was about £50 which has a slider on the front with 'more' or 'less' - and he's used it ever since. That's the compressor that he uses in the studio! If you listen to the records where he sings very loudly, you can hear it kick in - it's quite vicious but I really like it. When we were doing one of the songs for Buster with Lamont Dozier, he said: 'I wish we'd had this back in the '60s - it's great!"

So it seems Phil is someone who knows what he likes and sticks with it...

"Yeah, but the new album is sort of starker; the vocals aren't half as affected as they are on other albums. It's a deliberate move to enhance the personal nature of the songs. It's meant to be you and Phil in your living room..."

Unlike many of his million-selling contemporaries, Phil Collins has a reputation as a workaholic - remember his globetrotting gigging for Live Aid? I wondered if Paul had endured a tough regime while engineering the album.

"It was all very civilised. We did a five-day week, 12-hour days, 10am 'til 10pm, and then Phil would go home and bath Lily, his four-year-old daughter. Phil is very, very quick. We did three weeks of overdubs, and we could be working on seven songs in one day - doing vocals or backing vocals on one of them, bass parts on another, a couple of keyboard parts on another.

"Phil did all the guitar parts from the keyboard as well. There are no other musicians on the album. He's really good at making the keyboard sound as if a guitarist is playing. Normally, when a keyboard player plays a guitar sound, it sounds like a keyboard player doing a run. But Phil knows the scales and riffs that a guitarist would play, even though he can't play guitar! It's a very `played' album.

"Phil did lots of the bass parts, too, at home. I think it's the first time he's done this. Normally he'd put down a rough bass part which someone else would play. But he knew what he wanted the bass to do and, rather than take three hours telling someone else what to play, he did it himself."

Engineers are increasingly being called upon to double as programmers, and Paul Gomersall is no exception. But, with so much of Both Sides being "played", as he puts it, did the computer screen at The Farm actually get turned on at all?

"Phil did all the demos at home without any sync, so I had to do tempo maps and everything for Cubase. I just ran it 'til it went out of sync, and sometimes there were a few glitches because they were all drum-machine cycles and often they don't cycle properly. So you have to do tempo maps to compensate. We're talking of fractions of a beat from beginning to end - put a tempo change at, say, bar 60, of a couple of thousandths of a beat just to keep it in sync until the end.

"There were 16 tracks, so it took me three days to do it. Phil uses an E-mu SP1200 [sampling drum machine] running four-bar patterns, which is a bit of a pain as we were trying to sync this with the original tracks - so we could separate the drum sounds - and Cubase. If things started to go out of sync at, say, three minutes, and you wanted to try another tempo, you had to stop and rewind taking into account that that far into a song, the SP1200 would take at least 30 seconds to catch up. So that's why it all took so long.

"Then I just stuck clicks down; Cubase ran with the track and I was able to split all these drums off from Phil's original patterns. I could then put down anything sequenced - there were only a couple of things on the whole album - and a couple of drum triggers which I sent into an Akai S1100 and then re-triggered through Cubase. Apart from that, the whole album was very un-sequenced."

Knowing, as we now do, that our Phil works fast, does he have the time and/or patience to spend wandering through MIDI-land, tweaking this and that?

"Years ago you'd stick a keyboard sound through a chorus or whatever, but now it's built into a keyboard so it's all there for you. Someone's spent hours programming these sounds for you to use, and if you've got 200 pad sounds, the chances are there's going to be one that's perfect for the song - and it'll probably be using a chorus, a reverb, EQ and an Aural Exciter... On the album we used a Korg 01/W, a Wavestation and, for the guitar sounds, a Korg M2 guitar processor. We stuck raw guitar samples from the E-mu EIII into the M2, went through a few presets, and if the delays were wrong we'd change them and hopefully end up with a realistic guitar sound. Those four things and Phil's CP70 [Yamaha electric grand piano] formed the basis of the sounds on the album, though we did use a Roland D50 for bagpipes on a couple of tracks."

What about the studio Steinway that sits pretty in the Farm piano room?

"We did use that on the beginning of 'Everyday', but even that had an Emulator piano underneath it, 'cause that's a MIDI Steinway!"

In the name of curiosity (not to mention interview technique), I quizzed Paul on the microphones he used on Both Sides, and whether they differed from his usual formula.

"Beyer lent us a lot of mics, these new black hexagonal ones, I can't remember what they're called. We used Beyers on most of the stuff. But generally, on a bass drum it's an ElectroVoice RE20 and a Neumann U47 (not the valve version) and I don't know how I came to that combination. I just mix the two if the studio's got them. Normally, I'll just set a load of mics up and switch between them. You can quickly find one that sounds right, but typically it'll be a Shure SM57 on the snare. It just depends what's there.

"You can't be too precious or specific because the same mikes will sound different depending on their condition. I remember there was this one studio where the assistant told me this mike was fantastic for vocals - it was a valve mike and I gave it a try and I thought it sounded like the singer was singing into the back of it. But the assistant assured me it was okay. After a few more minutes I said it wasn't right, and could he turn the mike round, and that was it: the capsule had been in the wrong way round for God knows how long and people had been saying that this mike was fantastic on vocals. And yet it sounded like someone was shouting from the other end of the room!

"If I'm doing vocals I'll stick five mikes up and just flick through them. Everybody's voice is different, and for different songs, too. I'll use whatever I think's right at the time."

Soundwise, that leaves only the P Collins patented drum sound left to cover. While it may not be too fashionable right now, there's no doubt that the big, big, gated 'thwack!' remains one of the most influential sounds in the history of pop and rock recording. So what's the secret, Paul?

"'As far as Phil's big drum sound goes, it's basically because he hits them so hard and because that stone-walled room is really loud. So you stick the mikes up, and compress the room ambience, and that's it! Not forgetting his style, of course.

"We recorded his drums as a kit, but if, say, we did cymbal overdubs, we'd try lots of cymbals out 'cause Phil's got loads of stuff in the barn. We'd get ten different ride cymbals out and try them all. You can tell within a minute which one you like best. occasionally we'd add a couple of individual hits. But none of it was planned.

"Actually, there's a new drum sound we've created. It's a very lightly hit tom-tom sound that we recorded in the piano room. Phil used these American sticks that are made up of a lot of thinner sticks. His teenage son Simon introduced him to them - he's a really good drummer, a multi-instrumentalist. We set up about six toms, some miked at the top and some underneath - a matter of what sounded best. it's on two or three songs on the album, as well as on a Curtis Mayfield benefit album track."

The Farm is a beautiful environment to work in and the studio has an enviable (and infinite) equipment list, As Paul talked more about the project it began to sound like a very relaxed affair, Was there time to experiment? And, more to the point, is Phil open to suggestions?

"Because he's so quick, if I had any ideas I'd work them out when he'd gone and play them to him later. If he liked them he liked them; if he didn't, he didn't. But he's that critical on himself, too. He'll try something, and if in ten minutes it's not working he won't struggle with it. He doesn't agonise over tracks. If something's wrong, it's just wrong. He won't spend four hours trying to put it right."

With work on Both Sides proceeding at such a pace, it seems neither artist nor engineer was willing to see the project stall at the mixing stage. As a result, the whole album took just ten days to mix, as Paul explains.

"After three weeks of overdubs, we spent the last two days doing rough mixes of all the tracks, which took about two hours each. Then Phil went on holiday for three weeks. Phil faxed me - he'd been listening to the mixes and he liked most of them, with only a few points that he wanted to change - so when it came to mix, we'd manage three a day sometimes, although there were some that took two or three goes to get right."

Not bad for what can be the most agonising stage of an album project...

"Well, a number of songs didn't have any EQ on at all - what's on the record is how it went down to tape. If we had to do a recall on a mix, it only took about ten minutes 'cause there's no EQ on anything!"

We all dream, though, of being able to polish our existing demos without the hassle of re-recording. What Paul Gomersall hasn't yet explained is how, with a little help, turned this dream into reality. Here's what happened.,

"There's something about Phil's [Yamaha] REV5 reverb at home that sounds like no other. We started to mix 'I've Forgotten Everything' and then we thought we'd get his REV5 in, and then Phil just turned round and said: 'is there any way we can use the demo? I like it.' It was just a rough mix he did overnight so that he could listen to it in the morning. It was really noisy but fortunately we'd been lent Sonic Solutions [a high-end direct-to- disk recording and editing system]. You can de-noise the tracks with it. The system we had, you had to put in left and right channels separately. Then you had to get the [phase] coherence back together. However, on this song, one side needed de--noising three times and the other side only needed it twice, 'cause one side was noisier than the other,"

So the demo made it onto the album - a testament both to the joys of home recording and to state-of-the-art technology...

"I'm a big demo fan. There's something to be said for doing something quickly and leaving the rough edges, rather than the whole 80s thing of polishing everything."

Cooped up at home in our bedroom studios, our cassette transports clicking, our hard disks whiring, and our LCD screens flickering this, surely, is what we all want to hear. Rough is good. Rough is hip. Rough, in essence, is smooth. Now, if we could all write, play, sing and self-publicise like Phil Collins.