Tony Cohen


Tony Cohen was an Australian music record producer and sound engineer based in Melbourne. Cohen worked with The Birthday Party, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from the 1980s on. By July 1987 Cohen was living in Germany. At the ARIA Music Awards of 1994 Cohen won Producer of the Year for The Cruel Sea's album, The Honeymoon Is Over ; at the 1995 ceremony he won Producer of the Year and Engineer of the Year.

Biography

Tony Cohen was born on 4 June 1957 in Melbourne. His father was Jewish and his mother was an Australian of Irish descent. In 1975 Cohen began working as a sound engineer. In April of the following year he was working at Armstrong Studios with Molly Meldrum, media personality and some-time producer, on Perth's glam-rock group, Supernaut's lead single, "I Like It Both Ways". Cohen produced the group's associated self-titled album and its follow-up single, "Too Hot to Touch".
In July 1976 Cohen and fellow engineer, Ian MacKenzie, met with Meldrum to organise the production of The Ferrets' debut album, Dreams of a Love: "It was all a bit of Elton John, a bit of the 'Real Thing', called us in for a production meeting 9:00 in the morning at his place and he was still in bed and putting the music on very, very loud and then proceeds to shout at you over the top of it, and we were all sitting there sort of terrified thinking, what on earth is he saying?" After a year production was incomplete so The Ferrets took over, together with Cohen and MacKenzie; it was finalised in August 1977 and released in October.
In June 1978 Cohen started working with The Boys Next Door, as engineer at Richmond Recorders on their debut album, Door, Door, then their early EP, Hee Haw and, as engineer-producer, on their second album, The Birthday Party. The group's leader, Nick Cave, used Cohen as engineer or producer for almost two decades with his next group, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from From Her to Eternity to No More Shall We Part.
Cohen reflected on his early work with Cave, in an interview with Richard Fidler in September 2006, " was all very experimental then, because we were all learning – I fell in love with this new way of recording... because there were no rules. We were looking for sounds that made your fillings drop out rather than pleasant pop tunes, so we got to do crazy things like find concrete stairwells and abuse equipment, so it was all very attractive for me. Some of it didn't work, but as history has shown Nick really honed his craft, he's done some brilliant records... some of the early stuff was a bit rough but it was a learning curve then." Ed Nimmervoll, an Australian journalist and editor of Rock Australia Magazine, recalled "Nick Cave's Birthday Party were allowed to take up some of the studio time slack. Rather than home, their producer Tony Cohen slept in the air conditioning duct."
The Cruel Sea used Cohen's services for their debut studio album, This Is not the Way Home. He was nominated at ARIA Music Awards of 1993 for Producer of the Year for that album and for "Get Thee to a Nunnery", a track on TISM's EP, The Beasts of Suburban. At the following year's ceremony Cohen won Producer of the Year for The Cruel Sea's next album, The Honeymoon Is Over. In 1995 he won both Engineer of the Year and Producer of the Year. Over the previous 18 months – the eligibility period – Cohen had produced Let Love In, You Wanna Be There But You Don't Wanna Travel, Parables for Wooden Ears, Livin' Lazy, Three Legged Dog, Kim Salmon and the Surrealists and Mouth to Mouth.
He was nominated at ARIA Music Awards of 1994 for Producer of the Year and Engineer of the Year. At the following year's ceremony Cohen won Producer of the Year and Engineer of the Year.
After the year 2000 Cohen's name started appearing less regularly on album credits and he had effectively retired, but he emerged in 2017 to produce Augie March's album Bootikins, as he had always wanted to work with the group. He died unexpectedly before the album's sessions concluded, and Augie March leader Glenn Richards stated "It still amazes me that we got a chance to work with the man. The moments are ours and we will cherish them... He got us feeling like and playing like a real band again after a long interim, and we made some very good music together.".

List of productions

Tony Cohen as producer or co-producer, unless otherwise indicated: