To call Tony Cohen an unsung hero of Australian music wouldn't be entirely accurate.
While he's no household name, his stature as one of Australian rock's most formidable record producers and sound engineers is well established.
It's not just artists and the industry who recognise his greatness, music fans of a certain proclivity see his name as a mark of quality. You know an album recorded by Tony Cohen is going to sound alive, exciting, and brilliant in every sense of the word.
Cohen died in 2017 at 60 and was a long way through writing his memoir when his life of hard living, hard work, and hard partying came to its end.
We'll always have those scorching records he made, seminal works from the likes of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party, The Go-Betweens, The Cruel Sea, Models, Cold Chisel, Paul Kelly, Beasts Of Bourbon, TISM, Powderfinger, Frenzal Rhomb, Tiddas, X, Hunters & Collectors… you get the picture.
If there was a classic rock or punk album made in Australia in the 80s or 90s, there's a strong chance Tony Cohen was involved somehow.
Setting the record straight
Now we also have his memoir, Half Deaf, Completely Mad, which gives an even clearer picture of not just who the man was, but all the work he completed.
"There's a lot of things in there that no one has a clue that Tony did," says John Olson, who helped Cohen write his memoir while he was alive and finished the book after his passing.
"There's other accounts of how things happened. It's really good to get some facts out there, and people can celebrate all the work he did.
"Tony would never blow his own trumpet at all, so it's good for people to realise, 'Oh, he was involved in that?' Historically, it's really interesting."
Reports of Cohen's involvement in the recording of Cat Stevens' 'Another Saturday Night', for instance, or the role he played in the works of Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs or Lobby Loyde's Coloured Balls, are less known than, say, his longstanding relationship with Nick Cave.
The studios in which he worked, and the people he shared those spaces with, are equally noteworthy from a historical perspective, and both Cohen and Olson wanted these people and places to have their due.
"A lot of people that Tony crossed paths with are really interesting in their own right but will probably never have a book written about them," Olson says. "So, as part of this, Tony can tell stories of all these really interesting people."
This means we get reports from the floors of spaces like Melbourne's Armstrong Studios and Richmond Recorders and hear about figures like studio owner Tim Stobart and audio pioneer Graham Thirkell.
The memoir reveals a particularly interesting and perhaps unexpected influence on Cohen's early career: the legendary Molly Meldrum.
Cohen was in awe of Molly in the 70s, the early sessions he shared with the cowboy hat wearing icon were among the most influential of his entire career.
"People wouldn't associate Tony with Molly, really," Olson considers.
"Pushing things to the extreme, he learned that from Molly. You can hear that through all of the recordings that Tony's done, things are pushed to the extreme. And he talks about Molly creating an event, that a recording is a happening."
Essentially, it means there's a much shorter path from Molly Meldrum to bands like the Boys Next Door or Laughing Clowns than you might expect.
"I think it's good for people to read that to see how all these different people influence others," Olson says. "Then they work with other people who may not be directly influenced but, in a roundabout way, they are."
There are countless tales of misadventures in and out of the studio with some of the most beloved alternative artists our country has ever produced.
While Cohen never gets too bogged down in the technical side of what he does, there are occasional flashes of the expertise that helped make those records stand out.
"Tony wouldn't talk about technical things all that much, because he would just sort of do it and not really question why he was doing a certain thing," Olson says.
"It was really important to get that technical stuff in, just little bits so that people actually realise that there is skill involved in what he's doing.
"I thought if there was too much tech, some people may tune out, but I know a lot of engineers are very influenced by Tony, and they would want to know about certain things that he did."
A technical master with an astute mind
It's Cohen's takes on the figures around him that are most engrossing. He's a perceptive judge of character, which is an underrated skill for a record producer or engineer.
"It's something people wouldn't think he was capable of doing at the time," Olson says.
"He talks briefly about the psychology of being a producer. Some producers don't have that skill. When you're doing a recording, you need to know the dynamics and the people in the room.
"Tony wasn't someone who would overly push ideas, he just sort of put them out there and then let people pick it up. But you need to know the dynamic in the room when you do suggest things.
"Also, there's a lot of stress when people are recording – some of it may have been created by Tony too – you don't want to say something that gets someone upset."
One of Cohen's greatest learnings from Molly Meldrum was that the making of a record should be an event. As such, he never had too much of an issue with hangers-on in the studio, not exactly a common stance for many producers.
"It makes certain artists feel comfortable to have people that they're familiar with around and Tony would go with the flow on that," Olson says. "As he said himself, he could tune it out.
"It's unfortunate that there's so little footage of Tony when he was mixing, it was really impressive to watch.
"He was just so focused on what he was doing. He talks about Roger [Savage, an early mentor] with a cigarette in his mouth, just instinctively gliding across the console. Well, that was exactly what Tony was like too.
"To watch someone who's fully in control of their craft, it was really, really impressive."
Nick Cave, Jimmy Barnes, and the artist who made sure he got paid
Cohen is arguably best known for his work with Nick Cave, making records with The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds through the 1980s and 90s.
"He had a huge amount of respect for Nick," Olson says. "I think he refers to him as a genius, and Tony didn't throw things around like that lightly.
"When he did [The Boys Next Door's 1980 debut] Door, Door, that's obviously what exposed him to a different group of musicians like Laughing Clowns and The Go-Betweens.
"When Tony went to Berlin [with Cave and his Bad Seeds], they were the centre of attention there and that influenced the people that wanted to work with Tony."
There's also a clear affection for Mick Harvey, the guitarist and creative collaborator who was a key part of all Nick Cave-led projects up until 2009.
Harvey was a cool head and a straight man among the madness of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, and he kept an eye on the business side of things.
"The only band that has consistently paid me producer royalties is Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds," Cohen writes in his book. "It's due to Mick I receive royalties. There was never an agreement with the band's label, but he made sure I got included. I can't thank him enough."
"Tony was always very keen to acknowledge whoever helped him," Olson says.
"From my point of view, I'd say Nick [Cave] was a big beneficiary of Mick as well, because it wasn't just Tony that Mick was making sure wasn't getting ripped off. He was making sure that the whole band wasn't getting ripped off.
"They're all lucky that Mick had an interest in business and was keeping an eye on what was going on."
Cohen very briefly laments a lack of royalties received for his contributions to The Cruel Sea's monumental 1993 album The Honeymoon Is Over – "I received $1000 once – big deal" – and Olson says is symptomatic of how the industry can treat figures like Cohen when success arrives.
"When Tony talks about The Honeymoon Is Over, there's bigger forces involved," he says. "Tony was always someone who just worked with artists, he really had little to no interest in the business at all. So, when you get involved in an album that's becoming really popular, it gets beyond the band.
He worked with some massive and dominant personalities, but one nut Tony Cohen never seemed able to crack was the great Jimmy Barnes.
Cohen was brought on to produce Cold Chisel's 1984 album Twentieth Century, but Barnes clearly wasn't on-board, and they parted ways before finishing the album.
Fourteen years later, Cohen was again brought into the Chisel fold, this time to engineer parts of their 1998 comeback album Last Wave Of Summer. Yet he still couldn't get on the same page as Barnesy.
"I never felt confident enough for Cold Chisel," he wrote. "Don and the other guys I could dig, but Jimmy was hard."
With the benefit of hindsight, Olson can see how what should have been a formidable combination didn't work out.
"With Cold Chisel, Tony's connection was with Don," Olson says. "Don was a champion of Tony and Tony loved Don.
"I think Cold Chisel could have worked, but as Tony says himself, it was confidence. That was why it wouldn't have worked with Jimmy.
"Because, technically, it most definitely would have, and I know Jimmy liked him and he liked Jimmy too. But you have to be confident and say your piece and Tony wasn't the sort of person to do that. It was just two personalities that didn't work for that reason."
The finishing touches
Cohen and Olson worked on the memoir years before the producer's 2017 death and while the author tried finishing what they'd worked on soon after his passing, the grief was still too raw.
"There were large sections that were just audio," Olson explains of what was left to do. "I did try [to finish] that not long after he died, but listening to his voice was… I couldn't do that.
"I had another go a couple of years after he died. Tony had a really great laugh, so when I started to transcribe these recordings, he had his laugh in there. And it was actually enjoyable to hear his voice again. So that's when I could start those later sections."
Hearing his voice again helped with the grief, and hopefully reading the book will alleviate the sadness for those who knew and loved him. While Olson was at the keyboard, he's adamant that the story is in Tony Cohen's voice.
"He was very engaging person, and when he told a story, the beats were all at the right spot," Olson says. "It was important to try and get that in there, the flow of the way he speaks. And expressions he used which may make no sense to some people but I thought, 'I gotta keep that in there'.
"Chris Thompson, who used to work at Triple J for a long time, was Tony's oldest friend, he'd read it. Astrid, Tony's wife, had read it. And his mother had read it and they were all happy with it. So, once I knew that they were happy I thought, 'Oh well, it's done'.
Some of it would have been hard for friends and family to read. Drug addiction was a part of Tony Cohen's life and as such was unavoidable in his memoir.
He doesn't moralise about drug use, and certainly doesn't glorify it either: but there were definitely drugs around, and they definitely impacted on the music that was made.
"When he says it was part of the music, that's essentially just to say that if people weren't taking these drugs, the music may have turned out differently, or the way we recorded it may have been different," Olson says. "He doesn't necessarily say that it wouldn't have been any good.
"He makes it very clear all the negative effects of some of the choices he made, but it was part of the work, and he wasn't alone in that.
"Also, he was working for three days straight. There's no way someone can work for that period of time without being under the effect of something. It's just not possible.
"So that's why it does come up a lot, because otherwise you'd be wondering, 'How is this guy doing this much work for days on end?'"
The book isn't loaded with advice and is not intended to be a 'how to' on record production or navigating the shady music industry. But Cohen does offer gems of genuine wisdom, and if he had a mission statement, it'd be to stay true to your own methods.
"Tony was unique," Olson says. "As he says a number of times, he didn't follow any trend.
"Tony was not interested in followers, and that was the same when he's talking about engineers. [Engineers] did not necessarily have to do it the way he did it, or the way someone else did it. You had to trust your own instinct, and forge your own path of doing things.
"He wasn't interested in anyone that was copying what someone else did, because that's already been done."
Half Deaf, Completely Mad is out now.
A series of singles showcasing some of Cohen's most well-known work has been released throughout the year, check them out below:
Augie March with Romy Vager – Henry Lee
Julia Jacklin – Shivers
Leah Senior – Easy Come, Easy Go
Grace Cummings – Straight To You
CIVIC – Chase The Dragon