Producer, engineer and mixer Chris ‘CT’ Tsangarides spent his last decade living and working at The Ecology Room studio overlooking Kingsdown, a pretty hamlet on the Kent coastline between Dover and Deal.

The studio is featured strongly in the brilliant documentary ‘Anvil! The Story Of Anvil’, as is the very charming Tsangarides.

CT was one of the sonic architects of ’80s music, working on key albums by Killing Joke, Depeche Mode, Gary Moore, Magnum, Japan, Bruce Dickinson, Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy.

He also had a unique perspective on the excesses of the era’s hard rock scene, recently telling Classic Rock magazine:

I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management who also had (major producers) Martin Birch, Mutt Lange and Tony Platt. Battery Studios (in Willesden, North West London) was our home. Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. It was all, “Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.” It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies…

People would put on 18 tracks of guitar doing the same thing because “it’ll sound mega, man.” Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds…

You couldn’t mix a record unless you had 500 bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like £75 for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, “You’ve got to have one of those…because they’ve got one!”

RIP, CT.