By the mid-1980s, Londoner Mark 'Flood' Ellis had carved out a name for himself as one of the 'go to' recording engineers for left-of-centre electronica and forward-thinking indie-rock, with credits on albums by Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, New Order, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire and more. But when U2 sought out the studio technician to work on their fifth studio album The Joshua Tree, Flood assumed that he was the being pranked.
Speaking with Musician magazine in 1993, the respected producer/engineer revealed how he came to work with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois on the Irish band's 25-million-welling masterpiece.
“Around 1986,” he recalled, “I was doing a lot of freelance work at Trident [Studios] and I started getting these strange, vague phone messages like, 'Someone from Dublin is trying to get hold of you.’ Then one day I was sitting in a bar and a friend of mine came in and said, ‘Something weird just happened. Bono from U2 just phoned my mother trying to find you.’ It was around April Fools time so I figured the whole thing was just an elaborate scam.
“The next day I was sitting in the studio and the phone rang. The receptionist said, ‘It’s Bono for you.’ I figured, Yeah, right. But I picked up the phone and there he was. It turns out he’d really liked some of the stuff I’d done with Nick Cave and with [former Virgin Prunes frontman] Gavin Friday, who is one of his best friends. So I was invited to an audio audition, in effect. The band was set up in a house. There was no producer around. They basically said, ‘Here’s what we’re after, here’s a week, let’s see what you can come up with’. About two months later I was asked to record The Joshua Tree.”
