In 2009, David Wrench was close to giving it all up. He was working as an engineer in a recording studio in north Wales but wasn’t getting enough work and was struggling to pay the rent each month. An offer to do some lecturing came in and he thought: why not? When he ran this past his friend and collaborator, Julian Cope, he got a sharp response. “He said to me: ‘Go and look in the mirror,’” says Wrench. “‘You’re unemployable in the real world. Find a way to make this work because you won’t last five minutes, you’ll go completely crazy.’ Annoyingly, I knew he was right.”
Wrench didn’t have to wait long for his fortunes to change. In 2010, Odessa, a track he had mixed for Caribou, was released and became a global anthem. “That opened up a whole different world,” he says. He soon found himself working in New York. The very first cafe he went into was playing Odessa. “Having spent well over a decade sitting in the studio working 18-hour days, that was a big moment,” he says. The momentum continued. In 2014, when albums he worked on by Jungle, FKA twigs, Glass Animals and Caribou all arrived within about a month of one another, his phone started ringing: “Things haven’t stopped since,” he says.
