‘Julian Cope told me: you’re unemployable in the real world’: David Wrench, the Welsh studio wizard behind pop’s A-list

Wrench has combined music for Frank Ocean, FKA twigs, Blur and dozens extra – all drawn to what have been referred to as ‘the best ears ever’. He explains how he went from the dole to the large time

In 2009, David Wrench was near giving all of it up. He was working as an engineer in a recording studio in north Wales however wasn’t getting enough work and was struggling to pay the lease every month. A suggestion to do some lecturing came in and he thought: why not? When he ran this past his pal and collaborator, Julian Cope, he obtained a sharp response. “He stated to me: ‘Go and look in the mirror,’” says Wrench. “‘You’re unemployable in the actual world. Discover a strategy to make this work since you gained’t last five minutes, you’ll go utterly loopy.’ Annoyingly, I knew he was right.”

Wrench didn’t have to attend long for his fortunes to vary. In 2010, Odessa, a monitor he had combined for Caribou, was released and have become a worldwide anthem. “That opened up an entire totally different world,” he says. He quickly found himself working in New York. The very first cafe he went into was enjoying Odessa. “Having spent properly over a decade sitting in the studio working 18-hour days, that was an enormous moment,” he says. The momentum continued. In 2014, when albums he worked on by Jungle, FKA twigs, Glass Animals and Caribou all arrived within a few month of each other, his telephone began ringing: “Things haven’t stopped since,” he says.