Flood (producer)

Based on Wikipedia: Flood (producer)

The nickname came from tea.

In the late 1970s, a young studio runner named Mark Ellis worked at Morgan Studios in London, fetching refreshments for the musicians and engineers recording there. The Cure was in the building, and producer Chris Tsangarides noticed that Ellis kept up with every request for tea and bacon sandwiches while another runner seemed perpetually absent. Tsangarides started calling them "Flood" and "Drought." Only one of those names would end up on some of the most influential rock albums of the next four decades.

The Education of an Engineer

Mark Ellis was born in London on August 16, 1960. He attended St Olave's Grammar School in Orpington, and his first foray into music was as the vocalist for a band called Seven Hertz. But by 1978, he had figured out that his future lay behind the mixing console rather than in front of the microphone.

Starting as a runner—the lowest rung on the studio ladder—Ellis worked at Morgan Studios, Battery Studios, Marcus Studios, and Trident Studios. A runner's job sounds glamorous until you realize it mostly involves making tea, organizing cables, and being available for whatever grunt work needs doing at three in the morning. But it's also the best possible education in how records get made, because you're watching everything happen.

His first notable credit came as the tape operator on Rick Wakeman's concept album 1984. Tape operation is exactly what it sounds like: you run the massive reels of magnetic tape that captured audio in the pre-digital era, handling the physical medium that the music existed on. Get it wrong, and you might accidentally erase the perfect take that took hours to capture.

By 1981, Ellis had worked his way up to house engineer and then made the leap to freelance work. That same year, he served as assistant engineer on New Order's debut album Movement. The following year, he engineered Ministry's first album, With Sympathy—a record that Ministry's Al Jourgensen would later essentially disown as too pop-oriented, though it launched one of industrial music's most important careers.

The Some Bizzare Years

Flood's early career was shaped by his association with Some Bizzare Records, a label run by the eccentric and confrontational Stevo. The label's roster read like a who's who of experimental British music in the early 1980s: Cabaret Voltaire, who pioneered industrial music with their cut-up tape experiments; Psychic TV, the provocative project of Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge; and Marc Almond's side project Marc and the Mambas, which let the Soft Cell singer explore darker, more theatrical territory than his synth-pop day job allowed.

Working with these artists taught Flood something that would define his career: a willingness to pursue unusual sounds and textures. Some Bizzare wasn't interested in conventional rock production. They wanted records that sounded like nothing else.

This led naturally to Mute Records, the independent label founded by Daniel Miller that had become home to some of the most innovative electronic music in Britain. Flood became one of Mute's preferred producers, which meant working with their flagship acts: Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke (who had left Depeche Mode to form Yazoo and later Erasure), and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

His first production project was Nick Cave's From Her to Eternity in 1983-84, followed by The Firstborn Is Dead. These albums established Cave's post-Birthday Party sound—gothic, literary, steeped in blues and Old Testament imagery. For Erasure, Flood engineered their debut Wonderland and its follow-up The Circus, helping to craft the bright, anthemic synthpop that would make Andy Bell and Vince Clarke stars.

The Joshua Tree and the Art of Knowing When to Walk Away

1987 changed everything. Flood was hired to engineer U2's The Joshua Tree, working alongside producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The album would become one of the defining rock records of the decade, selling over 25 million copies and cementing U2's status as the biggest band in the world.

And then Flood did something remarkable: he gave up mixing the album to produce Erasure's The Circus instead.

This wasn't a mistake or a scheduling conflict. It was a choice. The Circus became Erasure's commercial breakthrough, and Flood had demonstrated that he wasn't interested in riding anyone else's coattails. He had his own vision, his own artists to champion.

The Industrial Connection

Shortly after The Joshua Tree, Flood co-produced Nine Inch Nails' debut album Pretty Hate Machine. The record was a collision of genres—industrial noise, synthpop hooks, rock guitar, dance beats—and it introduced Trent Reznor to the world. Flood shared production duties with John Fryer, Adrian Sherwood, and Keith LeBlanc, but the album's sonic adventurousness bore his fingerprints.

He would return to Nine Inch Nails twice more: co-producing three tracks on the Broken EP in 1992, and then working on The Downward Spiral in 1994. That album, recorded partly in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family, became a landmark of 1990s rock—visceral, disturbing, and sonically innovative in ways that still influence producers today.

Meanwhile, his work with Depeche Mode reached its peak with Violator in 1990, arguably the band's masterpiece. Songs like "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence" showed how far electronic music could travel from its cold, mechanical origins—these were warm, sensual, deeply human recordings that happened to be made largely with synthesizers. Flood returned for Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993, pushing the band into even more aggressive, guitar-driven territory.

The U2 Partnership Deepens

Flood's relationship with U2 evolved over the years. For Achtung Baby in 1991, he worked alongside Eno, Lanois, and Steve Lillywhite as the band reinvented itself, trading the earnest anthems of The Joshua Tree for irony, distortion, and European electronic influences. The transformation was so dramatic that the band's label initially worried they had lost their minds.

By Zooropa in 1993, Flood had moved from engineer to co-producer, sharing credit with Eno and guitarist The Edge. The album was stranger, more experimental than anything U2 had done—including a song sung entirely by Johnny Cash.

The partnership continued through Pop (1997) and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004). The latter won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, with Flood sharing in the recognition.

The Smashing Pumpkins and the Challenge of Ambition

In 1995, Flood co-produced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness with Alan Moulder. The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan had conceived an impossibly ambitious project: a double album divided into "Dawn to Dusk" and "Twilight to Starlight," running 28 songs over two hours. It was the kind of grandiose rock opera that critics usually punish, but the album went platinum ten times over.

Corgan has spoken about what made Flood exceptional:

Flood is a tremendous producer. Flood is very masterful with the sonics, but where he really shines is he's a great idea person. And I don't mean like he tells you, "Oh, put this chorus here." It's more like he can see an ambiance of the song that you don't necessarily see and he would really fight with us—not negative a fight, just he would really kind of push us to say there's another vibe here that you can get to.

This description captures something crucial about Flood's approach. He wasn't a producer who imposed a signature sound on every project. Instead, he seemed to identify what each artist was reaching toward and help them get there, even when they couldn't articulate it themselves.

Flood returned for the Pumpkins' Adore in 1998, assisting Billy Corgan and Brad Wood, and Machina/The Machines of God in 2000. The band was fragmenting by then, and the albums reflected the turmoil, but they remained sonically adventurous.

PJ Harvey and the Value of Creative Friction

Flood's work with PJ Harvey spanned some of her most acclaimed albums. To Bring You My Love in 1995 found Harvey moving away from the raw power trio sound of her early records toward something more theatrical and textured. The title track builds from a whispered confession to a howling declaration, and the production gives it room to breathe and explode.

Is This Desire? followed in 1998, and White Chalk in 2007, the latter co-produced with John Parish and Harvey herself. Let England Shake in 2010 won the Mercury Prize, and Flood's production supported Harvey's most politically engaged work—songs about war, empire, and English identity that somehow managed to be both deeply serious and wickedly catchy.

Building a Home

For years, Flood worked out of a studio in Kilburn called The Bedroom. Eventually, he and longtime collaborator Alan Moulder opened the Assault & Battery studio complex together. In 2008, Miloco Studios opened Assault & Battery 2 in Willesden Green, and the following year, the original studio came under the Miloco umbrella. Both Flood and Moulder remain involved, though the facilities have since been renamed simply Battery Studios.

The partnership with Moulder deserves its own examination. Moulder is himself an acclaimed producer and engineer, known for his work with Smashing Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine, and Placebo. When two such talents collaborate, the question of who contributed what becomes impossible to untangle—which is probably the point. Their co-production of The Killers' Sam's Town in 2006 showed they could apply their combined expertise to a band working in a completely different tradition, one more indebted to Bruce Springsteen than to industrial music.

The Eclectic Middle Years

A catalog of Flood's work from 2000 onward reads like a deliberate attempt to avoid repetition. Gary Numan's "Cars"—already a defining synth-pop anthem—got reworked for Numan's 2003 album Hybrid. London's The Duke Spirit received Flood's attention for their 2005 debut Cuts Across the Land. He mixed a-ha's Analogue and Placebo's Meds. He produced Sigur Rós's Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust in Iceland, an album whose title translates to "With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly."

The Icelandic sessions must have been something to witness. Sigur Rós makes music that feels geologic in scale, all sweeping dynamics and invented languages, about as far from the punk-influenced industrial music of Flood's early career as you could travel while staying within rock's broad boundaries. Yet somehow the collaboration made sense.

He worked with Thirty Seconds to Mars on This Is War, reuniting with Steve Lillywhite. He produced Editors' In This Light and on This Evening. He returned to Nitzer Ebb—the electronic body music pioneers—for Industrial Complex, their first release in over a decade. He produced The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's Belong, helping a Brooklyn indie pop band achieve a bigger, more textured sound.

The Producer's Paradox

Here's what makes Flood's career so unusual: there isn't really a "Flood sound." Listen to Violator and then The Joshua Tree. Listen to Pretty Hate Machine and then White Chalk. These records have almost nothing in common sonically, yet the same person was central to making all of them.

Some producers become famous for a signature—Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Rick Rubin's stripped-back approach, Max Martin's hooks. Flood became famous for the opposite: the ability to subordinate his own preferences to what each project demanded.

This doesn't mean he's invisible on these records. Someone had to decide how "Personal Jesus" should feel, how the guitars on The Downward Spiral should grind, how much space to leave in a PJ Harvey arrangement. But the decisions always serve the artist's vision rather than imposing the producer's.

There's a tension in record production between the auteur approach—where the producer is essentially another band member with veto power over creative decisions—and the facilitator approach, where the producer's job is to realize someone else's vision as effectively as possible. Flood seems to occupy a third position: he has strong ideas and fights for them (as Corgan noted), but the ideas are always in service of unlocking something the artist was already trying to achieve.

The Tea Runner's Legacy

Depeche Mode called Flood back in 2013 to mix Delta Machine, even though Ben Hillier handled the production. The band trusted his ears after all those years. That trust is the real currency in the music industry—not hits, not awards, but the confidence that when you hand someone your songs, they'll come back better than you imagined.

From tea runner to Grammy winner, from Morgan Studios to Battery Studios, from Seven Hertz vocalist to the person behind the console for some of the most important rock and electronic albums of the past forty years: Mark Ellis carved out a career by mastering the paradox of creative service. The best producers make the artist sound more like themselves than the artist knew how to sound.

The nickname stuck, but Flood never dried up.