The Listeners Episode 2 – Meet Steve

The Listeners is back! Our exclusive multi-media series, where we meet the people who’s lives and listening is shaped by Kudos Audio. This is Steve’s story…

It’s mid-summer, and we’re driving cautiously down a long, dusty farmer’s track in rural Lincolnshire. We’re heading to the home of Steve McElroy – co-founder and guitarist of The Australian Pink Floyd Show. He also happens to be a huge fan of Kudos Audio loudspeakers, and we have it on good authority that he utilises their talents in a pretty unique way. We’re excited to find out more.

After roughly three quarters of a mile of off-roading, a small cluster of handsome-looking farmhouses appears in front of us. Standing outside in the sunshine is Steve, smiling broadly and waving us into the driveway. The setting is pure English bucolic splendour – with little to suggest the presence of the audio treasure trove that lies through the gates in front of us. 

As we step out of the car, Steve greets us with a friendly handshake. He’s wearing a t-shirt for the band ‘Nick Mason’s A Saucerful of Secrets’, a new project from the eponymous Pink Floyd drummer. Steve’s deep love (and encyclopaedic knowledge) of Pink Floyd should really come as no surprise to anyone. Steve has been the guitarist, founder member, and general overseer for arguably the world’s biggest stadium tribute act for over 35 years. Steve is the band’s ‘Dave Gilmour’ in more ways than one, and over nearly four decades of touring, he’s performed the music of Pink Floyd to millions of fans at some of the most iconic venues in world music. 

One of the reasons for the sustained success of The Australian Pink Floyd Show lies in the band’s ability to so faithfully recreate each song in their repertoire with absolute fidelity to the original recording. The talent that this takes is really quite difficult to overstate – it demands a combination of musical virtuosity and an ear for sonic detail that most of us simply couldn’t dream of aspiring towards. This unique skill set adds up to make Steve a pretty good judge of a loudspeaker, as we’ll soon see.

Steve is all smiles in the July sunshine, greeting us warmly in his gravel driveway. He soon ushers us inside his rehearsal space-come-recording studio – ‘Aussie Floyd HQ’ as Steve calls it – and welcomes us into a whole other world of audio magic. Bare brick walls and exposed wooden roof beams greet us – this centuries-old space was both a cattle shed and a carpenter’s workshop in its previous lives. Since then, Steve has filled it with warmth, welcoming energy, and more audio gear than you could count. 

Guitars and signal cables hang on the walls. A large PA (alongside a pair of Kudos T88s) and a truly epic selection of guitar FX pedals adorns the far wall of the room, framed by a rug featuring Aussie Floyd’s logo (the Australian continent transposed into Dark Side of The Moon’s iconic light prism front cover). Shelves heave with carefully placed memorabilia from Steve’s childhood – Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett figurines, Batmobiles, robots from Lost In Space. A record collection features a healthy selection of Pink Floyd LPs, alongside The Beatles, Genesis, Yes – classic British bands of the 60s and 70s. Behind us, a sign over a doorway reads ‘The Crazy Diamond Pub’. Step foot through here, and you’re transported into a pleasingly familiar Aussie-Irish bar, resplendent with draft taps, opticals, a pool table and countless pieces of tour memorabilia from three decades of live shows.

It’s a remarkable place. A genuine Aladdin’s Cave of good times, memories, music, and crucially, studio gear. We could spend hours pouring over every detail, but we remind ourselves of our purpose – to find out more about the man that has built this fascinating space for celebrating music, and his love of Kudos loudspeakers. We sit down with Steve, and begin.

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC

“My early experiences with music was on rubbish AM radios in Australia – not exactly HiFi listening!” Steve tells us, as we ask about his early memories of music. “I recall listening to a lot of my sister’s music collection…she was listening to Floyd, Alan Parsons Project, The Sweet…mainly English bands. Growing up in Australia, you didn’t have a lot of choice, so if you had a record you wore that record out. I knew those albums very well.”

As Steve got older, his listening certainly evolved. “When I was 15, I got a job in a department store called Myers, in the HiFi department – I’d always been interested in sound and electronics” A joint appreciation for high fidelity and Pink Floyd began to grow almost symbiotically. “I used to take my Pink Floyd records into the store and play them on these really expensive HiFi’s…I sold a load of systems because of those records!”

Steve points to a groaning display shelf behind him, packed with records, DVDs, comic book figurines, and more. “I put this together as a little tribute to my passions as a kid…they’re my go-to albums when listening here.” Steve is only too happy to share the backstory of the shelf’s comic book features. “I was a big fan of Jerry Anderson…they had all these incredible sound effects that I’d never heard before. I was fascinated by it. I started making sound effects on a reel-to reel as a kid…I found if I recorded my sister’s hair dryer at high speed on the reel-to-reel, and played it back at low speed, it sounded exactly like Thunderbird 2”.

“As daft as that may seem, that was where my fascination with sound and mic placements began”. It’s a process that would stand Steve in good stead once he came to form the band that would go on to define his life and career to date.

THE BIRTH OF AUSSIE FLOYD

“When I was a kid I used to get these obscure bootleg albums of Pink Floyd playing live…I devoured these albums of Floyd playing their repertoire and hearing the audience go nuts.” At first Steve fantasised about standing in the audience, but soon, his focus shifted. “I used to think it would be so cool to be up onstage playing these songs. That planted the seed for me.”

So where did it all start? “It was 1988 in Adelaide Australia”, Steve reveals, “there was an ad in Allen’s Music Store for musicians to meet up and play Pink Floyd music.” He wasn’t to know it, but this ad would alter his life forever. “We all met up on the same day, me, Lee Smith, Jason the keyboard player…next thing we know, we’re touring Australia!”.

A chance visit to England – Steve’s first – offered an opportunity that Steve had no intention of ignoring. And he wasn’t afraid to go in big. “I went down to London and knocked on the door of a gig promoter called Harvey Goldsmith.” That would be the legendary co-founder of Live Aid, known to pop music history as ‘the father of stadium rock’. “He said he thought a Pink Floyd tribute was stupid idea and told me to bugger off!”

“I then rang a guy named Glenn Povey who ran a Pink Floyd magazine called Brain Damage…he was holding the first ever Pink Floyd convention at Wembley the following year, and he didn’t have a band. It was a pure fluke.” This remarkable coincidence marked the beginning of a new chapter for Aussie Floyd. “I signed a contract with Glenn on a napkin in a pub car park…we all packed in our jobs, and came out to the UK. We’ve been here ever since!”

What has followed is nothing short of remarkable. Multiple world tours on almost every continent at major theatres, arenas, The Albert Hall, to name but a few. The show has grown bigger than Steve and his fellow co-founders ever could have imagined – a genuine spectacle that has been readily endorsed by members of Pink Floyd themselves. What stands Aussie Floyd apart as unique? “We see ourselves less as a classic tribute band, than an orchestra playing the music of Pink Floyd. So it’s about the music, and the live experience, rather than us in the band.”

It’s an approach that’s seemingly paid dividends. When we ask Steve what he makes of Aussie Floyd’s achievements, he responds with classic Australian understatement; “it’s been a hell of a journey…yeah, it’s been alright.”

CREATING THE PINK FLOYD SOUND

There are many tribute acts that would prove an easier gig than Pink Floyd – a band known for its sweeping soundscapes, groundbreaking artistic vision, and revolutionary approach to audio. From the beginning, Steve and his bandmates’ approach has been to forensically recreate this sound as closely as possible. He explains, “We’ve always worked from the assumption that most Pink Floyd fans listen to the albums first and foremost, so we always saw it as our job to recreate those records, rather than do a live version”. 

This is the appeal of Aussie Floyd for so many fans – this total commitment to the original records makes them unique in the tribute act space. It also makes for a complex production process, as Steve reveals. “We essentially have to take a full recording studio on the road with us, because we’re trying to cover 40-50 years of different music, and the technology they used to record it at the time”. 

“It’s quite difficult to make a song sound really old through modern equipment…we’re almost obsessed with it, that quest of perfection. It’s been over 35 years and that quest truly never ends.

AUSSIE FLOYD HQ

The space that we’re sitting in now is where that quest is forged. This is where the band meets to rehearse, record, and fine tune the Pink Floyd sound. Steve is only too happy to show us around. 

“This is the command centre…we’ve been here for 26 years and it’s been basically designed to cater to the needs of Aussie Floyd.” Steve designed the space almost literally from the ground up to serve this very purpose. “The building itself is an old brick barn – we’ve put a floating floor in it to isolate the low end that these speakers generate. When we first moved in and switched the PA on for the first time our neighbour came running down the road because the sound was shaking the plates off her shelves.”

It’s not just a formidable recording studio and rehearsal room. It’s a multi-faceted, multi-use space. “This also doubles up as a cinema room and listening room for the family…and then the other half of the barn has been turned into a sort of Aussie-Irish pub.” This is the perfect spot for the band to decongest after a session, and percolate ideas in a relaxing environment. “It seems to work well,” Steve tells us. 

And what about the gear? “It is an odd combination of equipment in here. There’s some really high end pieces, and some fairly ropey stuff too.” This might seem a rather stark admission to most audiophiles, but in record production, a wide array of electronics is crucial. The reason? You have to recognise that different people will listen through very different gear, and you want recordings to sound as good as they can do, on every single medium. Therefore fidelity through a bog-standard pair of headphones or an iPhone is as important as fidelity through a £30k loudspeaker. Steve agrees. “They’re all tools to try and emulate the music of Pink Floyd.”

A recording set-up makes up the brains of the system, on an iMac running Pro Tools, Logic, and Ableton – all standard recording and programming software for the music industry. On the front console, Steve also features a Kemper guitar amplifier simulator – these have become hugely popular in recent years for their accuracy in simulating the sounds of almost any amp in musical history. A useful tool for a guitarist whose repertoire spans 60 years. A pair of Kudos Audio C10s make up Steve’s studio monitors, “you need something that’s not going to colour the music in any way – they’re perfect for that.”

“We use the T88’s for reference when we want something a bit louder…and we’ve also got a full sized PA in here as well, that’s loud enough for a theatre show. That’s for us to flush out any transients or nasty frequencies that might hurt an audience down at the front row, and to make sure the sound experience is consistent wherever you’re sitting in a theatre.” 

Steve’s Kudos loudspeakers, it turns our, form a crucial part of Aussie Floyd’s quest for perfect sonic reproduction. It’s to the T88s at the back of the room that we now turn our attention. 

DISCOVERING KUDOS

“The reason I discovered Kudos loudspeakers is because our front of house engineer, Trevor, is Derek’s older brother”. That would be Derek Gilligan, MD of Kudos Audio. “Trevor told me Derek had some prototypes of the T88s that he would never sell because they weren’t the finished product…so he had these amazing speakers sitting there that he couldn’t do much with.”

Here was an opportunity for Steve to bring a pair of leading loudspeakers into his recording space. Kudos were only too happy to oblige. Whilst Steve was expecting a great sounding speaker, he wasn’t prepared for the effect it was going to have on him.

“I brought them in, set them up, switched them on and I thought, ‘ah, idiot, you’ve left the PA on’. I got up to turn it off and realised what I was hearing was through these T88 speakers. I was absolutely gobsmacked.” What was it that Steve found so transformative? “I’ve never known speakers that have so much volume but in perfection…it’s so graceful but you’ve got all the power there that can deliver the energy of a live band.”

Steve’s T88’s quickly became an absolutely essential tool in the pre-production and recording process for Aussie Floyd. “The T88s play such an important role…they’re the detail. They allow you to really hear what you’re doing.”

Steve drives his Kudos Audio loudspeakers with a classic 1970’s antipodean amplifier – a huge, hulking Perreaux 6000B, designed and built in New Zealand. “That, with the Kudos’ have kind’ve become an extension of my ears.”

As Steve begins to drill into his love for this amplifier and speaker combination, we start to get a sense of how meaningful this fairly unconventional system is to him. “I can sit there and close my eyes [when listening] and I’m sitting at a gig listening to a live band” Steve tells us. “They recreate that atmosphere and vibe so effortlessly and perfectly…I haven’t found a better speaker than Kudos for using as a brilliant tool in that sense.”

“And then the gloves come off and you can have a lot of fun with them.”

Steve seems to understand the real, fundamental value in the way Kudos approaches loudspeaker design – and perhaps recognises echoes of his own approach to Aussie Floyd. “I think in the case of Derek and Kudos, it’s a real obsession and a passion,” he argues. “Ultimately they’re doing it for themselves. It’s not just about selling speakers and making money, it’s about sitting in front of these speakers and hearing the best speakers they’ve ever heard in their lives.

“Without that passion, it’s difficult to achieve something special. And I think that’s what Derek does – achieves something really very special”

As we approach the end of our time in Steve’s incredible rehearsal space, we ask; what would you say to someone considering bringing a pair of Kudos Audio loudspeakers into their life?

“If you love your music, just do it…it’s an investment in your happiness. The pleasure they’ll give you…it’s difficult to put into words.”

“If you’re into your HiFi, you’ll struggle to find a better speaker.”

Thank you to Steve and his family for being such gracious hosts to us throughout our time with them.