Kyrie was built from the inside out rather than captured as a traditional live band performance. After an early attempt to track it fully live at Ocean Way in Hollywood, the band and co-producer / engineer Paul De Villiers decided to construct the song part by part while always chasing the feel of a live take. Working in Studios A and B on an API console, they leaned heavily on the sound of the rooms themselves, using relatively little reverb and relying instead on careful mic placement and creative processing to keep the track powerful and immediate.
The drum feel was designed long before anyone stood behind a kit. Pat Mastelotto began work on a day off at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco, taking a cassette of the song and his Linn Drum up to his room to rethink the original samba-like groove. Hearing the melody, he immediately imagined something closer to a slow, chunky John Bonham feel and programmed a beat that would become the song’s foundation. In the studio he laid down the Linn pattern, the band played guide tracks against it, and then the final drum sound was built by combining the drum machine with acoustically generated ambience. Mastelotto fed the Linn snare to a Simmons SDS5 brain and out through large UREI speakers into a back linoleum room, placing a Camco snare sideways in front of the speakers so its wires buzzed sympathetically.
De Villiers miked the underside of that snare and recorded three passes at slightly different speeds, which is why the snare seems to grow in size halfway through the song. The kick was also re-amped through the UREIs while two second engineers wheeled Neumann M50 room mics away from the speakers until they hit a sweet spot around 15 to 20 feet. For the kit itself De Villiers used AKG C12s as overheads, Telefunken 251s on toms, M50s as room mics and a Beyer M88 on kick, then later used Mick Guzauski’s backwards-tape delay trick during mixing to pull the room mics into tighter sync with the close sound.
Underneath that drum picture sits a sequenced bass line tracked early in the process. The first element the band committed was a Prophet-5 bass part recorded to a click, which anchored the groove and defined the pulse of the song. From there came the long intro texture, devised primarily by Steve George, over which Richard Page performed the robotic “Kyrie” vocal figure. Additional drums, triggered elements and guitars were layered onto this framework. The sessions took place in the middle of the mid-1980s synthesiser boom, and the band treated the new technology like a box of toys. Polyphonic synths and programmable sequencers were still fresh, and there was little concern at that stage about how the dense arrangements would later be reproduced on stage.
Outboard processing played a major role in shaping the record. De Villiers was particularly fond of AMS digital delays and reverbs, a taste he traced back to work associated with Peter Gabriel. Those units, along with other gadgets, helped define the glossy yet punchy sound of the track. Studio owner Allen Sides contributed high-quality compressors, including LA-2As and vintage Teletronix units, which were used selectively. Plate reverbs were present but kept under control because the producers preferred to exploit the natural ambience of the Ocean Way rooms rather than drown the mix in artificial space. Page later recalled that the drum sound De Villiers drew from Mastelotto’s parts perfectly captured the spirit of that moment in mid-80s production.
The most painstaking work came with the vocals. Only Richard Page and Steve George sang on the record, but De Villiers wanted the choruses to feel like a 30-voice choir. He recorded the pair together multiple times through a single AKG C12, always without effects, and physically moved them around the studio according to a grid of X marks on the floor that represented where each singer in a real choir would stand. There were positions for a front row, rows behind and a narrowing arc in the middle. After each take he would have them step to the next marked spot, with the final positions up to 20 feet from the microphone. The C12 never moved, so the end result behaved exactly as if 30 different people had walked in one by one to stand in their place and sing. That approach created depth and width without needing extreme panning, although it required many tracks and careful bouncing.
Structural decisions were driven as much by radio reality as by arrangement taste. The band had just been through a battle over Broken Wings, which ran well past five minutes and had nearly scared off radio programmers who saw the length on the label. That experience led to some creative thinking on Kyrie. Rather than simply fading, the single version drops down to an a cappella ending that is both dramatic and time-friendly, while the album version closes on a fade. Page has explained that when duration concerns came up again, the a cappella ending was the neatest way to keep impact high without scaring off stations with an overlong running time.
Mastelotto’s early work on the Linn pattern and structural breaks was informed by time spent with producers Mike Chapman and Peter Coleman, both veterans of radio-driven hits like Heartbreaker and Hot Child in the City. He knew how effective short vocal breaks and drops could be for airplay and pushed for the a cappella moments and ending for that reason. When the time came to mix, the band moved to Conway Studios in Los Angeles, where they first met mixer Mick Guzauski. Page remembers walking into the control room to find a pair of feet sticking out from under the console, Guzauski napping after a long stretch of work. Woken and played the rough of Kyrie, he reportedly decided within a few bars that he wanted to mix it and got started straight away.
Around all this technical craft sat a song that could easily have been misunderstood. The title phrase “Kyrie eleison” worried Richard Page at first, as he feared the band would be pigeonholed as a Christian act, a marketing direction he did not feel suited them. Lyricist John Lang argued that the line fit the melody perfectly and fought to keep it. By the time the track was largely built, there was no realistic way to change course. When the single was released, the combination of that memorable hook, the synthetic yet muscular production and the painstaking vocal work helped drive Kyrie to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1986, where it stayed for two weeks. It also topped the Mainstream Rock chart and reached Number 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart, a distinctly 1980s blend of rock radio, pop sheen and studio ingenuity.