Wrench has mixed music for Frank Ocean, FKA twigs, Blur and dozens more – all drawn to what have been called ‘the finest ears ever’. He explains how he went from the dole to the big time

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.