¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Introduction and Trevor Horn's Journey
Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and thirty one of Soda Jacker on Songwriting. This is Simon.
And this is Brian.
And joining us today is a massively influential Grammy, Ivanovello and Brit Award winning record producer, musician and songwriter. He's perhaps best known for his seminal production work with the likes of ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones, Yes, Dollar, Seal, Pet Shop Boys, Art of Noise and Malcolm McLaren, as well as being a founder member of Buggles.
Just a couple of weeks ago he released his first album under his own name, Trevor Horn Reimagines the Eighties, on which he reinterprets some of the biggest songs from the decade in which he made his name with the help of the Psalm Orchestra and a few famous chums. We're honoured to welcome the estimable Trevor Horn to the show.
Of course, Trevor's often been referred to as the man who invented the eighties. When it comes to podcasting, I like to think of us as the men who invented the twenty tens.
Me too.
Anyway, we visited with Trevor at his lovely home studio in West London back in mid December twenty eighteen and had a great time speaking with him, didn't we?
We did, not to mention cooing over the vintage Lindrum he had sitting in the corner.
Yeah, I fancy doing a few bars of When Dubs Cry when I saw that.
Our guest was born in nineteen forty nine in Durham in the northeast of England. Music ran in the family, his dad played double bass in a big band, and Trevor took up the instrument himself aged eight, although he'd started out on recorder.
He later taught himself bass guitar and learned to sight read, and eventually began to dept for his dad if he couldn't make a gig, as well as performing in a local youth orchestra. As a teen, his attention turned to the likes of the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, and at fourteen he played in his first group, The Outer Limits.
Trevor was seventeen when he decided to pursue a music career. He moved to London at twenty one and did a variety of session gigs and produced the odd advertising jingle as well. He was later involved in the construction of a recording facility in Leicester, where he further honed his studio chops.
Our guest returned to London in seventy-six, did more session and production work, and also wrote for various artists like Dusty Springfield and The Jag, as well as playing bass for disco artist Tina Charles. He credits her producer Bidu as being vital to his own development in that field.
He formed Buggles with keyboardist Jeffrey Downs in nineteen seventy eight. They signed to Ireland and released their first single Video Kill the Radio Star the following year, which became a UK number one and eventually the first music video to air on MTV.
They released two albums, The Age of Plastic in nineteen eighty and Adventures in Modern Recording the following year. Both are very much worth your time. Their success led to an offer for them to write, record and tour with Yes, which they did for a year. Following which Trevor left to become a full time producer, with his late wife Jill Sinclair becoming his manager.
His first commercial success was the Dollar album in 1982 for Dollar, an assignment Jill had given him for which he also wrote several songs. An even bigger hit was ABC's The Lexicon of Love the same year, which was a UK number one record and as far as we're concerned remains a benchmark in recorded pop music.
It absolutely glistens that album, doesn't it?
Does. It makes me think of those old fairy liquid ads, you know where they'd run their finger down the clean dish and to make that squeak.
Yeah.
Trevor assembled his core team around this time, including arranger Anne Dudley, engineers Gary Langan and Steve Lipson, and programmer JJ.
Further Triumph came in nineteen eighty three with the Malcolm McLaren album, Duck Rock, not least one of its hit singles, Double Dutch, which blended pop hooks and South African rhythms when Graceland was still a glint in Paul Simon's eye. 83 was also the year Trevor established Psalm West Studios and co-founded ZTT Records with Paul Morley, which eventually led to the Art of Noise project.
Trevor's greatest commercial success came in nineteen eighty four when he produced Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, which yielded the massive hits Relax, Two Tribes and The Power of Love, all calling cards for Trevor's singular production style. The same year saw him reunite with Yes, one of the results of which was Owner of a Lonely Heart, as pristine a piece of record making as you're ever likely to hear.
Our guest moved to LA in the late eighties where he established Psalm West Coast and in nineteen ninety one produced Seal's self titled debut album, which was a UK number one, and featured the top ten hit Crazy, arguably that artist's signature song. He also worked at the likes of Mike Oldfield, Genesis, and Tori Amos.
Since the turn of the century, he's worked with the diverse likes of Tattoo, Lisa Stansfield, Pet Shop Boys, John Legend, Robbie Williams, Jeff Beck, and Bell and Sebastian. In two thousand six he formed the supergroup Producers with Lol Cream, Steve Lipson, Ash Sohn and initially Chris Braid, which is now called the Trevor Horn Band. He was also awarded a CBE in the twenty eleven New Year's Honors List for services to the music industry. Imagine if he just applied himself, Brad.
Yeah, what might have been. To hear a selection of Trevor's songs and some of his incredible productions, including a couple of tracks from the new album, check out our Spotify playlist for this episode. Head to Sodajer.com slash podcast, click on Trevor's page and you'll find a link under the episode player. Keep up to date with his latest news at Trevorhorn dot com, Facebook dot com slash Trevornofficial, at Trevor underscore horn underscore on Twitter, and at Trevorne Music on Instagram.
As always you can find us at sodajeker.com facebook.com slash soda jerker and at soda jerk on twitter and instagram subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts so that you never miss an episode and leave us a nice review and five star rating while you're there to help other people find the show. You can also donate to the upkeep of the podcast at Sodajerka dot com slash donate. No obligation, but those London train fairs don't pay for themselves, let me tell ya.
Before we move on, many thanks to Joel at SARM for his help in setting up the interview you're about to hear, and also to Suzanne for her assistance on the day. So here we are, down in London town with the great
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My pleasure.
¶ Reimagining the Eighties Album Vision
So the new album, Trevor Horn reimagines the eighties, is that January twenty fifth? Yes. So it's not enough that you invented the decade, now you're gonna reimagine it for us.
It's really just an excuse to have fun with a sixty-five piece orchestra and a bunch of old songs.
I was gonna ask you that actually. What constitutes the orchestra? Is it a mix of kind of studio magic and real players or oh
It's a real orchestra. Right. It's all the A players. It's like uh forty five strings, fifteen brass and six percussion players. So it's a lot of people. Not all at the same time, I hasten to add. You know, I I quite like the reimagined idea and I actually really did try to reimagine a few things. Imagine, for instance, that dancing in the dark was a sad ballad.
Well you've got Take On Me on there as well, haven't you, which is really quite divorced from that kind of synth pop backing that it had originally.
Yeah, well the reason that was on it was funny, I I wanted to do that with Ildeva. And I actually met one of Il Diva. I did a demo of it, you know, just singing all the parts. I was having fun. I was kind of you know, talking away impersonating Ildeva. And then they bailed on it. So I tried a bunch of other people and it didn't work, so in the end I ran out of time and I just left my voice on that.
Yeah, you know. Great vocal, like you sound very youthful.
Yeah, it was it's amazing what you can do in the studio, isn't it?
I'd take it lining up all the the guests on the album was fairly straightforward. I assume they were quite happy to sit atop a Trevor Horn production.
Yeah, it was a question if they liked the song and they like the arrangement. I mean Seal was originally gonna do different for girls, but when he heard Ashes to Ashes he wanted to do Ashes to Ashes. Um Robbie I just Sent him everybody wants to rule the world and it took half an hour. That was it.
It's not easy. Yeah.
Yeah.
What led you to pick the particular songs that ended up on the record?
When I look at it now it's mainly for the lyrics. I mean in most songs the lyrics are very important. If you think about it, you can have any piece of music but the thing that defines it are the lyrics that go with the tune. That's the thing that makes it into something. So I tried to pick all the lyrics that seemed meaningful.
Different for girls could have been an Aria or could have been from a musical, you know, What the hell is wrong with you till you can see it, you know what I mean? On stage, it has that sort of element to it, so That's what I was trying to do. So it I know there's been a lot of orchestral albums around recently. I can't say I've really liked any of them. The last orchestral album I really liked was the Joni Mitchell
Traveler, but that's Larry Klein. He's brilliant. He did all the orchestrations and I mean they're fabulous.
But I take it you're completing the tracks and then bringing in your guests to sing on them pretty much.
Combination of both things, you know. We tried loads of tracks, you know, we've got the list probably a ten that somehow we couldn't get the vibe for, you know what I mean? These were the ideas that worked best. The ideas came both ways. I would have an idea for a song, Julian's the arranger, and he'd sort of give it a day and
if it felt good in a day, you know, then we go deeper into it. Then you have to figure out what else you're gonna put on it, you're gonna put drums on it. It was a bit of a long process getting all of the people together and really getting the tracks to work. Of course in the process the house burned down. in LA so I lost my studio in LA. But we had some fun times. I rented Tom Jones' old house. We nicknamed it Funky Bel Air and um, you know, everybody sang in the cupboard.
We made it into a vocal booth. The house was a sort of studio.
It was quite a kind of homemade record in a sense.
And I came down here, you know. It isn't at home, but it's a proper studio, you know.
you wouldn't be taking advantage of portable technology and doing stuff on your laptop here and there or that kind of thing. Oh, I do.
That all the time. Sometimes do the bass on my laptop because I've been on the road so much this year. I've been doing a sort of Berkeley bass guitar course as well, you know. Great. To try and keep my playing and, you know, try and keep going forward with it. No, absolutely. You could do loads.
But th one thing that you can't do is have a proper set of speakers like these, you know. This costs money a a studio like this. And the hotel room really won't suffice, you know. If you're just working on a computer, you know, you don't need to be in a room like this. And most of the time y you're using samples so you don't have to have a proper studio. It's like
Two different kinds of kitchen, you know. If you're just gonna make everything from tins and packets, all you need is a couple of pounds, you know. But if you're gonna make sauce from the ground upwards and roast the meat and all that stuff, then you need proper kitchen.
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¶ Songwriting Craft and Collaboration
Do you find you're still in a kind of mode of capturing sort of original song ideas these days?
You know, most fun is when somebody hires you to write a song. I did a thing called The Reflection with Stan Lee and a Japanese studio. I did music and They asked me to write a couple of songs for it. Didn't know what it was gonna be like. I mean Stan Lee was, you know, God rest his soul. He's an interesting guy. I'm not big on the old superheroes that kind of go over my head a bit.
But the idea of writing songs I really enjoyed it. And they loved the first two songs we wrote, so it was like getting a free pass in a way. That was a really fun experience. When you have something specifically to write for it can be fun, you know? A song's no good without a vehicle for it, you know. Mhm. Writers have this idea that people will cover their songs, but to try and get anybody To cover your song is the most incredibly hard thing. That's Diane Warren.
Well we just spoke to Diane Warren. I mean you produced um Can't Fight the Moonlight, didn't you? Did she have any specific instructions for you about what she wanted from that?
Actually d that was when Diane came through because it was for the end of Coyote Ugly. And we'd had this song for ages called Find Now which is also one of Diane's songs. I'm fine now, fine now. I never liked it much, but I had to work on it, like you do sometimes in films. When we did the preview, the Disney people hated it, so Diane begged for a couple of days to come up with another song and she came up with Fight the Moonlight. And I thought Fight the Moonlight was a fucking hit.
Necessity's the mother of invention.
If you listen to it, it changes key all over the place. Diane was great. That's always what was good about working with Diane. Mm-hmm. I bought the uh multitrack of the demo offer and that kind of it bought me two days. Otherwise I'd have had to work it all out and blah blah blah. I got the demo and the demo was really good so all I had to do is ink in and chop it around a bit, you know.
Uh we wondered that actually how much of the sort of finished the article was in the demo.
demo would probably sound quite basic now compared with what we did. We did a lot of shit to it. There wasn't a demo. But what I'm saying, when you've got to do a record fast to get the program from the demo is such a good thing, you know? And I paid her five hundred bucks for it for her her programming, you know. But it gave me something to work on.
Mm. Well, you've always had a great ear for a classic song, haven't you? I mean, I remember reading somewhere that you were talking about the song Walk On By and just the qualities of that and how clear and simple and and how important that is for a song.
Well Walk On By is a beautiful song because it just has the atmosphere and it It has such a wonderful payoff. I break down and da da da da da. It sort of really amps it up, you know? Somebody like Vanilla Fodge could have done that song. They probably did.
We've spoken to some people over our years on the podcast who've worked with Bacharach particularly.
Elvis Costello and uh Cal Bay Sag.
Yeah, and they've always said how fastidious he is about putting particular syllables on particular notes, and it all has to fit, like, mathematically, you know?
One of my favourite albums that I go back to and that I sing along with if I have a chore to do, you know, for whatever reason, clear up stuff, do something like that, I always put on Ebbis Costello sings back a rack right.
Nice.
In the darkness. It's great for singing along with. And he does such a great job. I never thought I'd like him singing back rack stuff, but I kinda like it almost as much as I like some of the originals, you know?
Yeah. That's Painted from Memory album, some of his best singing.
Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about. Yeah, I love it.
¶ Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm Creation
You uh reimagine one of your own productions on the album.
I think that was originally for Frankie Goes to Hollywood that one, wasn't it? Yeah.
Yes, we tried it with the Frankies, but it was a very sort of Germanic version of the song that used to go boodo do slave to the rhythm doo doo doo It was like that. But it didn't suit them, you know, we knew that straight away, so it wasn't a question of They didn't like it. There's a vocal of it somewhere with Hollywood singing it, you know it's not a complicated song.
Yeah. The groove to that, wasn't that just kinda captured like you just captured the band kind of playing a few bars that you liked and you looped it?
Yeah, that was Steve Lipson. The band that we put together in New York, you know, because we had the first version of it that we'd done with the synclavia that was very sort of like had a kind of fascisty kind of sound too. And I had this sort of preoccupation with you know, if I'm gonna be a slave to the rhythm, what rhythm would I be a slave to? I thought the only one I like at the moment is go go rhythm. So since it was for Chris Blackwell
I asked him if he could get me some go go musicians, you know, bass drums and percussion. And he got me a great drummer, a guy called Juju from Experience Unlimited, and there two percussion pairs, Little Beats and another guy. And we tried to work out an arrangement of sleep to the rhythm, but it was sort of hopeless because
their idea of an arrangement was start and stop. And there's a groove, right? But while they had been sort of warming up and getting comfortable, the drummer had just been playing. He'd played for about eight minutes. And there was one part of it, like a minute of it, and I had it on a I used to have one of those Walkman cassette players with a speaker in it. And I had this one bit and I kept playing it.
And then Bruce, just out of nowhere, came up with those courts. Sting, sting. It's fucking great. I love these cords. And so then we we were in the hit factory in New York and uh we had to be out by five o'clock. We had to start at eight o'clock in the morning. We took a load of gear back to the hotel. I remember took a mixer. We had an eight to eight drum machine.
a JX, eight P, a bass, an amp. Steve programmed uh drum pattern into the A and Bruce playing the chords and we sort of rewrote the song. And then you know, we sent the band home the next day because it was hopeless and The next two days we edited the drum track. And then um Grace showed up and it worked. The chords were great though, you know, and read about it in the book.
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Well Rumour certainly puts a different complexion on the song, doesn't she, on the new album?
Yeah, she does, totally different. But I I've I've always loved Rumour's vibe because in a strange way she reminds me a little bit of one of my old time favourite singers is Karen Carpenter. Whatever kind of music you like, how could you not like Karen Carpenter? You know, the odd carpenter's record always cheers me up.
¶ Developing the Signature 80s Sound
Oh yeah. I'm a huge fan of her singing. It's just like the clearest purest voice I've ever heard. Yeah. But your production style overall is kind of synonymous, I guess, with a a certain kind of scale and attention to detail.
Well it is it is. I've made all kinds of records, you know. Some of them have been slightly more low scale, like Bill and Sebastian. Mm. But I suppose if you do it in your own name and it's reimagining the eighties it's gotta be a bit big, otherwise why bother? Yeah.
Yeah. Well I mean we grew up in Liverpool, didn't we, in the eighties pretty much, so Two Tribes and Relax were you know they were the sort of pinnacle of expansive production for us as kids, but
space in those records as well, isn't it? It's not you know, I think people just kinda think of eighties production in general as being kinda bombastic, but there's a lot of kind of room in there, it breeds, you know.
Well the frankings, yeah. You know, I had no idea I lived in in London, I come from Durham. I had no idea things were so bad in Liverpool, you know. Mm. So some of the things I'd born to run seemed just as relevant for Liverpool as it was for America. And I used to get them to tape record things that happened to them, you know, like, If you're late again, I'm gonna put you on early sign in and all that kind of stuff. That's what the woman said to Paul Rutherford just before he came down.
To do a vocal on something, you know. But we used to store those things up and Ferry Cross the Mersey was kind of poignant because things weren't great. I think things are better now, aren't they?
Oh yeah, it's improved a lot, definitely. Yeah. Is it right that you and Paul Morley established the theme of two tribes?
We didn't write it. Holly Johnston always wrote it. It was based on a riff, I think, that Mark wrote. No, what we did was kind of expanded into something. I mean You must know the story of the twelve inch you know, every radio station has an emergency record of the table, whatever that they play, and we got a copy of it. It was meant to be top secret. And it had that guy Patrick Woodsy's face talking on it.
All of the uh instructions, you know. And so all of that was sort of real. At the time, you know, people were still thinking about nuclear wars. I mean, my god, it's like closer to some kind of war now than we were then. You know.
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There's a song from your sort of early production days for Dollar that I always really liked, which I think you wrote as well, Video Tech.
Yes, videotape.
A really striking chorus. I just wondered if you had any sort of memories of how that one came together.
I'll tell you exactly how that one came together. Um I did four songs with them, Dollar. And I wrote the first two with Bruce and I wrote the second two with with another guy called Simon Darlow. I was imagining their world and then the first two songs they sort of meet in handheld in black and white. There's the idea of a fast moving life, fast moving pictures and things grabbed in a moment, and then mirror mirror was them in love, looking at each other and seeing the same thing, you know.
And then give me back my heart was they've split up. And then video tech was them seeing each other in a you know, in a video tech. Which they probably do.
Kind of a quaint idea now, the video tech, isn't it?
I know. It seemed very modern at the time. I do remember that there was some cool things on that demo because I remember I sang the demo. It's around somewhere on the internet. Great horn section for man. And the video tech do.
And they were later doubled with the vocals, weren't they, in in the actual record? Those brass parts became back in vocal parts as well.
Yeah, may have gone towards the end.
And uh Lexicon of Love had a kind of overarching theme as well, didn't it?
Yeah, well that was because, you know, it was written by someone who'd whose girlfriend had um dumped him at a certain time in his life when he was feeling vulnerable and he was traumatized. I could sympathize with him because I remember the first time I split up with a girl and felt bad about it and you get pretty heartbroken, you know? Mm. And uh he uh put it all into the lyrics of that album.
That was what was so good about it because it was all about the same thing. Yeah. I mean that was one of the things that was so good about it. The next thing that was so good about it was the lyrics of brilliant. The lyrics on his other records are really good too. But as a sort of solid body of lyrics about a topic, that record can't be beaten really. I mean I put it up with anything. Yeah.
One of our favourites, isn't it? Absolutely.
And they were pretty ambitious. They didn't want to just do like an indie record, you know, they wanted to try and do something that had a bit of a sound to it. Mm. And I had a great engineer at the time. I had a really good team, you know, Gary Langan and Ann Dodley and And I had a fair light and and I knew what I was doing, so it was one of those things it really worked, you know.
Yeah,'cause I guess you tightened up their performance by doing some programming and having them then perform on top, didn't you?
I did that in Poison Arrow and then look of love, Dave Palmer had bought his own drum machine and he'd already got it programmed. And I remember in one afternoon with Dave Palmer playing and Mark And a different bass player, Brad Lang, we did like three tracks, you know what I mean? They learnt really, really quickly.
Some great bass playing on that record as well.
Yeah, it's Brad Lang. He was like your kind of Bernard Edwards kind of person. What I'd said to them is, you know, you wanna make this album? I feel bad about it, but I had to say to him, I don't think you can make it with the space pair. Because basically the drummer was really good, the guitar player was really good and the bass player was okay. They needed somebody brilliant on the bass. Mm. And if you listen to it, you're right, the bass playing's terrific.
Mm. Tears are not enough, is particularly Bernard Edwards, isn't it?
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¶ Buggles: Video Killed the Radio Star
It's interesting, um, the sort of precision of those records and as you said, sort of how perfectly tight they sound. I guess people think of Video Killed the Radio Star in the same kind of way, but it it that one was actually performed, wasn't it? It wasn't uh Programmed back in those days.
Well, but actually program shit back in those days was tough, man. We rented the Kurtzweiler or whatever it was for two days, me and Jeff, we couldn't get a squeak out of that mother. I mean And so we ended up impersonating it. Jeff was great at it, you know. You'd use echoes, timed echoes, and you play parts like you know, you're right. I broke it down last year because I had this idea of re-recording it direct to this.
Exactly as the record would. And I figured out it would take me twenty-six people. Yes, I broke it down. I've got the multitrack. Eight of those people would have to be singers. You'd need two uh Selena players, a polymoog player, you know, all kinds of things. All the parts are very specific.
Hm. And how is the telephone style vocal done?
Really easy. I just sang it through an AC thirty with a hand mic. Right. I had to kick it in between the lines'cause it was gurgling. But that's what worked. It worked much better than trying to put some EQ on my voice on the on the desk, you know.
I always loved the first line of that song as well, the Age on the Wilds back in fifty two. Was that the sort of trigger for the whole song or did you have the title for it?
No, that was the trigger for the household. We had that line for ages, me and Bruce. It sorta came from talking about the Clithrope Kid and Dagoon Show and Round the Horn and all that stuff'cause we used to love radio comedy. And then, you know, suddenly one day it happened.
You know, I just came up with lying awake intently tuning in and you. If I was young it didn't stop me coming through. I've been reading loads of JG Ballad, so the rest of it just came out of the lump. It's funny how it does that sometimes. And I just came up with Video Kill the Radio Star. Mm. And Bruce said we can't use that because it's the name of two bands. Stips the Video Kings and the Radio Stars. And I said By the time this comes out.
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But choose
The whole idea of Buggles I guess is a kind of uh computer generated band
Yeah.
¶ Art of Noise: Experimental Production
kind of a nice postmodern approach. But a lot of your stuff is kind of there's this sort of futurism of art of noise and
Close to the edges.
Yeah, and everything seems to always have a slightly avant-garde kind of feel to it. A bit more experimental than someone might think if if they just think Trevor Horn, successful producer.
Well, you see, when the eighties started, don't forget I was yeah thirty. and I'd been a sort of professional musician since I was, you know, eighteen. So I wasn't coming to synthesizers as a sort of naive kid, you know what I mean? And, um I was a bit of a museo at heart. So I was always trying to sneak in something interesting.
Yeah. Well that baseline for close to the edit is just uh
Well, the baseline for Close to the Edit, I have to tell you, is Gary Langan.
Rice.
I didn't play that. Gary Langer came up with that. He was messing around on page R and w when I came in and heard it, I I loved it.
Yeah. I suppose your background and playing bass informed a lot of that later stuff'cause it so much just has a very strong rhythmic foundation to it. Yeah.
Yeah, no, look when you Base play plunking away at the bottom's no fun if what's going on on top's a load of crap. So you end up tending to organise people a bit, you know? Also people who play bass a tiny bit more selfless because the lead guitar player and the lead vocalist of the big stars
We got their asses up front, you know, whereas the bass player's gotta stay play all the time in time. You know? I can't uh go, Hey, I'm gonna lay these few phrases back. I mean fucking drummer will throw stick at my head, you know what I mean? Yeah, unless he's doing it and I have to follow him. I've had to learn how people time things and they speed up and slow down all the time on purpose. Anyway, where will we have wandered off?
No, it's just um talking about all those great parts on close to the edit and how they're all kind of distinctive, you know, they're all memorable, even though it feels like a kind of a insane collage of stuff at times. If you listen Yeah. But those individual parts they're all kind of accessible, aren't they?
Yeah, they are, they are. What closer to the edit was was trying to make a single out of Beatbox. We did it over a weekend because we brought in Frank McCorty to play the congres on it, I remember. And we kept everything that was good about Beatbox, but we kind of built more of an arrangement on it. And I remember coming up with a line to be in England with my love in the summertime close to the edge. And that's why Morley decided to call it close to the edit. I think by that point
Did I have Chris's voice? Yeah, I must have done. And I thought it came out well. He actually got in the charts. That amazing.
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¶ Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock Adventure
And we covered so many kind of styles as well, like you know, there's something like duck rock, it's kinda more kind of African and hip hop influence there, isn't it?
Well that was one of those things that you do when you're young when somebody plays something, you know, Markham McLaren was looking for a producer for he wanted to make a solo record and you know I just done ABC and I wanted to do something different. Mhm. And I went to meet him and he played me like three things and he played me um some township music. South Africa. That kind of stuff. I never heard that before. I was like, I like that.
Then he played me for the world's famous Supreme Teams radio show. Mm. That was the first time I ever heard record scratching. So I kinda got seduced into it, you know.
Mm. It's one of the things that almost kinda shouldn't work, like combining his voice with with those rhythms and
Oh boy, God bless so Malcolm, I'm not saying anything I shouldn't say, but Malcolm was the world's Supreme Team. Malcolm man you're a fucking vibe killer. You killed the vibe. Oh man, Trevor, what we gonna do? He's a vibe killer. And Malcolm was saying, sorry, sorry, I'm not Mr. Rhythm. I'm not Mr. Rhythm.
Yeah, it was really good fun to work with Markham Lou. And there was a couple of moments on that record that uh you know, you can imagine he wants me to get Cuban drummers, right? Voodoo, basically. And this guy fixes them, it's like five thousand dollars. And they all show up and uh they all get boozing, cogin', spliffing and whatever it was they were doing, then they got the drums out. There's like five of them and they start playing and it was something else, man.
And the first track they did was called Lube Changle. You know,'cause I had the interpreter there, the interpreter said, There's a voice part which goes over that. Would you like them to do it? So I said, Sure, yeah. So they do this sort of Oh, lube chango something. They do one take of it, right? And I thought now I wonder if they're bluffing.
And I said to the guy, Do you think they mind doing another take of that? I think we had a slight problem with the microphone. He said, No problem. They start off fucking identical. Well identical enough to put the two together, you know what I mean? So I knew they weren't kidding. Uh we got a few tracks out of them, and then they did this thing with the shakers. And I don't know if it was whatever weed I was smoking or whatever, but
It kinda did something. It was the weirdest thing. And then they all trooped into the control room to hear the recording of it. And one of them looked at me and he said something to the guy and he said he said you got the spirit on the last one. I said, Wow, I fucking got something, mate. I don't know what it was. And those tracks we messed around with and I really loved that. And I thought we could have done so much more.
Where we like, you know, put synths on them, you know, and they sounded beautiful. Anyway. Buffalo Girls was the result of six weeks of trying to get something out of the world's famous Supreme team McMarkham. Markham had had this idea of re recording Buffalo Girls, but he wanted to do it like the old folkways recording.
And I thought that was about as commercial as a turd. And uh when this rap and scratching thing came up, I was like, Why don't we do a rap and scratching version of Buffalo Girls? But it took a while
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¶ From Leicester Studios to Producer
What was the first um songwriting success that you had? Was it Baby Blue? Yes.
Well, it it wasn't much of a success, then it got to forty one. But it was the first time somebody jumped on a track that we'd done.
It's a lovely song that-
It holds up. Yeah.
Yeah, we rode with a party after I think after Bruce's brother had given us all poppers or something. And we were in the kitchen with the acoustic guitar. So
Was it designed for Dusty Springfield? Of was that just...
We just we we we just did it and then we did a demo of it. It was a really cool demo. Because by that point we were all getting pretty good in the studio. We couldn't afford a drama for the demo. We used to do things like bashing telephone directories with a wooden spoon and putting it through a fuzzbox to get a snare drum sound.
What was really disappointing was when I heard the uh Dusty Springfield version of it. I just thought it sounded so ordinary. I thought why didn't they do it like we did it? You know what I mean? It would have been so much more interesting. They didn't see it. They just made it ordinary. But really our version of it sounded like the eighties and it wasn't the eighties yet.
And you had a studio that you set up in Leicester at one point, didn't you? Was that pre all of that work?
Well when I was twenty five I was in London and I was working for a guy called Rain McVeigh. And we would do four or five shows up and down the country. It was, you know, however long you drove and then you drove back and it was um two one and a half hour sets a night. A cavalcade of crap, they used to call it. And we used to do um sessions during the day. Sometimes we'd get back from a gig at five and we'd have a session starting at ten.
And, you know, it was all sight reading sessions, you know, with stuff going to quarter inch tape and nothing like a session, you know, with a big red light. When the red light comes on you fucking play and that's it. So I was doing that for a year and I was earning a lot of money. And I bought myself a mixing desk and I bought myself speakers and I bought myself some mics and I bought a couple of revoxes. As you do. Back then. That was the only way, really.
I put up with it for about a year but then I couldn't take it anymore. Right. So I decided to go back to Leicester. There was a job in a nightclub seven nights a week. Seven nights a week. That's what cracks me up. When I when I uh think back to it.
But whilst I was there playing in the nightclub, what was it called? Bailey's in Leicester, I built studio. Some guy put up the money for the materials and me and another guy did it. And when I say built it, I mean built it with our bare hands. Rice. Literally. And when we finished it, it was pretty soundproof, but you know, all we had was two reboxes and a six channel mixer.
and one sort of cheap reverb unit and whatever and some mics. But we started to get a bit of work from songwriting competitions. People would want their songs fixed up and made into some sort of gammo and I started to do a bit of that. And that's when somebody said to me, What you're doing is called being a record producer.
Yeah. It sounds similar to what Eric Stewart did with uh Strawberry Studios, doesn't he? He kinda built the studio and then just took on whatever kind of work came in.
Yeah, they were doing football.
Both songs.
But I realised fairly quickly that it had been a mistake, that Leicester was way too far away from London and I might as well get my ass back to London and get back in there. Mm. Because it only really happens here. I suppose what really helped me is I'm you know, I ended up being Tina Charles' boyfriend for a while. Mm-hmm. And her publisher started to give me work as a producer. The way I orchestrated the music it worked and she liked it and
and all my friends liked my band, so they would hire me to do their demos with my band. It's a long way from there to uh learning how to make a record. Jesus, it took a long time.
¶ Yes: Owner of a Lonely Heart and Reflections
What I always loved about that record is that even though it's got those kind of flurries of synths and samples and things in it, it never loses sight of that core melody. It's like you always respect the song.
What was really good about the way those whiz bangs worked was that there was a very sparse backing track and the whiz bangs punctuated, they didn't play over things, they punctuated things. Because the track was so in your face. The sound of it. Banging things across it, I suppose.
Mm-hmm. And was it the verse you contributed to that one?
I wrote the tune and the lyrics of the verse because the original the verse was completely different. And then I kept saying to him, You can't have that verse and then then when John Anderson sang his verse, I still didn't like it. And that's why I said we've got to sort this, we've got to rewrite it. The verse's got to be rewritten. And we tried, we tried, we tried, we tried all kinds of things.
There's one Chaz and Dave version somewhere. But then at about three o'clock in the morning I turned into John Anderson, started to go, Move yourself. You always live your life into singing that and I wrote all the lyrics for both the verses. And then John came in and rewrote.
some of them. All the stuff about the eagle in the sky is John, not me. I can't remember what I had there, but I preferred it. And so when he says the eagle in the sky, we shot him. If you listen, there's a gunshot. That's the way we used to think. Yeah, the track though, it turned into one of those things. It just got better and better. And then you know, I came in one day with some
cassettes of crazy stuff from the radio. And I said, you know, I've got a feeling we should have some of this somewhere in it. J J put it in the fair light. Alan White played that du came up with all that stuff. You know, yes, we're quite brilliant, you know what I mean? They're all really good players. Have to get them to do this song because, you know, they didn't think the song was for yes and stuff. Amazing how it comes out, isn't it? Mm. Put them back on the map for a while. Mm-hmm.
Well, thanks so much for doing this, Trevor. We really I mean we've loved your productions over the years, you know, with sale and the stuff with producers as well. We've loved you know, so getting to sit down with you and chat about some of that stuff.
Producers I keep saying we should get the producers together and do a mini tour.
But as you say, thanks so much for doing this and best of luck with the new album as well.
Thanks a lot guys.
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That was Trevor Horn speaking to us at his home in West London. Amazing to get into that home studio space with him, wasn't it, Bryce?
It was and it was a lovely relaxed chat on the couches in a studio. And uh being kids of the eighties it was just terrific to hear the stories behind some of those classic hits we grew up with and and of course the likes of video kill the radio star, which is just such a a radio staple, isn't it, to this day?
Yeah. I'm glad I got to ask him about video tech as well. I always felt that was kind of an underrated track from dollar.
Definitely. And the amazing work he did with Malcolm McLaren, which I think is still pretty underrated and was a real precursor to so much music that came later. You know, we mentioned uh Paul Simon and Graceland. I think he was definitely listening to that in there in eighty three, eighty four.
Also enjoyed meeting his dogs, didn't you?
Yes, it's very enthusiastic dogs, especially his Boston Terrier, who was leaping on us and all over the furniture while we tried to set up.
Okay, so thanks to Trevor for the chat. Trevor Horn reimagines the 80s is available everywhere now. Get your retro vibes on by picking up a copy of that.
And we'll be back with another adventure in modern podcasting very soon.
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