Trevor Horn - 10 of his most important songs

Legendary artist and music producer, Trevor Horn talks about 10 of his most important songs described in his new memoir Adventures in Modern Recording: From ABC to ZTT.

1. Leon Jessel: The Parade of the Tin Soldiers

I love the way your book ‘Adventures In Modern Recording’ weaves your life in music with certain pieces that either inspired you or that you worked on. And at the very beginning it references ‘The Parade of the Tin Soldiers’. That’s a piece of music that you heard on the gramophone.

Yeah, we used to have a gramophone, and we had a couple of records. There was ‘The March of the Tin Soldiers’, the first one. And the next one that I really liked was Audie Murphy ‘Heading for the Last Round’. [Editor’s note – this may be Gene Autry]. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, I wouldn’t listen to it now. Because when you get older, it’s the last song you want to listen to. But yeah, ‘Tin Soldiers’ was the first one I really liked.

You describe your family background, the music that you listened to and the role of your dad, who also played in dance bands. He seemed hugely influential to you.

To be honest, I don’t know if I’d have taken up the double bass if it hadn’t been for the fact that my father played it. And it was there. I was pretty intrigued by music. But the idea of playing the bass, I didn’t even know what basses played till he showed me. And then I got quite interested in it. I suppose it was when people used to watch the telly, I would go into the back room and fiddle around with musical instruments, which is what I’m still doing now. [laughs]

When Dylan and The Beatles came in, you were in your teens. Your tastes evolved, along with the music scene that was going on around you.

Well, everything sort of. I’ll never forget going to buy ‘With The Beatles’, probably the day after it came out. And the guy that was serving me, across the desk of the record shop, was one of the French horn players in the youth orchestra. And a lot of the horn players were quite sort of po-faced. And as I was buying it, I said to him, “Not your kind of thing, eh?”. And he said, “You’re kidding, I bought this yesterday, I got my copy yesterday.”. So The Beatles changed everything because everybody liked the Beatles, even the classical guys in the orchestra. And it’s suddenly, ‘poppy’. I mean, it’s not that they weren’t great sounding pop records before The Beatles, but The Beatles just upped the bar completely. That vocal harmony sound was so compelling.

The Beatles, alongside George Martin and Geoff Emerick, were some of the pioneers in the evolution of sound and the studio as an instrument.

Very much so. They did all the same tricks that we do now. Sped their voices up, did all kinds of strange edits. So we still do it, but in a different way.

You wrote that you deputised in a dance band, and then it led you into your own bands. Eventually you went full time.

Yeah, back in the day, they used to call it turning pro. I turned pro when I was 18 but I went into a very old fashioned music scene. It certainly wasn’t a rock band. I was unusual in that I could sight read music for the bass guitar. Obviously, I wasn’t up to standard, it took me a while but, nobody else could do it. So I could get away with not being that great. And bass parts suddenly changed, when I was about 17. It went from being sort of pretty boring to being quite demanding, suddenly. People were getting used to the bass guitar and realising what it could do. I was mainly earning a living from the fact that I could read for the bass guitar and I could sing a few songs. I played in the Savoy Hotel in Blackpool for five months. I was in the house band there. I had to cut down this part of the book. When I started, I originally wrote pretty much everything that happened and it just went on for too long. [laughs] Too many different bands.

The late 60s to the mid 70s period was a fantastic apprenticeship in music. Playing clubs around the country and then to the studio as you started to venture more into that side of things.

All through the 70s I earned my living playing the bass guitar. I was in the resident band at Hammersmith Palais for a year and a half. And you got to play everything that was in the charts. So I knew all the songs. I can’t tell you how many times I had to play ‘Saturday Night Fever’. That was such a popular tune. I remember having to play that one a lot. And another one that we used to play a lot was ‘Everybody Dance’ by Chic. And funnily enough years later, I met Bernard Edwards, the bass player in Chic. He was quite brilliant, one of the very fast finger style bass players. I played with a pick. And so I had to read his vamping at the end of ‘Everybody Dance’ . I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it. It’s mental. I had to put in a bit of time to learn it. I met him and I said “You’re the bugger that played that bass guitar part!”. And he said, “Oh, man, did you have to play that?” And I was like, “Yeah”. He said, “Well, you know, we were running out of time in the session and we didn’t know what to do at the end. So Nile said, “Oh, Bernie, just vamp man. Vamp!”. So I was just vamping!” [laughs]

2. Buggles: Video Killed The Radio Star’

One of the other songs that you couldn’t miss out that’s referenced in the book, is Buggles and ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. It was futuristic, but futuristic in a retro sci-fi way.

Futuristic, retro. Yes, it is a very odd record, really looking backwards. But I think it certainly had the Goombay Dance Band factor. It has lots of little aural gags in it, like the “Oh, wa, oh” and all those sorts of bits, that really worked for it. So it was unusual. There isn’t a single machine on it. It’s all played by hand. But we were trying consciously to sound like machines.

It’s a fantastic example of the role of a producer or being creative in the studio. You’ve got Bruce Woolley’s and the Buggles versions. And it’s very clear that the Buggles version is far more commercial and catchy. More interesting on the ear.

Well, Bruce’s version was a group version because Bruce was going for being in a group. So he was going for that sort of indie sound. We were going for a hit. And when you come from nowhere, your records have got to be attractive to attract attention amongst all of the others that come out every week. Island [Records] used to send out a cassette every month of next month’s releases. From the moment that cassette went out with ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ the phone started ringing and it never stopped.

Everyone knows about Geoff Downes’ role on that album. But not many people will know about the role of the now legendary Hans Zimmer.

Hans was only in the band for a brief period of time. And really, we had one keyboard player already, Geoff was an exceptional keyboard player. Hans is a really good musician, he was great with programming stuff, the sounds. He had a Prophet-5 [analog synthesiser]. Hans is great with people, he’s a great guy to hang with.

After The Buggles, you stepped back from fronting and crafting music as an artist yourself and moved to the production side. So was that a conscious decision?

Yes, it was my late wife. Geoff left The Buggles and went to join Asia, so there was just me. She said “I think you should go back to being a producer, because that’s what you really are.”. You see, the thing is, when ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ came out I had spent nearly five years as a producer, doing demos and various things for people. I realised after a few years that it was going to be hard to get a hit act without having a hit already. Because there’s too much competition so I was gonna have to write my own and I didn’t think I would end up singing it. That was a surprise. So it had never been my first thing, I was really a bass player. So my late wife was right, she said, “I think as an artist you will always be second division.”. Because I never had a great voice and bass players, apart from Sting, but I’m not Sting. Sting has an incredible voice, he is a great writer. She said “I think you’d be better off being a producer because I think if you went back to being a producer, you could do really, really well.”. And so I listened to her. And I thought “She’s right”. And so I decided to concentrate on producing.

3. Yes: Tempus Fugit

I wanted to ask you about Yes and ‘Tempus Fugit’. That must have been a strange moment.

I decided to be a producer after I’d been in Yes. Don’t forget. Yes came more or less, straight after The Buggles. Yes was like a whole, just one of those sideways things that you never think is gonna happen and happened.

They were one of your favourite bands growing up.

Oh, yeah in the 70s I used to listen to Yes, all the time. I loved Yes. Being a bass player, it was hard not to like Yes, because the bass player [Chris Squire] was so good. I liked the singer as well because everybody else was being soulful and all kinds of things. And Jon Anderson just had a totally different sound.

A mixed feeling the first time around when you were in Yes. You were fronting the group, but it was a period of transition. Really good material, but it conflicted with an audience that wanted the traditional lineup.

Well, no, I don’t think that was why it didn’t last. I think it didn’t last because I wasn’t a good enough singer. I could do it on the record, but 22 nights into the tour, and you’re singing [sings] “A man conceived a moment’s answers to the dream”, really at the top of your range, it could get pretty tough. I think that was kind of what finished that iteration of Yes. Rather than anything else.

4. ABC: Poison Arrow

The 80s was such a productive time for you. There is so much great material featured in the book. You had huge success with Dollar and then working with ABC, the track being ‘Poison Arrow’. Was Jill, your late wife?

Yes.

She comes up repeatedly in the book as being very influential. And you’ve talked about the fact that she mentioned ABC, and you were watching Top of the Pops.

She said, “I found the next band for you to produce.” and she made me watch ABC doing ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ on Top of the Pops. And I was like, “Well, that’s not a bad song”. She said, “No, this group is perfect for you”. And I was lucky because when I went to meet them, we got along pretty well. I think they liked ‘Hand Held in Black and White’ , one of the records I had done with Dollar. And they were ambitious, they were intelligent. They still are. [laughs] And that makes a lot of difference.

It seems you had a view of how the band should sound in the studio. You mentioned Chic earlier. Was something that you wanted to bring into ABC?

Well, I didn’t. That’s what ABC wanted. I think I said in the book when we first did ‘Poison Arrow”, they played it and it sounded okay. And I said, “Is this what you want? Or do you want to get it better than this?” And of course, they said, “How do we get it better than this?” And I said “Well, one way that I can think of is that I’ll program exactly what you played on the drums into the TR-808 [drum machine]. And I’ll program the bass part. At the time, I had TR-808 with trigger outs and I had a Roland sequencer that you could put lists of notes into. So I could program the drum part. But then I had to use the cowbell on the TR-808 to trigger the bass synth. It took me all day to do and I programmed the bass by doing [sings the ‘Poison Arrow’ bass line] from the cowbell of the TR-808. And I don’t know if you’ve ever programmed anything on a TR-808, you have to be very painstaking. I think it took me 10 hours to do it. But by the end of it, I had a perfect techno rendition of the rhythm track for ‘Poison Arrow’. And then Dave Palmer played the drums on top of it fitting exactly with the 808, and the bass player did the same. Then suddenly, we had a much more in your face backing track. And that was just just something I learned along the way, how to do that.

The role of Anne Dudley.

Anne Dudley is a terrific piano player. I was playing with a trio in a nightclub in Wimbledon Tiffany’s. People used to dep the gig out occasionally. And one Friday night this blonde girl showed up and she was like 10 times better than the normal keyboard player. And I was like, “Whoa, this is terrific! She’s great!” It brought the band to life because I was on automatic pilot with that band, I was earning a living. And I never forgot her from that night. And she’s still like that. If you’re playing and got Anne sitting next to you, you know it’s going to be right.

5. Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Relax

Another example where you see a band relatively raw and work in the studio to produce a magic single is Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ‘Relax’.

Yeah.

So you saw them for the first time around when they were on The Tube [Channel 4 TV music show].

That’s how I saw them. They had some women chained up. It was a weird version of ‘Relax’, because it went into some kind of strange middle eight. But that’s when I first saw them. But it didn’t hit me – the song. It didn’t hit me that first time. What hit me was the drummer. I thought the drummer was interesting. But the rest of it, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it really. And then I heard them on a session that they did for John Peel, where they played ‘Relax’. And what I heard on the radio going home, I suddenly thought “I could really do something with this”. Because the sound of Holly’s voice and just that duff, duff, duff [also claps his hands]. So that’s how I got into it.

And that experimentation in the studio, persevering with new approaches to find something that really clicks, really comes out in the book.

Good.

Just keeping going and finding the right sound for the song.

Yeah. I have picked the songs that probably had the most drama attached to them. Because if you’re gonna write a book, it’s no good going “We went in, everything went fine. And it came out great.” [laughs] If you want a bit of a story. And the funny thing is that most of the really big ones, as the book shows, or the really good ones that you do, quite often involve a lot of messing around. Well read the book, how crazy it is. I’m sure it’s the same in any artistic endeavour.

6. Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices

We mentioned ABC earlier. That was a band where you used orchestration. And that also comes across with the Pet Shop Boys ‘Left To My Own Devices’, where you’ve got that brilliant melding of orchestration with the synth sound of the duo.

When they first said, “Would you like to do a track with this for a new album?” in 1987, they played me an early version of ‘Left To My Own Devices’. I said to them, “Have you ever thought of using an orchestra?”. They hadn’t. I was like, “Why don’t we give it a go, see how it works for you.”. And they were up for it. It was quite an unusual track and it suited it really.

In the book you talk about how you use orchestration. You had a fuller orchestration and used elements for the track.

What happened was, the arranger Richard Niles, had gone a bit mental at the end. It was like one of those things where it was absolutely brilliant, all the way through all the way through till it hit the very end when it goes round and round. And he’d written some sort of really insane stuff. Which, you know, Chris [Lowe] really didn’t like. So, we recorded that stuff, whatever it was, and because it was just going around on the same chords, for like, two minutes, I got him to write footballs for the orchestra. Footballs for the chords, footballs means semibreves [sings note]. And made it gradually rise up. When you’ve got 50 people waiting while you write the parts out, that’s no joke, believe me. And then what we did was we took that very straightforward stuff. And then we just punched in, we took a few bits from the crazy orchestration that he’d done, and put those in here and there, to make it work. That’s what you do. It’s very rare that I’ve ever done an orchestra and gone back to my own studio with it, and not mess with it in some way.

7. Paul McCartney – Rough Ride

The range of artists that you have worked with is so broad. Another example is Paul McCartney. You worked with him on ‘Rough Ride’. The dynamics between yourself as a producer, or the producer more generally, and the artist is fascinating.

He was good fun to work with. He’s really the kind of guy, if he was around the corner, from where I am now and I was working on something and I needed some ideas I’d get him in like a shot. Great ideas. [laughs] Really great in the studio on anything just about.

And he was open to ideas?

He was pretty open. On ‘Rough Ride’ we had a beat that we grabbed from E.U, Experience Unlimited, that fitted it and then he played the drums on top of it. Yeah, he was open to things. He was good to work with.

Did he have an idea of how he wanted it to sound?

Not on ‘Rough Ride’. I think on the next one that we did ‘Figure Of Eight’ he had more of an idea. I think on ‘Rough Ride’ he was just open. This sort of concept, that you have an idea what it’s going to sound like. I suppose quite often when I start things I have an idea that I want it to be good and exciting, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it so I don’t really know till I start. The thing is, you’ve got to have faith in the song. Some songs, you can work on them. And you keep working on them because you know that they’re good and when you get them right it’s going to be worth it. Other songs, you can’t sort everything out, you can’t fix every song. I can’t anyway. Maybe there’s somebody there who can. But there’s a few I couldn’t fix, but there’s no point in writing about them.

8. Simple Minds – Belfast Child

Simple Minds ‘Belfast Child’. Was it your idea to introduce a folk element to their sound, which previously was quite synthy?

I thought it might be a good way of getting a really cool song. A folk tune. Because I always felt there was an element of that in Jim’s [Jim Kerr] voice. As there was in U2 in a funny kind of way, as well. But that was one idea that actually worked. But it worked because Jim did a good job of it. He took the song that I mentioned, ‘She Moved Through the Fair’. [Sings] “And sadly I watched her,
move here and move there.” It’s a lovely old song. And he just adapted it. The thing is you can have lots lots of ideas but somebody’s got to do them.

In that passage you describe, and that’s one of the threads of the book, is that the material decides itself. You play to the strength of the band.

Absolutely. You don’t just have some stupid idea of how you think it should be if it’s not really come out like that. Like, “Hey, funky Belfast Child!” I can’t see it!

9. Rod Stewart – Downtown Train

I’ve previously spoken to John Altman. He worked on the orchestration of ‘Downtown Train’.

He did, yeah.

You give your side of that incredible story. The idea for the song, your involvement and the recording process. It seemed so tight, having to adapt it as you go.

‘Downtown Train’, John Altman did a great orchestration for that based on an idea by George de Angelis. But the problem was, I did it in the wrong key. So when I got to LA, I had to take it up a minor third. And these are the days… Taking things up minor thirds is a lot easier now than it was then. And, of course, I had this beautiful orchestra in the key of G. And I had to pitch them up to B-flat. And it wasn’t easy. And when we first started doing it, a lot of it sounded bloody awful. And then, what I had to do is a combination of the bits that I could pitch that worked, along with Kevin Savigar, who is Rod’s MD, replay a lot of it on synths, on string samples. So the orchestra was a kind of meld of what I could recover from the recording in G. With other stuff on top of it.

Rod was very clear in the studio of what would work for him as an artist. And when you needed to respond to that.

No. Rod came in on a Friday night in England. Did a guide vocal over a backing track that I’d done, and with a Proteus module on the dining room table. It was a pretty crap backing track. I said to him “Ignore the backing track. It’s just to get your voice on this, because I’ve only had a day’s notice.” He sang it in G and he sounded great. And then he went back to America, and I spent the following week with four musicians. Then, made the whole backing track in G, and flew out, we put the orchestra on and everything and then flew out to America with it. And the first time he heard it was on the Sunday, a week and a bit later, because it had to be done so quickly. And he loved it. I remember, he was in the other room. I gave them, whatever it was, a DAT of the rough mix of it. And he called me up on the on the internal phone at A&M, and he said “Fucking great backing track man. Sounds like the fucking Titanic going down. I love it. Great. I’ll be in to sing it in five minutes.”

But, yeah, that record was a bit of a trip because there was so much pressure on it. And because it was sanctioned from England, but was being paid for by the Americans. People got pretty er. They kept ringing me up. “What’s it Sound Like?” “Er, doesn’t sound like anything yet.” [laughs] The problem is that if you play something that’s not finished to people. It’s a bit like showing them the house. You’ve explained to them that there’s no doors and the roof isn’t done yet. But, the first thing they say is there’s no roof. There’s no doors! Rod was good to work with. He’s funny. He’s very funny. When he wants to be.

10. Belle and Sebastian – I’m A Cuckoo

The final track that I wanted to ask you is Belle and Sebastian, ‘I’m a Cuckoo’. Some people think Trevor is going to do a Trevor Horn on Belle and Sebastian, but that wasn’t the case at all.

No, I just tried to do a really good job of it. They were lovely. They wanted to play ‘I’m a Cuckoo’ live, the seven of them. I think I say in the book, they played it 22/23 times, we had 22/23 takes of it. They didn’t want to fix anything, they wanted to try and get it really dead right. I’ve got a lot of respect for that, back in the early days, some of the rock bands used to do that as well, before you could cheat. Really play it. We did the same thing with the backing track of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. It was just piano, bass and drums, but we played it over and over and over again for like 10 hours to try and get it to sound perfect. Belle and Sebastian were good like that.

Stuart Murdoch’s got a gentle voice and you’ve got the drummer who responds to that in a different way than what you see with a rock band, for example.

Singers in rock bands generally sing really high and they’ve got very loud voices, because you have to with a rock band. Ideally, someone like Robert Plant, who has a beautiful low voice and a beautiful high voice. Belle and Sebastian’s a different ball game altogether. The interesting thing is, once you start playing the drums quietly rather than loud, they sound completely different. And if anything, it sounds more like the 60s. People these days, pull up the drums very hard, that makes a certain sound, or if they play the drums at all these days, because it’s nearly always a machine. So the thing about them was, they worked out the whole arrangement of the song. And if a shaker came in on the chorus, one of them played the shaker and it came in on the chorus every single time. It wasn’t like we’re gonna overdub a shaker. It was there. So they were really good like that. I think I say in the book, they were my daughter’s favourite band for a long time. And I thought their songwriting was amazing, because when I heard ‘Stars of Track and Field’ I loved it. ‘The Boy with the Arab Strap’, I think, was the name of the album. So I kind of got into them.

I didn’t contact them though, I had a housekeeper out in LA. And one of their part time jobs was every time Coachella [music festival] came around, she would do all of the artists’ dressing rooms. And she told Belle and Sebastian that she worked for me. And they were really curious. “What’s he like?”, people always wonder what you’re like. If they have some picture of god knows what. And when I met them, I really liked them. I loved the collection of songs, it was a great collection. Because I do like albums. Albums are made up of really good album tracks, and really good album tracks are not failed singles. They’re really good album tracks. It’s a big difference. We made the whole album in their rehearsal room on a small ProTools system. Before we went into the studio proper. I’d love to have a copy of that. I wonder if they’ve got it. In fact, we may have even used the version of ‘Piazza, something Capture’ [‘Piazza, New York Catcher’] from that version of the record. I don’t know. It’s a long time ago.

It’s a great way to close. ‘Adventures in Modern Recording’ is a fascinating story of your life, your roots, your influences, and the different approaches to get the sound that was right for the song and the band. Thank you so much for your time, Trevor. It’s been a real pleasure.

Good, The Strange Brew Podcast. That’s what I’ll tell people. I was on The Strange Brew Podcast. Nice to meet you.