Trevor Horn — 25 years of hits
Trevor Horn has been at the forefront of technological innovation since his earliest work with the Buggles, in a career that has yielded innumerable classic singles and albums.
From Band Aid to Bob Marley, SARM West has seen some action over the years. One of the most prestigious studios in the UK, on the cold October day when I visit it’s even more of a hive of activity than normal. It’s less than a week before Produced By Trevor Horn, a one-off concert for the Prince’s Trust held before an audience of 6500 at Wembley Arena. The plan is to celebrate 2S years of hit-making and get on stage some of Horn’s most celebrated collaborators. Most of them are buzzing around SARM West this morning, and Mark O’Toole is in reception ready to rehearse with a reformed Frankie Goes To Hollywood. “It’s great to have the Frankies around again,” Trevor later tells me. “They just bring a real buzz to everything.”
Meanwhile, in a lounge off SARM’s main control room, Trevor Horn is methodically learning the bass line for one of his classic hits —
“It’s been astonishing,” says Horn. “We’ve been going through multitracks for this show, and ‘Living In The Pastic Age’ and ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ were both played. We played them from one end to the other because there was no way that you could drop in on the machine that we had. It was a 24-track machine that you could drop in on but it was very hard to get out. You had to do the backing track in its entirety, so both songs —
“But listening back to the piano, bass and drums tracks was extraordinary. Paul Robinson played the drums on ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ and Richard Burgess played the drums on ‘Living In The Plastic Age’, and I do remember that by the time we’d finished playing ‘Living In The Plastic Age’ Richard Burgess was pale! He was so worn out because we insisted that it sound perfect and that he played it perfectly. And the funny thing is that when you listen to it, it sounds like a drum machine. Both tracks sound like drum machines because at the time we were so manic about them having that spot-on perfect techno feel, not some sort of bullshit Elton John groovy album feel.”
Another Day, Another Dollar
Trevor Horn’s move from pure playing towards the increasing involvement of technology began when he wrote and produced four tracks for Dollar. “The Dollar stuff was the first stuff I really produced, after being in Yes in 1982, and by that time I had a rig. Very few people had rigs back then, but I had one and it consisted of a Roland TR808 and a set of Simmons drum modules. Dave Simmons had modified my TR808 and put on a set of triggers so that the kick drum from the 808 would also trigger the Simmons kick drum. On top of that, I had a Roland sequencer. I’ve forgotten what serial number it was, but I’ve still got it somewhere. It had four buttons —
“I could program in drums and very basic sequences using the Minimoog, and that’s how I did the Dollar records. By the time Malcolm McLaren arrived, I’d got a Fairlight. I’d already seen one —
“One of the first really interesting things we did that blew me away, was we sampled Thereza Bazar going ‘aahhhh’ and ‘la! La!’ And we used that on Dollar’s ‘Give Me Back My Heart’ and it worked perfectly. What was clever about what we did, though, was that Thereza Bazar didn’t just sing into the machine, we made up the samples. We 16-tracked her for every note. This was still in the days of analogue tape, and we bounced it down so we had a beautiful bed that was 16 tracks of her, across the range of an octave or whatever. And JJ disappeared into the back room and he spent weeks with her voice fucking weeks! —
Tracing Paper
The next year, things moved on further when Trevor started working with ABC on The Lexicon Of Love. “ABC was a slightly different ball game but it all became useful, because the first track we worked on was ‘Poison Arrow’. They first played ‘Poison Arrow’ like a sort of live band in RAK Studios, and they played it quite well because they were pretty good musicians, so we had a recording of them and I said ‘Is that what you want, or do you want it better?’ And Martin Fry said ‘I want it as good as it can possibly be.’ And I said ‘If you want it as good as it can possibly be we’ll have to start again. And this is what I propose we do. We take the drum track and I’ll program it into the TR808 exactly with David [Palmer, ABC’s drummer]. We’ll go through every note. And then we’ll get a nice Simmons drum kit, so that will take care of the drum track, and then the bass part I’ll program into this Minimoog and CV/Gate thing. We’ll lay that down on tape and then you play on top of it. Play the drums and then play the bass, but we’ll use it like ‘tracing’, you know?’
“They were completely into that, and I remember I bought the rig over, the Dollar rig, and it took me about 12 hours because to put a song into the 808 was a pretty buggy thing. You had to fuck around quite a bit and fiddle. You had to put the song in in real time. You had to let it run through and make the changes as it ran along. That took a little bit of time, but eventually I got it and what we had was like a very crude blueprint of the song running from an 808. So that gave us a skeleton. ABC were fascinated by the idea of that. You’ve got to remember that we’re talking about 1981/82 —
The Birth Of Rap
“And then, if I remember rightly, the next thing I did after ABC was Malcolm McLaren. I used the same rig with Malcolm McLaren, again with JJ Jeczalik, except what happened with Malcolm was we went all around the world. We went to New York and we met DJs and people. The thing about scratching back in 1982, 1983, or whenever it was I did McLaren was that it was unheard-of over here. And actually ‘Buffalo Girls’ is the first rap record ever. The only other record with scratching before ‘Buffalo Girls’ that I know of was Grandmaster Flash’s ‘On The Wheels Of Steel’, which is where he’s just using a record and dubbing it —
“By the time I did McLaren I’d bought an Oberheim sequencer and drum machine, a DMX and a DSX. I told the World’s Famous Supreme Team to tell me their favourite drum beat. It took a couple of hours for them to actually communicate it to me, but once I’d got it, that was ‘Buffalo Girls’: ‘du du —
“It was an amazing time because it was all exploding. Just as the McLaren thing came to an end, Page R arrived on the Fairlight. And that was gobsmacking because that was the first time you heard those sort of sounds sequenced. And that’s where the Art Of Noise came from. We were in a very lucky position because when Page R arrived I was doing Yes. So I had Alan White’s drums and it was Alan White’s drums that became [Art Of Noise’s debut single] ‘Beat Box’.
“One of the big things at the end of the Yes album [1983’s 90125] was that this gizmo came along called the Conductor. It was a device that allowed you to connect a Linn drum machine to Page R. And that might seem like a minor detail now but, boy, that was breathtaking for us back then, because it meant you could lock a Linn drum machine to Page R! And all of the early Art Of Noise stuff was locking things to Page R. The very first thing was ‘Beat Box’ and it came from JJ Jeczalik messing around with Alan White’s drums while I was working on 90125. I brought the Fairlight into 90125 for all that stuff on ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’. We did use the Synclavier also at the time, but all of that ‘da, ba ba ba’ and all that stuff —
“I’d met Afrika Bambaataa at a club and I’d asked him who his favourite band was and he said The Guess Who. I said ‘The Guess Who? That’s a Canadian old-school rock band! “American womaann!…”‘ They turned into Bachman Turner Overdrive. I said ‘You like The Guess Who?’ He said ‘Yeah man, I’ve got a live album and there’s a great drum break.’ This was in New York in like 1981/82, and so when I heard ‘Beat Box’ I knew that they would love that groove in New York because I’d heard something like it from Afrika Bambaataa looping The Guess Who.”
Going The Distance
Another notable feature of Trevor Horn productions from this period were some of the earliest and best 12-inch remixes, a genre pretty much defined by Horn’s early Frankie, Art Of Noise and Propaganda (‘Dr. Mabuse’) 12-inches. “We were just messing around with sessions,” explains Trevor. “And you know when we did the ‘Red & Blue Mix’ for ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ it was a pretty mad sort of thing to do, because nobody really understood 12-inches over here. They were just kicking off, and I was like the king of them at the time because I’d heard a lot of them. The ABC guys had played me some of them. We did a brilliant ABC 12-inch of ‘Look Of Love’, it’s an all-time classic. We put whole chunks of the track —
“It was all this technology that was just exploding at that time, and [Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s] ‘Relax’ was probably the pinnacle of all that stuff. It was a combination of Page R and the Conductor and locking it to a Linn drum machine. So the basic track was eights running in a Fairlight (‘eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh’), fours on a bass (‘ee ee ee ee’) and a set of Linn drum machine patterns locked to Page R played on top of each other. It was an amazing feel.”
Continue »By the time Seal’s ‘Crazy’ came out in the early ‘90s, however, Horn was bringing in external remixers and concentrating on the album versions. “I just didn’t want to do any more 12-inches. I’d had fun with them, I’d done everything, you know. I’d had the dry ice machine! I’d just tried everything I could think of, and when you’ve had enough of it you’d rather do something else. I’d won Best Dance Producer —
Visions Of Paradise
Trevor Horn’s second hit with Frankie marked yet another technological revolution: 24-track digital recording. “Back in the mid-80s we had 24-track Sonys. I had one of the very first 24-track Sonys in 1984. And ‘Two Tribes’ I think was the first number one single on a Sony 24-track digi. ‘Two Tribes’ was completely digital.”
By the early ‘90s, however, Horn was moving from hardware to software in the studio. “The first program that I really got into was Studio Vision, and on the first Seal album, ‘Future Love Paradise’ was originally recorded with two tracks of MIDI, one track of audio straight into Studio Vision —
“The minute I saw Studio Vision I sold all my PC stuff and bought a Mac. When I saw a Mac I realised it was the computer for me, because it was built for idiots. And I always hate anything too complicated. I remember I bought a load of Line 6 pedals because I saw on the box it said ‘Bonehead simple!’ and I thought ‘That’s me —
Not everything, alas, has been as useful or as instant as Studio Vision. “If there was one piece of gear that cost the most and was the least useful it would definitely be the Synclavier. It cost well over a quarter of a million dollars and it’s still there in a cupboard. We used it on a few records in the late ‘80s, but then it became too cumbersome. We more or less —
“With the first Synclavier, we tried to sequence the bass drum playing fours on a four-on-the-floor. It sounded dreadful. We phoned them up and said ‘Is your sequencer accurate?’ They said ‘Oh yes, absolutely accurate.’ ‘Is it really accurate?’ ‘It’s absolutely accurate.’ ‘How accurate is it?’ Well it’s accurate, give or take 200 milliseconds.’ ‘What the!… You think that’s accurate? I know people that can hear a millisecond!’ And they were saying ‘That’s impossible, nobody can hear a millisecond.’ I said ‘I know somebody that can hear a millisecond —
“We wanted it to be perfect. If you listen to a Synclavier sequencer, it’s absolutely perfect now. They got it perfect but it took a few months, and then it was so incredibly slow to use because you had to put the tempo in as a coefficient of 120bpm. So if you were at 80bpm it had to be 0.66! Continue »
Workstation Working
These days, Trevor Horn works mainly in software (“I’d say that Pro Tools is a fundamental part of everything now. That’s the universe that we all work in”), and has no truck with the idea that older methods produced different or better-sounding records. “I can’t tell the difference between something mixed in Pro Tools and something mixed through a board. The only way I can tell the difference is there’s more distortion from the board. You can’t really tell. These days we all sort of work the same way —
Although this way of working might make it tempting to load everything onto a laptop, however, he still prefers to use a purpose designed studio.
“The older I get, the more I like to work in a proper control room. I did a few years of that, but the reality of it is, you’re better off in a proper acoustically controlled environment when you can hear what you’re doing and it all makes sense. I went through a phase of working in houses and working in strange places —
With that it’s time to unplug my tape recorder and plug Trevor’s bass amp back in. Rehearsals were top priority for a show that —