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Horn of plenty

Will Hodgkinson meets Buggles founder and Frankie Goes To Hollywood producer Trevor Horn

The music industry is full of nerds, but a smokescreen of long hair and attitude tends to hide them. Trevor Horn has never made any attempt to deny his nerd nature. From the moment he made his public debut as one half of the deeply uncool electronic duo, the Buggles, Horn tied his colours to the nerd mast through a combination of technological prowess and oversized red spectacles. He went on to run ZTT Records, produce such quintessentially 80s bands as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ABC, and become a torch bearer for the kind of technology-led pop that has always tormented the ears of the hip. One can imagine Horn spending his evenings happily compiling lists of synthesiser serial numbers, although this is purely speculative.

“Ive a got a really good collection of picture-sleeve singles from the late 70s and early 80s,” offers Horn over a morning at his house in St Johns Wood in north London. “But if I have a day off Im likely to listen to Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. The discipline of the musicians on those records is incredible, and you can imagine how awful rocknroll must have sounded to guys like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin because it was so rough and unsophisticated.”

Horn spent the 70s working as a jobbing musician in Sinatra-style big bands around the country, but he saw that their time was coming to an end when he was still a child. “When I used to go to the dances in Durham with my dad in the early 60s the beat groups were appearing and everyone was afraid. On the one hand you had men who could read music and knew what they were playing, and on the other you had guys banging a guitar around. When we started making electronic music I imagined that the reaction we got from the rock musicians must have been similar to the one the beat groups got from people like my dad.”

Horn was trying to establish himself as a producer when he formed the Buggles “as an act of desperation”. He needed a hit to make his name, and none of the late-70s acts he was working with were obliging enough to provide him with one, so he had to write his own. “I saw how people reacted to songs that made them dance, because of my big band job, so I made Video Killed the Radio Star a single that you could dance to,” he says. “Relax [by Frankie Goes to Hollywood] was the same. It has exactly the same beat as Saturday Night Fever because thats what I was playing with my band every Saturday night at the Hammersmith Palais.”

When Horn first embraced the new technology of the 1980s there were few pioneers to look towards. I Feel Love by Donna Summer, which got its distinctive sound from its German producer Giorgio Moroder, was an early record to use machines instead of traditional instruments. “I was fascinated by it. But the most influential record was The Man Machine by Kraftwerk. This was the end of the 1970s, and I couldnt get my hands on the equipment they used. Eventually I hired the synthesiser that Giorgio Moroder used, at great expense, and I couldnt get a bloody squeak out of it.”

The early synthesisers that Horn eventually learned how to use gave him the power to fashion the sound of the 1980s. His most important tool was the Fairlight, which was the first sampler: costing £18,000, it took around eight seconds of an existing recording and allowed it to be digitally manipulated for a new recording. “This was 1981 and my wife thought I was out of my mind, but I knew how revolutionary this thing was going to be.” The machine was complicated to operate and it took over Horns life, but his reward was the creation of a sound that had never been heard before. “There were landmark moments — like making the otherworldly backing vocals on Give Me Back My Heart by the Art of Noise out of a sample — that were mind-blowing. It was the birth of digital recording.”

Sampling laws had not yet been invented, and Horn stuck a skull and crossbones flag over the Fairlight to promote the image of being a pirate, stealing existing recordings and turning them into something new. He also pioneered the use of the Linn drum machine, which sounded the death knell for live drummers. “You could tell the Linn what to do, which was unbelievable because before then you had to tell the drummer what to do and he was generally a pain in the arse.”

Horn is fascinated by technology partly for the dehumanising impact it has on society. “Me and my friends were obsessed with a song called Warm Leatherette by the Normal, which is based on [JG Ballards novel] Crash. The opening scene in the book features a head-on car crash where the guy is looking at a woman whose husband is between them, dead on the bonnet of the car. They are trapped in the smashed-up cars, facing each other, and thats the most incredible image. Ballard was a big inspiration at the time — Video Killed the Radio Star came from a Ballard story called Sound Sweep in which a boy goes around old buildings with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up sound. I had a feeling that we were reflecting an age in the same way that he was.”

A big concert on Wembley on November 11 will celebrate Horns career, with his early bands such as ABC and Frankie Goes to Hollywood performing alongside his latest charges, the Glaswegian pop group Belle and Sebastian. Even the Buggles will be there. But the music Horn actually listens to at home is a long way from his own oeuvre: he reveals an unlikely love for the albums of Joni Mitchell, and the only CD he has in the car is Déjà Vu by that luddite Californian singer-songwriter trio, Crosby, Stills and Nash. “I am associated with techno epics,” he concedes. “But I made them in the early 80s. Thats a long time ago now.”