Trevor Horn is one of the all-time greatest UK record producers, establishing the iconic label ZTT Records and collecting more awards than we’ve space to name over his nearly seven-decade career.
The brains behind epic songs such as Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, The Look of Love by ABC, and Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Horn also worked on hits like Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart, Seal’s Crazy and most recently, the new album from ‘00s indie darlings Bloc Party.
Trevor Horn & His Band is embarking on another UK live tour in December, playing a varied collection of songs that Horn has produced, played and sang on, so MusicRadar sat down with the bespectacled legend to hear the stories behind a selection of the tracks in the setlist.
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Living in the Plastic Age – The Buggles
“This was the second Buggles single. The first one was Video Killed the Radio Star, which sold, god knows, about 12 million copies. Living in the Plastic Age only managed to sell half-a-million, in the days when that wasn’t very good. It’s a strange sort of song, because it’s a bit of a hybrid – it sounds a bit like a cross between Gilbert and Sullivan and Yes, but I’m quite fond of it.
“When I was on tour with The Buggles, we played it in America. I always thought it was funny playing Living in the Plastic Age in Texas – what are they going to make of it? Of course, when you’re young, you write lines like, ‘they’ll send the heart police to put you under cardiac arrest’ ‘cause you’re young, and you don’t give a shit. When you get old and you’ve had a heart attack, it’s a bit different…”
I’m Not in Love – 10cc
“This was a record that, when I first heard it back in the ’70s, I thought it was the best-produced record I’d ever heard. It was so unusual. If you think about it, it was the first time we heard that ‘voice sound’. It sounded a lot like what came later with the Fairlight or the Synclavier. It’s fascinating how they did it, too – they made up a 24-track recorder with a note on each track, created with tape loops. There was a fair bit of noise and hiss, but what an amazing sound it was. So atmospheric.
“It was funny that I ended up meeting and getting to be really good friends with Lol [Creme] because when I was starting out in the late ’70s, and I was trying to get a hit, we all used to say that if you got ‘Studio Fever’ – when you started to get an inflated sense of how good a track was that you were working on – the way you got yourself back down to Earth was listening to I’m Not in Love. It’s a really good song – although my late wife [Jill Sinclair] used to hate it. She used to say it was ‘a typical man’s song, a man pretending he’s not in love…’”
Cry – Godley & Creme
“I produced that, working with Lol [Creme] and Kevin [Godley]. Cry has just three chords, but it does every combination of those three chords. It’s my fault – I was trying to keep it interesting! It’s always one where the person singing it gets tense, because if you make one mistake and you go off-grid, it’s a bit of a minefield. It’s basically E, A, and F-sharp minor. But sometimes it’s like, three bars of F-sharp minor, then two bars of E. It’s just different all the way through. You can’t afford to zone out on it.
“We were in New York and we started to work on a track called Hit the Box, which was basically using the big knob on an American TV to switch between channels – almost like scratching a record. It was a hopeless enterprise, because getting the clearance on the bits of TV would have been impossible, and we never finished it in New York. So when we got together in England, supposedly to finish that track, I really wasn’t in the mood for it.
“I’d had enough of all of that kind of stuff, because I’d done it with The Art of Noise. I said, ‘can’t we do something more interesting? Have you got a song? Just any song – we’ll do that.’ And they had Cry, which I quite liked. We decided to have a go at playing it live with the band, and it’s one of those songs that really plays live very well. The first time we did it was at the Cropredy Convention and it went down a storm – it sounds good live.
“They made a brilliant video for Cry too. Lol and Kevin made me mime the final high pitched ‘Cry’ vocal on the video because it was my daft idea.”
The Power of Love – Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“That’s another song that plays well live and people enjoy it. We’ve done that with quite a few different people… Matt Cardle for a while, who did a great job of singing it, and also Guy Garvey sang it with us at the Roundhouse, and he has a beautiful voice. The Power of Love was a good song, you know? It was the third Frankie Goes to Hollywood single. We perform the first three Frankie singles and the first four Buggles singles!
“The Power of Love was always going to be the third single for Frankie, but the only problem putting a ballad out is it’s very hard to do a 12-inch. No-one wants a 12-inch of a ballad – it’s too slow. I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, what are we gonna do with this?’
“I didn’t actually want to do a fourth Frankie single, because it forced us to do a single version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, when the original is 14 minutes long. At that point we were worn out by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, because it was only three of us doing it all [Trevor Horn, Stephen Lipson and Andy Richards].
“Although having said that, when I listen back, I thought we did a really good job of the single version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome – it wasn’t bad at all. Interestingly Holly only ever sang Welcome to the Pleasuredome once – all the rest of the stuff, the ‘Yeeeahhhhs’ and so on, came out of the Synclavier.”
Slave to the Rhythm – Grace Jones
“That’s really good fun to play. It’s such a great rhythm and those chords are so beautiful. It’s one of those songs we put so much effort into – I wish Grace had put the same amount of effort into promoting it! She was a little bit mercurial when it came to promotion, although in lots of other ways, she was really good fun.
“She’s never really had anything since that record that I’ve heard that was any good – which is kind of sad, because before that, when we came to work with her, I really liked My Jamaican Guy and La Vie en Rose; such good records. Interestingly that was Chris Blackwell [Head of Island Records] producing. He wasn’t really a record producer but turned out to be a really good one! Chris was very nice about us doing a whole album, although I think he would have preferred us doing just one track. But there was a bit of, you know, megalomania going on at the time…
“It was the two of us [Horn and Stephen Lipson] having a ball with a Synclavier – there’s a couple of things on the album that I still really like. I love The Fashion Show – that sounds amazing. There’s also another bit on Don’t Cry – It’s Only the Rhythm with Steve [Lipson] messing around with a sample of the track in stereo. It’s an extraordinary-sounding thing. He was showing me that, and I was like, ‘Quick, let’s record it, it’s just so good!’
“When I went into the cutting room to cut it, ‘cause I used to always master my records with a guy called Ian Cooper, he would always tell me off – ‘what load of rubbish have you brought in this time?’ I was like, ‘you’re going to like this Ian!’ and he just said, ‘what am I meant to do with this?’ because it’s much harder to cut those kinds of sounds onto vinyl.”
Kiss From a Rose – Seal
“I think it’s one of the few songs that Seal didn’t do with a co-writer, he wrote it himself. Seal told me about it, while we were making the first album, saying ‘I’ve got this song. It’s a bit like Greensleeves. I don’t know if you’ll like it.’ When we were doing the second album, we needed a couple more songs, so asked about it and asked him to do a demo, which was really good.
“When I first heard the song, I loved it, because it was kind of like nothing else that he’d done all the time. It had a very sort of English folk kind of thing about it – baroque. At first I wasn’t sure about how to do the track – it caused me more soul-searching than anything, because when it was finished, I wondered if I’d done it in too organic a fashion. Adamski did a remix of it called Kicks from a Rhodes that I loved as it was so unusual. I thought maybe I should have done it like that, rather than doing it just in a very straightforward way.
“A couple of things happened while we were doing it. I remember, I used to work with Betsy Cook a fair bit. She was the high voice on Living in the Plastic Age. I wrote a lot of things with her and did the single Docklands for example – I really had a lot of respect for her, as she has a great voice. We were working in Studio 4 at Sarm on Kiss From a Rose and she came in and said, ‘I’ve been hearing this through the door, and if you don’t mind, I’ve got an idea for a string arrangement for it.’ So I put some strings up on a keyboard for her, she did a couple of passes, played some things, and it was so good. Then I brought in a proper string arranger to finish it. I think I credited Betsy on the record, as it’s a really good arrangement.
“The thing that really knocked me out on that song was Seal’s backing vocals, which were amazing. Seal sang it all on a Tuesday afternoon and I have to say, it was one of the all-time most enjoyable sessions I ever worked on.”
All the Things She Said – t.A.T.u
“That’s had well over a billion streams now, because it was in the TV show Heated Rivalry. That was a difficult track – all the big ones are difficult! Yeah, those girls [Lena Katina and Julia Volkova] couldn’t speak a word of English and their manager was a moron. That vocal from them is a work of art – it took me and the engineer two weeks to get the lead vocal. There were times when I nearly gave up.
It took me and the engineer two weeks to get the lead vocal. There were times when I nearly gave up
“I’ve got a quarter publishing of that song – I should have had a half because I wrote the English lyrics. The translation of the original Russian lyric was no help, because it was things like, ‘I’m mad about her, I’m mad, I’m mad’ – that kind of thing. But in the end, it came out well, because I wrote a lyric knowing that they would still sound like they weren’t English. It sounds like a translation. The record came out really good and it sold so well, selling many albums on the back of it too.”
Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears For Fears
“I did a version of this with Robbie Williams on my Reimagines the Eighties album. I’ve always just loved that song – whenever you play it live, it lifts everybody up. We always play it much faster than the original and more organically, as the original was a bit stiff. It’s just a really fun track to play – that’s why we include it. I suppose the fact that I’ve done a version of it gives me a little bit of leeway – we did it like the Robbie version at first, but Lol [Creme] got too cross with it and said it was unnecessarily complicated, so we put it back to the simple version.
“I never worked with Tears For Fears. I had The Seeds of Love album playing in the car and I thought it was a really good piece of work, very well-produced. I know they got shit for it from certain quarters, but I thought that was bollocks. Just because they worked hard to try and make it sound good.”
Tickets for Trevor Horn & His Band’s UK tour are on sale now.
