Back in 1985, the concept of a professional home studio was still fairly alien. Synthesizers and drum machines were firmly on the agenda, but with digital audio in its infancy, any reasonably substantial studio environment would still need a sizeable mixing desk and space for a multi-track tape machine. Reel-to-reel models were still the preference.
With these space – and price – demands, music production at home was something that was inaccessible to most.
Nonetheless, this didn’t prevent musician and producer Paul Hardcastle from creating the bulk of one of the most iconic songs of the era within his own limited home setup, based in the front-room of his Mum’s house in Leytonstone, East London.
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Fittingly for this lounge-based origin, the track’s lyrical content was lifted straight off the TV – from an American TV documentary on the Vietnam war, called Vietnam Requiem.
The story began earlier in the day, when former keyboardist and First Light member Paul Hardcastle – then working on developing his solo artist career – was sat at home reading the newspaper. Scanning the television guide, he noticed that said documentary was due to be broadcast later that evening. He set his newfangled video recorder (VCR) to record the program.
Apart from offering him the ability to view the recorded content, this pertinent decision also furnished him with a recording of the show which he would later employ on the track 19.
Vietnam Requiem was made by US TV channel ABC and first broadcast in 1982. It was during the Peter Thomas-narrated documentary that an extraordinarily grim statistic was highlighted – the average age of soldiers in the Vietnam war was just 19. This profoundly resonated with Hardcastle.
“When I watched it back, what struck me was how young the soldiers were: the documentary said their average age was 19. I was out having fun in pubs and clubs when I was 19, not being shoved into jungles and shot at,” Hardcastle recalled in The Guardian. “One line – ‘None of them received a hero’s welcome’ – really struck a chord. When the soldiers came home, people wondered what had happened to the smiling kids who went out there. What did they expect if they’d been through that shit?”
Looking for a way to process his emotional response, he found himself recording fragments of the narration into his sampler (an E-mu Emulator I) placing the spoken-word alongside an proto-hip-hop/techno beat.
The Emulator range of rack-mounted samplers and keyboards were partially responsible for the growing development of sampling in music, thanks to their radically reduced price tag when compared to the competition such as the Fairlight CMI.
Emulators were still pricey though, and offered only a couple of seconds of sampling time. Hardcastle was forced to use his equipment resourcefully, noting that when the narrative from the documentary was partially loaded into the emulator, the word ‘nineteen’ seemed to stand out beyond even its own emotional resonance.
Hardcastle emphasised the number hypnotically by repeating and stuttering the sample (“n-n-n-n-nineteen”).
As a concept, it’s quite a madcap idea to envision that a mere number could become such an identifiable hook in a song, but it wasn’t just down to the sampling.
Alongside the Emulator, Hardcastle’s workhorse synthesizer from this era was an original Prophet 5. This was responsible for the highly identifiable bass sound, as well as the pads and leads that we hear on the track.
In terms of its musical assembly, the track is fairly basic. The main chordal element relies on a popular chord sequence from the mid-80s; a chord of E minor for two bars, followed by a chord of D/E for two bars. Simple stuff, but highly effective, and also the same chord sequence used on Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Thankfully, harmonic content is not open to copyright protection, although Hardcastle would later have to deal with accusations of creative infringement.
Apart from the chordal section, the foreboding bass part takes a central role in the next section, with an implied open chord (E5) to support it. In this section, the notes E, F and D create the unease in the bass.
The movement from the note E to F is particularly unsettling, in much the same way that the same device is used by John Williams, in the theme from Jaws.
The inspiration of early hip-hop pioneers was definitely an influence on Hardcastle, not only in this track, but also his other work.
The drum groove was assembled using a hired Roland TR-808, which had all of the iconic sounds that he required. It was the drum machine behind the influential Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force, and had acquired a status of it’s own within the genre. Later, Hardcastle also acquired a Linn Drum, but the drum track on 19 is unmistakably an 808!
One of the biggest problems with working with early samplers was that vastly reduced recording time, not to mention the reduced sample and bit rates, which affected the quality of reproduction drastically. This meant that Hardcastle would have to record audio from the documentary directly to his tape machine; a Tascam half-inch 8-track.
“I managed to buy myself a very cheap 24-track machine called an Aces and it broke down all the time. So I went back to using an 8-track Tascam which didn’t breakdown as much so I recorded a lot of 19 onto that and took it into the studio and bounced it up,” Hardcastle recalled in an interview with The Electricity Club. “The sampler was only an Emulator I with two seconds of sample time in it! A Prophet 5 did all the bass, chords and melodies, there was an 808 and a few orchestra samples triggered by the Emulator!”
Thinking that the track would benefit from some bespoke vocals, lyrics were written and vocalist Janice Hoyte was hired to record a slightly softer vocal to contrast the harder narrative delivery of the documentary.
As a juxtaposition, some unnerving stabs were added, supplied by the Emulator The dissonant harmony plays a perfect balancing role to the sweeter harmony supplied by the Prophet 5. Using the notes B, F and C, it sits uncomfortably against the harmony in the rest of the song.
Eventually, this winning combination of futuristic-sounding arrangement, compelling hooks and its emotive subject matter drove 19 to the top of the charts in 13 different countries including the UK. But initially, Hardcastle had trouble pitching the song to the powers that be;
“Can you imagine the reception I got when I was taking 19 round the record companies?” Hardcastle remembered in an interview with Sound on Sound. “It goes ‘n‑n‑n‑n‑nineteen’ and it’s about the Vietnam war!’ I nearly got kicked out – they thought I was nutty. Radio 1 wouldn’t touch it.”
“The record company didn’t want me to put it out,” Hardcastle later recalled in The Electricity Club. “They thought it was going to be the biggest flop ever on radio! But there were two guys at Chrysalis, Ken Grunbaum and Simon Fuller who were thinking ‘This might just change the face of music’, due to the fact of the sampling and that the story was being told to you in no uncertain terms of ‘this is what happened in the war’, as opposed to being clever with it.”
In a successful attempt to keep it at number one, additional remixes were created by Hardcastle, which were played weekly on shows such as Britain’s Top of the Pops, along with newly edited videos. This kept the appetite for the track alive – and even prevented Duran Duran from hitting the top spot in the UK, with their theme to the Bond film View To a Kill.
19 would soon be regarded as both a classic track on both a technical and a conceptual level. It would bag the Ivor Novello award for best international hit in recognition of its obvious power. But as the old adage goes, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ!
Mike Oldfield sued Paul Hardcastle for copyright infringement, stating that the synth melody line used on 19, was reminiscent of Oldfield’s work on Tubular Bells.
Cases involving copyright infringement can be long and expensive, which was one of the likely motivators for Hardcastle to take the advice to settle quickly out of court, offering Oldfield a credit and small cut of the royalties. Oldfield is now listed as a co-writer for the track – providing him with his only UK number one.
Meanwhile, the enormous success of the track hadn’t gone unnoticed by the producers of the original documentary, Vietnam Requiem. The voice over for the documentary was provided by Peter Thomas, and, given the prominence of his voice in the narrative, Hardcastle and his label offered him royalties too.
