Music producers have a Zelig-like quality. In the studio, to get the best out
of a band or a singer, they are there at, and yet detached from, the great
moments in recording history. Even by producers’ standards, however, Trevor
Horn’s knack for playing a part in the records that have shaped the course
of popular music is uncanny.
Horn predicted the Eighties a year before they began. Video Killed the
Radio Star, the 1979 hit by his old band Buggles, may have been inspired
by a J. G. Ballard story about a boy who cleans up old sounds with a vacuum
cleaner and comes across a forgotten opera singer, but it was prophetic. The
song’s video was the first to be on MTV, ushering in an age in which visual
impact in pop music became as important as sound.
Thirty years later Horn has produced Robbie Williams’s new album, Reality
Killed the Video Star. Now it looks like the reality television star
Susan Boyle could beat Williams to the Christmas No 1 spot. Is this all part
of a plan to skewer the zeitgeist?
“The title was Robbie’s idea,” says Horn quickly. “For me, programmes like Britain’s
Got Talent and The X-Factor are a bit tired. You have someone
like Susan Boyle — she shows up, she looks a bit manky, she sings OK and
everyone goes bananas — but you can’t have too many of them.” Williams’s
album title does suggest that reality television has won the battle over pop
for public consciousness.
“I’m aware of what we’re up against,” Horn says. “But people from reality
shows can be like a tree planted in a garden where the roots aren’t deep —
if they don’t take quickly, they’re going to die.
“Someone like Robbie is born for fame, and it’s not just talent but charisma:
he charges through the door and the whole mood lifts. Tina Turner was like
that as well. With a lot of people everyone’s mood drops the moment they
arrive, so that kind of quality is valuable — and rare.”
Williams has returned after lost years in LA, growing a beard, searching for
aliens, and spending too much time googling his name and dealing with the
attendant psychological issues that arise. Did Horn have to coax him back
into work?
“After a few years of turbo fame, the strain gets to anyone, but Robbie was
ready to get back into it,” Horn says. “And he made me laugh in the studio.
He was always digging up some s*** I made in 1979 and playing it back to me.
He wanted to know if I still had the large glasses. Without wanting to gush
too much, he is a very likeable, hugely charismatic guy.”
The son of a milk technology engineer from Co Durham who moonlighted as a
bassist in a local orchestra, Horn began his career as a bass player for the
disco singer Tina Charles. By the Eighties he was a producer with the very
successful, if largely forgotten, pop duo Dollar. The big change came when
he produced Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood in 1983, pouring
£70,000 into transforming a song that already existed. Wasn’t he concerned
about the lascivious nature of Relax, which contains the immortal
line, ‘Relax, don’t do it, when you want to suck it to it’?
“Holly Johnson [the band’s lead singer] told me the line was, ‘when you want
to sock it to it’, which is quite different,” claims Horn. “I knew the song
was sexual, but I thought it was like Good Golly Miss Molly. You
know, suggestive.”
Horn’s career has been as much guided by developments in technology as by the
people he has worked with. He did do a brief tenure with the progressive
rock giants Yes, but he is chiefly thought of as the boffin in oversized
glasses who knows what to do with all the new machinery that has been
baffling everyone since the early Eighties.
From the one-note keyboard pulse of Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
to the fragmented, floating melodies of his studio group Art Of Noise, to
the synthetic bass boom of Robbie Williams’s new single Bodies,
Horn is the top producer for artists looking to capture the sound of the
future.
It’s a profitable role. We’re at Sarm Studios in Notting Hill, West London,
which Horn part owns and from where his record label (ZTT) and publishing
company (Perfect Songs) are run. The studio has recently produced hits for
Lady Gaga and Take That. All have combined to make Horn a multimillionaire,
but money never seems to have been the driving factor.
In 2006, Horn’s wife, manager and business partner, Jill Sinclair, went into a
coma after being accidentally shot in the neck with an air rifle by her son.
It was Sinclair that helped Horn set up ZTT; it was also Sinclair that
suggested he work with the Sheffield group ABC after she saw them on Top of
the Pops. In April Horn paid tribute to Sinclair at ABC’s reunion concert in
London, for which he received a standing ovation. He is understandably
reluctant to talk about his wife, who remains in a coma, but he does suggest
that staying busy and productive can help. “You soon discover that the
things money brings aren’t important,” he explains. “People need to work.”
Which is what Horn is doing. As well as finishing off Robbie Williams’s
record, he has recently completed an album by the less well-known singer Kid
Harpoon, who has written songs that, Horn claims, are so good that they they
remind him why he initially got into the business.
A quick listen to a few tracks from Williams’s album suggests what to expect. Bodies
is reminiscent of Frankie Goes To Hollywood at their most brash, while a
beautiful ballad, Morning Sun has a touch of Sgt Pepper-era
Beatles, with its sweeping strings and long instrumental section. These are
big songs in which the studio has been used as the chief instrument. How did
Horn approach them? “Robbie’s songs are anything but formulaic, so I needed
to be creative,” he says. “Robbie would always tell me if he didn’t like
something I did. But all of what I do is designed only to make the singer
sound good. With too many records these days the production comes first, so
they sound like they come out of a tin.”
This statement is somewhat surprising, given that Horn is the man associated
with putting records into tins in the first place. “But the amazing things
about the old Buggles songs is that they were all played!” he counters. “We
would play backing tracks for 14 hours until it sounded like a machine made
them. My aim in those days was to combine The Man-Machine by
Kraftwerk with middle-of-the-road pop. I was quite militant about it.”
Horn’s obsession with technology has been driven, at least in part, by an
inability to reproduce the expensive-sounding productions on late Seventies
records by Elton John and Dire Straits. “I could never get that sound, so I
looked towards technology to get a different one,” he explains. “I hated
punk, but it made me think that I had nothing to be afraid of. If people
that bad were prepared to make music, anything was possible.”
By the early Eighties Horn was buying up, at huge cost, machines such as the
Fairlight, the world’s first sampler, and the Synclavier, a prototype
synthesizer that gave Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood its urgent,
alien sound. It certainly wasn’t down to the band — they didn’t play on the
record.
As well as dealing with costly machines, Horn has dealt with very big stars.
He refuses to name the difficult ones — apart from Shane MacGowan. “He was
threatening everyone in the studio, but he was so out of it that you could
have knocked him over with a feather,” Horn recalls. “All that diva s***
comes from insecurity. Someone once asked me how we were going to allocate
the dressing rooms for a big gig we were doing. I replied, ‘Give the biggest
to the most insecure person’.”
Grace Jones, one of the most dramatic and formidable pop stars of the past few
decades, comes to mind. Horn worked with the Amazonian icon in 1985 on Slave
to the Rhythm, a powerful dance album inspired by a style of funk music
called go-go, which came out of Washington in the early Eighties.
When asked what she was like to work with, Horn says (after a remarkably long
pause): “I’m very fond of Grace. I asked her to be part of a show I put on
at Wembley and she railed at me for half an hour because I didn’t get back
in contact with her after Slave to the Rhythm.
“At the end of this diatribe she shouted at me, ‘I’ll do the show, but it’ll
cost you!’ I asked if it was going to cost me from my wallet, my soul, or my
body. ‘All of them!’ Grace, when she’s great, is wonderful. There is
certainly nobody like her.”
How would Horn describe his job, now that anyone with a computer can sample
and synthesize to their heart’s delight? “To get the record finished. And
that’s harder than you might imagine. I guess there’s only one real job for
the producer: to know when something is right.”
Biography
Early years
Born in 1949 in Durham, Trevor Horn was inspired by his father, John, a dairy
engineer by day but played double bass in ballrooms by night. Horn played
bass at school and for club bands.
In the studio
By the age of 30 he had set up his first recording studio with his friend
Hans Zimmer. He also formed the synth-pop band Buggles in 1979 — their
single Video Killed the Radio Star was the first video to be played on MTV.
Horn went on to play with Yes and formed the band Art of Noise.
Greatest hits
Obsessed with technology, he was one of the first to buy a Fairlight sampling
synthesizer and spent more than £70,000 on his version of Frankie Goes to
Hollywood’s single Relax, which, after being banned by Radio 1 because of
its lyrics, went on to become one of biggest-selling songs of its day. Horn
claims that the original version of Relax was “rubbish”. It was only on the
fourth attempt to rework the song that he was happy with it. As a producer
he soundtracked the Eighties, scoring hits for Frankie Goes to Hollywood,
ABC and Grace Jones. More recently he has worked with Pet Shop Boys and
Belle and Sebastian, and is now at the controls for Robbie Williams’s
comeback, Reality Killed the Video Star.
Robbie Williams’s single Bodies is out on October 12 on EMI
Virgin. For more on Horn’s work, go to trevorhorn.com
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