There is another door next door, leading to Horn’s studio. A house that once belonged to a Hollywood star, big enough to house a huge recording studio: it’s the home of someone who has done very well for himself, which of course Horn has. His recently published autobiography, Adventures in Modern Recording, describes an amazing career as a record producer, filled with wildly entertaining stories that usually involve Horn holed up in a studio, smoking copious amounts of marijuana while dealing with the dizzying technical issues that lie ahead. from pushing the latest recording gadget to its limits and then finally emerging with a hugely successful single. ABC’s look of love. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones. Tatu’s All The Things She Said. Joining Yes, I went from the frying pan to the fire In fact, Horn’s name is so synonymous with massive chart success that it’s easy to overlook his strange path to fame. He began his career in the early 70s as a bassist with the Ray McVay Orchestra, best known as the house band on TV’s Come Dancing. “It was the highest paying gig,” he shrugs, before correcting himself: “Well, the highest paying gig. We were playing anything that was a hit, so it was a good foundation of what makes a good pop record.” He spent time in his then-girlfriend Tina Charles’ backing band before eventually mastering the Buggles Killed the Radio Star video in 1979. The time he spent with fellow Bugle Geoff Downes making it was Horn’s first time being famous perfectionism in the studio, which eventually led him to spend £70,000 – a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money – making Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. He says he was uncomfortable being the frontman. “I enjoyed it at first, but being on a TV show, miming while some guy is sitting there eating a sandwich and it’s Tuesday morning – that started to wear a little bit. But I mean, I went from the frying pan to the fire going into Yes.” Oh yes: Yes. Like the Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric, Video Killed the Radio Star was a single that seemed to foretell the way the next decade would play out, but Horne followed it up by doing the least imaginable of the decade of 1980 and joined the declining titans of prog rock. as a singer. It was inevitable that Horn would agree – Yes it was his favorite band and the mention of it today makes his eyes light up and he starts singing the riff to their 1971 track Starship Trooper (“I love it, man!”) – but the whole experience sounds like hell: Yes, fans were not thrilled to see the frontman of a pop band take the place of singer Jon Anderson (he used to shout “fuck Trevor!”), he took his voice out of singing too loud and suffered the indignity of his microphone stand and tambourine being smashed to pieces in front of 20,000 people. At the end of the tour, Yes fired him. “Well, it was fun at first, but it got harder and harder,” he admits. Then the ardent Yes fan reappears. “But because I was a bit weak, the band was playing out of their skin. There are some live tracks from that time and what strikes me when I listen is how good the band was. They really knew how to do it.” In fact, he liked Yes so much, he returned to produce their 1983 album 90125. Determined to succeed them, he came up with a song called Owner of a Lonely Heart. The band refused to cooperate, deeming it “too poppy”, forcing Horn to take desperate measures. “I literally dropped to my knees and started pulling [bassist] Chris Squire’s pants, begging them.’ Owner of a Lonely Heart became Yes’ only No. 1 in America. “It was fun at first”… Yes in 1980, with Horn on vocals. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy By then, Horn was one of the greatest record producers in the world, though his path to that title was also a strange one. After Yes fired him as their lead singer, he chose to work with Dollar, an incredibly draining pop duo who might have been one of the few artists considered even less hip in 1981 by his former employers. They had, in Horne’s memorable phrase, “something of the cruise ship about them”. Anyone else might have run a mile, but Horn saw a conceptual opportunity. “I loved Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine, this idea of a band that was all techno. And I thought: wouldn’t it be great to put it together [perennially unfashionable British MOR crooner] Vince Hill?’ Horn laid down songs that played on the duo’s previous romantic involvement in visionary electronic production. Listen to 1982’s Videotheque, with its pounding drums, high-drama cues and tried-and-tested vocals, and you’ll hear the sonic future of ’80s pop being mapped out. Understandably, his reimagining of the irredeemably spontaneous Dollar got Horn noticed: first by ABC, whose debut album The Lexicon of Love was one of the best-selling albums of 1982, and then by the former manager of Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren. His 1983 album Duck Rock contained Buffalo Gals, the first British hip-hop single, which might have been less legendary if Horn hadn’t dissuaded McLaren from his original idea of ”doing a rap and scratching track based on in the movie ET’. Rhythm… on stage with Grace Jones at Wembley in 2004. Photo: Brian Rasic/Getty Images Horn says the chaotic, trailblazing spirit of Duck Rock fueled the founding of his own record label, ZTT, a word for a certain kind of ’80s excess, from the odd sleevenotes penned by music journalist Paul Morley, to huge number of remixes Horn made of every single released by the label (apparently much to his dismay “because each one was like making the record from scratch”). For a while it worked like a dream. Horn’s pioneering group, Art of Noise, made records so futuristic that when his old heroes Kraftwerk heard them, they were disappointed, realizing that someone else was now on the cutting edge. Meanwhile, Frankie Goes to Hollywood became Britain’s biggest and most controversial band. In Adventures in Modern Recording, Horn is careful to credit the latter band’s musical abilities. None of its members featured singer Holly Johnson on their debut single, Relax, which was essentially created in the studio by Horn and his team – a fact that you sense probably haunts Horn today. “I could let them play at Relax,” he nods. “It was stupid because it created a secret, and the papers always love that. Look what happened to poor Milli Vanilli. But it was good, the bass player’s riffs on Welcome to the Pleasuredome and Two Tribes were great, he’s a talented guy. And the drummer had something.” He pauses. “I don’t think when I started Relax I had a clear idea of what I was going to do with it. I was just going to see where it went. It didn’t have a chorus, it was really just a verse and an outburst.” Radio stars… with Geoff Downes in the Buggles. Photo: Fin Costello/Redferns Horn seems to have loved every minute of ZTT: using percussion to smash crockery, a sound he sampled on Propaganda’s Dr Mabuse. shocking Grace Jones into singing on Slave to the Rhythm, despite the fact that she “was in a state … she had found out her boyfriend was cheating on her and set all his clothes on fire”. But perhaps inevitably, it didn’t last. The artists left due to disputes over money. Frankie Goes to Hollywood fought each other, an experience Horn says was “like watching a car crash.” Horn’s career continued apace – selling millions more records and working with everyone from Rod Stewart to Bell and Sebastian – but he missed the ZTT madness. “I did. I was kind of sad about that. If someone decides to go crazy and experiment, I think it’s something you end up being because you’re willing to take risks with things. So you can’t go back to that, really.” He says he wonders if technology has made it too easy to make records in 2022. Things that used to take him days can now be done “with a few clicks of the mouse,” but “there’s a kind of Zen in having to spend a lot of time on something, you have to to do it very carefully, little by little.” He seems surprised at the current spate of plagiarism lawsuits. “You notice that the guys who write film scores never sue each other, and that’s because they all accept that this is going to be this way, this way.” However, he brightens, there’s plenty of fantastic music being made in 2022: he’s a fan of Mark Ronson’s productions, among others. And as he shows me to the door, I ask what he’s working on in the studio downstairs. Oh, he says, it’s a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s Swimming Pools (Drank). Tori Amos sings it. It’s hard to imagine what that might sound like, but the idea itself sounds weird, which makes it very Trevor Horn.
