Trevor Horn
Trevor Horn started small and became huge. He spent his early career as a session musician, playing bass on cheap and nasty albums of hits covers, before producing mostly forgotten sides by John Howard and girlfriend Tina Charles. But his massive success as one-hit wonder Buggles, “Video Killed The Radio Star,” gave him entry to the big league and before long he was producing landmark records with ABC and Malcolm McLaren.
Renowned as an early champion of then-new electronic technology, Horn traces his story to the brink of his superstardom with ZTT in his 2011 Red Bull Music Academy lecture.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt Let me have the pleasure of introducing a man who… it almost feels like a
weird arms race this week. We’ve had a lot of big records, and we’re still
going to have a couple more, but no one has made them sound bigger than the
man I’d like you to join me in welcoming right now. Mr. Trevor Horn, please. [applause / bows] Trevor Horn Hello. Torsten Schmidt In preparing this thing I tried to concentrate on the most important bits.
The essential playlist features only 52 tracks now. So bathroom breaks, no.
It’s going to be painful and long. Trevor Horn You’re not going to play all 52 of them, are you? Torsten Schmidt I already tried to exemplify a little bit, and I think we can concentrate on
a few of them. But there’s actually one track in there that is not by you and
I’d like, while we start playing it, afterwards elaborate on why we should
care about a song like that. (music: Dionne Warwick – “Walk on By”) So if you were a radio DJ what would you say right after this song? Trevor Horn I’d say, “That was Dionne
Warwick singing ‘Walk on By,’ written by Bacharach and David, first released in probably 1963, ’64,” I don’t know the exact date. That was the first
record apart from the Beatles that really got to me. I loved that record, It’s
such a beautiful song and I’ve always loved the way she sings, very straight
like a saxophone. She doesn’t mess around and jump all over the place. A few
little jumps, but it’s an amazing voice. I always think her voice is like the
tip of an iceberg – there’s a whole load more underneath it, but you hear the top of it and it’s beautiful. Torsten Schmidt: So it’s pretty much the contrast to what you’d see in a TV casting show these
days. Trevor Horn [laughs] Oh God, yes, it would be the opposite. I think it’s called melisma
or something. Some people like to do that. She still sings, she’s an amazing
singer. In fact, I got to speak to her on the phone. I did some music for a
film Ali, where Will Smith plays [Muhammad] Ali. I did the first 12
minutes of the music and it was a Sam Cooke concert and the only person we could find to sing it was her son, funnily
enough. We only found him the day before he was due to join the LA police
force, which was a rather odd thing. He said, “If you hadn’t got me this gig
I’d have been in the police.” I said, “Does that mean we can’t smoke this?” “Nah, nah, you’re alright.” Torsten Schmidt It’s legal in LA anyway these days, so. Trevor Horn Sam Cooke sang so high. If you listen to something like “Bring It on Home to
Me,” he’s actually singing in the key of C, he’s singing top Cs in full voice, which takes some doing. Torsten Schmidt Normal vocalists would have to go to falsetto straight away. Trevor Horn Yeah, after an A probably guys normally have to sing in falsetto. Torsten Schmidt Any other Sam Cooke recommendations on that note? Trevor Horn If you’re into Sam Cooke, the best thing to listen to of his is a live show
he did in Miami. It’s the one that we copied for that film, it’s quite amazing. A lot of those singers were good, though, because they grew up singing in church – like Dionne Warwick grew up singing in church. So they really learned how to sing. Torsten Schmidt And how to take care of their voice, so excuse me for the lozenge break.
Where were you around the time when you heard that record? Trevor Horn I was playing with the youth orchestra, playing double bass. Similar to this,
when you’re in the orchestra when you were young, they take you away
for the weekend. We used to stay in a castle and rehearse a piece of music and
then give a concert on the Sunday afternoon. I heard that record, I was
listening to that all the time, because I liked it so much, and thinking,
“That’s the kind of music I want to do. Not this – this is too hard.” We were
doing Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony and it
has a hell of a bass part in it. Torsten Schmidt So how did your bass-playing career evolve from Tchaikovsky? Trevor Horn My dad was a bass player part time, he used to play five nights a week to
earn extra money. When I was a kid, I learned to play the recorder – is it
called the same? The little flute thing. I really had no idea that I
was particularly musical, because the way they taught us music at school was so
boring that I wasn’t interested. But when I got the recorder I really got into it. They
used to have me playing every day for the hymns when we sang before school. From playing the recorder I suppose I learned how to read for the bass, because my father showed me how to play “Way Down Upon the Swanee River” and I worked it out
from there. I used to dep for him when I was 12. Sometimes, if he couldn’t
make the first set with his dance band, I’d go and play the first set. Then,
when I was about 13 he got a bass guitar, and bass guitars were so different to
the double bass. My father was thrilled with it. He said, “What’s great about
the bass guitar, all those guys who used to be bluffing on the double bass
‘cause you couldn’t hear them, now you can hear them, so they better play the right notes.” I was 16, 17 and I was the only guy around who could read for the bass guitar.
Lots of people could play rock & roll on it, but I could read so I could work in dance bands and things like that. That’s how I started, playing all of
that old Frank Sinatra stuff. Torsten Schmidt I was going to ask, when you say dance bands, what era are you talking and
what were the first tunes you learned to play? Trevor Horn: [sings] “I’ve got you under my skin.” Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, all of that stuff from the ‘50s
and the ‘40s. There was some great dance band music. My father’s favorite
band was Tommy Dorsey, things like
“When the Quail Went to San Quentin” and “Summer Ridge Drive,” those
sorts of things. Torsten Schmidt And what would a dance look like when you played? Trevor Horn Lots of old people doing this sort of thing [holds arm out, sways]. I used
to get very bored with it. I used to practise letting my nose run and seeing
how far it would go, things like that, because I was so bored. I used to get into trouble because a couple of times I got
very drunk and was rude to the drummer. I remember my father telling me off
for that, I was only 15. But the thing was, I used to get paid for it. What I really wanted
to do was to be Bob Dylan. I was a
completely unashamed Bob Dylan imitator. I had the harmonica, and I could sing any
Bob Dylan song up to about 1964, ’65, ’66, before he did John Wesley
Harding. Torsten Schmidt So do we need to get a guitar in here and you give us your Bob Dylan
renditions? Trevor Horn I don’t think so, you don’t really want to hear it. I used to think it would
be a great idea to get Bob Dylan to do something like Bob Dylan Sings the
Songs Of Diane Warren, or
something like that [sings “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong” in Dylan
voice], some corny old tunes. But anyway. Torsten Schmidt Let’s jump ahead a little bit and hear something we found in the depths of
the internet and maybe you can elaborate on it a little bit. (music: Big A – “Juke Joint Bop”) Trevor Horn I think I played bass on that, did I? I haven’t heard that for a long time. Torsten Schmidt There’s a C. Horn and a T. Horn credited on that record. Do you have another sibling? Trevor Horn Nobody who plays. That’s called “Juke Joint Bop,” isn’t it? I think it was
something I played on when I was a session guy and a friend of mine, Rod, used
to write those kind of songs. God, I haven’t heard that for a long time. Torsten Schmidt How did you get to be a session guy? Trevor Horn Well, there’s all different kinds of session guys. I used to do a lot of
sessions ’cause I could read. I did a lot those awful albums you see in the
shops, where it’s 30 pop hits. They used to be 30 pop hits for like two bucks, you know? Torsten Schmidt You mean the ones that really annoyed you as a kid where you spend five currency off your pocket money and, like, “That’s not what I wanted”? Trevor Horn Absolutely, yeah. But they used to pay very good money. You did them very
quickly, you did 12 songs in an afternoon. I played bass on them but for a
brief period of time, I did Bryan Ferry songs as well. They used to
say, “You’re the only guy we can find who sings out of tune.” ‘Cause Bryan
Ferry, god bless him, he sings out of tune. So I’d do the Bryan Ferry
songs and the funny thing was we’d do them all in one take. You’d wait
outside, go in and then [sings “Let’s Stick
Together”] and then it was done.
I remember being in a restaurant one time and some music was playing and
thinking, “Jesus, that’s awful. What the hell is that?,” and it was me singing
“Tokyo Joe.” [laughter] But I
did some other sessions, I used to sing on radio jingles. Even after I had my
first hit as a producer, I would still hear jingles that I’d played the bass
on that were still going years later. But you only get one payment. Torsten Schmidt Here’s another from those radio session days. (music: Tina Charles – “Making All the Right Moves”) Trevor Horn ...which, believe me, was a dangerous occupation. Torsten Schmidt In what respect? Trevor Horn Well, Tina could drink more than most men that I know. And when she’d had a few
drinks, she could cause more trouble than anybody I ever knew. But she was a
good singer. Torsten Schmidt Are you still bruised? Trevor Horn Part of me is, yes. Funnily enough, I met her again a few years ago, she came
and sang with us. She hadn’t changed one bit, really. I still like her, but she was kind of crazy. And that was a B-side ‘cause her producer was a guy called
Biddu. He was an Indian guy. He was a good
producer, he produced “Kung-Fu
Fighting” [sings] and “I Love
to Love.” She did “I Love to
Love” while I was still living with her. Torsten Schmidt How did that make you feel? Trevor Horn I didn’t play on it. I thought it was great, when Biddu played me the song.
Back then I was very much Tina Charles’ boyfriend. I wasn’t a producer or anything,
and so I was always behind her or in the corner of the room. “I Love to Love,”
when Biddu played it I told her, “That’s a really good song.” But what was
more important, she came home with the backing track. That was the first time
in my life that I’d ever heard a backing track. That sounds funny, but I was trying to produce records and I wasn’t doing very well with it. I didn’t find it easy at
first, I couldn’t quite get the backing track right. Listening to the backing
track for “I Love to Love” was a really educative thing for me, I learned so
much from it. It was so simple, it was cold, it was clear. Nobody played
anything that they shouldn’t play. I studied it and learned a lot from it. But
I never played on her records, I think that was the first one I ever played on
and Biddu just let us do it as a B-side, just to keep her happy. (music: John Howard – “Baby Go Now”) That’s a guy called John Howard, right? Torsten Schmidt It is, yes. Trevor Horn Did I produce that? Torsten Schmidt I’m just double-checking, because it’s the first time you’re credited as a
producer. Trevor Horn Yeah, I think I did produce it. Biddu had produced John Howard before; he was
a good dance producer but he wasn’t very good with artists. Producing dance
records and producing artists is an entirely different thing. I did three or
four tracks with him. It turned out pretty well, but I don’t think they sold.
He was a lovely guy, very gay, very over-the-top camp. He’s still going. In
fact, he wrote to me last week to invite me to something. So we still stay in
touch. I haven’t heard that one for a long time, though. Torsten Schmidt It’s kind of interesting looking back now. We might not have the right notion of where it stands in that point of time, but it definitely draws from Steely Dan and certain West Coast things. Trevor Horn Oh yeah, Steely Dan, we loved Steely Dan. Those records, if you’re a musician they’re so
good because they’re pop, but they were great pop. Torsten Schmidt What made them great pop for you? Trevor Horn The arrangements, the way people played, the chord structures, the
intelligence of the lyrics – it was great stuff. An album like Pretzel Logic, it sounded so good, too,
they really made an effort to make the record sound good. There were a few
people around like that, 10cc as well
sounded great back then. It’s funny you’re playing these, I haven’t heard these for ages. Torsten Schmidt Now the next one, probably we’ll play it here and then move to your computer.
This one, if you were a three or four year old boy at the end of the ‘70s,
strapped in your mom’s car in the back seat, this was your tune. (music: The Buggles – “Video Killed the Radio Star” / applause) Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, not only the biggest tune in Thalfang’s Volkswagens, but also the first tune to be played on MTV, I believe. Trevor Horn Well, it was perfect for them, it was their manifesto. I had no idea what it
would turn into when we did it. I wrote the song originally with a guy called
Bruce Woolley. I started writing
songs. I was working as a producer, but I didn’t write songs. I used to fix
people’s songs up. I discovered very early on that if someone has a song and it’s
not right, if you rewrite it for them – especially if they’re amateurs – as long
as you don’t claim any of the credit they’re really happy, they don’t mind.
They kind of start pretending it’s theirs. I was astonished, but it can be a
way of solving a problem if you’ve got a problem with the song. I was fixing
people’s songs and then I though this is stupid, I should start writing songs
again. Bruce and I had that lyric – “I heard you on the wireless back in ‘52”
– but couldn’t figure out where to go with it, it’s a funny line. We were
reading lots of science fiction. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a guy called
J.G. Ballard, we were reading J.G.
Ballard a lot and also listening to
Kraftwerk. Man-Machine was a huge influence at the time, we just played it all the time because it was so different. At the end of the ‘70s
it was either rock – you know, Led Zeppelin, Elton John and all that crew – or it was
punk. I hated punk because it was so unmusical. I once went to a show and I actually found myself throwing stuff at the band ‘cause I was so angry at how awful it
was. Torsten Schmidt What band was that, for the record? Trevor Horn The Unwanted, I think they were called. And it was a song called Buried Underground.” [sings] “Ten feet
underground, decomposing.” Get the fuck out of it! Dreadful. So I hated punk.
didn’t like rock, because the rock guys were all gods and maestros and I
didn’t feel like a maestro. But Kraftwerk, it was like you could see the
future when you heard Kraftwerk. Something new is coming, something different.
Different rhythm section, just a different mentality. So we had all of that, myself
and Bruce, and we actually wrote this song probably six months before we recorded it.
We were walking in the park one day. If you write lyrics, sometimes you
can spend days looking for a line and then it just goes, Bang! There it is.
“Lying awake intent in tuning in on you / If I was young it didn’t stop you
coming through.” Then the bit about taking the credit for your second
symphony. “Rewritten by machine and new technology / And now I understand the
problems you can see.” That’s what I could feel was coming, how technology was
going to change the way music sounded. But the problem for me and [Buggles keyboardist] Geoffrey [Downes] was we had no access to any technology. We tried renting an Oberheim sequencer once and I
remember it cost me £15, which was £15 that I didn’t really have. I couldn’t get
the damn thing to work, I couldn’t get a note out of it. It came with a manual
that was German, or part in German. It was really hard to operate. So we
figured out ways of faking it by playing it like a sequencer and putting
echoes on things. If you had an echo you could sort of make something sound a bit like a
sequencer. Even though “Video Killed the Radio Star” was recorded in 1979, it
was all played, there were no computers anywhere around the place. Which is
kinda funny because it sounds like it was sequenced. The other problem we had
back then is I didn’t know how to edit two-inch multi-tracks. In fact, nobody
told me you could do such a thing. I actually learned a lot about editing two-
inch multitracks with Yes, when I
did 90125. They would edit multi-tracks
to correct the drums, they’d take a quarter of an inch out. I’d never seen
that done before. So this meant the 16-track machine, or the 24-track machine
we did it on was very primitive, which meant you couldn’t drop in. You had to
play the thing from one end to the other without a mistake. By the time
we got the backing track for this, we’d been playing it for nearly 12 hours,
which is a long time. The drummer was really angry and we had to put
him on triple rate to get him to stay. He kept saying, “You’re fucking mad, I’m going.
I’m not playing this anymore, my hands are hurting.” And we were, “Please,
just have one more go.” And Hans Zimmer was in the control room. He
wasn’t playing on it but he was in the control room. It was me, Geoffrey
Downes and a drummer called Paul Robinson. I brought the multitrack with me ‘cause
I thought it might be interesting for you to hear what went down first. Or a
bit of it, I don’t know if you want to hear the whole thing. Is that OK? Tim’s
been my engineer on and off for 20 years. I hope this isn’t too boring for
him. This is what went down. The piano was recorded with the effect on it. (music: The Buggles – “Video Killed the Radio Star” (instrumental demo)) You get the idea anyway. That tape effect wasn’t there, that’s just us rewinding a tape machine and recording it. Torsten Schmidt It might be worth putting that multitrack on the desk in the other room later
on, then you could give it a little rerub. Trevor Horn Sure, as long as nobody nicks it, I’m fine with it. I don’t really want
it on the internet. But yeah, it’s just piano, bass and drums. Torsten Schmidt You were mentioning a certain young man from Frankfurt in there who still claims
his participation in this track to up his street credit these days.. Trevor Horn Well, he did participate in it. He was there, he was part of the band at the
time. The thing was Geoffrey was such a great keyboard player that there wasn’t
any room for Hans to play the keyboards. But Hans was, still is one of the most charming,
nice people I’ve ever met, so he was great to have around. But after we did
that take, he said, [affects German accent] “I don’t think this is the one.”
Geoffrey and I said, “It’s the one.” Torsten Schmidt How did he get into the group or into the room in the first place? Trevor Horn Hans had a Prophet-5 [synthesizer]. [laughter]
And we only had a Polymoog up to that point and it was a little unstable, and it was a bit unlimited – it wouldn’t remember sounds. The Prophet-5 was the first synth I saw that would remember a sound. You spend ages programming a sound, it would keep it in a
bag. The thing that Hans was always great at was he always got great sounds, you know?
He was a great programmer. Funny enough, there was a track on the first Buggles album, he
persuaded us that if we played to a click which he laid down, then he would be
able to overdub keyboards and lock the keyboards to the tape. I was like,
“What? You mean have the keyboards play afterwards in time?”
“Yes.” “How? I don’t understand how that’s possible.” It was a track called
“Johnny on the Monorail” on the
first album. We spent ages recording it to this click of his, then Hans disappeared into a room off to the side, we didn’t see him for a week. Then he came back. He’d done
all these overdubs with this big rack of synths that he has in his place, they
were all banging away and playing with “Johnny on the Monorail,” relatively in
time. Not perfectly in time, but pretty much in time. Problem was we didn’t like any of the overdubs so we didn’t use it. We’d already more or less finished it by playing
by hand. It took me a long time to get into the idea. I still don’t like MIDI
very much, I find it a bit inaccurate and sloppy. Torsten Schmidt Unlike the Hollywood people? Trevor Horn Yeah, yeah. We were talking about this last night. Because Hans, really, he was into programming,
that’s what he was very good at. When he first went to LA that’s what he
did that was so different to everyone else. He could do a piece of a score and
it was all in MIDI. And if you’ve ever worked in film, it’s a crazy business and
they’re constantly changing everything, constantly cutting bits out of the scene. If
you’re an old-style composer where you have the orchestration, it’s hell
getting the cues to fit. Hans was the first guy who had a great, big MIDI rig that could
change cues instantaneously and fake an orchestra in a convincing way. Of course, they loved
it out there. He’s a franchise now; he has like 20 guys working for him. If you
ever get the chance to go work for him, I strongly recommend that you do.
He’s a lovely man and he’s helped a lot of people out. People like Harry Gregson-
Williams started working
for Hans. He’s not a selfish, egotistical asshole, he’s a good guy. Some of
those guys can be like that, but not Hans. And if you ever get the chance, just do it. Torsten Schmidt And there’s a good chance there’s a Grammy involved in it too. Trevor Horn For me? Torsten Schmidt No, not you. You got yours later. I meant an Oscar. Trevor Horn It depends if you can take the pressure. I’ve done a couple of films and
they’re not easy and the people can drive you mad. It’s the most exhausted
I’ve ever been. I did a film called Coyote Ugly, I did the music for
that years ago, and I think that was one of the hardest things I ever had to
do in terms of hours. I saw Hans the other week, actually. We did a Buggles
gig. I said, “That film thing’s not going anywhere, mate. You should come and
join the band, forget it.” [laughter] He was doing Sherlock Holmes, the new
Sherlock Holmes film. Torsten Schmidt I do feel like we’re rushing a little bit, but we’re only on five out of 50.
But, like I said, this is just the essence. (music: Malcolm McLaren – “Double Dutch” / applause) Trevor Horn That’s Malcolm McLaren and “Double Dutch.” That was 1982 and I’d just done ABC, Lexicon of Love, and everybody wanted me to do another record like that. And Malcolm wanted to do a solo album. My wife, who was my manager at the time, said to me, “Well, you can do
Spandau Ballet and you know
it’ll be successful because they’re a really good band. If you do the Malcolm McLaren thing, God knows what’s going to happen ‘cause he’s a weird guy.” Torsten Schmidt Can you fill us in quickly on the things he did before? Trevor Horn Malcolm was the Sex Pistols’ manager. He was the guy who got them to swear on TV and designed all their clothes. He was an amazing guy to be with. He was so mad in a way, but funny, with great ideas. I had him over. My wife Jill had been a maths teacher and wanted to tell him off for punk rock, basically, to have a go at him. But when
we met him we were so taken with him because had one of those buffalo gals
hats, and he had a pair of trousers that hung down at the back that looked as
though he’d pooed in them. He looked very strange, but he was so funny and he
played me some music that I’d never heard before at the time. And he told me
some stuff that took my breath away. He said that all the black kids in New York
were listening to Depeche Mode. I was like, “What? I don’t get...” “And they do this thing with records, they scratch records.”
And he played me the start of the tape that you heard there, the World’s
Famous Supreme Team, who were
two New York guys who basically worked a con on Broadway. They used to do the
egg cups with the coin underneath it. The money they got from that they used to
spend doing this radio show at three o’clock in the morning, which was all designed to get girls. I’d
never heard anything like it, never heard scratching records. Just the idea
that people from New York were into Depeche Mode was mind-blowing to me at the
time anyway. Then he played me this South African township music and said, “I
wanna make a record of all this stuff.” I was kind of, “Great! Let’s go.” I think the first
thing we did was we went to South Africa. And we were there two years before Paul
Simon, because Paul Simon mined the
same musical scene with Graceland. But he was two
or three years behind us. We were there first, and we didn’t take any
psychiatrists with us. I know he had two psychiatrists with him when he went.
So we went South Africa, and South Africa was, like, a weird place. Torsten Schmidt Obviously, that was during apartheid. Trevor Horn Yes, big-time apartheid. Malcolm had been there before me. He collected all
the musicians, who were the musicians the record labels there didn’t like.
Malcolm had found them because probably they had a bit of spirit, who knows.
So I walked into a studio and there’s 15 Zulus and Xhosas sitting and I was, “Hi!”
And I was the big producer from England. Malcolm had told them, “You’ve got to do everything he says.” And we could
only work at nights, we were in there for 16 nights in a row. And we had the
most fun time. They couldn’t go out at night, because if you were black you weren’t allowed to be in Johannesburg at night. You had to be bussed out back to
Soweto. I went to Soweto with Malcolm and one of the best songs for me was
“Living on the Road in Soweto.”
If you’d have seen Soweto in 1982, it was like the dark satanic mills. There
was no electricity and a great big pall of coal smoke above it. Torsten Schmidt They already had that massive Kraftwerk thing right in the middle of
Soweto, right? There’s like a big coal Kraftwerk kind of thing. Trevor Horn I just remember seeing it in the distance and seeing the coal smoke above it.
Things were different. When we were starting I was sitting behind the desk,
everyone was sitting at the back. This tall white guy came in and said, “Is
everything alright? Do you like the studio?” I said, “The studio’s not great,
but it’ll be fine.” He said, “Anything else?” I said, “I’d like a cup of
coffee.” And without thinking I said to everyone else, “Anyone else want a cup
of coffee?” The guy looked at me like that [mouth agape]. I said, “Nobody
else wants a cup of coffee.” So the guy went and got me a cup of coffee. It was a
weird vibe. But after I’d been there for a day or so I asked him, “Can you get me
some pot? What’s it like getting pot ‘round here?” He said, “Oh, I can get you
come pot.” So I gave him $20 and the next day he came back with a carrier bag
full of pot. I said, “My God! Hide that, quick! That’s too much. We’ll go to
prison for that. Hide it. Would you like some? Here, have some.” I was giving them some, and then I rolled
a joint and they were fascinated. “What are you doing?” “I’m rolling a joint, here.”
They roll it with newspaper, wet newspaper. So we became really good friends. Malcolm was
creating all the time, trying things out. But God bless him, he couldn’t sing
particularly; I mean he really couldn’t sing. I remember the first time he
ever sang for me was in South Africa and the song he was going to sing was
“Jive My Baby.” I think it was
on the album. He won’t mind me doing an impersonation of him, I did love him,
wherever he is now, he’s passed over. I said, “Malcolm, I’ve got to hear you
sing.” He said, “Oh, that’s no problem, I’ll sing ‘Jive My Baby.’” It was
about 11 at night and all the musicians were sleeping in the back. He went
into the studio, wearing this cowboy hat and I said, “You have to put some
headphones on.” So he put the headphones on and he was standing there. I said, “Malcolm.” [looks startled] “What, what?” “I’m here in the headphones, me in the headphones.” “Oh, right.” “The music will play through the headphones and you sing along with it. You’re in after eight bars.” “Eight bars? What’s a bar? What do you mean?”
“Eight bars. Eight times four beats.” “Oh no, no, that’s too technical. Just you
give me a cue, you go like that [points] when it’s time for me to sing.” And
the track started up [sings] and I think to myself, I better give him the cue a bit
early so maybe he’ll come in on time. He’s standing there looking at me and I
gave him the cue. He went [sings badly] and we went [stares horrified] And
everyone who was sleeping at the back woke up because it was such an awful
noise. My old engineer Gary Langan
has a tape of the session where I say, “My God, he sounds like Jimmy Clitheroe...” – who was an
English comedian – “...on acid.” And this little Zulu woman, who was quite a
piece of work, said, “Trevor, Malcolm can’t sing.” I said, “Don’t get
involved, it’s my problem.” After he’d sung it, I went out there and said, “Malcolm, you’re not singing the tune really. The tune goes…” [sings] He said, “Do you want me to sing it like that?” “Not exactly like that, but that’s the tune.” “I can’t sing it like that. No, no, no. If you’re looking for me to sing
this in time and in tune, it’s not gonna happen. I’m a wacky kind of guy and
that’s all you’re gonna get, so you better figure out what you’re gonna do
with it.” Which is what I did. [laughs] But in the end we made a whole
record together and we had a good time. When I left it was really sad. We paid
the musicians – we didn’t pay them proper money, because we just didn’t – but we paid
them like £1,500 each, which was incredible for them, because most of them lived in
Soweto and they had very little money. I remember saying to the guitar player, “What are you doing when you get the big check?” And he said, “I’m buying a wife.” “How
much is a wife?” “£600.” “But you’ve got a girlfriend.” “Ah, but I want a wife.”
And we were staying in the only multi-racial hotel in Johannesburg because I got a
call from the reception saying, “You’d better come down. There’s a guy here
says he knows you.” It was the guitar player. He had a crate of, like,
special brew that he was holding and this terrified little woman who looked
like she was about 18. And he was checking into the hotel. It’s OK, he’ll be fine,
that was his honeymoon money. Anyway, I can talk about Malcolm for hours. You
probably want to move me along. Torsten Schmidt There was one moment in there earlier where you said Malcolm told them, “Here’s the big-cheese record producer from England and you better do what he
does.” How did that make you feel, coming from England, which is a lot more
multiracial, and then coming into this environment where you’re obviously
white and probably part of a system that you’re not really supporting? Trevor Horn Well, not at all, no. You know what? I didn’t have a single problem. I was into thumb-slapping the bass at the time and everyone in the band wanted to learn how to thumb-slap, so I was having
thumb-slapping classes. We got on well. Musicians are musicians, it doesn’t
matter where you are. I’m dictatorial, a megalomaniac, all those kind of things, but I like to think I’m not unpleasant. So it was a really good atmosphere. I knew it was
going to change. You can’t keep something like that going, it was dreadful.
And it changed in a few years, thank God to Nelson Mandela. But no, I didn’t feel funny
at all, I had a good time. I enjoyed it. It was after that that we did “Buffalo Gals.” You’re going to play that one? (music: Malcolm McLaren and The World’s Famous Supreme Team – “Buffalo Gals” / applause) It’s difficult to know how crazy that record sounded back in 1982. People,
when they heard it, their jaws would drop ‘cause it was so unlike anything
anybody had ever heard. Funnily enough, I got a phone call on Friday last week, a
guy called Richard Russell rang me up. Richard Russell runs XL Records, who have the White Stripes and so on, and he wanted to come ‘round and see me. He’d been with Damon Albarn from Blur and Gorillaz and they’d been playing this
track, they’d been on the internet and they said, “Do you know that’s the
first British rap record?” I said, “Yes, I did know.” It’s not something that
many people are interested in. It was a trip, those guys, we flew them over.
It was one of those daft ideas. Malcolm wanted a single from Duck
Rock to be “Buffalo Gals.” He played
me the Peyote Pete recording of it from the 1948 Folkways album, which is
basically [sings]. It’s an old hoedown country-dancing sort of thing. He wanted
it to be the single, and ooh, I had a real problem with that. I couldn’t see it, I
didn’t know what to do with it. We tried recording it like the Peyote Pete
version of it, down in Tennessee. That was an experience in itself because… it
just was. But we don’t have hours. Torsten Schmidt The three-minute Cliff Notes version of that, please. Trevor Horn Well, Malcolm said, “We’re gonna do ‘Buffalo Gals.’ I’ve got a group called
the Hilltoppers, they’re gonna come and play.” And we’re in this studio called
Tri-State Studios and the Hilltoppers showed up and they were in a purple VW
van that had carpet on the inside, purple carpet. There was a very old
Hilltopper who had a hat on saying “The Oldest Hilltopper” – he was about 92.
And then there were a few children who looked like they might have had
interesting parents ‘cause they were boss-eyed and a bit strange looking. And
they started to play. We set up some mics around the studio and they started
to play and they were awful. Malcolm came up to me and said, “This is awful.
You’re the producer, get rid of them.” So I had to go over and say, “Guys,
that was great, that’ll do for what we need. Thanks very much, here’s $50.”
And they were happy enough and off they went in their purple VW. And I said to
the guy who owned the studio, “Do you think you can get us any musicians?” In
the southern states of America they’re very laidback. “Yeah, yeah, should be
able to. Utility pickers.” “Utility pickers, great.” “Gimme some time, I’ll
get on the phone.” So a bunch of guys showed up and they all had that slightly
tough hard-bitten American look until they smiled. They set up and they could
obviously play really well. They were crazy guys, I remember going to the
toilet and there’s about five of them doing great big lines of blow off the
sink in the toilet. Pretty quickly I had to put Malcolm into a soundproof area
and take him out of the headphones. He had his buffalo hat and he’d just lose
his place and throw everyone totally out of sync. They were looking at me
like, “What are you gonna do with this?” “I’m gonna do something with it,
don’t worry.” And I remember Malcolm saying, “We’ve got the single, great.”
And I’m thinking, ‘We’ve got the single? No way’. One of those moments at
dinner, he said, “I wanna do a scratching record now, rapping, scratching
called ‘ET Come Home’ about ET.” I said, “Why don’t we a rapping scratching version of ‘Buffalo Gals’?” He said, “Yeah!” Thank God, we might be able to have a chance now. So
he flew those two guys over from New York to England, the Supreme Team. They
didn’t know what was going on, they thought Malcolm was some weird guy from
God knows where, and they didn’t even bring their decks with them. So we had
to get onto the record label in New York and so there was three days where we
couldn’t do anything while they went to a shop, bought the decks with the
Stanton cartridges and they were
flown over. Someone from Charisma
Records brought them on a
plane over to England. It was one of those things where I didn’t know where to
start with them. I said, “The thing you do, scratching the records, is really
amazing. I’ve got this thing here called the Fairlight and it does the same
thing with digital audio. Let me show you, the possibilities are endless.”
They looked at the Fairlight and were, “No man, that’s wack.” I was, “What
does wack mean?” I hadn’t heard all that opposite language at that time. I
said to them, “We’re gonna make this rap record so what you need to do is show
me what your favourite beat is.” So they showed me their favourite beat, which
was [sings beat]. I had this Oberheim rig, which was a DMX, a DSX and a keyboard. It took me
hours ‘cause I kept going, “No no, no no,” to get the swing of it right.
After about four hours I had this thing that went [sings beat] and I threw
in this bass that went [sings bass], just to give it some bass, and they
really liked it. I said, “Now we’ve got to rap this over it.” I showed them
the lyrics to “Buffalo Gals” and they went, “Nah, we can’t do that – that’s
Ku Klux Klan shit. That’s what
the Ku Klux Klan dance to.” I said, “We’re gonna modernise it.” “Nah, we can’t
rap that.” “Look, I’ll show you, we can rap it. Gary, I’ll go and do it.” So I
went into the studio [raps “Buffalo Gals”] and I looked into the control
room and I couldn’t see them. I thought, “Oh, they’ve gone. They’re so pissed
off they’ve gone.” So I stopped and I went into the control room. They were
both on the floor crying with laughter, they were laughing so hard. They put
their arms around me and said, “Trevor man, don’t be a rapper. Man, you’re
shit.” I said, “Is that shit good or shit bad?” “Bad.” [laughter] “Is bad
good?” [laughter] But anyway, it broke the ice a little bit, which helped,
‘cause up till then they hadn’t been sure. When Malcolm rapped “Buffalo Gals”
I had to stand there and punch him in the chest in time with the track,
because he’d just go... [sings very fast] “No, Malcolm it’s [thumps chest
and sings in time].” “Right, I get it.” So I’m standing there doing this,
after about four takes I start to get tired. I stop doing it and off he went.
He’s, “You’ve gotta keep hitting me. Come on, what’s your problem?” “I’m
exhausted, Malcolm.” So that’s how we got the vocal. The record itself, the
track, took ages to do because he was trying something much more ambitious. I
had Anne Dudley, the keyboard player
and arranger, she was doing the music and
J.J. Jeczalik, who was in the Art of
Noise, was doing the Fairlight. We
spent days, probably two weeks, trying to get something out of Malcolm and the
World’s Famous Supreme Team, Anne Dudley and J.J., that would be good. There are
some hilarious outtakes I’ve got somewhere of Supreme Team saying to Malcolm, “Man,
Malcolm, you’re a vibe killer. You kill the vibe like nobody.” In the end I
had to say to him, “Malcolm, give me one day, just one day of me and the guys and I
think I can crack this track.” And we did it. Anne Dudley and myself, Gary
Langan and the World’s Famous Supreme Team did it in a day. Malcolm did the
vocal. I always remember when World’s Famous Supreme Team were leaving England
to go back to New York, they phoned me up and said, “Trevor, we’ve gotta record
that song again.” “Why?” “Because the scratching’s wack.” “Does that mean it’s
bad? I don’t get you. You mean it’s not right?” “It’s wack.” “Don’t worry about that, it’ll be fine. It’s a
punk record.” They said, “Oh, OK, then can we have the drum machine?” I said, “No, it cost me 2,000 quid, I can’t just give you that.” They said, “OK, bye.”
They were gone and I never heard from them again. Is that enough about that? Torsten Schmidt It’s kind of amazing to see that all that effort went into something that sounds
like someone coming back from New York with a tape recording on a cassette
and just chucking it into some sort of device and cutting it up. Trevor Horn Yeah, but you couldn’t chuck it into anything back then, there was nothing to
chuck it into. [laughter] Torsten Schmidt Didn’t you just say there was a massive Fairlight? Trevor Horn I had a Fairlight but there was only eight seconds of sampling time and you
could only put in bits that were half a second long. There’s a certain
structure to it. But it was actually a hit, they played it on the radio and it
was a hit. Just as a sort of postscript: I was always a bit nervous ‘cause at the end I had the girls saying
“too much of that snow white” and I thought, “Should I have left that on? I
could get in trouble for that.” It was a reference to cocaine, obviously. One
day I got a message saying the controller of the BBC wants to talk to you, and
my heart starts going like this. [beats heart] And I thought, “Jesus,
they’ve sussed out the fucking snow white thing.” So I picked up the phone and
he said, “We’re going to give you a special DJs award.” I thought, “Thank God
for that.” It caused quite a stir. One thing I did do that was interesting, a
lot of the stuff I’d recorded in South Africa, ‘cause I was aware of copyright
even then, I cut onto vinyl. All that [sings] “Looking like a hobo,” is the
Zulu people from South Africa. That little noise at the front, that [sings],
that’s the Zulu woman who said Malcolm couldn’t sing. That’s the Zulu war cry
that Zulu women make when they’re killing somebody. That’s what she told me
anyway. Torsten Schmidt Earlier on, you mentioned this. A mildly happier note. (music: ABC – “The Look of Love” / applause) “Yippee aye-ay, yippee aye-ay.” Trevor Horn It’s funny listening to that. There’s one part where Martin goes [sings]
and I remember how we made that up from a few bits of vocal ‘cause we didn’t
have samplers then. We needed something for that bit and I remember flying it
off onto a bit of half-inch tape, editing it on half-inch tape, then flying it
back into the track. Flying that line [sings]. David Bowie came in while we were working
on that album in Tony Visconti’s studio. We were working on the end, ‘cause if you listen to
the end where it’s, [sings] “Be lucky in love,” that’s me singing. We were
trying to figure out how to finish the songs off. I said, “Martin, we need to
do something at the end, maybe you need to talk or maybe you need to say something.” Tony Visconti
comes in and says, “Do you mind if David sits at the back for a minute?” No.
I was a huge David Bowie fan, so no problem at all. It was the only time I ever
saw Anne Dudley put some make-up on. She ran off to the loo and came back in
with make-up on. “You look different, Anne.” “Well, David Bowie’s coming in.”
I remember being quite impressed with the fact that his eyes were two different colors. We were talking about what to do with the end and he said, “Why don’t you have a message from an answering machine?” Answering machines were relatively novel
at that point. Hmm, don’t know about that. Martin said, “No, I’m
gonna write something.” Then David Bowie went and then suddenly he came back
again. I remember he was like, “Has anybody seen my bag?” “No, sorry David.” Then he went
again and his assistant came in. “Has anyone seen David’s bag?” One of the
guys from ABC came running in and he was so pleased with himself. He was
saying, “I’ve freaked David Bowie out, I’ve freaked David Bowie out. I’ve
hidden his bag and he can’t find it. He’s looking everywhere for it.” He was so
chuffed with himself. But they were brilliant, ABC. You listen to that, the
lyrics are really clever. They were all bright guys and they were listening to
American records. Most of that – that was the second single – they had it all
worked out themselves. By that point, we had a way of working. The first record I did with them was “Poison Arrow.” We spent the day
in the studio and they played “Poison Arrow.” They were OK. The drummer was a
guy called David Palmer who
plays with Rod Stewart now, so he was a career drummer. I thought he was
pretty good, but nobody else was that good. So when we recorded it I said to
them, “Is this what you’ve got in mind? Is this what you want?” “Why?” “Well,
do you wanna work harder on it? Do you want it to sound better than this?” “How good
can we get it to sound?” “You can get it better than this, but you’ll have to
go through a process.” At the time I was probably one of the first producers
who had a rig and my rig consisted of an 808 with a set of triggers on the
side of it and a Minimoog and a
sequencer; it was a Roland sequencer that you just put lists of notes into it. Everything
worked from the 808, I used to
use the audio as triggers for the sequencer. I used Dave Simmons’ synth drums
that he’d made for me and he’d modified my TR-808 so I could drive these synth
drums. In essence, the sequencer worked with CV and gate – that’s controlled voltage and
gate – which is why I’ve never liked MIDI because that used to be absolutely
locked spot-on. So I said, “If you want to make it better, the first thing I
have to do is program everything your drummer’s played into the 808. Then
I’ll program our bass player’s part, put the two in the sequencer, then we’ll record that. Then start again, you play the drums over the
TR-808 and try and get everything as close as possible so it’s in perfect
time. As perfectly in time as you can.” They were bemused by it, but they were very
ambitious. Of course, that’s exactly what we did. It must have taken me eight
or ten hours. I don’t know if anyone’s ever programmed an 808, especially if
you have to put a song in it, it’s very fiddly. Of course, we weren’t singing
it to tapes, so when it was done you just press the go button and off it
went. So the bass player played on top of it and we got a much tighter track,
and that opened their eyes a little bit and by the time we came to “Look of Love” they had it all worked out. They wanted me to put the bass part into the
sequencer and we started it exactly the same way. That’s the only thing you
could do back then; it was the early days of locking stuff to tape. Torsten Schmidt On the content level, you’ve got almost a four-hour soul/disco/opera in this
track in the way the drama builds, the arrangement and all that. Then you’ve got these tiny
little asides with the voice counteracting – the “who’s got the look?,” things
like that. Who came up with that concept? Trevor Horn Oh, that was them. They were very bright guys. It was a bit like, you give them one thing and they run
with it. They wrote the song. I think my main contribution was [sings] “Be
lucky in love” at the end, and suggesting that he talk, aside from mixing it.
And Anne Dudley did the strings. That was the first time we did strings on a
record and it was Anne Dudley’s first ever string arrangement. It was the
first time I’d used strings for a long time as well. Before I had a hit I had
a very bad experience with a string section who literally walked out in the middle of a take. As the clock struck one, they put down their instruments and walked
out in the middle of a take. I was so upset because it cost money. I remember
I threw the check on the floor in front of the fixer and put my foot on it
then walked off. I said, “I’m never using real strings again. Never working
with those kind of musicians ever.” We all say those kind of things. When it
came to this, it was Anne’s first arrangement and it was a big thing for her. But she was good. I was lucky on that record. I had a great keyboard player, great engineer. The
engineering on that was really good, so… what was the question? I’ve
forgotten. Oh, was it their idea? The whole record was their idea. When they
were at university they used to go to clubs and dance. They loved American
records and they wanted to make their own version of an American soul record
that had more content to it. So I facilitated it. Torsten Schmidt Was Paul Morley involved in any way at that stage already? Trevor Horn No, Paul Morley was a journalist
for the NME. He interviewed me when I was
a Buggle, I was doing lots of interviews and I was pretty inexperienced. I
thought people who interviewed you were your friend. I had a pretty rude
awakening. For a while I was saying if I ever saw that Paul Morley again I was
gonna deck him. I was pretty angry with him ‘cause he wrote something pretty
nasty about me. Which was kinda true in retrospect. Torsten Schmidt Which was? Trevor Horn “Dirty old men with modern mannerisms.” That’s what he called the Buggles.
We were dirty old men. I was 30, I wasn’t 17. And I did have modern
mannerisms ‘cause I’d been listening to Kraftwerk. But then I produced this
group called Dollar. “Give Me
Back My Heart,” “Mirror Mirror,” “Hand Held in Black and White.” They were all
big hits in England, don’t think it did anything over here. But suddenly, the NME
was writing nice things about me. I was kind of astonished because I didn’t think
they’d like Dollar, because they were a little pop act. Although compared to
some modern acts they were like Pavarotti because there was no Auto-Tune, so you really had to be able
to sing. And Dollar got me ABC, ’cause ABC were very trendy, and Paul Morley
loved ABC, so he wrote even more nice things about me. So the next time I met him I
didn’t punch him. But I got him to start ZTT for me, because Island Records wanted me to start a record label. Torsten Schmidt Before we get to that, there was another track in between that might be worth
talking about. (music: Yes – “Owner of a Lonely Heart” / applause) The crazy thing when you listen to this now, especially when you grew up with
that stuff on pop radio, is the amount of things that don’t really connect.
You’ve got an incredibly manly guitar riff, a disco-ish beat, a couple of tape
samples, I presume. Trevor Horn No, by that point we had a Synclavier. Torsten Schmidt Which was what? Trevor Horn Which year was it? I know exactly when – we started the album late 1982 and
finished it autumn of ‘83. We had this track for a long time but it had a
different song over it. The song, as it originally was, was so awful – well,
the verses of it were so awful – that I was convinced that if we didn’t put loads of
whiz-bangs and gags all over the verse, no one would ever listen to it. I
always thought it was a hit chorus. To give you some perspective, Trevor Rabin, who was a South African pop star, had joined Yes. He was a brilliant guitar player and keyboard player, but
as a songwriter he tended towards American rock. When they wanted me to
produce them – because I’d been in the band as a singer I replaced Jon Anderson for one year in 1980,
which was an incredible experience never to be repeated because Jon Anderson
sings so high. I can sing high but I can’t sing as high as Jon Anderson and
not for as long. So I knew the band really well. In 1983, I’d just done Malcolm
McLaren, I was really hot as a producer and my wife was furious with me for wanting to do Yes. “Yes are finished, they’re old farts. Who’s interested in
Yes?” But I always loved the bass player. Chris Squire, to me, is the only bass
player who got away with playing melodic parts on loads of songs. I don’t
think anyone has even come close to him. So I wanted to do it, but I wasn’t
sure about the songs. I went to Trevor Rabin’s to hear the songs for the
album, and he played me three or four and they were all the same kind of
thing. I remember one of them [sings corny pop-rock melody], that kind of looove kinda thing.
And I’ve always been allergic to looove, it’s just not my thing. And I was
getting a bit [looks deflated], “God this is gonna be a bit of a drag. What
am I gonna do about this? What are Yes gonna sound like doing that?” And
Trevor Rabin went to the loo and left the tape player running and this song
came on. And the demo had that intro, a very powerful intro, and did that sort
of snap jump-cut with the [sings] drums right up in your face. I think the
intro didn’t have drums on, just had guitar. And I thought, “Oh that’s a good
gag, I like that gag. And I like the riff, good tempo, like the riff.” And
then the song came in – the song was [sings], that kind of thing. I hated
the verse. Then it went [sings the chorus], and I thought, “Oh that’s good.”
Then when he came out of the toilet I said, “This is a hit song, that’s a hit
chorus.” He was, “This song’s not for Yes, I wrote it for someone else.” I
said, “Yes could do this song, it’s a hit song.” “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Anyway, 90125, we recorded all of the tracks except this one and they didn’t want to
do it. I had to beg them. When you’ve been the singer in the band you can kind
of be funny with them. I was literally in the townhouse crawling around on the ground,
pulling at people’s trousers saying, “Please, please, have a go at this song.
We need a single. I’m a hot producer at the moment, if I don’t get a single
I’ll be fucked. Please!” Chris was like [reluctantly], “Alright, we’ll give
it a go.” And we spent days with them trying to play it. The intro was fine,
but once the track started they kept wanting to change the riff. [sings]
“Can’t we just play it straight and simple? We’ve got to program it, we’ve
got to program it.” They were very against it because they’d never programmed
anything in their whole careers, and the drummer was really anti it. I
prevailed, and myself and Chris Squire programmed the drummachine for the
initial track. Trevor Rabin’s big friend was a guy called Mutt Lange. If you don’t know Mutt Lange,
he’s probably the biggest record producer there’s ever been. He’s the guy who
produced Def Leppard, Shania Twain, the
Cars, Boomtown Rats, AC/DC. He’s a rock producer and
he’s what some people would imagine I’m like. He’s draconian. He’ll have a
fist fight with the band if he can’t get his own way. He’s a tough guy. Trevor
had this idea that the drums should be really big, like an American thing, a
big snare drum. He kept trying to interfere with the engineering side of it
and kept trying to make the drums sound like that, driving me and Gary nuts. Trevor, I hope
you don’t watch this. So when we came to do the drums, I said to Gary, “All
this shit with the snare drums, it’s crap, it sounds dreadful. It doesn’t suit
Alan.” I’d just been listening to Synchronicity. Stewart Copeland, that’s the sound.
“Let’s tune Alan to a high A.” So we tuned Alan’s snare drum to a high A, that
sound, and I loved it. But I was working in a tiny control room and in order
to get to the toilet you had to walk through the reception. As I was walking
through the reception, the whole Yes crew was there. I heard the chief roadie
say, “Fucking drums, sounds like a fucking pea on a barrel. I don’t know what Trevor
Horn’s up to.” And then he saw me and was, “Sorry, Trev.” I said, “Fuck off, Noonoo, they’re staying like that.” Ahmet Ertegun, the guy that ran Atlantic, heard the backing
track, because all of those little doodles were originally on the demo but they
were played on a Minimoog. I had a Fairlight and I had that Malcolm McLaren
tape and I took that in and said, “Can’t we use some of this? Instead of
playing those things on a Minimoog let’s play them on crazy sounds.” It worked
really well, worked incredibly. It took me from, I think, from January of 1983
to July to persuade Trevor to rewrite the song. In the end, he and I stayed up
all night, we rewrote it about three or four times. At about 3 AM I turned into Jon Anderson and said, “I’m
Jon Anderson and I’m not singing that and I want to sing something different.”
I started to sing [sings], that bit, for which I got 15% of the song. I
wrote the verses. Jon Anderson didn’t like it at all. I said, “It’s an
improvement on the other tune.” He said, “Well, it’s not exactly ‘Send in the Clowns’ anyway.” He was a bit rude about it and he said he wouldn’t sing my
lyrics on the second verse because he didn’t like them. So he rewrote it and
did the white eagle in the sky. So me and Gary decided we would shoot the eagle – so
if you listen there’s a gun blast. That’s us shooting the white eagle in the
sky. But Ahmet Ertegun loved the song. Trevor Rabin kept trying to remix it
with a big snare drum. Ahmet Ertegun stopped them and made them put out our mix of it. Torsten Schmidt: Would this be a good example to tell people about negotiating techniques in
getting points on a record? Trevor Horn Points on a record… well, points on a record my manager would’ve sorted out
beforehand. But writing, yeah. I’ve always tried to be very fair with writing.
I did four Seal albums and
you wouldn’t see my name credited on any of the songs as a writer, even though
I contributed a lot to some of the songs, mainly arrangement. If I actually
write something – and I wrote verse, lyrics and tune for that – then I want
something for that. But if you’re working with decent people, it shouldn’t be a
problem. I’m always straight-up about it. What can be awful – and I’ve felt it
once or twice in my life – is when someone doesn’t want you to write something
because they don’t want you to have any of the publishing. The couple of times when I’ve found myself in that position, I’ve generally left because I don’t want to be
caught like that. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. I tear people’s songs
apart and rebuild them and people are fine with it, just as long as you don’t
try to get some of the writing. But if you do write some of it, you really do
write something, not just suggest something or come up with a word. I came up with two words for a
Robbie Williams track last
year and I said, “You can have the words.” Just two words in one bit of it, you know?
It’s better to be upfront about those kinds of things. I remember Dave Gilmour, the guitar player in Pink Floyd, telling me about how
edgy he got with his producer, because he kept thinking he was trying to get
some publishing and he would be pushing it away all the time. So negotiating techniques for points… Torsten Schmidt How would it work? Would your manager negotiate a certain rate before you
went in for the record, say, “I get a set fee or I get five points on this”? Trevor Horn Back then I would probably have got four points on that Yes record. That was
my going rate and I was always much more interested in the points than the
advance. If you’re in the film business, make sure you get a big advance
because there’s not much on the back end of it. But in records there used to
be a lot on the back end. But I wouldn’t necessarily negotiate that; my wife
used to negotiate it. But to give you an idea of how that would go sometimes, in
about 1986, ’87 I got a call from
Sting, he invited me to his
house up in Highgate. I went to see him for lunch and he said, “We want to do
a greatest hits album, the Police, and we want to re-record all our greatest
hits. The only person we can agree on is you to do it.” I said, “I’m really
flattered, but do you really want to re-record ‘Roxanne’?” My favorite Police song was “Don’t Stand So Close to
Me.” I thought Nigel Gray’s production was brilliant, he
was one of the unsung hero producers. I never heard anyone get a better guitar
sound than Nigel Gray. And Sting said, “No, we definitely wanna re-record them
because I can sing so much better now.” I said, “Right, OK.” It was a bit of a
big one to turn down. He said, “Have you got a good manager, because mine’s an
animal?” Those were his exact words. I said, “I’m married to my manager, she
can be an animal sometimes.” [laughs] “But don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
Sting’s manager at the time was Miles
Copeland. The negotiation
between him and my wife lasted about 32 seconds. It went, “Hi.” “Hi.” Miles
Copeland said, “We never pay royalties.” My wife said, “We never work without
getting royalties.” “Well, we never pay them.” So Jill said, “OK, then give me a
million pounds for it.” He said no. That was it, clonk, gone. The end of it. But I said to her, “Look, I really don’t wanna do this, because I think it’s one of those stupid ideas
that’ll end up nowhere. Once they start playing it they’ll realize, playing it
again, so what, who cares?” Who wants to hear a re-recording of “Roxanne”? I
don’t. So, that’s negotiating points. Torsten Schmidt Using that song as another example, when you listen to it, it’s almost like
you have an old-school hip-hop DJ playing two tracks at once. Once the riff has come in it’s [blows raspberry], it’s over to the rhythm track. How would you picture this in the studio at the time? How many people would be operating the board? Trevor Horn There was a 40-channel SSL and what we did, I used to call those whiz-bangs, the things that would go
across it. We had a very simple backing track, and for instance, we did the
guitars at the front. We would do those guitars and then we would cut the tape, the two-inch, lever it up on
both sides so everything stopped dead on the downbeat. If you pull up the
multitrack for that song, you’ll find it’s pretty like the record. I learned very
early on that leaving things to the mix is a bad thing. In the mix you never know
where your head’s gonna be at, you’re worn out with the track. It’s much
better to have every effect. This is pre-computer. Although I think we had the
computer by the time we mixed that one, but I never lost the habit of having
every effect already recorded. So if you put the multitrack up you get that
record. You wouldn’t have to do anything with it, you just have to balance
it up. I could talk all afternoon about what you had to do when you record in
analog, it was a completely different thing. With analog it was noise.
Nowadays, you can do a vocal and if you’re not a very good engineer you
can record the vocal so that when you see it in Pro Tools it’s like this.
[draws straight line] Then because it’s not recorded properly you can jack
it up 20 dBs. If you jack up something you’ve done on tape 20 dBs it would
sound dreadful, the hiss would be as loud as the vocal. That’s why the engineer was so important. Gary
Langan, who engineered that, is brilliant. His hand would never be off the fader. If someone was singing, he’d be following,
he’d have a lyric sheet. When he was singing quietly he’d be cranking it up,
pushing it back, all the time. Everything he recorded was like that. There
were all sorts of tricks that you did. If you wanted to fly something in you
had to put it on a piece of half-inch tape with chalk marks and press start. It would
take you five or 10 minutes and eventually you would start it at the right
point. You’d fly things in like that. There was all kinds of stuff that we
did. Does that help at all? Torsten Schmidt I guess it will be a little more haptical if we head over to the studio
later. Trevor Horn You haven’t got an analog machine, have you? Torsten Schmidt The things we can find in time. Torsten Schmidt Something else that might be worth playing. (music: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – “Relax” / applause) Trevor Horn “Relax” came about, really, because somebody brought out a box called a conductor. I had one of the first ones, and you could lock page R on a Fairlight. Page R was a sequencing page, it had eight tracks. You could lock page R to a Linn drum machine. That was, at the time, that was pretty big stuff because there was no way really that you could sequence samples other than a Fairlight on this eight-channel sequencer. I was having a problem, you know. I’ve talked about this record, people ask me about it a lot because this was the fourth version of this song. Because when we signed the band they never told me – like bands never tell you shit, right? They never told me that the guitar player that they had in the band couldn’t play. The guy that had played on the demos had left to go into plumbing. That was a wise choice. So the band couldn’t play. It was one of those things, you said it. It always makes me laugh when I hear people go, “Just simply recording, I just set microphones up and they played it and there it was, and I didn’t interfere with it.” God knows what would have happened if I would have done that with this. It sounded terrible when they played it, they couldn’t play it in time. The bass player and the drummer were good, and the singer was brilliant, and the track was great, but it was an unusual track. It didn’t really have a sort of... It was like a jingle. It was obviously about sex. And it was also at the time where, I don’t know, it was a big gay thing on the go because it had been legalized. You could be gay legally. I think before that you couldn’t be, so there was a whole new kind of feeling in the air. The Frankies, three of them were straight and two of them were gay, but they all got on really well and they were funny. They were all from Liverpool. They were kind of like I imagine the Beatles must have seemed, they were funny and charming, and I thought [singer Holly Johnson]’s voice in the track was really good. But I just didn’t know how to make the record out of it, and we tried. I tried with the band, I tried with Ian Drury’s band the Blockheads; I tried getting them to play it. The bass player in the Blockheads, Norman Roy, who plays the bass part, “Your Rhythm Stick,” I think, is one of the all time great bass parts, came up with bam, bom, bum. I remember thinking, “I’ll keep that, that’s a good idea.” I was messing around with the Linn 2. I had a Linn 2 and I had some pet patterns, and that sort of hoe-down pattern. [mimics drum pattern] It was a pattern that I had. It was just one Tuesday afternoon, I sort of went over the limit a little bit, got a bit crazy due to something that somebody gave me and I suddenly saw the light. I realized we’d been wasting our time and we had to start again. I tried to get the guys to wipe the tape, even. I said, “We’ve got to wipe it, I never want to hear this version again.” Anyway, I threw a bit of a wobbler and I got under the desk, and I was being silly and saying, “I’ve been defeated, I can’t do this track,” all that kind of stuff. Then said, “Let’s have one more go.” It was a great day. It was like one of those days you feel, when if you’re boating, the wind’s behind you. And the first idea was, “Why don’t we put an E-minor chord behind it and see what it sounds like with an E-minor chord?” Because before that it had been a sort of R&B key, which is like E whatever. Putting it in a minor key suddenly gave it a sense of drama and made it sound more European, in a good way. A way that I particularly liked. We started to work on this arrangement, and my engineer at the time, who I didn’t know very well, started playing guitar. A guy called Steve Lipson who’s a big producer now. He was playing guitar and a guy called Andy Richards on the keyboards, and I’d had this one thing, I had this eight piano with a four-on-the-floor drum machine, and I knew there was something in that. The way that this conductor thing worked, the sequencer, the Fairlight sequencer went round all the time playing exactly the same thing, which was eights on a piano and fours on a bass playing four Es. But, I could change the pattern on the Linn, on the fly. The effect of going from the four-on-the-floor ... I mean, I think we’ve got it on here, Tim, because I brought the multi-track of it. The effect of changing from one beat to another was obviously really good. When you get to it, “That’s great! That works.” Four or five of us in the control room, nobody from Frankie, unfortunately, spent the next four or five hours working up this quite complex arrangement of the tune, which I would be singing the song and changing the patterns on the drum machine and boogie-ing around, and Steve was playing, Andy Richards was playing keyboards and J.J. was doing silly things on the Fairlight, all the funny noises. We worked up the arrangement, it was about sort of nine o’clock at night. We recorded it, and because it wasn’t the era of locking anything to tape we couldn’t sort of put something down then lock the sequencer to it. You set the sequencer going, and I changed the Linn on the fly, you just had to give it... You’d punch the numbers in, it would play into bi-loops. We did it first take, and it is the first take. The second thing we did after we recorded the backing track for the single, we did a fourteen minute version of it that we called the Sex Mix, but here it is. If you just listen to the way that... (music: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – “Relax (12" Sex Mix)”) That change, in itself, was very exciting. Funny enough, it never occurred to me that it was a dance record. I know that sounds absurd now, but I wasn’t thinking about a dance record. I was thinking about at the front, where it started, I imagined that armies of people stretching out to the horizon waiting to have sex. And Holly being the sort of, like standing on the top of a tower, and a minaret, with minarets, calling the faithful to come and fuck, basically. Torsten Schmidt It’s basically the direction that the Thatcher government had towards the track as well, right? Trevor Horn Yes. Oh, people got very angry about it. I thought all this was in my head, and that we would be okay. Anyway, I remember the singers arrived, because the band were up in Liverpool, and Holly and Paul, who were the two singers, arrived at the studio at about eleven o’clock that night. I told the reception, when Holly gets here, to keep them down there. Don’t let them come up to the studio. Anyway, they phoned me at eleven o’clock, they said, “Holly and Paul are here.” So I went downstairs and they of course said, “How’s it going?” I said, “Well, it’s changed a bit.” They said, “Changed? How much has it changed?” I said, “Well, it’s changed quite a lot actually.” He said, “Oh, no. You haven’t started again, have you?” Because remember, this was the fourth time. I said, “Yeah, I’ve started again. Sorry.” And they ran. I ran after them, they ran up to the studio, and of course we played it, and from the minute it started they started to dance and they loved it. Holly loved it. He couldn’t wait to sing it. I told him the idea about the minaret and him on the tower, so he got my saxophone, and there’s a note at the start. I don’t know if it’s there. Is it there, in the multi-track? And he played the note on the roof of the studio and somebody... One of the guys recorded it on a cassette player or something, and, is that there? [engineer plays sound] Not that, no. It’s at the same time as that. Is that it, there? Actually it might not be at the front. It’s actually at the front, there! [playing sound] That’s Holly, on the roof of the building, calling the faithful. Of course, you know, I can’t help myself, I got carried away with it a bit. I started saying things like, “I want to have a huge orgasm here,” and that was the big orgasm in the middle. He goes “Come! Come! Push!” We kept trying to get the orgasm bigger and bigger. I remember going home that day, that night, at about sort of five o’clock in the morning. My wife... One of my children had just been born, because it was a long time ago. I said to her, “I think we’ve cracked that track now. I think we’ve got it.” “Thank God for that.” Literally, we finished it within a couple of days. The interesting thing was, when it was first released, it got really bad reviews from a couple of the music papers. They said really horrible things about it. “Here’s another disco record, another crappy disco record.” I was a bit... It sort of was out for about 4 weeks and didn’t do anything. I was in America working with Foreigner. Not many people know it but I did most of the backing tracks for Foreigner 5, their fifth album, “I Want to Know What Love Is” and all those things. Then, I couldn’t go on because we didn’t get on, so I walked out. But I was there working with them when the first video for this arrived. You can imagine, these are all old rock & roll guys. I tried to sort of play it down. Torsten Schmidt Could you describe the video maybe a little bit? Trevor Horn It was the pissing video. You know, where they’re all pissing on each other and stuff. They were all saying, “What’s that? What’s that video you’ve got?” And I was going, “Oh no, nothing, nothing.” They go, “Come on, let’s see it.” I said, “OK,” and played it. They were like, “That’s disgusting. It’s a fucking awful track as well.” I could see them looking at me, thinking, “God, is this our producer?” I remember the leader of Foreigner saying to me, “I don’t know how good that is, you know, ‘Relax.’” I was pretty down on it. I thought, “Oh well, there you go. I’ve worked hard on it but obviously it’s not going to do anything particularly.” I was in New York, Chris Blackwell took me out to a place called Paradise Garage which really, as they say, blew my mind. It was a dance club but it had a rock & roll PA. It was the first time I ever saw people bombing the bass and doing crazy stuff with records. I was so impressed with the sound there. When we came out, it was a Thursday night, I said to Chris, “I want to do another mix of ‘Relax.’ Now that I’ve been there, I know exactly how to do it. Do you think you could get me in the studio?” He got me in the Hit Factory. I did that 12" that you were playing; I did it on a Saturday. Andy Richards was over in New York. I got him to play all those keyboards at the start. He played those live as we printed it. I did it in half-inch edits. The engineer that was engineering it was a rock and roll engineer. He hated the track. I could tell he hated the track. He hated the whole thing. You know, I’d keep doing it and go, “Yep. Done. OK. Edit that on. Now we’re going to do this. Now we’re going to do a double, triple drop ... “ Where we drop it some, then we drop it some and then we completely drop it, then we drop it even more. He went to the toilet and the assistant, who was like a 17-year-old kid, as soon as he went out of the room said, “This is great! It’s great! Don’t listen to him. I love it! It’s great!” That sort of kept me going because I was getting a bit miserable. There was a lot of misery about “Relax.” Then, what changed it was the band went on Top of the Pops. From the second the band stood up and mimed to that track, they went mad. They went absolutely mad. We just sold millions of records the other year where it was just unbelievable. I kept trying to get the records right. I kept trying to get the 12"s right. Consequently, there would be two or three different versions of the 12" and people were buying all the versions. It was really the start of that whole 12" thing being big in the ‘80s. The record label suddenly saw that you could make a load of money from it. Torsten Schmidt I mean, there’s other sides of that story where people are just going, “Oh well, they just remixed it and remixed it and remixed it to make sure it went to number one.” Up until that point the British recording industry authorities only allowed two or three remixes of a record? Trevor Horn Yeah, they stopped it. They stopped me. In the end, I refused to do another mix of it. I was so sick of it. But I was enjoying doing 12"s for a while, you know? We were doing “Two Tribes” whilst that was still number one. I was terrified with “Two Tribes.” It took me a long time with “Two Tribes” to be confident enough to let it go. The first 12" of “Two Tribes,” the one that has all that stuff about, “If your grandmother or anybody else should die whilst in the shelter...” Torsten Schmidt Which is a pretty grim theme. Trevor Horn Yeah, it’s a great 12" though. I think it’s one of the best ones we ever did. I used to approach the 12"s like it was a Yes track, like it was an arrangement of something that instead of being three minutes long, it was eight minutes long. It always had an arrangement, you know? It would build to a climax and then break down. It was a fun time for 12"s. 12"s were fun then for a while. Then, after a couple years I just got so sick of it. Torsten Schmidt Let’s just quickly see whether that was the right version we got there, now that we’re talking about it. (music: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – “Two Tribes (12" mix)”) Trevor Horn Listening to that just reminds me of how much trouble I used to get in. People got very angry about some of that. They just got angry about it, I don’t know why. Torsten Schmidt In what respects? Trevor Horn Just angry. I mean, everyone knows “Relax” was banned, because of Paul Morley. Paul Morley just did some funny things, you know what I mean? There’s some talking on that. I think it’s on that and another track called “War”. I said to Paul, “Some of that sort of speech that we got the actor to do is a bit weird. What is it from?” He said, Mein Kampf. I didn’t know about that; I wish he’d told me. The whole thing was kind of a bit like that, the guy that did all the talking. We discovered pretty early on that there was a tape that all the local radio stations had; it was actually a disk. Every radio station had this disk and if there was a nuclear air raid, they had to play it. It was a disk that they would get a call from the government and everyone would have to play this disk. This guy, Patrick whatever his name was, had done the voice-over. It was all about, “When the air attack warning sounds, go to the shelter,” the whole bit. We got this bootleg copy from the CND, the anti-atomic weapon people. They’d given us a copy of it. You weren’t meant to have it, it was on the secret list. Rather than just use the track – I didn’t want to get into trouble – I wanted to pay the guy who had done the original voice. We hired him, he was a voice-over guy. When he came in and I gave him the script that he had to do... It was a 1,000 pounds, he was a well-known person. When I gave him his script he looked at it and said, “Oh. Where did you get this from? You’re not meant to know about this.” I said, “Well, we got it from CND,” and he said, “I don’t know if I can do it. If I do this I could be in trouble. Ah, what the hell, I’m going to do it anyway.” So he did it. We had written it all out for him to say and he said it. At the end of it he said, “You know, there’s one bit that you haven’t got that you’ve missed.” Then he said, “If your grandmother or anyone else should die whilst in the shelter, put the body outside.” Then he said, “No... is it... If your grandmother...” He said it about four or five times. I thought, “God, that’s dynamite! I love that.” I had it on a reel to reel, you know, a piece of quarter inch tape while we were doing the 12”. We used to get pretty carried away doing the 12"s, any way we could do them. We sort of would have them blasting out loud. We would be jumping around. We even had a smoke machine at one point for a while, to get you in the mood. You know, you need to be in the mood. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a cold process. Studios are pretty dreadful places when there’s no vibe in them. We had the sort of big vibe on the go. I had the quarter inch tape. We got to one bit and I just kept playing it and rewinding it and playing that bit over again. I thought, “It’s so macabre.” We never got into trouble, nobody said anything. I was kind of disappointed. I thought we might get arrested or something. We’d been banned for “Relax,” you know. The guy banned it very publicly on the radio. He banned it when it was number two. Of course, we were all very upset because we thought it was going to destroy any chance it had at getting to number one. From the moment it was banned, the sales went through the roof. We never looked back. Torsten Schmidt It was a relatively popular thing at the time with pop bands. But bizarrely, everyone was... There was a lot of cerebral pop out, I guess. If you summed this up, it would be like amyl-nitrite-infested-gay-sex meets nuclear-Holocaust-paranoia. Trevor Horn That kind of thing, yeah. [laughter] Torsten Schmidt The graphics we’re borrowing from futurism, fascism, basically everything at the same time and just turning it into, how can we get it as controversial as possible? Trevor Horn Paul Morley was pretty into that. I remember I took amyl nitrite once, and it’s one of the few times in my life where I’ve danced. Poppers they were called, weren’t they? We were boogieing on the sofa, boogieing everywhere. And then boy, then there was this awful smell. What’s that smell? And then I realized it was me, god I stink, and I never took it again after that. When I listen back to it, it sounds a bit like that. Torsten Schmidt Maybe that’s our segway for a last Frankie track, on the amyl nitrite. (music: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – “Welcome to the Pleasuredome”) Maybe we switch to a different mode now? Have it running low and talk over it cause it takes awhile to load up. Trevor Horn We are not even out of the ’80s yet. Torsten Schmidt No, not even, no. This is still like an absolute stable in every spinning course gym around the world. I mean spinning fitness coaches just love this tune ’cause, yea, they just put in on the tape for three times and they get all the different heart rates in one workout. Do you still get royalties out of that? Trevor Horn Yeah, I’m sure I do. I’ll check. This one came about because it was meant to be the title track of the album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome. It was actually only a two and a half minute song and by this point we were recording on Sony Digital. We had one of the first Sony 24-track digitals. I found out very quickly that if you have one Sony 24-track digital, you have to have two, because they malfunction. I had two of them. I was working with a brilliant guy called Steve Lipson. I came into the studio one day and he said, “Listen to this.” He played me a piece of this, but what he’d done is he’d offset the two machines so the verse was playing on one machine, and the chorus was playing on another machine. And they were playing together at the same time. Which is fair enough, I mean the chords aren’t really complicated on this, and I was knocked out! “What are you doing? How are you doing that?” He said, “I put an offset in, so I could offset one machine against the other.” He said, “That means we can make this longer if we want.” I was like, “Well what are we waiting for? Let’s get going.” It just started, it took us three months. I know that because I had to stand up in court and testify and they said, “You took three months to make this song?” They were trying to infer that I was doing it for the studio money or something like that. So I know exactly how long it took. Torsten Schmidt Who took you to court for that? Trevor Horn Holly, Holly Johnson, he wanted to get out of his contract. I lost the case but I kept the record, which was really the most important thing. Once you realized that you could do that, additive editing – you offset the two machines so you’ve got a verse and a chorus, you have the machine with another verse on it and you just drop in to record at this moment and you print another verse. Then you drop in to record another chorus with the machine adding stuff, you know? It went over ages. The front is two girls from Propaganda in the bath upstairs at some... because I wanted to give it an atmosphere of that sort of Dionysian kind of atmosphere with fawns and women and baths and stuff like that. Torsten Schmidt Maybe, to save a bit of time here, while we’re listening to this. What did you have to do with Propaganda in the first place? Trevor Horn Well, we signed Propaganda, Propaganda was a German band. We signed them and we had a bit of a hit with “Dr. Mabuse.” We all really liked Claudia and Suzanne, the two singers. I asked them if they’d mind getting in the bath. They said they’d get in the bath but we couldn’t go up. So, we set the mics up, and they locked the door and got in the bath. [laughs] There’s some funny outtakes. I think in fact on the Frankie album you can hear [inaudible] shouting, [in Liverpudlian accent] “Claudia, Claudia, blow me Claudia!” Some rude comment to her, because the Frankie’s, they were from Liverpool, and they could be pretty vulgar, and very funny. So, that’s how we start this, and then it sort of went on and on and on and we kept thinking of all this. When we got seven minutes into it, we decided to take it off into a time tunnel. I was trying to imagine this sort of record equivalent of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember that? Where he goes through the stargate and it’s all kind of like this... We decided to try and do a whole section that was like that. Which is the whole middle part, and he hasn’t even come in singing yet has he? Torsten Schmidt I mean even the album version was incredibly long as well. Trevor Horn Yeah, sixteen minutes long I think. Sixteen, seventeen minutes. Yeah, but it’s good, it doesn’t get boring either. There’s some great guitar solos in it. Torsten Schmidt I mean it was also around the time when the CD got really popular and all the sudden there was like a lot of high end, and people were getting really anal about, “Oh just listen about this great quality.” Trevor Horn Yeah. Torsten Schmidt Sometimes, at that time, your accused of torturing the world with top end. Trevor Horn Yeah, well I picked that up in New York because that’s the way the New York mixers used to mix, with loads of top end. I guess I was over there for a little while in the ‘70s because a very nice guy called Eddie [inaudible], who ran the [inaudible] Factory in New York, bought a record that I’d made – this was before I had a hit – and flew me over to New York cos he wanted to meet me. He was like, “There’s something about this record that you’ve made and it was not like anything I’ve ever heard before, and I just wanted to talk to you and see what you were like.” He was a funny guy and I learned a lot from him. He mixed the record for me, and so I came away with this idea with a lot of top end. It was also a point where a lot of die hards, analog people, like rock people, hated this stuff, because it was too brash and too coarse-sounding for them. I remember going to a seminar that Sony had for their new digital multi-track. All the old engineers were there and they were all kind of, “It sounds shit, it doesn’t sound very good!” They were kind of talking like that. I remember Steve Lipson standing up and said, “Who cares!” Him getting quite heated. And that’s Steve Lipson playing the guitar, beautiful guitar solo, one take. I have lovely memories of doing this, hanging microphones out of the window when they were sweeping up after the Notting Hill carnival. Great stuff, but it took a long time. Torsten Schmidt Well, as you can tell, I guess we could go on for hours there, but there’s another track that we can’t leave the house without... (music: The Art of Noise – “Moments in Love” / applause) Trevor Horn When I first played that to my wife in the car she said, “That’s really boring.” I said, “It’s meant to be boring, some people like boring stuff so we’ve done something boring for people who like boring stuff.” It’s maybe to have sex to or something like that so you could just leave it going on in the background. It was long. It’s eight minutes long. It’s one of those funny... One of those things, when we did it, it was an idea of Paul Morley’s, “Moments in Love,” and Adam came up with this sort of, the riff. Initially, when we recorded it, we used drum samples or something and I remember saying, “Why don’t we try and use all the wrong sounds on this and see what it sounds like? You know? Let’s use an orchestral snare, a double bass, and you know, just the wrong sounds.” It worked with all the wrong sounds, for some reason. There’s a bit of an old John Lee Hooker record in the middle. “Now, now, now,” one of those kinds of things. Torsten Schmidt Did you clear that? Trevor Horn Yeah, post- we cleared it. But at the time we didn’t because I just went into a folk record shop and said, “Have you got anything with a guy playing a guitar?” The poor person whose shop it was, “What kind of thing do you like?” And I said, “Blues!” “Ah, I’ve got some great blues.” All I wanted was a noise, I just wanted a bit of noise. He was so into all of the records, he would’ve been horrified if he knew what I was going to do with it. Torsten Schmidt Now, Art of Noise, this track, and “Beat Box,” were absolute stables in a lot of different dance communities around the world, like Chicago, New York, Detroit, especially. Trevor Horn There was one afternoon when I was working on Foreigner back in, what was it, ‘83. Foreigner was the kind of band that when I worked with them, I put on my best trousers and I polished my shoes and stayed pretty straight because they weren’t much into being playful. So I was looking very straight and I was walking through Greenwich Village and there were two break dancers. They had a boombox on the pavement and they were break dancing to “She’s a Hobo Scratch,” which was another one of the Malcolm McLaren tracks. I remember standing there in front of them and thinking, “God if I told them that I made that record they wouldn’t believe it.” I looked so straight, you know? Torsten Schmidt Well, when you were more on the straight side of being the record-producer-mogul kind of guy... Trevor Horn My wife was the mogul. I was never the mogul. Torsten Schmidt I’m staying out of other people’s... [laughter] There’s an account that you actually had a conversation with a young Derrick May about doing some production work for you and being signed as part of a project which would include him, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson. Trevor Horn When would that be? Torsten Schmidt A little later. Apparently you called him in to work for Seal. Trevor Horn That was it. It was the opening track on Seal’s first album. It was a song called “The Beginning.” What was the guy’s name? Torsten Schmidt Derrick May. Trevor Horn Derrick May. Sorry, I’m old, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Yeah, Seal had this thing for this track. He kept talking about Detroit techno and I was like, “What’s Detroit techno?” He played me a couple of Detroit techno records and he said, “Can’t we do it like this?” We had a Space Invaders machine and he kept going on about this guy called Derrick May. I think it was Derrick May. I was walking past the Space Invaders machine and this American dude with a sort of cap and R&B look about him was playing the Space Invaders machine. I said to him, “If you do this [moves fingers] you’ll get a bigger score.” And what happened? He said, “Oh yeah, great, thanks man.” I said, “I’m Trevor Horn, what’s your name?” He said, “Derrick May.” “Not Derrick May from Detroit?” He went, “Yeah. I’m up in Studio One with some guy.” I said, “Man we just been talking about you. Will you do the rhythm track on this Seal song?” He said, “Yeah, sure.” That weekend he came in and did the rhythm track for the beginning. Seal never liked it. I mean, we used it but Seal never liked it. That’s the funny thing. Torsten Schmidt Well the way he goes on with the story is that apparently you offered him and the other three, or the other two, to form a full-on project. Then apparently there was a conversation about what they would do if they were to go on to Top of the Pops. Trevor Horn Right. Torsten Schmidt He said, “We had this chance of going there and we were like, ‘Oh, no no no, why would we do such a thing that’s not our style? We don’t do that kind of stuff.’” Apparently you said, “Oh, hey Kraftwerk did it,” and they were like, “Oh really? Hmm.” Apparently there was a full contract negotiated or whatever, and after that conversation it was dropped or whatever. The project was called Intellects or something. Trevor Horn Intellects? You see that would’ve probably had been with... I might well have said the thing about Top of the Pops, but I was only one part of a machine, you know? There was Paul Morley and my wife and stuff was going on all the time that I never knew anything about. So that might well have happened. Yeah, wow. Wow. There you go. Torsten Schmidt When you say you’re a part of a machine, like, if you were one of the driving factors in the machine, or, actually the namesake of it, like, “Hey, there’s Trevor and the Horn Team coming in and all that.” How do you keep track of whatever is going on and how do you develop the trust to leave certain aspects to other people? Because you can’t possibly do it all and know it all and remember it all? Trevor Horn Certainly you can’t remember it all. Well, I started a record label with my wife. My job was to make the music. Once I finished one record I was off making another record straightaway. I’m still the same and I’m gone. I’m working on the next thing. So I wouldn’t know what was going on behind me, sometimes. I suppose that’s the way it works. My wife was my manager. She she ran the record label too, with Paul Morley, although they didn’t get on very well. They were always fighting because Paul was very, sort of, crazy and left-field. My wife was very hard-boiled and hard-nosed and, you know, business. Which is fine. You always need sort of... In any situation, you should always have an uneasy truce between money and creative. If either of them gets too strong, everything goes to shit. If they’re both pulling against each other, it always works better. You can’t just be stupid. I’ve met loads of bitter people who’ve made records and never seen any money from them. You don’t want to do that. But then again you can’t just do everything for money. Some of the things that have been the most success, “Moments in Love.” I had no idea “Moments in Love” would turn into the kind of classic track that still sells now. It was just being, messing around, you know? Trying something, seeing if we could do something that was more ambient with what we had. I guess that’s what I would say about that. You should always have a tension between the two things. If creative people are completely in control and stamp all over the financial people, it never lasts long. If it’s the other way around then creativity is stifled and you don’t get hits. You have to be in a state of conflict all the time, I think, really. Torsten Schmidt It’s pretty painful but I don’t know how you guys are doing. Can we go on for like another...? Trevor Horn Oh, wow. Jesus! It’s 6 o’clock, I didn’t realize. We should stop. You know? I thought this was only meant to go on to 5 o’clock. Take this mic. We got on for so long the batteries are flat. (music: Grace Jones – “Slave to the Rhythm” / applause) That was a daft thing, really, doing that record. I should never had done it. It was one song for Grace Jones’ Greatest Hits. I met Grace and I got a bit carried away. Bruce had written the song, but the song was quite different to that. It was very [starts singing]. It was very robotic, and I didn’t like it. Chris Blackwell wanted me to do it, but I wasn’t very keep on it. I thought “Slave to the Rhythm,” what rhythm would I be prepared to be a slave to? And the only rhythm at the time I would be prepared to be a slave to was a go-go beat. Go-go beats, you know, it was happening in Washington. I really loved that stuff, so I got Chris Blackwell to get me a go-go rhythm section. Part of the rhythm section was from Experience Unlimited, the two percussion players. A couple of the other guys were from Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. I got them in a studio in New York. I realized pretty quickly that there was no way that they were going to be able to do an arrangement, like an arrangement where things changed. They were used to just getting up and playing for an hour, just anything. I tried to teach them the arrangement of that song. It was hopeless. But, there was one bit when we were setting up where they just played a groove, and they played that groove. And I thought that groove was great and Bruce re-wrote the song over it completely, put those beautiful chords which, he had a JX-8P and it had that flat fifths sound on it. Those inversions of those chords that he played, this lovely sound. He played that over the go-go beat. That sounded great to me. We made a drum loop. It was the first time I had ever really done that. We did it with two Sonys, the same sort of idea as “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” but we just made the drum track up. It was across eight tracks, like a normal recorded drum track was, except it was made up in edits. It took us two days in the Hit Factory to make the drum track up. It’s not actually in time, if you put it in Pro Tools and analyze it. You see that one bar’s slightly longer than the other, and that caused problems playing on it. We didn’t realize at the time, but every time somebody came to play on it, it always took longer than you thought because you’d have to get into the way it seemed... You don’t so much hear it when you play it. You might hear it now that I pointed it out, but when you played on it, it had the effect, it was hard to lock in sometimes. We took ages making that. I mean, we went so over the budget, but it worked. It was a lovely record. When Grace came to sing it, I always remember that she was three days late. She phoned me up and she said, “I’ve just had a row with Dolph Lundgren,” the boyfriend. “And I’ve set fire to all his clothes. So I won’t be able to make it to the record.” Torsten Schmidt [Russian voice] I will crush you. Trevor Horn Yes. I said, “Oh, Grace, come on. Come to New York, man. We got a really good track on the go. Come on and sing.” So she showed up on a Sunday and we played it to her. She said, “Boy, this is different from the other versions,” and I said, “Yes, very different.” Then she said, “But you know what it reminds me of? It’s like I’ve been working all day in the fields picking, and I’m sitting down on the porch, and...” I had Bruce, Bruce Woody, standing about a yard away from her. The music started and Bruce would say the line, “work all day,” and Grace, [starts singing]. She did it in this sort of voice that sounded like she had been working all day. It was one of the few times Steve Lipson and I ever danced together. We were so overjoyed. We were literally jumping around in the control room, holding each other because we’d spent days on it. I got into trouble. My wife had told me I was an idiot for spending so long and everything, but when you hear the singer... When you make records, you really don’t know if you got a record until the person sings it. Nowadays I’m draconian. I won’t do a record with somebody who can’t sing. It’s too much of a pain in the neck. When I was young I’d take it as a challenge, but now I’m too old. You know, anybody can make backing tracks. Well not anybody, but backing tracks are easy compared to getting the vocal and getting a hit vocal. So we didn’t know if it was going to work, you know? But the minute she opened her mouth, the first two lines, we just knew, “Oh thank God, it’s going to work! It’s going to work! We’ll be all right!” I was worried. I was really worried about it. It’s still like that. I just did a Seal album, Seal’s new solo album. Boy, the difference listening to Seal. When we did the first Seal album, Seal was like a puppy dog. He was young and he could sing. His voice was brilliant, but I wasn’t prepared for how well he could sing now. Twenty years on. Loads of gigs. It took my breath away sometimes, how good he was. How much he’d learned in those 20 years since I first recorded him. Grace always had loads of character. If anybody tried singing “Slave to the Rhythm,” it’s actually very little range in it. It’s only about a fifth. Grace doesn’t have a big range. The only way we could get a climax out of it by getting her to go, “Here’s Grace,” at the end of it, which is an idea I had after seeing her on the Johnny Carson show when he went, “Here’s Johnny!” It was, “Here’s Grace,” that gave us a climax. Anyway, here we are, six o’clock, we’re not even out of the ‘80s. Torsten Schmidt That’s the thing. I’m not really sure whether Grace is the right example, but to anyone who wants to go out there and record vocalists, do you have a quick, free highlight tip on how to treat vocalists in the studio? Trevor Horn Absolutely. For a kick-off, I always used to say if I gave a talk on how to record a vocal, the technical part of it would last 15 seconds. Get a valve microphone and a valve pre-amp. You can’t go wrong with a good valve mic and a good valve pre-amp. But the most important thing is for the singer to feel comfortable, relaxed, and to know in their heart that you think they’re a really good singer. If you work with somebody and you let them know in anyway that you don’t think they’re very good, you won’t get a good vocal out of them. You’ve got to find someway of saying to them – you can’t be obvious – just some way of making them think that you really dig their voice. That’s the first thing. Bullying never gets you anywhere. Losing your temper never gets you anywhere. Getting cross with singers for getting it wrong all the time never gets you anywhere. It’s got to be nice, it’s got to be fun. Every time a singer sings a song you have to react straight away. The minute the tape stops, you’ve got to give them input. “That was great! You lost it a bit on the chorus, but the verse was great!” Anything. You cannot leave it silent. You cannot be silent after a take. You’ve got to keep encouraging them. If they start to lose it, everybody is the same. They’ll sing a song three or four times, or three times maybe. Then they’ll just be reading the lyrics. They won’t be singing the lyrics proper. What you can do is you can give them a break. Talk about the song. Talk about anything. Tell them some stupid story. Get their mind off the song for a second. Then let them come back to it, and they’ll suddenly be singing the lyrics again. I say, “Who you singing the song to? Imagine the person is there. Talk to them. Sing it to the person to put the meaning into it.” A few times I’ve worked with singers, who shall remain nameless, who insist on doing vocals in loops. Loop the first line, sing the first line 10 times. Loop the second line, sing the second line. I loathe that. I hate that. I like people to sing the song all the way through, and if they can’t sing it all the way through then they will go home, learn it, come back, and sing it all the way through. Because when you sing a song all the way through, you understand the song. You understand how to give it dynamics. If you sing it in bits, it’s not the same. It’s dreadful. Personally, I try no more than seven takes. If I can keep it down to seven takes that’s my ideal. Then I’ll spend two days putting together the vocal from the seven takes. I worked with one guy when I was doing an album for Mona Lisa Smile, he’s not a bad singer either. He had a big hit with that song with the girl on the beach, half-naked. What was her name? I can’t remember. Anyway, he insisted on doing 50 odd takes. I remember trying to get through 50 takes of this song. In the end, I just looked at them. “Those 10 are crap. I can tell from the way they wobble, so I won’t even listen to them.” But in the end... “Jealous Games.” What’s his name? Chris Isaak, that’s it. He’s a good singer. “Wicked Games,” that was it. He was just very paranoid. I find with American singers, especially if you’re not their normal producer. A few times, I did the song at the end of Pearl Harbor with Faith Hill, “Everywhere I Go There You’ll Be,” you know, I have to earn a living. It was a really good song, and Faith Hill is a really good singer. But she was terrified, because she worked with a producer that she worked with all her life. Until they know you’re going to get their voice sounding right they’re always paranoid. On the other side of it... Torsten Schmidt How do you avoid lying? Trevor Horn Pardon? Torsten Schmidt How do you avoid lying to them? Trevor Horn I don’t avoid lying to them. I lie to them, but only white lies, nice lies. There’s nothing wrong with lying in the right environment. We all tell lies. “How do I look in this dress?” “Fabulous!” “How was that?” “Great! Could be a little bit better...” I have a few things I try not to say to them. I try not to say, “You’re out of tune,” because that’s so hopeless. Because they’re trying to sing in tune. I think the main thing is you’ve always got give people the feeling that it’s going to work. It’s gonna work. I did a track with Yolanda Adams for the end of another movie. I remember she came and sang it about five times, and she didn’t find it easy. When she heard the vocal comp she hugged me so hard it hurt me. She was so pleased. One time when I did “Downtown Train” with Rod Stewart, he had a problem with one line in it. When he heard the comp, I’d moved his voice a little in the machine, he picked me up and ran around the room with me. He was so pleased. Once you do that for a singer once, then there’s never any doubt after that. You can say whatever you want, and do whatever you want, because you’re both there for the same thing. You want to get this vocal recorded. I don’t have any ego. I’ve also been lucky, because I have a fairly crap voice, but I can sing. The thing is I can sing a song, and it’s completely non-threatening. People are always going to sing it better than me. That can be very helpful. Torsten Schmidt Work on your non-threatening singing voice. I want to give everyone the chance to ask questions. Obviously there’s a lot of abstract and theoretical things to talk about maybe later when you’re hanging around as well. There’s countless thing that we did not touch on that we [voices at the back]... Where’s this coming from? Crazy. It could be from, god knows, Robbie Williams, Belle and Sebastian, Texas, John Legend, Simple Minds, countless Seal albums, resurrecting house classics with the Pet Shop Boys. But jumping into the 21st century there was also this bit here. (music: t.A.T.u. – “All the Things She Said”) Can you remind me again what Paul Morley wrote that upset you so much about the Buggles? Trevor Horn “Dirty old men with modern mannerisms”... I was a dirty old man. I actually had to get a couple of newspapers to retract things they wrote about me after this, because they implied that these girls were 13 years old, and they weren’t. They were 17 or 18 years old, and they were very worldly girls, as well. Very nice girls, very charming girls. Even though they couldn’t speak much English, I think they saw me as an ally, because I was always nice to them. They always said, [thick Russian accent] “Could I have a cigarette?” They’d get me to give them a cigarette. Their manager was a bit of an asshole, and I’ll say that. He was what I think the papers thought that I was. That was a big Russian record. It sold about a million copies. It’s quite similar to the record that I made if you listen to it, but quite profoundly different as it goes along. I think the version I did gets better as it goes along, and the Russian one kinda gets worse. It doesn’t go anywhere. It was an idea, a guy called Martin Kierszenbaum. I went to a meeting with Jimmy Iovine, who runs Interscope Records, to see if there was any work kicking around basically. My wife sent me, she said, “Go see Jimmy. He’s a producer. He always likes to see you.” This guy Martin was head of marketing. As I was going out he said, “Can I show you this video of these girls?” He showed me the video for “They’re Not Gonna Get Us.” He said, “We sold a million albums in Russia. We’ve never sold this many albums in Russia. We want to do an English version of it. We’ll need English lyrics. We haven’t got any money.” I said, “Well, if I can write the lyrics, have half the song, then sure I’ll do it for whatever money you’ve got.” It was one of those things you start, and boy it was a hard job. I had to listen to the first one where it goes, [sings], whatever it was. I think Russian has 32 consonants or something. It took me a while to get the idea for the lyric. The lyric was about two girls who were falling in love with each other. I’ve got three daughters. My 21-year-old daughter is a lesbian, and a very bold lesbian. She was thrilled with this record. I went up so much in her estimation when I did this record. But I got a lot of grief from quite a few people. They called me a pornographer or something in the paper. I made them retract it. I said, “I didn’t do the video. I didn’t make them kiss. I just did the record. I’m not a pornographer.” They called me a promoter of gay sex, all kinds of stuff. Torsten Schmidt You were kind of used to that. You had that like 20 years before already. Trevor Horn With Frankie, but I’d forgotten about it. By this point, I had four children. I was a lot older. I wasn’t prepared for it. When you’ve got daughters, the idea that somehow you’re a bit pervy really made me angry. I was more concerned about this than I was about Frankie. They were sweet girls, but you don’t know how difficult it is to sing in a foreign language. It really is one of the hardest things to do. I had that opening lyric, “I’m in serious sh–, I feel totally lost.” It’s shit, but you know... “If I’m asking for help, it’s only because.” They’d be, [trying to say English words in Russian accent]. I just kept singing it them, “I’m in serious shit, I feel totally lost.” This went on for quite a while. The manager who I referred to previously, he’s a bit of an asshole. He said, “You know what your problem? You problem you’re too soft. You need to be strong with these girls. You need to show them, teach them!” I said, “Look, if you think you can do better, you have a go,” so he went in and of course within five minutes, both girls are weeping, crying, he’s shouting. And then of course he went and we just went back, “I’m in serious shit, I feel totally stuck!” For hours. But we got it in the end, it took a long time. They were game, in the end we ended up finishing the record in my house. I’ve got a place in LA that has a a studio in it, as well as a house. I’ve had it 20 years. We call it the Magic Cupboard because another session was going on downstairs in my house, so we had to do their vocals in the cupboard upstairs. So to this day it’s called the Magic Cupboard because the record did incredibly well. We sold seven and a half million albums off the back of that single. It surprised me, I had no idea it would be so big. Torsten Schmidt Before you knew that, during the recording, that doesn’t really sound like the kind of job you want to get up for in the morning. Did you at any stage doing a project go like, “Fucking hell. Why on earth am I doing this to myself?” Trevor Horn Oh, well there was a point with this project. There was a point with it, where we’d finished it, we’d spent all the time and it hadn’t worked for whatever reason. I couldn’t figure out the chorus and I had I a very complicated lyric on the chorus. Ot went, “All the things she said running through my head while I’m lying in my bed and the sun is running red and...” And it didn’t work. We all kind of gave up a bit, “Well, we tried.” And then I went back, I remember the same thing, “Let’s have one more go at it.” I went back to the Russian record and I listened to it and I realized that they’d repeated one line, over and over again. I thought, well that’s the way to do it! “All the things she said, all the things she said, running through my head, running through my head, running through my head!” But the problem was they”d gone back to Russia and they hadn’t sung it. Thank god for technology. A new program had just arrived, Pitch in Time or something like that it was called. You could pitch things, so we re-pitched there voices to make them sing the tune to the right lyrics. The vocal track of that is like a work of art. Rob Orten, mixer, who worked with me at the time, mixes Lady Gaga now, he does all of her stuff, he sort of cut his teeth on that. We did all kinds of things. We found the problem with them was that they couldn’t pronounce certain syllables in English. So I got an American singer to sing the song, the girl that had the rock voice. You would never know it but occasionally I used bits of her voice. I’d use the start of one of the Russian girls but then a syllable would be from somebody else. You know, what can you do? It needed to be finished. I had to do it. I told them! Torsten Schmidt Yeah. Just makes you feel like you wanted to play one of your Pet Shop Boys tunes now and again “It’s Gonna Be All Right.” Trevor Horn Yeah. Torsten Schmidt But before we go. I mean obviously we could go on for hours, but... Trevor Horn We have. Torsten Schmidt You’re really earning your money here, that’s for sure. Are there questions from your side? And do we have a microphone for that? Questions anyone? Trevor Horn Don’t worry, you don’t have to. Audience member Hi, I didn’t really know a lot about your music before and today I realize some of the music I had heard before, that’s quite popular. I really want to know how in the beginning you got involved with the music thing? Like, just a bass player, you like music, or? Trevor Horn Well I like music but I was always fascinated by recording studios. So whenever I played on a session, I’d always ask them to let me go into the control room so I could sit at the back and watch what they were doing. You see, back then we’re talking about the mid-‘70s, ‘73, ‘74, ‘75. There was no course for being a producer. You couldn’t go on a training course. Now people train but when I started there was nowhere. So I didn’t know how to do it. You couldn’t find out, because the only place you could make a record was a recording studio, and recording studios back then were very expensive places. So, it was like a chicken and an egg. What do you do first? How do you get into a studio without knowing what you’re doing? I think, for me, what happened with me was I became a music director for somebody, Tina Charles. I put her band together and everybody liked the band so much that they said to me, some songwriter friends of mine said, “Can we use you and your band to record our songs?” So, we’d play their songs, and this song might be a bit crappy and we’d make it sound better. That’s how I started doing it really. The writing thing, I used to write songs when I was 16 or 17. I was a dreamer and I wrote songs, but then I stopped for many years. So that’s kind of how I, does that explain it at all? Audience member Also you mention about singers who speak different languages than you, you want them to sing English. As a singer I want to ask, I speak Chinese; English is not my language. I can only sing Chinese. I cannot take that anywhere else or? Trevor Horn China is a pretty big place. I don’t think they pay for records though, do they? Audience member Yeah. Nobody really find music anyway. Trevor Horn Sometimes it can work for you singing in a different language, because when I wrote the lyrics for “All the Things She Said,” I kind of purposely wrote them in a way that made them sound like they were a bit of a translation, because I didn’t think that the Russian girls would be able to sing any slang. It would have to be almost like “formal” language. You asked me about Propaganda at one point, Propaganda were a German band that we had some hits with in the ‘80s. One of the things that made them interesting was that it was a German guy writing in English. So he wrote some strange things, but they were interesting. At least it wasn’t the same old cliché. “I’m a satanic gambler and you’re just the pool.” I remember when he told me that lyric. I said, “you’re just the pool?” He said, “You’re just the pool of money.” Ah, right! It’s an odd thing, and so if you want to sing in English, make the Chinese thing work for you. Audience member I don’t really want to sing in English. [laughs] That’s the point. Trevor Horn Oh, right! Audience member Thank you very much! Audience member My pleasure. Audience member You were like one of the first on the cutting edge of analog synthesizers and programming and stuff. Have you dumped all that stuff in 2011 or do you still use it? Trevor Horn No, in a way we’ve sort of just gone back to... I’m bored with programming, so I try and play everything now. I find playing much more fun. I think synthesizers have taken a turn for the better. I’ve just bought a Dave Smith Prophet 08, it’s a really lovely thing. I did a Pet Shop Boys record about four years ago, called “Fundamental” or something, and really the first thing that I did, that we did, Tim and I did, was we just took all their MIDI, they’d programmed it in plugins, we took all their MIDI and used old analog snyths. To me it just sounds so much better. It’s like, I don’t like plugins. I don’t really the... I mean they sound all right and they’re a good way around, a good way around carrying all of that equipment around. But they don’t sound right to me, and they never have the dynamics. Audience member And then, how did you feel about “Planet Rock” when it came out? Trevor Horn “Planet Rock”? Afrika Bambaataa? I loved it. I met him in a night club in New York in 1982, just after “Planet Rock” was being pretty much a hit at the time. Malcolm McLaren introduced me to him and I said to him how much I liked the record and I said, “Who are your favorite band?” He said the Guess Who. I was like, the Guess Who?! The Guess Who are a Canadian rock band that turned into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I said “You like the Guess Who?! I wouldn’t have thought that.” And he said, “Oh man, the live album has the best drum break on it ever.” Ah yeah right, you like the drum break. So when Jay Jay played me the “Beatbox” loop first off, which is a loop of Allen White, from Yes, I knew that Afrika Bambaataa would love it. I knew the people in New York would like it. Audience member I stole that loop for a song on my record. Trevor Horn I’ll get your name on the way out. Audience member Really quick question, pretty much yes or no. I was really surprised that you were partly responsible for World Famous Supreme Team, anyway the recorded aspect. Did you do “Hey DJ”? Trevor Horn No, they did that on their own. I only worked for them on that one record and then they went back to New York. I remember “Hey DJ,” it was quite a good track. Audience member The piano lick is crazy. Trevor Horn Yeah, well they loved Dan’s piano playing. When they left England they got an advance from Charisma Records, £20,000, and they insisted on having it in cash. So they were carrying loads of cash with them. The R&B world’s all about cash, you know? Got to pay the cash out. We used Rakim on a Art of Noise record in the ‘90s. I remember he wasn’t very keen and then on the phone I was saying to him, “When are you going to get here?” And he said, “Well man, I might make it this afternoon.” And I said, “Look, I’ve got $15,000 here in cash.” He was there within half an hour. Sometimes you need to muscle it in a bit, you know? I should let you guys go and eat! Audience member You mentioned before when you heard the kind of early demo of “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” that you had an inkling that the chorus was going to be a hit. Trevor Horn Yeah. Audience member Do you feel that... That was what, 29 years ago or something? How’s your kind of sense of what’s going to work later in terms of what’s going to work in the studio and what’s going to be a hit? Is that something that’s just kind of down to luck, you work hard trying to make a good record, then if it’s a hit, it’s a hit or do you kind of hear things and think, “That’s the one” and have a good sense of that? Trevor Horn I think you have to have a good sense of what might be a hit because a hit basically means that a lot of people liked it. In order for a lot of people to like something, it has to have something special about it. Sometimes it can be really hard having an idea when things might be successful and when they won’t, because sometimes you have to tell people, “I don’t think you’ve got a hit single here.” And that can be a very hard thing. People won’t accept it. But what can you do? It still happens, you know. You make a record and there’s no hit single. You can’t really manufacture that either, you know? It’s gotta come from some kind of inspiration. Somebody has to be inspired. There has to be something, they have to be saying something. The older I get, the more concerned I am really with when I listen to songs and what people are actually saying. What are you saying? What are you saying to people? It’s a communication medium. What’s your message? The message might be, “Hey look at me, I’m beautiful and I’m wearing nice clothes.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you’re saying. But if you’re not saying anything, it’s not going to appeal to anybody and nobody will be interested. Songs haven’t changed that much. I mean, people tear them apart and reconstruct them, do funny things and lots of records these days are just made up from a couple of good ideas that are sort of repeated in a good way with lots of sounds. But they never stay around for as long. A really good song is quite a rarity. I think every year you might hear two. I have to be honest, I’m always very rude about songwriters, professional songwriters, because I’m the one that has to sort our their crap, you know what I mean? Most of those songs, they’re written from the point of view of somebody not really feeling anything. I’d much rather fix up a song that somebody’s written. You know The Lexicon of Love, that album, he had written that whole album because when he was a university a girl had rejected him, Martin Fry. It was the girl that says “Goodbye” on “The Look of Love,” it was the girl that rejected him. We got her in to say just that one bit. Because she’d rejected him, all of those lyrics, his anger about the rejection... and that’s what makes them so potent. If you don’t have that kind of... Obviously if you don’t have that kind of communication in the song, the song will never last and nobody will ever like it. I often have arguments with people about singles too because it’s not enough. A good song or a good single should have at least four or five ideas in it. You can’t just do it with two. You can’t have a verse and a chorus. It makes me angry sometimes. I get songs and they’re just a verse and a chorus and there’s nothing. What can I do with it? There’s no intro, there’s no middle eight and you have to figure out the intro, figure out the middle eight. All those kinds of things. I don’t get any songwriting credit for that. The songwriter earns all the money but they didn’t finish it off. If you work with a really good songwriter, professional. Look, if you’re gonna go with a hooker, you might as well go with the best one. Diane Warren always gives you at least four or five ideas, you know? I’d still rather fix up a song that somebody wrote from pure inspiration, you know? Torsten Schmidt Well, I guess we have some special lyrics right after everything’s done here and the cameras are shut down. But first of all we sincerely hope there was a little bit of an inspirational piece in the past hours. Trevor Horn I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t go on for too long. Torsten Schmidt We very much thank you. Trevor Horn everybody! [applause]