Interview: Trevor Horn
A pioneering producer of the 80s, Trevor Horn takes a moment to talk to MTM about the journey from analogue to digital in this magical era for production.
Trevor Horn – otherwise known simply as Horn – has worked on countless successful projects over the years. He’s been a member of Buggles, Yes and Art of Noise. He’s produced groups and artists including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones, Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Cher, ABC, Marc Almond, Seal… the list goes on. Most importantly, his production sound and approach to arrangements has been a huge influence on what we take for granted today. Looking back you can see that much of this was down to his embracing the digital age at a time when many misunderstood what it offered and deliberately overlooked it. This and his attention to detail seems to be why he has had so many successful projects, which still sound strong if you hear them today.
He tells us why he decided to go all-out as a producer: “I remember thinking that being an artist at the time wasn’t where it was at. There was so much more excitement about what was going on in the control room. You could feel it was all about to change, big-time. Something was coming.”
Today we’re sitting with Trevor in the famous SARM Studios in Notting Hill, London. Previously named Basing Street Studios, Trevor and his wife/business partner Jill Sinclair bought it in 1982. Prior to this Trevor worked out of what’s now referred to as SARM East, but as he found access to the studio becoming increasingly limited during his initial success in production, SARM West was born. We took the opportunity to find out about how Trevor worked with the early era of digital technology and managed to get such a tight production sound.
Seeing the light
Trevor first saw a Fairlight CMI (see Studio Icons, Issue 98) being used by fellow Buggles and Yes member Geoffrey Downs. He tells us about his initial experience: “It took a while to get my head around what it did, but when I did, I was just knocked out by it – such an amazing piece of gear at the time and I could see what potential it had.” They both explored this potential while creating a few demos. Then, when Geoffrey left to join Asia, Trevor decided to go back into production work and made the huge investment of £18,000 for his own Fairlight. Trevor declares that one of the clever things he did at the time was to hire someone to be a specialist operator, learning and manning what he calls “a tricky machine to use when it first arrived”.
His early Fairlight forays can be heard on Dollar’s single Give Me Back My Heart. He reveals how the angelic vocal stabs were created: “I remember it taking weeks to get them done. We recorded layers of Thereza Bazar on multitrack first and then sampled that. I figured out pretty early on that there was only any point in sampling something that already had a great sound to it. It was a great time, as people would hear things like that and not understand how it had been done – at least for a while.”
Soon after his Dollar work became successful he worked with ABC, and recalls a bizarre moment for him when the single Poison Arrow was introduced on Top Of The Pops: “They said ‘produced by Trevor Horn’ and I leapt out of my chair! I was thinking, why did they say that? It wasn’t a time when they’d say that about people’s records – and I certainly never asked them to.”
So it seems this was the point at which a producer could be as big a selling point as the artist themselves. It’s not surprising, though, as Trevor really didn’t follow convention in terms of how he should be working. In his earlier days he’d create a primitive drum machine by recording a phrase of multitracked drums that would be dubbed back-to-back to another machine for a continuous beat. He could then change the speed on playback for a drummer to play to.
He tells us his reaction from one drummer while recording the grooves: “I remember the drummer saying, ‘That sounds like a f***ing machine,’ and I was saying, ‘And that’s bad?’ I really loved Kraftwerk, which to me sounded amazing. You need to remember that at this time [the late 70s] Britain was going through its heyday of beautifully produced rock, like Zeppelin, Elton John and Genesis. The idea of techno music was seen as a cheat in an era when bands played all of the song.”
A cut above
We ask Trevor about the earlier times in the studio, in the days before the arrival of digital technology and convenience. He replies: “SSLs were coming; there were so many things about them that were so good. The sub-grouping, the ease of muting and solo’ing things – it was such an easy desk to operate… What really changed in the late 70s was that elements of the desk started to feature automation. The recording studio had started to become a musical instrument: you could play it much more than you had ever been able to before. I figured out pretty early on that you could bring elements in and out from a 48-track project using mutes. I think The Look Of Love was the very first thing we did with the computer in an SSL for automation.”
But before this era, Trevor got into heavy tape editing: “Before computers I learned to be meticulous about how tidy a multitrack tape had to be. We used to do what I called a ‘jump cut’, as I realised that bringing in a load of instruments at the same time had a good effect. But back then if you tried to do this with the record button there was always a delay in the mechanics of doing it. The best way was to slice the tape and erase the tracks in the cut-out section, then put it all back together again to make the sound jump out tightly.”
Transfer market
Trevor’s embracement of technology then moved on to the early digital multitrack machines, which he took to because of their sound quality and the fact that it didn’t degenerate between transfers. The last album Trevor did in analogue was the Yes album 90125, in 1983. He tells us about his last experience of the delicate format: “We did the backing tracks to 16-track and did edits to the tape for time-correction, like tightening up the drums. We copied this to a 24-track, put the original in the cupboard and after nine months of work we then pulled out the original 16-track on mix day. The quality had degenerated so much in those nine months of use compared to the original reels. I think it was that aspect that really made us go with digital.”
It wasn’t long before he new ideas about how arrangements could be changed and extended with this new format. He shares this historical moment, saying: “I remember I was working with Lippo [Steve Lipson] on Welcome To The Pleasure Dome and he showed me something amazing. At this point we’d got a second Sony machine to make back-ups as the early machines had a few issues with clicks and pops. Lippo said, ’Check this out,’ and he played me Welcome To The Pleasure Dome, but the verse was on one machine and the chorus on the other; he’d offset the time code on them. I’d never thought of that before and we then realised that we could put anything anywhere. Obviously, everyone’s used to doing this easily in Pro Tools now, but back then there wasn’t any way of doing that. Then I thought, ‘So that means, instead of a verse being eight bars, we can make it 24 bars.’”
In the end they built up the track to 15 minutes using the two Sonys. Trevor also points out that although they could already do some tricks with samplers, this discovery meant they could now drop overdubs anywhere they liked and, best of all, it was all perfect quality. This was the first moment that Trevor realised that this sort of thing could be done.
Box clever
Soon after, other advances were made with great success – one being a simple sync box that gave them the power to run a Linn Drum machine and the Fairlight’s Page R sequencer together for the first time. This was the backbone for Frankie’s famous single Relax, which used a piano sample playing eighths and a bass on the beat from the Fairlight sync’ed with a pattern Trevor programmed on the Linn. Trevor tells us: “This was so new; then, as everyone cottoned on, plenty of ways to sync machines together became available.”
We ask Trevor which projects truly let him run wild with the tech, and although he confirms our expected answer – Art of Noise – he also thinks Relax and Two Tribes were equally as tech-intensive: “Aside from the guitar, all of Two Tribes is programmed. We worked really hard on it and didn’t want it to sound like a bunch of samples. We wanted it to sound like a full bandwidth of sound. The Fairlight was limited to sampling time and was eight-bit, so we used a Synclavier, which had over 60 seconds of sampling time and great bandwidth. To this day it’s one of the best-sounding things I’ve heard. When I asked them why it sounded so good they put it down to the digital audio cards they had made for it. When I listen back now to Two Tribes on a version not cut to vinyl, it’s an amazing-sounding track, when you think it was made in 1983.”
So what was the last technological landmark for Trevor in the studio? “I used to have an IBM computer that I used a bit, then someone told me about Apple Macs, saying they were for idiots – and as soon as someone says that I usually think, ‘That’s for me,’ as I’m not really a great techno person. So I bought an Apple with an early version of Sound Tools.
“I remember being able to edit on that and first used it on Crazy, by Seal. I could edit on tape at the time but it was a pain in the neck, and this was the first time I could try out different arrangements quickly, to experiment and get it to make sense. I remember thinking it would be great if I could do this for multitrack recordings and then it soon went from stereo two-track to four-track. That really opened up the game and was the last big change for me. Auto-Tune and Beat Detective etc are all fabulous, but nothing was as big a switch than from digital tape to the hard drive.”
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 101
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