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Jul 15, 2024 · Best Trevor Horn Productions: 10 Pioneering Songs That Shaped Pop Music. From Seal to Yes and Pet Shop Boys, the best Trevor Horn productions changed the pop landscape in the 80s and beyond.
- Charles Waring
- Leon Jessel: The Parade of The Tin Soldiers
- Buggles: Video Killed The Radio Star’
- Yes: Tempus Fugit
- ABC: Poison Arrow
- Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Relax
- Pet Shop Boys – Left to My Own Devices
- Paul Mccartney – Rough Ride
- Simple Minds – Belfast Child
- Rod Stewart – Downtown Train
- Belle and Sebastian – I’m A Cuckoo
I love the way your book ‘Adventures In Modern Recording’ weaves your life in music with certain pieces that either inspired you or that you worked on. And at the very beginning it references ‘The Parade of the Tin Soldiers’. That’s a piece of music that you heard on the gramophone. Yeah, we used to have a gramophone, and we had a couple of records...
One of the other songs that you couldn’t miss out that’s referenced in the book, is Buggles and ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. It was futuristic, but futuristic in a retro sci-fi way. Futuristic, retro. Yes, it is a very odd record, really looking backwards. But I think it certainly had the Goombay Dance Band factor. It has lots of little aural gag...
I wanted to ask you about Yes and ‘Tempus Fugit’. That must have been a strange moment. I decided to be a producer after I’d been in Yes. Don’t forget. Yes came more or less, straight after The Buggles. Yes was like a whole, just one of those sideways things that you never think is gonna happen and happened. They were one of your favourite bands gr...
The 80s was such a productive time for you. There is so much great material featured in the book. You had huge success with Dollar and then working with ABC, the track being ‘Poison Arrow’. Was Jill, your late wife? Yes. She comes up repeatedly in the book as being very influential. And you’ve talked about the fact that she mentioned ABC, and you w...
Another example where you see a band relatively raw and work in the studio to produce a magic single is Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ‘Relax’. Yeah. So you saw them for the first time around when they were on The Tube [Channel 4 TV music show]. That’s how I saw them. They had some women chained up. It was a weird version of ‘Relax’, because it went...
We mentioned ABC earlier. That was a band where you used orchestration. And that also comes across with the Pet Shop Boys ‘Left To My Own Devices’, where you’ve got that brilliant melding of orchestration with the synth sound of the duo. When they first said, “Would you like to do a track with this for a new album?” in 1987, they played me an early...
The range of artists that you have worked with is so broad. Another example is Paul McCartney. You worked with him on ‘Rough Ride’. The dynamics between yourself as a producer, or the producer more generally, and the artist is fascinating. He was good fun to work with. He’s really the kind of guy, if he was around the corner, from where I am now an...
Simple Minds ‘Belfast Child’. Was it your idea to introduce a folk element to their sound, which previously was quite synthy? I thought it might be a good way of getting a really cool song. A folk tune. Because I always felt there was an element of that in Jim’s[Jim Kerr] voice. As there was in U2 in a funny kind of way, as well. But that was one i...
I’ve previously spoken to John Altman. He worked on the orchestration of ‘Downtown Train’. He did, yeah. You give your side of that incredible story. The idea for the song, your involvement and the recording process. It seemed so tight, having to adapt it as you go. ‘Downtown Train’, John Altman did a great orchestration for that based on an idea b...
The final track that I wanted to ask you is Belle and Sebastian, ‘I’m a Cuckoo’. Some people think Trevor is going to do a Trevor Horn on Belle and Sebastian, but that wasn’t the case at all. No, I just tried to do a really good job of it. They were lovely. They wanted to play ‘I’m a Cuckoo’ live, the seven of them. I think I say in the book, they ...
Feb 4, 2023 · Legendary artist and music producer, Trevor Horn talks about 10 of his most important songs described in his new memoir Adventures in Modern Recording: From ABC to ZTT.
- Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart. Horn’s intersection with prog-rock dinosaurs Yes seems like an unholy liaison, but after floundering during the production of the second Buggles album (with Horn as artist alongside keyboard player Geoff Downes) Horn found himself looking for a fee-paying gig.
- Pet Shop Boys - Left To My Own Devices. While famous for taking on the majority of the production heavy lifting themselves - often drafting in engineers- and remixers-as-producers to help finish the job - fourth album era PSB found the boys rather rudderless.
- Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome To The Pleasure Dome. Picking just one FGTH smash for this list seems positively criminal, the Frankie singles each being months in the making, released to huge fanfare with landmark videos and carefully crafted press campaigns by Paul Morley at Horn’s own fledgling ZTT records.
- Propaganda - Dr Mabuse. In the long testament of Horn productions, Propaganda Presents The Nine Lives of Dr Mabuse is criminally overlooked, Dr Mabuse himself being a master criminal depicted in three Fritz Lang films in 1922, 1933 and 1960.
Trevor Horn Greatest Hits · Playlist · 19 songs · 171 likes.
Trevor Horn - The Best Of · Playlist · 46 songs · 5.5K likes.
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Trevor Charles Horn Born: July 15th, 1949 in Durham, England. Bass player and singer, he started in the late 1970s in the jazz-rock band ‘Tracks’ before founding ‘The Buggles’.
