‘Grace Jones was in a state’: legendary producer Trevor Horn relives his mega-hits

When I ask if I can use the toilet in Trevor Horn’s house, he shows me the way there himself. “Bob Hoskins’ old thunderbox,” he smiles as he opens the door. “He used to sit there and read his scripts, apparently.”

There’s another door next to it, which leads down to Horn’s studio. A house formerly owned by a Hollywood star, big enough to accommodate a huge recording studio: it’s the home of someone who’s done very well for himself, which of course, Horn has. His recently published autobiography, Adventures in Modern Recording, details a stellar career as a record producer, packed with wildly entertaining stories which usually involve Horn barricaded in a studio, smoking a vast amount of marijuana while dealing with the dizzying array of technical issues that come from pushing the latest recording gadgetry to its limit, then finally emerging with a hugely successful single. ABC’s The Look of Love. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm. Tatu’s All the Things She Said.

In fact, Horn’s name is so synonymous with huge chart success, it’s easy to overlook what a peculiar route he took to fame. He began his career in the early 70s as a bassist with the Ray McVay orchestra, best known as the house band on TV’s Come Dancing. “It was the best-paid gig around,” he shrugs, before correcting himself: “Well, the best paid shit gig around. We played anything that was a hit, so it was a good grounding in what makes a good pop record.”

He spent time in the backing band of his then-girlfriend Tina Charles before eventually hitting big with the Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star in 1979. The amount of time he and fellow Buggle Geoff Downes spent making it was the first instance of Horn’s celebrated perfectionism in the studio, which eventually led him to spend a reported £70,000 – a quarter of a million quid in today’s money – making Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. He says he was uncomfortable being a frontman. “I enjoyed it at the start, but being on a TV show, miming while some guy’s sat over there eating a sandwich and it’s Tuesday morning – that started to wear a bit thin. But I mean, I went from the frying pan into the fire by going into Yes.”

Ah yes: Yes. Like Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric, Video Killed the Radio Star was a single that seemed to predict the way the next decade was going to pan out, but Horn followed it by doing the least 1980s thing imaginable and joining the waning prog rock titans as vocalist. It was inevitable Horn would agree – Yes were his favourite band and mention of them today causes his eyes to light up and him to start singing the riff of their 1971 track Starship Trooper (“I love it, man!”) – but the whole experience sounds like hell: Yes fans were nonplussed about seeing the frontman of a pop band taking the place of singer Jon Anderson (he became used to cries of “fuck off Trevor!”), he blew his voice out from singing too loud and suffered the indignity of his microphone stand and his tambourine falling to pieces in front of 20,000 people. At the end of the tour, Yes sacked him. “Well, it was fun at the start, but it got harder and harder,” he concedes. Then the ardent Yes fan reappears. “But because I was a bit weak, the band were playing out of their skins. There’s a couple of live tracks from that era and what strikes me when I listen is how good the band were. They really knew how to do it.”

In fact, he loved Yes so much, he returned to produce their 1983 album 90125. Determined to get them a hit, he alighted on a song called Owner of a Lonely Heart. The band refused to cooperate, deeming it “too poppy”, forcing Horn to take desperate measures. “I literally got down on my knees and started pulling at [bassist] Chris Squire’s trousers, pleading with them.” Owner of a Lonely Heart went on to become Yes’s only No 1 in America.

By then, Horn was one of the biggest record producers in the world, although his route to that title was peculiar as well. After Yes fired him as their singer, he elected to work with Dollar, an implausibly drippy middle-of-the-road pop duo who may have been one of the few artists considered even less hip in 1981 than his former employers. They had, in Horn’s memorable phrase, “something of the cruise ship about them”. Anyone else might have run a mile, but Horn saw a conceptual opportunity. “I loved The Man Machine by Kraftwerk, this idea of a band that were totally techno. And I thought: wouldn’t it be great to mix that with [perennially unfashionable British MOR crooner] Vince Hill?”

Horn set songs that played on the duo’s previous romantic involvement to visionary electronic production. Listen to 1982’s Videotheque, with its booming drums, high-drama synths and sampled voices, and you hear the sonic future of 80s pop being mapped out. Understandably, his reimagining of the irredeemably naff Dollar got Horn noticed: first by ABC, whose Horn-produced debut album The Lexicon of Love was one of 1982’s biggest-selling albums, then by former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. His 1983 album Duck Rock contained Buffalo Gals, the first British hip-hop single, which might have been less legendary had Horn not talked McLaren out of his original idea “to do a rapping and scratching track based on the film ET”.

Horn says the chaotic, groundbreaking spirit of Duck Rock fed into establishing his own record label, ZTT, a byword for a certain kind of 80s excess, from the florid sleevenotes penned by music journalist Paul Morley, to the sheer number of remixes Horn cranked out of every single the label released (apparently much to his chagrin “because each one was like making the record all over again”). For a while it worked like a dream. Horn’s own avant garde group the Art of Noise made records so futuristic that when his old heroes Kraftwerk heard them, they were dismayed, realising that someone else was now at the cutting edge. Meanwhile, Frankie Goes to Hollywood became the biggest and most controversial band in Britain.

In Adventures in Modern Recording, Horn is careful to credit the latter band’s musical abilities. None of its members bar singer Holly Johnson performed on their debut single, Relax, which was essentially created in the studio by Horn and his team – a fact that you get the feeling rather haunts Horn today. “I could have let them play on Relax,” he nods. “It was stupid not to because it created a secret, and the papers always love that. Look at what happened to poor Milli Vanilli. But they were good, the bass player’s riffs for Welcome to the Pleasuredome and Two Tribes were great, he’s a talented guy. The drummer had a thing too.” He pauses. “I don’t think when I started Relax I had any clear idea of what I was going to do with it. I was just going to see where it went. It didn’t have a chorus, it was really just a verse and a run-out.”

Horn seems to have loved every minute of ZTT: employing percussionists to smash crockery, a sound he sampled on Propaganda’s Dr Mabuse; inveigling Grace Jones to sing on Slave to the Rhythm, despite the fact that “she was in a state … she’d found out her boyfriend was cheating on her and set fire to all his clothes”. But perhaps inevitably, it didn’t last. Artists departed due to arguments over money; Frankie Goes to Hollywood fell out with each other, an experience Horn says was “like watching a car accident”. Horn’s own career continued apace – he’s gone on to sell millions more records and work with everyone from Rod Stewart to Belle and Sebastian – but he missed the madness of ZTT. “I did. I was kind of sad about it. If anybody makes a decision to go and be mad and experimental, I think it’s something you kind of end up being because you’re prepared to take a couple of chances with things. So you can’t go back to it, really.”

He says he wonders if technology has made making records too easy in 2022. Things that used to take him days can now be done “in a couple of mouse clicks”, but “there’s a sort of zen thing about having to spend a lot of time on something, having to do it very carefully, bit by bit”. He seems aghast at the current spate of court cases over plagiarism. “You notice that guys who write scores for movies never sue each other, and that’s because they all accept that this is going to be a bit like that, a bit like this.”

Still, he brightens, there’s plenty of fantastic music being made in 2022: he’s a fan of Mark Ronson’s productions, among others. And as he’s showing me to the door, I ask what he’s working on in the studio downstairs. Oh, he says, it’s a cover version of Kendrick Lamar’s Swimming Pools (Drank). Tori Amos is singing it. It’s hard to imagine what that might sound like, but the idea itself sounds peculiar, which makes it very Trevor Horn.