It’s an absolute thrill tonight, to be here. I was saying to somebody earlier on that I’ve just got the best job in the universe, the absolute best job in the universe. I get to meet awesome people in the music business. I get to meet awesome newcomers in the music business as well.And, and it’s a thrill. Every day is a thrill for me. I never know what’s gonna happen.

I never know the conversations I’m gonna have. And I feel so privileged to be able to do what I do and also to be able to share it with you guys. It’s one thing just experiencing this stuff by yourself, but it’s entirely another thing, being able to share it with other people. And, whenever I do these kind of interviews, I’m really just kind of asking the questions that I would want to know, and I figure that if it’s stuff that I want to know, then maybe you guys wanna know that too. So, I think we should start the evening’s proceedings, don’t we?

We’ve had a cracking day. and we’re gonna, I’m going to talk to Trevor for a wee while, and then we’re gonna have, a couple of drinks, a little bit of an after party. I’d like to thank all my friends from the music business for coming along tonight as well. It’s great to see you guys. Some very esteemed people. we’ve got some of our mentors here, and some great people from the business. and Danny Kirsch.  And so there  you go, Danny, take it back.

There you go. so it’s great to see you guys special, special night. and, I’m gonna let the music do the talking and a couple of the pictures and, ask you to welcome please if you would. Trevor Horne.  Wow.

Hello. Hello. Well, have you heard that song before on a walk-on  just a few times probably. Right? I did it on a German TV show last week. Last week. Good. So it’s only been a week since you’ve heard it. Great. It got, Shes the eighties show. Fantastic. It was really good fun, actually.

He had a great band.  Well, I had a fantastic time. I saw Trevor recently at the Royal Festival Hall and just had an amazing time, listening to just so many, so many hits. and I remember, so I remember seeing Prince at the O2, and he actually sat at a keyboard and went so many hits, and he was just like, playing and, and, and I sat at the, the festival hall and I was going so many hits. I, I mean, it’s just a remarkable, remarkable career.

And so diverse as well. An incredibly diverse, array of artists that you’ve worked with, records that you’ve made. my go-to question has got to be, where did it all start for you? Where did you, where did you first get the buzz, the rush from a piece of music where you thought, oh, f**k, I’ve gotta do this for the rest of my life?  Well, I, from, you know, from my generation, it was basically listening to appearing The Beatles, you know? Yeah. My dad was a double, double bass play.

He played in a dance band five nights a week.  So when I was a kid, I remember he showed me how to play way down upon the Suwanee River  on the base. You know, it’s quite simple. Bum bam, bam, way down upon the Swanee River.  And I worked it all out from there, really. he used to play, and, and so I, I guess I grew up a, around music,  but, you know, you  know, first we had the Beatles, and then it was the Rolling Stones.

I loved both of them. Then, of course, Bob Dylan, when I was about 15, I kind of fell in love with Bob Dylan. And  if you think about when I was 15, that would’ve been 19 64, 65, that was Bob Dylan’s great era. That was when he was writing Masters of War and Gate and all of those terrific songs.  So that’s where I got my sort of real love and pop music, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And, and what was your thing? I mean, was it like picking up a guitar? You know, were you, were you pretending to be John Lennon or were you, were you sitting at a keyboard?

What was, what was your thing?  W  Well, you know, I, I was doing an interview with a German magazine, and they’re very German magazines. Can be very, people are very formal. And the guy said to me there, then, did your first to realize you are a musical genius.  And  I mean, how can you answer a question like that? And I said, that’s the wrong question. The real question is, when did I first realize that I wasn’t a musical genius?

Nice. And that was when I learned how to play, please, please Me, and played it into a tape recorder and heard the playback.  It was awful. And since then, I’ve just been trying to sort of work it all out, you know?  Did You have one of those moments where, where you remember getting the spine tingle? For me, it was singing, oh, comely Faithful in the School Choir at the age of about 12. And I got a massive rush. and I remember that moment. Do, do you remember yours?

I think it was when I first heard Walk On By by Dion Warwick. Right. I got a real buzz from that. I thought that was like, at the time,  the best record I’d ever heard, you know? What Was it about it that did it for you? I don’t know. I’d never heard anything quite like it. And of course, I was probably about 14, and I was in love with the Bassoon player,  so I’m sure there was some involvement, romantic kind of vibe coming from that. Yeah.  So did you sort of, I I, I’d love to know your sort of entree into music.

Was it, was it like, I’m gonna be a songwriter? Or did you immediately start hearing how records should go? No, no. What happened was, you know, like anybody back then, I had a group called The Outer Limits, and I was a league guitar player. And, we were terrible. But, you know, we played local sort of clubs. I had a jumbo guitar with a pickup on it, and we used to do things like long Tall shortly Mm-Hmm. The Kinks. He really got me anything that didn’t have too many chords in it.  But gradually, as time went by, I  used to,  you know, my dad couldn’t do a gig sometimes, and by the time I got to 15, I would stand in for him on the base.

Wow. But just for the money. ’cause I could, you know, base parts were relatively simple back then. And I could read for the base ’cause if it was in the youth orchestra. So I’d do gigs from my dad. And gradually that started to take over really. But, but for a while, when I was a fifth 15, I was a big Bob Dylan impersonator. You know, I, I knew every song just about.

And, and I probably remember them now, you know, that there was, some of ’em were so,  so great. And I, I used to sing at folk clubs,  and so I, I mean, it was a, a funny thing. I never, I  didn’t really start the idea of writing a song I didn’t have till I, I was about 15, and then I thought, I’ve gotta think of something really original. So I, I spent ages trying to find the weirdest chord sequence I could think of that nobody had ever used before. But of course, I realized after a while that that really wasn’t what it was about.

That somehow you had to  write something that was kind of like other things, but a bit different. Yeah. It took me a little bit of time to figure that one out. But, you know,  I sort of, I, I, I tried really hard when I was about 19, I,  I wrote a bunch of songs. I got on Leicester radio, you know, just me and an acoustic guitar.  And I came to London. I  was 19. Where Was this from, by the way?

Where were you? I came down from Blackpool. Okay. I, I was playing in a house band at a hotel in Blackpool, and I’d made all of these songs, and I had a song called The Blackpool Astronaut,  and I  played them to a whole load of record labels. And I went through what everybody goes through, where the publisher says, well, if so and so’s gonna sign it, I’ll publish it. You know?  And then of course, they all get interested for half an hour, and then  suddenly it sort of evaporates,  you know? And you’re left with your record. What happened? Yeah.

I got nowhere. So I kinda gave it up,  and I spent a long time after that just making my living as a bass player in all kinds of bands, you know? Mm-Hmm.  And then, then in my late twenties, I built a studio up in Leicester. I I was with a  band, terrible band called Ray McVay, his band of the day.  The only good thing about it was that you earned a lot of money from it. It was like a show band, 12 piece show band. And we used to play six nights a week, but, you know, back in the mid seventies, I was earning 150 quid a week.

And we, we would do like three broadcasts a week, two albums, you know,  you know, this was the days when you went into the maid of El Studios, and I was always the youngest  playing in those bands.  And, and, and I, I started to become absolutely sort of fascinated by studios. And so after we’d done whatever we did, I would go and sit in the back of the control room quietly watching what was going on.

I loved the playback in the control room, knocked me out the first time I heard it. Yeah. You know, I’d never heard such fantastic speakers. It’s a magical place to be, isn’t it? There’s something really special about being in the control Room, that’s for sure. I’ve been there for 40 f*****g years.  Well, it’s gotta be magical to keep you there for that long, for sure. I Know. It was, it was great. But you know, it,  what I did is I saved all of my money up from Ray McVey, and I went back to Leicester and I played seven nights a week in a nightclub, Bailey’s nightclub.

And, during the day, I built a recording studio with another guy,  and, when we finished it,  we put an ad in the paper  that, you know, any songwriters, like, you know, if they wanted their songs demoing, we would demo their songs for eight pounds or something like that. Brilliant. And the first song that we, that we actually demoed, came second in a,  in a  songwriting competition. Mm-Hmm. And I remember the song  because it was called a Woman Beater.

What say, say that again? A woman beater. It Was woman beater. Wow. They call me undecided, foolish, misguided, lion, cheating woman beaten rebel.  That was the, Wow. I  don’t think you can get away with it now. No, I don’t. Somehow, I don’t think  so. So,  so, you know, I I, I, I got a, you know, the guy came in, you know, with his 10 pounds or whatever it was, and we made a demo for him.

And afterwards, somebody said to me, you know what you did there with that guy  that’s called record production. Right. I had no idea, you know, I said, wow, that’s record production. I just wondered what they did.  You know? Well, that’s what I’m gonna do. but  then I think from that moment,  it took me  having that sort of minor epiphany five years, you know? Right. To get a hit. Right.  And so, so presumably at that point you’re sort of like, just gradually upping your rates, the more people are coming to you  Now.

I was just trying to survive really back then. Right. You know, I was playing six nights a week with Tony Evans Band in The Ha With Poly,  and I was doing demos for, for publishers. Do You know, I just, I love this. I  Love, now I’ll tell you what I love this thing of, of just sort of, I was doing this to survive while I was  pursuing my dream. Yeah. You know, I mean, it’s like, that, that is, that is the definition of passion for me.

It’s like when you, when you just, I  mean, I used to play in pubs, like, you know, playing three men and a dog, and it’s, it’s, I used to call it prostituting my art, you know, as a musical w***e. And, but, but it was like, just to do what I wanted to do.  And yeah. So I so loved that. I mean, six nights a week, that’s no mean feat, is it?  Well, when I was building the studio up in Leicester, we were doing seven nights a week.  It was no night off.

Wow. And, and funny enough, I I tell this story sometimes. Okay. I do this gig for a year, and I mean, we had people like Tommy Cooper, Neil Ska, Dave Allen, they would all come for the week, gene Pitney Del Shannon, and you’d have to back them, you know, because I could, I could cite read for the bass. It was, I could, I could do all of that. So I worked there for a year, every single night, first night off  a Sunday night, like, God, what are we gonna do?  God, let’s go to the club.

Come on.  So we went to the club, ’cause Harry Seon was on, I’m a big Goons fan. The same club you played In. Yeah. Same club I’ve played in. So,  so I walk in and of course, the bouncers said, what the f**k are you doing here? You’ve been here for a year, you know?  And I said, oh, I just wanted to see Harry seek him.  And,  and as I walked in, the managers saw me and he came running over, thank God you’re here. He said, the guy in the, the guy in the replacement band can’t Reed. So you gotta, you’ve gotta go and do play for Harry Seekin.

Oh, brilliant. I was like,  sure. Whatever. Yeah. You know, levy his bass guitar.  So yeah, I, I was always, you know, having to, having to earn a living. In fact, the year before video killed the Radio Star in 1978, I remember specifically that I demoed 47 songs  for various publishers.  And for that I earned like 2,300 pounds. I had it all worked out in the back of the book. Wow.  I was thinking, God, someday it’s gonna, it’s gonna be worthwhile.

You Know? And of course it was, you know, Mean it was, yeah. But that, that five years was your apprenticeship, surely. Yeah. You know, just like learning your, your, your skills.  Yeah. You, you, you know, you, you sort of, it’s a good thing to try and make every mistake before you have a success if you can. ’cause then you tend not to make quite so many of them afterwards.  And, you know, boy, I made a few, you know,  yeah. I could make a great demo for something and then make a lousy master, you know, those kind of things.

Yeah. And then try and make it, you know, try to make things into something that they weren’t suited to be. You know, I  did it every crap thing, you know, demolishing singers being horrible to them.  So I learned my trade. You’re right. Five years of it. Yeah. But I figured out after a few years,  I thought the only way I’m gonna beat this  is I’m gonna have to be, I’m gonna have to write my own song. ’cause nobody’s gonna come through that door with a hit song. You know? I’m gonna have to write my own song.  The  one of the things that truly amazed me when I started, producing people’s demos,  I would,  sometimes people would send me a demo that was so monumentally crap.

Right. You know, when you listen to it, you’d think, God,  this is shocking.  And I remember one particular one, it was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  And, it was around the time of the film was, and it was, oh, sin Count, the third kind, whatever, this, this guy’s demo.

But he had 250 quid to spend.  So I,  I thought, I wonder how much I can get away with it. So I, I completely rewrote the song.  I totally rewrote it,  and  I played it back to him,  and he was like, ah, isn’t my song great?  And I realized that I could, in a way, with some of these guys, I could just do whatever I wanted.

So I started fixing the songs up, you know, fixing people’s songs up. You know, you can’t have three verses, two bridges, and then half the hook. You know, come on, let’s get real. You know, there is a certain constructional ethic that you have to conform to whatever.  I started fixing people’s songs up, and then I started to think, I’m fixing people’s souls up. Why the hell don’t I write start, you know, write one, you know? Yeah. Because, but I was very lucky because, I wrote a lyric  called Clean, clean.

And so I used to read loads of those Sergeant York comic books, and it was meant to be an ironic observation on the Violence of War, whatever. And Bruce Woolley, looked at it and immediately put a tune to it. And,  and then of course, like three songs later, we wrote Video Kill the Radio Star.  So, wow. So Tell me, I mean, that  we were talking earlier, although you haven’t met him, but, but you know, of his work.

Chris Neil, my friend. Yeah. so Chris and I have been working together for 25 years plus and made a ton of records together.  And,  and he talks about a  career making songs. There are certain songs that, that you just listen to and you go, there’s nothing else like that. And occasionally they still drop Now, where you just get those songs where you go, wow, that’s, I just wasn’t expecting that.

And, you know, radio Star was one of those songs, wasn’t it? I mean, it was there, there was nothing like it at the time. It was completely groundbreaking. I really, really want to know how that song came about. Where the idea came from and how you developed it. I mean, what, what was, what was Happening? Well, I can tell you where the idea came from. It came from, a line  that Bruce and I had for a month. I heard you won the wireless back in,  back in 52. And  we have that line, we see, gotta think of a, a line to follow that line.

I heard you Wonder Wireless back in 52. We were thinking about all the old comedians, you know, on the radio. Oh. And, you know, back in the fifties, there was actually a ventriloquist on the radio, you know,  educating Archie and the Ventriloquist. I mean, obviously the guy didn’t have to worry about his lips moving, but, and so we had this line for ages.  And then one particular day we went walking on the Richmond Common.

I think we smoked a bit of weed, and we were  Richmond Commons. Fabulous. You know, the airplanes go down at the Heathrow over it, and we’re just walking along. And it popped in my head,  lying awake, intently tuning in on you. If I was young, it didn’t stop you coming through.  Bruce says, ah, that’s good.  And we went straight back and, and, and we, we, we wrote the rest of it in about an half an hour. ’cause I’d been reading JG Ballard, you know, science fiction.

Mm-Hmm. So I had the whole idea of, you know, they took the credit for your second symphony rewritten by a machine on new technology, all that stuff, you know? Wow. That was all kind of me,  JG Ballard  and Video killed. The Radio Star just, just came, popped in my head that just at that moment.  And I always it, because Bruce said, you can’t do that. We can’t use that.  I said, why not? He said, well, it’s, it’s the name of two bands,  snips, and the Video Kings and the radio stars.

And I said, ah, come on. They’ll be gone by the time this comes out, you know? And they were funny enough. So,  but I, but,  and you know, Bruce did Main, mainly did the tune, but, you know, it overlaps a bit. But it was, it was generally me doing the lyrics and Bruce doing the tune.  And, I remember when we,  when we just, as we finished it, Bruce’s girlfriend arrived  and, and  maybe I shouldn’t tell you this stuff.

Lisa’s girlfriend arrived and Bruce had just gone to have a shower, and she came bursting in, and she said, finally, I’ve caught you at it. She was convinced we were having some sort of gay love of her.  And the fact that Bruce was in the shower, she thought he was, he was hiding,  but nothing could be further from the truth.  So we had, so we had that song. And, I remember when, when I made my, we had a little demo event on a cassette,  you know, when you, when when I made my, new Year’s resolution, 1978 going to 79,  I thought  my resolution was I wanna get a hit record this year.

Wow. And then as I, as I, as I thought the resolution, I thought, well, I’ve written a song.  I know it’s video killed the radio style. I’ve just gotta figure out how to do it. You know, how to get the money to do it.  But then I was lucky.

What happened was, I’d been, Tina Charles’s, md,  and Tina Charles had some money she wanted to put into a project.  And, I said, I’ve got a project called The Boggles. It’s,  and she was, of course, Tina, they said, are you singing in it?  And I was,  well, I might be  your little wibbly voice.  Tina was, was never a big fan of my singing. And, you know, ’cause she had a terrific, she was a terrific natural singer.

Mm-Hmm.  And, but I talked her into it. And she actually paid for the original demo. And  a video killed the radio star. The demo that we did in the sort of eight track studio  turned out to be one of those days that you have like two or three of them in your life. You know,  the day we did the demo of that, it was just the most amazing day because,  you know, we, we, we had another song called On tv, and we knocked that one off in five minutes. And then we came to Video Kill the Radio Star.

I always remember Jeff said,  I’ve got this piano lick, and he played that God,  I like, that’s great. I said, can I sing? I heard you. Yeah, of course. I can sing the song over it. And then  we suddenly, we were like off and running, you know, and we were all, we were all really good at it at the time, because we were making records all the time. And that, you know, that’s the only way to really learn. Don’t forget, back then you couldn’t sequence anything or anything like that.

You know, we had a drum machine called the Mini Pops Junior, and there was one setting on it where we could get Boof, daf daf. And we used to use that most of the time. And we would cheat, we would play like sequences, you know? Yeah. This isn’t the single sequencer on video, Gilda radio stuff. It’s all played by hand. Wow.  How did that feel like when you’d done it? Did you know? Well, I knew, I, I’d tell you, I knew it when Jeffrey started to put the, the synthesize,  when he started to do that,  I thought, God, this is brilliant.

I love this.  You know, somehow it, it’s, it started to take on a life of its own.  And, you know, Tina Charles was the original. Oh. Oh.  Because originally those bits were just Bruce going, oh, whoa.  And, and I was saying, come on, come on. We need to make them more American. And so if you listen to the record, all of the sort of interjections were all in American,  it killed the radio. That sound enough?

When you sang it, video killed the radio star just didn’t work. Yeah.  But I knew by the time we got it, I knew it. I knew it was good, because it wasn’t just a good song. It was an interesting record. ’cause there had loads of gags in it, you know? Yeah, Totally. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s, it’s a groundbreaking record as well. Yeah. It was an unusual song, but a groundbreaking record. The fact that he used the, the radio,  radio F radio F voice, The radio. Yeah. there’s just me singing through a Vox AC 30 with a hand mic.

Brilliant. You see, I was thinking, oh, what plugin would he have used for that article?  It’s, you know, The funny thing is when we finished the record, Bruce hated it. ’cause Bruce had the camera club and he was doing the camera club.  And I remember  he said,  it has no integrity whatsoever.  And I said, well, it, it’s if by like being sort of English and indie, you mean, integrity certainly got none of that intentionally, you know?  But the funny thing is, actually before video came out,  we, we wrote a song at a party.

Me, Jeff and Bruce,  just, you know, somebody, it was the only time in my life I ever took those balls poppers.  Right. We all got loony at this party, and we wrote this song called Baby Blue. Right. And Dusty Springfield covered it.  And that was the first, time I ever had a record out of a, of a song that I’d written. Yeah. Or co-written.  And I  didn’t like the record at all,  because  our demo  that had obviously got Dusty to do, it was all, it was all us with crazy stuff, echo units, and,  you know, banging telephone directories with a wooden spoon and  putting things, real Production Around production.

Whereas the Dusty Springfield, the one that kept one or two elements of that. But it was really ordinary. And, and I knew it wouldn’t be much of a head.  So my first brush with music publishers,  So you’ve, you’ve got, oh, by the way, bugles  What,  how, what, what was bugles All bugs was a stupid idea that, that we looked, that we followed through.

The idea was that the bugles were banned, that were invented  by somebody with somebody on a computer, you know? Right. Like, just making up stuff on a computer in the future somewhere. Right. Obviously  we had no idea how quickly it was all gonna happen,  but that was the idea. And we were never gonna appear.

Right. But you try having a number one and never appearing  it’s, boy, you’ve gotta be strong. Talk. Talk us through the journey then, from the point that you’ve got this, you’ve got this tape in your hand, and you’re going, oh my God, I know this is great. To that journey from that point to becoming a number one, you know, how, how quick did it happen? What was the process? Did you just walk into a label and he went, oh yes, we’ve gotta do this. What was it? Well, well, we had a, we, you’re right. We had a great demo of it,  and we took it to a few people.

We took it to Warner Bros. Mm-Hmm. In America. because we were, I was over in America just for a few days  doing a disco record for somebody.  And we had video killed the radio star. Jeff and I went in and played it to the Lady of r Warner Brothers.  And we, and you know, there were three or four songs. The video was the first one. And I always remember what she said.  She said, that one’s not bad. You know, video killed the radio star, but no, we’re not interested. And I was like,  really?

And you think that that one’s a hit, but you’re not interested? She said, yeah, because you’re not a group, you’re not a thing. You know, there was just two of us, you just a singer and a keyboard player. You know,  this was a long time before the pet up boys and people like, you know, what’s the group? What are you gonna do? How are you gonna play live? Who are you gonna be?  So we got a lot of that. Nearly everybody turned it down.  but, a guy who used to, the person who did Spot, it was my late wife, Jill Sinclair.

In fact, it was how we got together because, I bumped into her at a party and I, I took, I said, I’ve got a, I knew that she had a production company at Psalm.  And, I said, I’ve got a demo or something. Can I come and play it to you?  And I, I played a, i I played at a demo and I could tell she really liked it. She gave us a free day of Free Studio time  and we did another song called Kid Dynamo, which I think was on the B side of it.

And, and she offered us a deal,  but there was wasn’t much money in it, you know? And so we were gonna sign to her, and then just at the last minute  Island came back and made us a big offer, like 15 grand each, which was like amazing money back then. Mm-Hmm.  But  I saw Jeffrey two weeks ago, and Jeffrey reminded me of a couple of things. How we’d gone into a couple of record labels and put on video, killed the radio stuff almost exactly the same thing as the record.

And people had listened to it and gone,  nah, don’t get it.  You think, f**k, how could you not get that a dick? You know,  get outta it. You seem unsure. Yeah,  yeah. You know, but that’s the way it went. And, and so Ireland signed it, but the problem was that we had almost immediately was that, was that Tina had wanted to sign us because she’d put up the money for the demo.  But even though we loved Tina dearly, we, we, we really had felt the time had come for us to leave her  her all bet, as it were.

Because  Tina could be a handful and, and strike off on our own. You know,  so we couldn’t use the demo, so we had to do it again. Yeah.  And that taught us a really big, big lesson.  A lesson that I’ve never forgotten. And,  and it’s bitten me in the ass, even though I’ve learned it  I like, is, you know,  Ireland gave us a budget of 10 grand to, to, to make three songs.

And we spent nearly, nearly all of it doing a new version of video Kill the Radio Star. you know, we must have spent four weeks on this version.  And we were around at Jeffrey’s place, we were listening to it, you know, eh,  it’s really good.  It’s really coming along, man. We are getting there.  And it’s still for Jeff said,  start again.  We, yeah, we’ll start again.

Wow. We f****d it up. We got to, we played fast and loose with it. All the stuff that we’d done on the demo, all the clever little gags, we were bored with them. So we didn’t do them. And we’d done this and we’d done that and we’d done, and pretty soon it sucked. You know,  so we had to go back. Right. This time we’re gonna get it right.  And, when I go back to it and listen to it, you know, I remember that we finished, we, we put it down with, piano bass and drums and the drum machine, just the three instruments  with Han Zimmer in the control room.

’cause Hans was in the band at the time.  And we played it from about sort of seven o’clock in the evening, right the way, two till four o’clock in the morning, because we’d never heard of editing two inch tapes. And because drop-ins were so hard, right.  We had to play the whole thing more or less perfectly from one end to the other. And that’s what we were striving for. And in the end, we had to, the drummer was on triple session scale ’cause he tried to walk out at two o’clock in the morning.

So triple session, triple session, all right, I’ll play it again. Ah, you know, everyone was like, ah,  crazy with it.  And then  finally about four o’clock in the morning, we did one. And I always remember hands coming on the talk bike saying, I don’t know if this is so good. And Jeffrey looked at me and went, we got it. Alright. That’s it. Okay. We got it.

Wow. And then it took us a, you know, Ireland said, how’s it coming along? How, how’s the album coming along? And I said, well, they said, because they, they were pointing out that we, we’d spent our way through the 10 grand.  I said, well, you know, we had this version of video kilder, you know, it’s amazing how, how, confident I would. ’cause even though I was bullshitting, I had no idea really. I said, you know, we thought it was okay and we thought it might like get to number 30, but we wanted to start again. ’cause we wanted to get to number one.  Went All right.

Okay, great. so really, I mean the whole, you know, God knows we went so over the budget,  but  when it was actually finished, it went on a cassette.  The islands used to put out every month with their new releases.  And from the moment it went out on that cassette,  our lives changed. Totally. ’cause the fir with, within a day,  Timmy on a t****y in Oxford  suddenly wanted to interview us.

Timmy Mallet. Oh yeah, yeah. Timmy Mallet. And I was like, the record hasn’t come out yet.  And he was like, I still want to interview you. You know, and,  and people were talking to us like the record was a hit before he came out. Wow. The,  but the first time I heard it on the radio,  I actually heard it on the radio.  I thought, it’s gonna do well. It sounded great on the radio and the bit that was, I was worried about. ’cause in the middle, you know, when it drops down  and the girl comes, Linda comes in singing, you are a radio star that bit.

Yeah, well, she was just, she was on a tape delay. we had a tape delay running and, and that the idea was that we were just bringing her back from the plate.  So she was off in the distance and then we gradually faded the signal in. So she came up front,  but because she was, the signal was delayed, if you listen to her, she’s right behind the beat.  And for some reason, I was obsessed this mistake would, would doomed the record to the sort of trash bin forevermore.

but when I heard it on the radio, I  thought, God, it, it’s great because it exaggerates the fact that she’s in the distance. So I knew when I heard it on the radio that we were gonna hear it a lot. Yeah. That’s the perfectionist producer coming out, isn’t it? Yeah. Well on on that one. We got a bit like that, you know? Yeah. Because it, it had to be like that. So How did it feel getting that number one?

Well, it definitely gives you confidence. It’s like getting a diploma. I’ve got a number one, I’ve done it once,  even if you never do it again.  But I mean, we were lucky. ’cause you know, we sold, God knows, 10, 12 million singles  of that number one 16 countries. We got so sick of, traveling around Europe and being on TV shows. We never played it live.  Really? Yeah. You know, when you’re on your 10th TV show miming and you know, the guy  you’ve taken, whatever drugs you wanted to take, because it doesn’t matter, you know, because it doesn’t matter down because you’re just miming.

So you can be as wrecked as you want to be.  And  You heard it first here Kids, and,  and it was, you know, t  trawling around the Italian DV stations and just miming to the song, you know, leaning in with like, I heard you on the wireless. I definitely, definitely was a,  honestly, it was fantastic because  somebody had said to me, his girl had said to me the year before video was a hit, what are you doing with your life?

Look at you. You’re 29, you’re driving around in an old banger living, you don’t own a house, you just rent in a room. You’re living from one week to the next. You know, what are you doing? Right? What’s, have you got a plan or  whatever? And I said to her,  I’m pulling the handle of a slot machine and I’m just gonna keep pulling it.

I keep pulling it ’cause I know it’s gonna pay out the Jackpot. I love that so much. You know, I love that. And so that’s what I’m doing. Yeah. And that’s what I was doing. You just never know.  You never know which one it’s gonna be. It’s like  as long, but as long as you’re doing something and you’re in the game, you know? Yeah. That was the important thing. Yeah. Do you know, I, you know, we talk about that now, you know, I talk to our students about it that, you know, every song’s a lottery ticket  and Yeah.

You know, same kind of deal that like some of them are gonna earn absolutely bugger all and some of them are gonna earn a lot more.  And you know, obviously these days it’s, it’s not gonna happen that you sell a single 10 or 12 million copies of it.  But, but it’s the same principle, isn’t it? That, that you just, well, you can, you just keep rolling the dice, pulling the handle. Yeah. You can get a billion streams of something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. You just gotta keep going and, sooner or later.

But you know,  the thing is, people talk about luck, but you know, the luck’s no good if you, if if if you’re not, if you haven’t learned a bit about it, you know what I mean?  You know, it’s, anybody who wants to take songwriting seriously, you know, there’s tricks that you can use, you know, whatever.  But  I dunno. I funny, we were talking about, you know, my girlfriend Janet’s in music publishing and we were talking this afternoon about  what is it that just makes that song really good and another song  not so good.

Yeah. Let’s go there. Let’s go there. What do you think?  Well, it,  it, a lot of it’s to do with the, with the record that you make out of the song,  because I’m sure that maybe there were a few  records last year or  songs that people wrote last year that if they had been  done better in a more interesting way, might have done better than they did, you know?

So, you know, if, if you, I I would like, for instance, now, I wouldn’t like to be a writer for hire where you’re trying to get people to cover your songs  because, you know, from my point of view, from what I’ve seen, that’s one of the hardest things to get people to do. Mm-Hmm.  You know, and the people that are successful at it, like Diane Warren  are really a certain personality type, you know?  And, the truth Yeah. Really won’t take no for an answer.

You know, Diane Jerry Heimer told me that Diane Warren actually burst away into his office one day and climbed on his desk and stood on his desk and said, I’m not going to you listen to that song again. You know,  that’s the kind of balls you’ve got to have. Yeah. I’ve heard of her crawling under, tables at, at no, not that way. And, Function that sounded More interesting, literally coming up under the tablecloth and going, here’s my demo.  And I wouldn’t put it past three people’s letter boxes, you know, just up in, up in la you know, but you, it’s like, fair Plato, she’s, you know, it worked.

You’ve gotta be tenacious,  But sometimes you’ve all, you’ve also gotta be your own artist or somehow you gotta, you’ve got to,  you gotta figure, I mean, we’re talking about two different things. We’re talking about songwriting or record production. Yeah. They do go hand in hand. But there’s a diff there’s a difference Right. Between, would you agree that there’s a difference between a great song and a great record?

Hmm.  Well,  Yes. I wouldn’t say Relax was a great song,  but I would think it made a really good record.  And, you know, there’s two different things. You wouldn’t pick up the guitar and go relax, don’t do it. Like,  not particularly, it wouldn’t strike you like that, one of those kind of songs. Well, I’m in an intimate gathering, you know,  I’m really glad you brought that up because I mean, there’s, there’s so many songs that we could talk about that you’ve worked on, and, that you’ve either written or that you’ve, you’ve produced.

you know, I,  I remember  of course, we all remember Relax, right. a remarkable record again, followed by two tribes. And, and I was, I was absolutely, I I  I’m fascinated to know what they, what Frankie came to you with, what they came to you with as the initial thing going, Hey, here’s our song, relax.

And what you heard and what, what the process was to turn it. Because it was a a  absolutely, as the young people say today Mm-Hmm. A sick record. it was, it was remarkable. But how did they come to you with that? I mean, what was it? Well, I’ll tell you, I tell you, I I was working with, yes, I was making, doing 9 0 1 2 5 mm-Hmm.  And I just had a big fight with them because Chris Quire had come in five hours late into the studio, and the studio cost 140 quid an hour.

It was Air Studios at Oxford Circus. Mm-Hmm. And so,  and Trevor Rayburn, the lead singer, had been giving me a hard time, but we’re here and it’s 150 pounds an hour. I told you this place was gonna be two expensive, and Chris is late, five hours late. So when Chris came in, I’d fight with him. I was so angry. And then, and then I was in a really bad mood. You know, it’s very rare in 40 years, it’s only happened two or three times. normally am not like that at all. but you know, Chris had God bless him, I love him dearly, but he had the ability sometimes to drive you crazy.

Right.  And I’m sitting having dinner and the Tube came on, and,  and Frankie’s came on and they had girls like, you know, chained up here and everything  and Chris said, eh, never  that’d be good for your record label. And I was like, f**k off. I,  and but I watched them a bit, you know, I watched them a bit. I thought they were all right.

I like the drummer.  I just liked the drummer. They had that beat, just doof. Yeah.  And then I heard it again on the radio. kid Jensen, he was, he doesn’t like be called kid. I heard it on his show. And I phoned my late wife straight up and I said, we gotta sign this group. Frankie goes to Hollywood. I’ve heard that song twice now, and I know I could do something with it.  It’s  not really a song. It was more like a jingle. But I liked Holly’s voice. You know, he had a, Holly had an amazing voice back then, like a really full on voice, you know, lots of excitement in it,  but I had no idea what I was gonna do with it.

And I mean, I, I didn’t know. And I met them  and the band said to me, we wanna be like a cross between Donna Summer Meets Kiss.  Okay. You know, Donna Summer had just had a huge hit with that. I feel love, you know, all the techno stuff. Yeah, yeah. And I thought, Donna Summer meets Kiss, what a great idea. I  really like that. You know,  so, you know,  they were scheduled.

They, they were, we  signed them because everybody turned them down ’cause of all of the gay iconography, you know, they had stuff, I dunno if you ever saw their original photographs. They were amazing. One of them, he had like a, Holly had a Bowie knife coming out of his flies, and he had Paul and he was stuffing in his mouth,  subtle. He was so gross that I  think everybody was terrified of him.

Turned him down.  And, and I was just coming off the back of working with Yes. You know, I just spent a year doing 9 0 1 2 5. Yeah.  And suddenly I’m in, I’m in this room with a bunch of scouters, you know,  and  God bless him, but you know,  the guitar, they never told me. Right.  But the guitar player had just left,  and Nasha had just come in the guitar player and he’d don’t even been playing guitar for six weeks.  So, you know, when they set up and when they played Relax,  it was like, oh my God, what have I got myself into, you know?

’cause you know, yes, we infuriating. But they were quite brilliant players. Yeah. All of them.  I didn’t know what to do, so  I didn’t know. Yeah. I didn’t even know how to start. Well, what I did do is get them all to jump in the swimming pool. And I recorded it, and it’s actually on the record at the very end. but then I, what, what what I did was I said, you know,  do you mind if I get a proper band in?

And we try your song with a bunch of other musicians?  And they, of course, they, they didn’t like the idea. But since it was my record label  and,  you know, I couldn’t just walk away from it, you know,  we got the Blockhead injury and the blockheads. I got them in and I got them over a weekend. We recorded a version of it with the end jury with Holly singing Holly and Paul singing on it.

And it was sort of okay,  you know, because the song wasn’t a song. I,  I just knew it had to have something about it.  And then, and then I,  sorry, I don’t wanna drag this out too much, but this is how long it grown. This, but then, then I played the band, the version that the Ian Jerry the Blockheads had done and said, why don’t you play it like this?

Or something like this, because the bass player had come up with that ba bam bam. Which I thought was a great dick. Yeah. And so we keep that. And, and they played it and we worked on that for 10 days.  And it, it sort of just seemed to get worse and worse.  And, and then one of my buddies came in to, to see me and he bought me a Nepalese Temple ball, which is some kind of very strange hashish from the from, yes. From way out to the movies.

I vague recollections of those. And, and we smoked some of it, and it got completely off my head  and said, we are gonna start this again. And we, we are gonna do it. That remember that gag that we did in the rehearsal rooms where we had the eights going on the piano in the Fairlight? We’re gonna do that. Yeah.  And we started that.  And then, and then, do you know the thing that changed the song the most? I said to Andy Richards, Andy, can’t we put a f*****g chord behind it? Something European E minor, E minor ninth.

And it doesn’t have to be this awful blue scale,  you know, about as romantic as you know.  And the minute he played that chord,  and then you heard the sort of piano coming in, oh, you know,  and we, we, there was me, Steve Lips and Andy Richards and JJ and Charlie. And we spent, you know, we spent sort of,  I’d only just discovered that, Steve Lipson played great guitar.

Oh yeah. So suddenly I had a guitar player  and the four of us, I was singing the song like out loud and changing the drum machine. ’cause all the dryou know, I had a pet, it was my pet pattern in the drum machine  pattern number 41.  You know, I got a great gag from going from the straight bass drum into the pattern with all of the bits on it. You know, it was early days of that kind of stuff. And,  and, and, and we rehearsed it because  back then it,  it was much harder to sort of  link things to tape.

And we were, we were running the Fairlight and we just got this new piece of kit called, a conductor and it locked the Fairlight sequencer to the, to the Lin Drum machine. Yeah. And that was extraordinary. And then we were playing on top of that, you know, keyboard and guitar. And we must have spent four hours just routine it going over and over and over it, and making our way through the net East Temple ball and going over and over and over.

Finally, we  banged it down in one take.  And when we actually recorded it, and, we were so pleased with ourselves that we immediately did a 14 minute version of it, which came out as the sex mix. But that’s another story. Right. So that’s how it kind of came about.  The band weren’t even there, because they were up in Liverpool, but God bless them, what we played was so much simpler than what they played. Yeah. That they never had a problem playing it live. And it was one of those things, if I’d have  psychologically, what I should have done at that point  is got the band back and had them play  on it.

But I was too selfish and too headstrong.  And you know, Holly, the night that we did the new backing track was a Tuesday I remember. And Holly was due in at nine o’clock, to the stu to Samm West. And it was a,  I said to the reception, I  was up in Studio One, so when Holly gets in, don’t let him come up.

I want to come down and talk to him first.  So when he arrived, you know, of course I went running down to the reception and I was obviously a little bit,  you know, in another world. I  said, Holly, before you come up, I’ve gotta tell you man, it’s changed a bit. And he said, how much has it changed?  I said, well, actually it’s changed completely. And he said, oh my God. ’cause you’ve gotta, you gotta realize this was the fourth version of it.  And they came running up.

But of course, from the moment it started, they loved it. And he couldn’t wait to sing on it.  And in fact, I made him wait a couple of hours to sing. And he was getting so worked up that he took my saxophone and he went on the roof of the, the studio and he was blowing notes. And a bunch of dreads came. Gangsters came. And they were waving up to him.  And he was quite amazed by that, the fact that he’d drawn an audience. And,  and so when he, he was telling me about this and I said, get the sax  play a note.

And he played a note, the opening note of Relax.  And he goes, ma ha ha. Yeah. That’s how he just blown the sax. Wow. I just put it on the front. ’cause I,  it was seemed so funny to me that he’d been up on the roof.  Love That kind of organic record making, you know, just trying, trying stuff out. Absolutely fabulous. And  so was it the similar kind of story with two Tribes? Well, no, no. Don’t forget, with Relax, everyone talks about Relax. Like it’s a classic, you know, but Relax was out  for six weeks  and, and it was doing not, and it got terrible reviews in the NME.

It was banned.  No, it wasn’t banned until it was number two  didn’t, didn’t the BBC banned it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But they banned it because of something that was written on the sleeve that Paul Morley had written on the sleeve. Oh yeah. That we hadn’t seen until the record went out.  You know, Paul Morley, we brought into Ron’s ZCT, but he was, was a bit, he was a bit apt to do whatever he wanted.  And  something he said to me, have you seen what’s written on the back of the 12 inch?

And I was like,  no.  And there’s stuff about licking the s**t off my boots. And I was like,  that’s a little bit displace.  What’s all this about? You know? But it was, obviously  it did, you know, the sex mix right was 14 minutes long. The original 12 inch for Relax  had no single on it. It had the sex mix and it had a version of furry cross the me on it with lots of talking and interview.

And the sex mix was 14 minutes of us jamming on relax with me,  with me banging my head, you know,  cutting turnips into buckets of water and sucking bananas under water and just doing all kinds of gross things. Right.  And we got complaints from gay clubs about it.  And  so,  and they said, you’ve got to put the single on the 12 inch. So we, so we made a second 12 inch of Relax, and this is all before it was a hit.

And, and then I was out in New York and I was working on Foreigner, an album I never finished. and, Chris Blackwell took me to Paradise Garage.  And I dunno if anybody, if any of you have ever been there  or ever went there, it was the most amazing place. I had the best sound system I’ve ever heard in my life. And it was the first time I ever saw movies projected whilst DJs made music.

And they played a load of my records. ’cause I was doing lots of 12 inches at the time.  And after I, I, I saw this at Paradise Garage in the limo on the way back to the hotel, I said to Chris Blackwell, I’ve gotta do another 12 inch of relax. I know exactly what it should be like  now that I’ve seen that.  And he said, well, why don’t you do it this weekend? And so I did. I had a keyboard player. Funny enough, I had Andy Richards over working on Foreigner.

So I spent the whole weekend and I thought, I’m gonna do a 12 inch and I’m gonna orchestrate it. I’m gonna actually put, put keyboard overdubs and things on it, you know what I mean? And make it like a piece.  And  I threw this together with this old hippie engineer, I’ll never forget with, and a young tape op in the hit factory.  And the, I could tell the engineer didn’t like the record ’cause he kind of had this look of distain on his face all the time. You know, I kept saying to him, come on, it’s a drum machine.

It’s not performing. You’ve got to perform. You could have pushed the faders a bit, you know, get it moving. Right.  And I’m, you know, I’m mixing bits off and Addie Richards playing bits and we’re editing them together and I could tell, you know, what the f**k I was doing. Right. And at one point he went to the toilet and the assistant went, when he went out, he said,  this is amazing. I love, this is great. Don’t worry about him. He’s an old fogy, you know, ’cause he gave me a bit of heart ’cause I was getting a bit depressed, you know,  so yeah, I, so I did the New York mix, which is actually, you know, even a,  we falsely Modest is still the biggest selling 12 inch of all time, I think in, in, Is that right?

Yeah. Was that Mix. What, what sort of numbers are we talking? Probably 3 million. Wow. You know, for Ray Max all at half rate. Wow. Because it’s a promotional item,  but at least I got half rate dead or alive. Got nothing for, spin me round. ’cause Sony never paid for 12 inches.

Wow. Incredible. Let’s, you also worked with Steve Lipson on, Grace Jones, didn’t you? Yeah. With Slave. Yeah.  And, Simon Darlow.  Yes. I think Simon Darlow may have Co-written a song with Bruce Woolley. Right. Yeah. Because Simon Dao was briefly in the Boggles. Um Oh, really? Oh, yeah. We wrote some songs together. We wrote a couple of dollar songs together. Right.  Yeah. So What was it like working with Grace?

I I always felt that, that at the time I remember thinking, that looks like one of the scariest women on the planet.  What was it like Grace Wasn’t, grace wasn’t that scary actually, the first, the first time. I’d heard some pretty, pretty, to curling stories about her.  But, you know, you’ve gotta realize that my late wife  was, was the only person that, the only woman that I was afraid of, you know? So Grace Jones didn’t scare me.

Right. And,  and actually Grace is, grace is quite sweet in her own way, you know? Right. She’s really, she’s really, she could be very funny.  And the first thing that we did on Slave to Doism was a completely different version. The version that’s sort of, well, as men who know that version, you know, sort of straight version.  And it was only when I,  you know, after she’d done it, and she was a, she was a really good sport when she did it, you know, she threw herself into it.

She marched around the studio. She was a good laugh. But then  after we’d done it, I hated it. So  I kept thinking this one,  one record I’m gonna do with Grace Jones for a great hits, and it’s this piece of s**t. You know what I mean? So I just didn’t like it.  And  I had this idea that if I’m, I was gonna be the slave to any rhythm I would have, the only rhythm I would be prepared to be a slave to was Go-Go Rhythm. ’cause that at the time, was what really excited me.  So I had this idea of going to New York and using a a Go-Go Rhythm section and trying to rerecord it.

It never occurred to me at the time that  what a daft idea it was.  You know, it really was a mad idea. And, and in, in a way it was Steve Lipson and Bruce Woody that got me out of the hole. ’cause  go, go go-go. Musicians can’t play arrangements.  They understand. Start and stop  and whatever happens in between happens. Right. If you try and organize what happens in between, you  are on a loser.

Right.  A total loser. So I, I’m, I got all these Go-go guys from Washington. I’m trying to get them to play slave to Rhythm,  but they just couldn’t, you know, like, you don’t play there for four bars and then you come in.  So I don’t play for four Bars. Then I come in,  then do I stay in? Well, well,  You are meant to sort of come out. Oh God. we realized pretty, pretty quickly that it was gonna be difficult.

But luckily  we had been recording them. Steve Lipson was brilliant, brilliant engineer. Yeah. Was recording them while they were warming up,  and they played a, a drum groove while they were warming up. And that was the drum groove that we used. And I had it on a little recording. You know, those Sony used to, used to make a great Walkman that had a speaker in it. Yeah. And you could go around with something and you could play stuff. And I had this drum loop, and I was saying, this is it. This is this rhythm. And Bruce, who we had with us, Bruce Woolley,  came up with those chords, the beautiful chords at the start.

Oh yeah. When he played those chords, I was like, yes. Now this, now we’re talking.  And, I always remember he came up with those chords. We had this rhythm.  We were in the Power Station studios.  We, we only had the studio. We had the studio from nine in the morning or six in the evening. We sent the Go-go guys home at about four o’clock in the afternoon. And we packed up a load of equipment and we went back to the Park Meridian Hotel, and we walked in.

We were carrying drum machines, guitars, speakers, keyboard, the whole bit, actually people looking at us. And we went up to the room and we, we wrote the song basically up in the hotel room.  Lippo,  you know, programmed the beat that we, that that I kept playing in the little thing. He programmed it into a TRA to eight.  And we, we got a basic construction for the song.  And then the next day we spent a day and a half constructing a drum track  from that one drum take  using the sort of, the blueprint that we’d made of, of the song.

But, so we ended up with, with, ba Drum Loop and fills and all that kind of stuff. But  it was all put together from a minute of playing.  And it was all across like 12 tracks on the multi track. Yeah. It was the first time we’d ever done that. It took a long time to do using Offsets with two Sonys, you know, two Sony tape machines.

But one interesting thing happened while we were doing it,  and that is we discovered that Jim Steinman was in the next studio. Right. And we got a note from him, two o’clock in the morning saying, would you like to come to a listening session at 4:00 AM in my studio? I am, I’m going to preview my new song. It was all very formal.  And we were like, yeah, why not?

Let’s go.  Because, you know, we were working away on Slave. And, and we went into this room and Jim Steinman was there with a guy I didn’t recognize, but who Lippo  went crazy about. ’cause it turned out to be Todd Ren. Right.  And Jim Steinman gave us all lyrics sheets, and he played us loving, use a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.  And  I’d never heard anything like that before. Have you ever heard that song goes on forever?  Every time you think it’s finished,  it starts up again.

It’s like, kill it, kill it.  No, it’s starting up again and off it would go again. I mean, it’s about eight minutes long.  And, of course, you know, we are very polite about it. God, that sounds a amazing, yeah, it was great. And everything. He said, what are you working on? So he said, with this track, slave to the rhythm,  he,  you know, we played him a bit of it, and of course he loved it. He said, make it epic. Make it 20 minutes long. He’s like, I dunno, Jim,  you know, but we did.

That’s the joke of it in the end. It was, it was incredible feat. Now, great Grace was, grace was meant to come on on a Friday, and she,  I phoned her out, and Grace, are you, you gonna come to the studio today?  And, she said,  I just had a row with my boyfriend, b boyfriend Dolf,  and I just set all these clothes on fire.  I thought, wow,  great. Ah, well do you think you might make it tomorrow? You know?  And she said, I’ll see.

Anyway, she showed up on the Sunday,  and,  and she was, she was a bit shocked  because of course, you know, after you’d heard the other very strident version of Slave To the Rhythm, the new version of Slave to the Rhythm was a bit of a shock for a few people. Even Chris Blackwell was like,  are you sure you’re doing the right thing here? You know,  it’s very different,  you know, it’s not fast. It’s not a dance record, you know.  But, she listened to it a couple of times,  and, I,  of course, she and Bruce bonded, and Bruce Bruce was there, and he, he wrote her next two albums with her.

But  she said, she said, this is a very different version. She said, I, I, I can feel I’ve had a long day in the fields, and I’m sitting on the porch in the evening. And she sat down in a chair, we were moving the mic,  and then, you know, we rolled the tape and she sang it sitting down.

And Bruce, you know, is, if you think about it, it’s quite slow at the start.  And Bruce would sing the Line Work all day,  grace work all Day  Ass Man, who know Ass Man who know. So if you listen to the vocal track and solo, you can hear Bruce  somewhere in the background giving line, feeding The Lines. Yeah. but, you know,  we’d been working on it by that point for like three and a half days,  and we hadn’t known if it was gonna work.

Yeah. You know, and one of the things that we’d done was because Grace Doesn’t, isn’t known for having a Grace upper register. Yeah. So we had to find a way of making the song work without making it too rangey.  But I do remember that was one of the few times when Lippo and I actually joined up like this and danced in the control room. It’s gonna work. Thank God for that. Yeah. You know, because Because there’s moments where she’s almost talking it, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But she was great. And then, and, and then of course, I, I, I, I got a book, Grace’s book, and it turned out she was only three blocks away.  She, I thought she was in la, which she was only around the corner.  But, you know, she, she was fun and she was nice.  And as a, as a producer, what gets you excited about either a song or an artist? You know, what, what, what really sort of fires you up has fired you up and still does maybe  Well, when you hear a song that you think,  you know, that could be a hit song, and maybe other people haven’t realized it yet.

That’s great. I mean, I think one of the great things about being a producer, if you work on a really good record, it’s like you’ve all heard Slave to the Rhythm. You’ve all heard  Relax, but  we heard it first, you know? Yeah. And there was only four or five of us there, and we thought it was really good,  you know, and that’s, I think that’s when you’ve got something that you know, is really good, it’s, you know, it doesn’t often happen.

And sometimes you don’t dunno how good it is to you get away from it. But  I always thought Slave that, you know, the slow version of Slave Two Rhythm was very beautiful and very unusual. You know, it wasn’t anything like anything else really. Yeah. You know, I mean, you talk so affectionately about, and I, I get it about the, the, the,  the limitations of, of this, of production back then.

It’s like you have X amount of tracks. You, you can’t manipulate vocals so easily. You know, it’s literally, you, you’re cutting tape if, if, if you have to. But it’s more about sort of like, improvising along the way. You talk so affectionately about that you’re still making records now. How,  how is it in terms of the way that you work now? How has that changed and what do you miss and what do you absolutely love being able to do now that you didn’t used to be able to do?

Well  back in the nineties, you know, when you were working with, you obviously you couldn’t tune vocals up in the way that you can tune them now.  And, and so  believe me,  people have been, record producers have been doing Dodgers since the year,  since time began. You know, I’m, I’m, I’ve just been  reading a lot about The Beatles. And I mean, they, they would used to use, you know, very speed all the time to make their voices sound higher, you know, you know, just very speeded down.

So very speed is when you actually speed. For those of you who don’t know very speed. It’s when you speed up the tape so it sounds higher or you Slow No, you slow the tape down, you slow down. And, and, and then, you know, you sing it and then when it’s played. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. You’re Up, you’re up a semitone. Yeah. The Semitone is a good thing. Makes you sound 20 years younger.  Literally. I kid you not. Yeah. And even the Beatles said that when they were 23, they said, makes us sound younger.

So back then in the nineties, we couldn’t do any of that. So you had to comp vocals, you know, and, and,  and,  but I mean,  48 Track Sony machines came out in the nineties, and I had two of them at one point.  And that had a, had a hold function where you could sample a bit and then fly it back on.  So, you know,  if you had a naughty bit in a, in a vocal,  and sometimes  you would, you know,  especially if you were under a time pressure,  the singer hadn’t learned it or couldn’t get the phrase in quite right.

you could mulch it around in there and, and get it to work, to great effect. I remember when, when Rod came and heard Rod Stewart came in and heard the comp that I did of his voice on downtown Train, he was so pleased. He picked me up and ran around the control room with me.  You know, he was so chuffed because we’d sorted out one of the lines that he had a real problem with  using,  using the Sony 48 track.

And it just went through and sounded great. He was so chuffed, you know,  so back then we were, we were tri, but so what, what used to take a day back then, you know, with lyric sheets, marking it, listening to the eight takes, and then going through it all.  Now  I can get through a vocal in an hour and a half, you know? Yeah. An hour and a quarter. Yeah.

That’s just first stage comping. Yeah. And then of course, we can do all kinds of things after that. Move it so easily. Well, you know, we used to move stuff in the old days if we didn’t think the phrase was right and move people all the time.  What, what do you work on now? Pro Tools. Pro Tools? Yeah.  I’ve never been into any of the other ones much. ’cause I don’t like the way they deal with the audio.  What do you miss?  What do I miss?  I mean, from the, from, from the Old. I miss the camaraderie of having to play everything with a bunch of guys.

I think it used to be fun when there was four or five of us in the studio, and  you had to work out an arrangement.  And I always used to try and  get a key change or do something.  And,  you know, my buddies hated key changes. So  it would force me into figuring out ways of disguising a key change, things like that. You know, I miss that sort of  the repartee and just the socialness of,  of everybody there.

And  I still like to get, you know, if, if, if I’m doing a song, you know, we got Robbie, when I did Robbie’s album about eight years ago, I started off with a band in the studio and played all the songs  and then, you know, disappeared in the back room. And we programmed them all up  using the playing as a basis for how we programmed them, you know? Yeah. I still like that process.  Do you think it was more creative then? Or do you think the, the, the software now, it just gives you more creativity?

I,  I just think it’s different. Yeah. It’s Different. You know, back in the sixties you use a guitar and an amplifier, you know,  but you know, it, it didn’t matter. You could buy a marshall hundred and, a Gibson Les Paul, but it didn’t make you very Clapton.  And it’s the same thing, you know? I see you’ve got David Getter talking tomorrow, you know?  Well, David GTA puts on a pretty good show.  He knows what he’s doing, you know what I mean?

But it’s a totally different thing.  Don’t forget, I don’t, you know, I never, I  made dance records, but most of the records I’m known for weren’t necessarily dance records.  Dance records are a very specific genre, you know? and they changed so,  so quickly.  You worked with Malcolm McLaren, didn’t you?  Yeah. How Was that? Because you, you were your co-writer on Buffalo Girls as well.  Yeah, well, that was, that’s where, where I first came across that wonderful epithet  tried, arranged by,  I’d never heard of that one before.

I suddenly discovered halfway through making the record that Malcolm was registering all of the songs as Tread arranged by Malcolm McLaren.  So I stopped it and insisted that it would be rad arranged by Malcolm McLaren, Trevor Horn, and Ann Dudley,  because Oh, yeah. Let’s, let’s explain this for, for, for the people out there that, Have you heard that tra arranged by traditional, arranged by, so  when you take an old folk tune  and you rearrange it, you see, in the case of Buffalo Gals, which was the first, the first, single that came from that record was originally based on, you know, first Buffalo gal go around the outside, around the outside, recorded in 1948 by peyote Pete on Folkways records.

but it’s actually a, a folk song. No one’s credited with writing it. It’s traditional. Yeah. So if you record a song, it becomes traditional, arranged by  whoever did it.

And, Malcolm was brilliant to work with.  You know, I wish Malcolm was here tonight. You know what I mean? He’s one of those kind of guys. He had loads of ideas  and  he was also very, very adaptable.  And so, if one of his ideas didn’t work, but you’d come up with something that was better,  he’d go along with it.  But, but he was, he,  he know, he was totally,  totally musically kind of  crazy.

If,  since I’m not playing any music, I ought probably I’ll give you, give you a demonstration of what Malcolm was like. Right. Excellent.  We have this song that he’s, that he’s written,  and it’s the first time he’s gonna sing. Right? We’re in a studio in Johannesburg, and it’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’ve got 20 Zulus, along the back of the studio, all sleeping and snoring away. And I said, right,  Malcolm, come on.

Time to sing  was, you want me to see, you know, you had that funny hat on, right? You know, the, the, the, the, the, Buffalo Gal’s hat,  you want me to sing? Alright,  I’ll go sing.  Which one do you want me to sing?  I said, well, this, this one and what we’re working on. Right, right. This one. Okay.  So he goes out  and the assistant  puts the headphones on, and he’s there with the headphones on, under the control.

And go, Malcolm. He goes, who? What, what, what? I  said, Malcolm, you’ve been in the Stu Studio before. And he was like, yeah, it was a long time ago though,  right? I said, well, look, you’re in after eight bars.  He looked at me, he went  in after eight bars, but what’s the bar?  Wow. I said, well, bars four beats.  Oh God. I said, look, I tell you what,  I watch me and I’ll give you a cue.

So, so  he is by the, by the mic.  You know, the eight bars start to play out. Malcolm, forgive me for this. I’m doing it with affection. Right. I’m not, I’m not being horrible about, he  said, he goes, Get up, do this. Says, look at Russell up. Shut Up. You shut, loves to Door, Baby.  And we were  all the Zulus along the bat woke up.  People woke up,  my engineer woke up,  Gary Lger.

And, we were kind of like gobsmacked. And of course he just went,  I kept, first kept going through the song and there was this little Zulu lady, who was like, probably five feet tall and five feet wide.  And she’s the woman that sang at the front of Buffalo. I goes, Haah, which is a Zulu Woman’s Walk cry. And I remember she said to me, Trevor,  Malcolm can’t sing.

And I said that. I said, don’t get involved. That’s my problem. So,  so Malcolm finished, and I went out and I said,  because Malcolm said at the end of it, he said, how was that? Alright,  we’re done. Right? And  I went out, I said, Malcolm, now you’ve gotta learn the, maybe you need to learn the tuna bit. You know, it needs, it goes like this. It goes, Tina, Tina says, you can dress her.

She loves you. She loves to drive my baby Tina.  And he said,  you want me to do it like that? I said, well, no, you don’t have to do it like that. I’m just telling you the Chew. He said, I can’t do it like that. He said, oh, boring and whatever like that. He said, nah, no, I’m a wacky kind of guy. He said, you’re just gonna have to deal with this.  So he did. You know, and  but it, you know, in a way, in  a way, it was a problem  for the record, you know, because every track that we did, we had to figure out some way of getting Malcolm on it.

And that wasn’t necessarily easy.  And Buffalo goes the single,  you know, I’ve told this story a few times. ’cause Malcolm, Malcolm had to wrap, you know, first Buffalo girl, I’ll go around the outside or just, you know, on the, on, on the, the single  as Buffalo gal go around the outside. I had to,  I had to stand with him with my arm around him punching his chest. First Buffalo. I said, make the words land on my punching.

You verse Buffalo Gal, go around the outside.  And we had to, we were doing that over and over again. And  then I started to get tired, and he got behind the beat and he was like, come on,  that’s Buffalo Gal. So that’s how we got it out of him.  But man, he could, he was so funny, you know, and he would tell us stories about the Sex Pistols and  some of the stuff he got up to. I, I had a great time on that record.

I loved that record. But, you know, ultimately I knew it  was only gonna, it was only gonna do so well, but it was kind of groundbreaking, I suppose. Yeah. Again, and yeah.  And, you know, you’ve, you’ve worked in such a diversity of styles as well, you know, do you, do you have like a kind of, like, do you have a go-to thing? Is, is there one thing that you go, yeah, that’s the river I really swim in?  No, I’m, I’m, I’m always just worried, you know, about getting too bored. I try not to do the same thing over and over again.

I mean, even when you try not to do the same thing over and over again, you tend to do it anyway.  But, I, I, I like all sorts of, you know, just like a good song, you know?  Yeah. But they’re hard to find.  Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.  What about, for you, what, what would you say is,  you know, what would you call, what you might say is your, your legacy song or, or work that where you sort of Go Legacy song?

I’d love to be remembered, but for that,  I mean, I, I think, I think, you know, I think I made a, like, I think Owner of Learning Heart’s a good record, really interesting record, you know,  and kind of the first one of its kind. And I think,  you know, video Killed the Radio Star was an interesting record. Doesn’t sound particularly old fashioned.  Yeah. So, yeah.  You know, I, I  suppose if I, if if, if it’s my own stuff that I’m gonna listen to, then if I listen to my own stuff, I have a tendency to listen to Seal.

You know,  Let’s, like, let’s talk about that because I mean, that, that was, again, just so different. You, I mean, you listen to  Frankie, and then you go to like Buffalo Girls, and then you go to Seal of, I mean, of course you, you, you did quite a few Seal albums, but Included, I did the First Four Kiss from a Rose, which was like, and it is like, so, so, so different.

And everything is so, yeah. And, and it’s like, I, I’m thinking, where the hell do you get all of these damned ideas from?  Well, kid, you know, kiss From A Rose was a real, he  was is one of the few songs that Seal actually wrote the whole song himself. Right? And he, and he, he wrote that song before the first album and told me about it, but never played it to me. And when we were working on the second albI said to him, what about that three four Elizabethan song you were telling me about? And  when he came in with a demo of it, I remember thinking, this is great.

My contribution to that song was I made him, I,  I took the, the middle eight, then Kiss by Rose on the Gray. I made it drop down a tone, you know, like Change Key and then Change Key Back. Mm-Hmm. And I put a three eight bar in it. But that was, you know, my, my, you know, aside from producing the record, but I always thought that was a really cool song. I didn’t know where it fitted or anything like that.  And we were very lucky because Joel Schumacher made the video.

And even though the song wasn’t in Batman, it sort of went round the world as part of the sort of Batman marketing campaign.  And it was huge. It suddenly went from nowhere to being record of the year.  I always think that’s a great example of how  it didn’t fit into any genre, urban or anything. And yet they played it on everything. And I, I think it was because it was just so good. I  mean, not, you know, the record was good, but just Seal was really good on it.

You know, the backing vocals and just the whole idea of it.  All of those harmonies in the, the last verse, you know, And he could sing,  See, oh my God. Yeah.  Well that’s one of my sort of three or four favorite sessions of all time  where when he came in, and that was another Tuesday after Funny Tuesday afternoon. Wow. He said, I’ve got some ideas with the bating vocals on Christopher Rose. And he came in and did all those backing vocals in one five hour session. Because once you get going on those sessions, you can work so fast, you know,  four, track it, bang that one done, four, track it, do it, do this, I’ve got this one.

You know, and suddenly you’ve got all of that,  all of those great. If you ever listened to it is amazing stuff. He did.  That’s when I thought, wow, this track’s really taken off. I, you know, I dunno, you know, ’cause it’s in three, four, I dunno if the radio player, but it’s really good.  Was that your favorite Seal track? Do you, would you say My favorite Seal Track?

No, it’s not my favorite.  My favorite Seal track’s probably Prayer For The Dying. I love that.  Because that really  saved my arse on the second album. ’cause it made number one alternative radio in America. They released it as an alternative thing. And that track, if you were driving around la  that track used to sound fantastic on the radio, you know? Yeah.  It was when, and it was one of those things that, you know, it was, it was the biggest pain in the neck on that album to get that track.

Right.  And, ’cause Seal kept wanting a big beat on it.  And, you know, to try and get the, get the drum loop so that it didn’t spoil a song was really hard. Yeah.  To find a dull, a drum loop,  a dull thick drum loop, 105 beats a minute, you know? Yeah. You try. I’ve been looking for them for years.  Most of my drum loops have been pretty dull actually.

so, who would you, who would you, I mean, you’ve worked with,  again, a remarkable array of people, but who would you have loved to have produced? Or who would you still love to produce?  Anybody who’s got a good, a good song? That’s the prob that’s the thing. You know, the, the problem is, is you get old. Right. You get offered all kinds of, you know, gigs that you, your old heroes, you know?  But the problem is, it’s, it’s that 17th albyou know,  you know what I mean?

That doesn’t really excite me. You know, whenever I get asked this, this question in interviews, I always say, I’d love to have to do an album with Bob Dylan. You know, Bob sings the songs from, from from the movies. Like, you know, lived System where We belong. You imagine it, it’d be hilarious, wouldn’t it?  And occasionally people have written it all down taking, you know, I’m saying. Yeah. You know. Can you imagine how cool that would be?

I can’t, I always thought Bob Dylan would’ve been interesting, but in his sort of golden era, you know, when he was writing,  writing the other songs,  it’s whoever’s got a really good song. Yeah. You know? And what makes you hungry now?  What makes me hungry now  And excited?  Yeah. Well, if you get something good on the go, it’s too, you know, it’s still an exciting thing. You don’t, you know, you never get so good at it or whatever that you,  that you just do it,  you know, go through the motions.

You can’t do that.  It’s, it’s a very, you know, I mean,  being a, being a, you know, what people regard as modern record, production is isn’t really where I come from.  I come from sort of  somebody who,  who doesn’t necessarily play everything. I don’t, you know, I, you know, I play instruments and whatever, but  I don’t,  you know, my records have all got great musicians on them.

I, I like using musicians.  I don’t like just programming s**t. You know what I mean? Boys, boys ts off me, you know, I like stuff going on. when you say what excites me, I  still just, just,  just getting something to, to, to work properly. Yeah. Getting something to,  to sit. Right. You know, I still enjoy all that process.

Yeah. And are you working with any new artists now?  I just did a week with Clan Ad.  Oh, really? Yeah. Well, fancy. Doing something that didn’t necessarily have drum machines on it or whatever. Yeah. And that was really interesting ’cause  Yeah. You know, folk musicians,  all of the  taste dials change, you know? Yeah. I, I think it,  I love to work with, I’ve tried working with young bands a few times, but  it’s very hard to find a young band that have got the balls.

Really,  most of the time they’re two scared. You know, you think you might  mess that s**t up, you know what I mean?  Right.  So what advice would you give to, to producers these days? Producers working on, you know, trying to, trying to make their mark? I mean, you’ve made your mark in so many different ways. Well, I think the first thing a producer’s got to remember is that the artist’s the most important person.  And, you know, you, you are a hired hand after all,  and it’s the artist’s record.

So you have to  make sure that whatever you’re doing,  that they’re happy with it.  You can’t just push them around and do stuff. And,  and you’ve gotta work to, you’ve gotta find out what their strengths are and, and, and present them in their best possible light.  That’s, if you’re gonna be a producer of artists, if you’re like a producer of drum loop records with no singing on them, just ramble on, then  you don’t have to worry about anything.

Yeah. But if you’re doing songs with artists,  I always remember talking to two brothers in a studio in LA  and a guy came up, who’s a big Ron, fair, big record producer type guy. Yeah. And these two young urban producers were moaning about the fact that they were working with Whitney Houston, and they were having a really hard time.  And I always remember Ron Fair said, first Division X, first division problems.

And I thought, boy, it’s like that, it really is like that sometimes, because if you work with a big singer, you know, you’ve gotta get it right. They’ve gotta be happy.  Have you ever had to really sort of  go out of your way to placate  or satisfy an artist? You know, either the, the wackiness or the whimsies of them? I mean, I was talking to Jake Gosling this morning and he said when he was working with the Libertines, he said they had canvases in the studio and they’re throwing paints at canvases and all kinds of stuff just to sort of like trying to  be,  be as one if you like, you know, like we we’re in this together.

Have, have you encountered the similar kind of things apart from Nepalese Temple Bulls?  I don’t think I, I, I’m always a bit suspicious of that kind of stuff.  I, I don’t know. You know, I mean, do you have to go that far? Painting paintings in the studio? Is that what they’re doing? Who knows? The liberties, I suppose they’re looking for a vibe. It must be quite hard because you’re playing the same old simple thing, but you’re trying to imbue it with some kind of voodoo magic.

You must have to resort to the odd thing occasionally. I’m sure the Rolling Stones did, you know, you listen to exile on Main Street or something, you think, God, anybody could probably play all of these tunes in half an hour. Really? But I suppose they were looking for  the amazing way of playing that incredibly simple thing, you know? Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.  And in terms of songwriting,  so obviously a lot of people that come through the Songwriting Academy by nature, are primarily songwriters, even if they’re producers as well.

Yeah.  Everything has changed in terms of, the music business landscape. What advice would you give to songwriters now that are, that are sort of trying to make their mark?  You mean real advice or b******t advice? Go for it. B******t.  Right. I don’t, I dunno, I dunno.

you, you wanna be a songwriter, right? It’s really difficult. It’s not what you think. It’s like, if you wanna be a film composer, believe me, the world of being a film composer is not romantic. It’s really hard work. And a lot of the time you’re having to copy other people,  songwriters,  it’s very easy to fall into a trap, I think, where, because you are chasing whatever’s happening now, that what you are knocking out are sort of facsimiles of something that’s  been a hit recently.

I’ve, I’ve heard quite a bit of that. what advice would I give you in,  in reality, only a few people are gonna make it.  So just keep going.  If you keep going,  even if you don’t have any luck at all, at first, if you keep going, at some point  it’ll happen.  You have to,  one day you’ll go, you go to bed, nothing’s happening.

You wake up the next day and you’re in business.  It just happens like that sometimes. All the rest of it, you know, like keep, keep, you know, when I say you just gotta keep doing it,  if that’s what you really want to do,  you know? But believe me,  it’s even harder than you think. It just is. You know?  And I, I,  I think, I  think  to get, I mean, I was trying to write a song for somebody with a, with a journalist,  and, and he, I remember he, we had this line, you know,  he came up with this line, you are like a blue hole in space.

And I say, if you’re gonna write lines like you are a blue hole in space,  there’s only one person that’s ever gonna sing that. You Right. You will not get anybody else to sing a line like that. Right.  I think you have to be aware of what you’re trying to get people to sing.

But it’s very hard because most artists who are any good  these days will write their own stuff, because that’s the only place you earn money now.  You don’t earn much from the records. You know,  you learn from the, from the copyrights. So most artists have t tweaked that. And so to get them to actually do your song,  I would, I would, you know, if I was a songwriter, I’d, I’d, and that’s what I really wanted to do. I’d put to, you know, if, if, if, if I was interested in boy bands or girl bands, I put my own girl band together and start working with them  and making records with them, you know?

Yeah. And my own boy band together. I wouldn’t, don’t sort of write songs and think you’re gonna drop me through the letter box and Simon, what’s face is gonna ring you up and go, Hey, you’ve got the next single with, whatever they called, one erection or whatever, that lot,  you know what I mean? That’s not gonna happen ever. Right.

It doesn’t even happen if you, if you’re sort of famous. Right. it just doesn’t happen. So  you gotta make your own act.  Don’t hang around waiting for somebody else to do it for you.  You gotta do it yourself,  and you just gotta keep going until you manage to, achieve it. And you, every time you think you’ve learned a lesson, you’ll find it’s like peeling the skin off an onion. There’s another layer to go down, you know?

But that’s what makes it interesting. Yeah. And it certainly is, isn’t it? Yeah.  So you’re talking about, you know, music these days. When was the last time that you, you heard something, and you just went, wow, I love that. That’s a groundbreaking record or song, you know, the career songs that we’re talking about. I like the song about the cowboy riding the, you know, the new one.  Yeah, I like that. Which One was that?  Old Town Road,  right?

Yeah. Is that, that’s the one. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. so I see, I still hear the things. I like  it. Do you know,  when I listen to like the top 10  in America,  every track, even if I can’t remember, it  has got some kind of gag in it, that’s really good. Otherwise it wouldn’t be in the top 10. Yeah. And it’s still the same thing, you know, you just hear something that’s got something good about it. Yeah.  Okay. Let’s talk about professional jealousy now.  So  records that you, you you’ve listened to and you think, damn, I wish I’d produced that.

Hell, that’s a, a hell of a bit of Work.  Uptown Funk. I wish I’d done that one. That was a good one. Yeah. I first heard that. I loved that. yeah. Records I wish I’d produced  Highway 61 revisit.  Yeah. you know, back in the day when I started up a Queen with a holy grail of record production, you know, I don’t think Killer Queen as a piece of rock record production has ever been betted,  you know,  killer Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody, tho like, between those two, there’s just about every gag, you know,  I, I, I loved Jeff Lin, you know, ELO  Oh, out of the blue.

I mean, the songs were absolutely  naff, but  brilliantly done, you know what I mean? Yeah. Brilliantly done. You didn’t want the lyrics to mean anything, you know,  because the whole soundscape was so exciting.

It didn’t need to be relevant, you know, socially or anything. Yeah. So, yeah, those are the kind of records I, I, I wished I’d done not many records in the eighties that I wished I’d done, but,  you know.  And what’s next for Trevor Horn?  What’s next for me? Well, I’ve got, I just did Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits, rod Stewart and the  Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

So I’ve got that coming out fabulous. At Christmas.  And I think Rod’s probably on the Royal Variety Show. I just did a duet with him and Robbie  Oh, brilliant. Singing a song. Yeah, I could say that. Which is kind of funny. You know,  they’re both, alpha males.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get them both in the room together. I’d love to have had them in a room together. but,  you know,  I think Rod Rod came to my house.

I had to go out to Robbie’s house and  set up a studio in his bedroom to record him. Right.  And, artists, they, you know, they the who can you pick a favorite artist? Would that be a, a  bad question? That would be a bad man for asking that question. Well, favorite artists that you’ve produced, you’ve Worked with. Well, I, you know, I,  with all due respect to everybody I’ve ever worked with, I’d have to say Seal, because I’d made so many records with him and, you know, six record albums with him.

Yeah. Way more than I ever made with anybody else. A lot of other people, I just made one record with them, you know? Yeah. But, so, you know, I’m very fond of Seal.  Yeah. And what a talent. Remarkable, remarkable talent.  Yeah. should we take some questions from, from these lovely people? Yeah, We, for time. Oh, okay. Yeah. have we got the, the catch box? Does anybody have any questions for Trevor?

Okay. Excellent.  What’s that?  This is a throw ball microphone.  Wow. Alright. Oh, is it not? Is it not on?  So that’s not a throw ball microphone, what he’s got in his hand right now. Yeah. Well, it, technically it’s throw, but it is not necessarily catchable.  So the words, paradigm shift occurred to me because you are notorious, whether it’s apocryphal or not, of stripping back,  you know, and saying, it’s good,  but it’s not good enough yet.

We’ll take it rather than, because we, we’ve been listening to songs here that people have written this afternoon,  and we’ve been suggesting tweaks. It’d be good if you just tweak that or just tweak that. But, you represent to me that kind of paradigm shift. I mean, it’s a revolution of saying it’s great. It’s great. It’s not good enough yet. So, would you suggest that us as aspiring songwriters stop tweaking and just go,  we’ll start again.

Good question.  In writing the song or making a record, well in, you know, slaying your babies is or slaying your darlings Yeah. Is, is is a phrase across the art business, whether it’s music or art or sculpture or performance.  So it’s whether you would still be, because I come outta the punk movement and we just kind of said, no, it’s not good enough.

We’ll just, we’ll make one up on stage, you know?  So, would you suggest  tweaking? Or would, would you suggest revolution?  Well, it depends what you’re trying to achieve. And you’re trying to, you know, if we’re talking about,  you know, I based what I’m trying to achieve with the record, I’m trying to make the record entertaining from one end to the other with no flat spots that bore you. You know,  you can get  songs, you can get better and better.

Most people don’t have the stomach to rewrite a song. I always say it takes a producer to rewrite the song, you know, and it’s things like trying to make the verse go properly into the chorus, you know, make the lyrics sort of follow through and make sense and pay off, you know, and just things like, things like that. Don’t forget, sometimes as a producer, you, you get a demo, which is the guy, you know, crazy, you know, you know, man decides after seven, he’s nothing there to work from.

And you have to, you know, just a guy in an acoustic guitar.  And you have to figure out some way of taking that acoustic guitar and making it into instrumentation  and all of those things. And within doing that, you start to rewrite the song a little bit here and there. When you say tweak it, you know, to, I, I dunno, I dunno, you know, your frames of reference, you know?  Well, I, I, I, I’m aware of sometimes well, say for instance, Elton John and Bernie TAing, Bernie TAing would send in these lyrics and they’d go, these are the,  this is what I envision.

And Elton John would say, yeah, but I’m just gonna take this line  and make that into the chorus, because that’s the bit I like.  And for topping that was quite traumatic, because it’d say, well, this is the song. So I, I, I suppose I’m,  I’m wanting you to say, yeah,  you want revolution, don’t you just go for the, you know, if the essence is there and you know it in your heart.

Right. You know, the essence is really that line you wrote just as you were walking into the studio, having got this finished thing. You just admit Yeah. Actually that, yeah. I want, yeah, you’re right. I want revolution. Yeah. And I think that’s what you represent to me personally.  Say revolution. Okay. No, but, okay.  So You’re in this, then we can move on.

That’s why he’s saying You, you, you sometimes when you’re working on a song and you have a fixed idea of how it should be, and it doesn’t seem to want to go like that. Yeah. And then something goes wrong and something happens and you go,  now that’s an idea. Yeah. That you should be able to turn on the six sprint and Yeah. Pursue whatever is really good if it comes up. Okay.  Well, just one thing before I, before I sit down, you said with Radio Star, you developed it, you developed it, you developed it. Mm-Hmm. And then you said, oh, wait a minute, we’ve lost all those things.

Because Yeah, we tried to develop it too much because we got bored with hearing them upset. Yeah. But very often the essence is, is there this man in the green shirt take a Thank you very much. Okay.  David. Yes. Trevor, I remember, I  think it was you years ago saying,  always pay attention to the record. That’s at number one. Do  you remember that at all in some interview years ago? Probably. Yeah. You know, I always, it always stuck in my mind and I, you know, you said it for a reason  and those records were number one for a reason.

Yeah. But if you did say it, do you think that still applies today? Yes.  I think, I think it’s a, you know, it’s, apart from, apart from sort of  records from things like X Factor, which I regard as, you know, aberrations in a way, they’re only there because of what happened on the tv. You mostly find things that get to number one are really good,  you know?

And I always remember Ann Dudley once said something funny to me. she was saying,  I don’t smoke pot ’cause everything sounds too good. And  I said, and I mean, you ever smoked pot? You smoked pot one time. She said, I did once  and everything sounded good. I  said, what were you listening to?  So I was listening to the top 10 on the radio.  That’s why it all sounded good, You know, The X Factor wasn’t around then,  you know, I mean, they can, the reason I keep going back to that is ’cause they can get records to number one, that like s**t, you know what I mean?

That nobody would normally in their right minds touch, but, you know, because of the power of the show. Yeah, Sure. It’s about tv, isn’t it? More than, more than music.  So I still think it’s worth paying attention. But I dunno what number one is this week very Wise. Oh, also, is the producer’s band gonna be doing anything this year? The producer’s band?

It’s all producer’s. All Chris Braid. If Chris Braid wants to do a gig, we’d do a gig. You,  he’s off in Songwriter World in Hollywood. Let’s have a question from Khaled there.  nice to meet you in, in my opinion, you produced one of the four  most important albums of all time that are, Avi wrote  and I, that the, the opera Dark Side of the Moon, A 91 2 5 Ida, 1, 2, 5.

Yeah, definitely. But very flattery. Thank you very much. Can you tell us something about this masterpiece? the process of recording this album?  How long have we got? I know We got, God,  don’t forget, I’d been a singer in Yes. In 1980. Yeah. Yeah. So I knew all the guys in Yes. And, and it, it, it gave me a bit of a,  it gave me a bit of a sort of inside track because I could really play on their emotions.  And I I, I did, I did that album straight after Malcolm McLaren.

So I went straight from like, rapping and scratch into Yes.  And that was a bit of a culture shock, even though I knew what I was letting myself in for  getting them to do Owner of a Lonely Heart was, was was the biggest problem because Trevor Raven had written that song, but he hadn’t written it for Yes.  And  they thought it was too simple and poppy for them. But  that was getting get, you know, that was, that was a real,  was a real trip getting them to do that.

And also that was a great,  I actually have like 16% of Honorable, lonely Heart. ’cause I rewrote the verses. ’cause the verses were originally completely different.  So Yeah. Yeah. That was one of those things that happens once in, yes. We’re just at a point, you know, and, and,  and like at one point they tried to bail an out of a lonely heart, you know, they said,  it’s wrong for us, we don’t want to do it.

You know, and, and I literally, I got on the floor and I begged them, please, please do it, please. I,  I I’m famous record producer and, and I need to get a hit with you. And if you don’t do this, we won’t have a hit, you know,  and, play, you know, because I’d been in the group.  I mean, I was doing it as partly as a windup, but I was serious as well, you know? Yeah. And, it did take a while because it was the first time they’d ever played with a drum machine as well.

So it was a whole load of things that they’d never done before.  So it was like,  drag them through it a bit, kicking and screaming. But once they, once they got into,  once they sort of got into it all, you know, the, the every Familiar With the Record Owner of A Lonely Heart has a really great sample in the middle and a great lick where the, a horn section goes, da da da da da da. A triplet, you know, that was Alan White.  I gave him the sample on a Fairlight and said,  we do something with this in the middle.

And he did all of that stuff, you know,  so that, that was, it’s too late to, you know, I could spend two hours talking about that record. But  Yeah. Fantastic record. Really good. Yeah. Let’s take one final question from Taz at the front here. Stand up. Yeah. Stand. Yeah. From, from there. Yeah. What, what’s your favorite, Bob Marley record  and can I borrow some sinking come from, the Batman kids from the Row you’d see I that, no, what’s your favorite Bob Marley record?

My favorite, my favorite Bob Marley record is I shot the Sheriff.  I always liked that the best. with, with, Buffalo Soldiers, I always liked that one  as well, because we used to, you know, Bob,  Bob Marley used to record  in the studio. I used to have, but, but, but, ’cause it was originally Island Studios and then we changed it into Som West.

Yeah. And they’ve just put a plaque on the building and I unveiled the plaque. And we used to have Bob’s old crew.  We had all the gangsters from, you know, Peter to all these,  Well, we did have Peter too. No, these big as that. But, but like, lucky Gordon, who was, who was his chef, used to cook in the studios. And because we were right next to All Saints Road in like, from 1982 onwards,  we used to have all the local guys used to come in and hang in the studio, you know?

and they used to tell me stories about, Bob and whatever, you know,  so, yeah. Fabulous.  So it’s just like, just everybody you’ve, you’ve either worked with or known or did, connected to so many incredible icons in the music business. And Yeah. I,  I could sit here and talk for hours, but I know that, that our time is limited.

but, I was just gonna, I know we kind of like touched on it very, very briefly before we came in here, but I was gonna see if there might be a way that you might be able to play something. Is that putting on Jesus Christ. You, but I’m a, the thing is, I’m a record producer. If I, you want me to pick what, what would you like me? Well, I’ll tell you, if you did, if you did do Radio Star, then we could probably blank the production, couldn’t we? And the keyboard parts and the,  and the, the backing vocals, because there’s a load of pe load of great singers in here.

but it’s, it’s entirely your call. I don’t wanna No, no pressure or anything, Trevor. But I Mean, it’ll be, Do  you know  I do We have the, plug, where is the plug? I’ve never played it on the acoustic guitar. Really? And not, certainly not on The Key It was written. Am I Is it here?

Oh, we do, we do actually have  the plug for it. You  got that?  Sorry.  Don’t record.  Oh, yes. No, no. Phone recordings. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

Good point. Very. It’s just such a funny thing to sit and play the towards. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s, no phone recordings. Thank you. Phones away. Thank You. IWireless back in 52,  lying awake on You.  If I was young, it didn’t stop  you.  They took the credit for your second pho  rewritten by a machine on new technology.

And  now I understand the problem.  I’m sorry. I met your children. What did you tell? Three, four.

And now we meet in abandoned studio.  We the playback. And it seems so long ago. And you remember the, the first one?  You were the last one. We can’t Rewind.

We’ve  Far  Let’s leave it back. Thank you. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, please go crazy for Trevor Horn. Thank you very much.