Trevor Horn:

Video Killed the Radio Star

Video killed the radio star

Video killed the radio star

In my mind and in my car

We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far

Pictures came and broke your heart

Put the blame on VCR

No kid in the Western world could have missed the Buggles’ hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” when it exploded on the scene in 1979, ushering in the over-the-top go-go ’80s. Tailor made for fluorescent-clothed teens, the song still more excitingly announced the arrival of music videos on TV—hardly as impactful as the first televised presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy, but a new and important dimension in pop music and pop culture generally. Aptly, “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first clip shown on MTV when the network launched, on August 1, 1981; the single shot to number one in sixteen countries, selling more than 12 million.

Funnily enough, in pop music terms, the musicians in the Buggles were on the old side to be debuting, all verging on thirty years of age. They also hailed from Britain, where there were only (gasp) three TV channels, as opposed to at least seven, plus cable (including MTV), in the United States. But this hit would be instrumental in setting up the career of one Buggle, the lead singer and a co-composer, who would become one of the main architects shaping the soundscape of the coming decade, not as an artist but as a producer: Trevor Horn.

I was familiar with Horn’s name because of the effect it had on people in the pop music world—sheer reverence—when his name came up in connection with Duck Rock (1983), the seminal album by my late boyfriend Malcolm McLaren. Duck Rock was Malcolm’s first as an artist, after having art-directed and managed the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols, and Bow Wow Wow. Ostensibly Duck Rock was based on indigenous dance music around the world, but in fact it introduced world music and (soon to be dubbed) hip-hop to the world at large.

I met Horn once briefly after Malcolm died but I didn’t truthfully understand what it meant to produce Duck Rock or any of these records that were made just at the dawn of the digital age. By the time I knew Malcolm, technology was light years ahead of when he made Duck Rock, nearly twenty years earlier, with Horn. Now, with Horn’s entertaining memoir Adventures in Modern Recording, I understand and appreciate that what he’s done as producer, with Malcolm and other artists—a veritable who’s who of the ’80s verging into the ’90s, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones, Pet Shop Boys, Simple Minds, Rod Stewart, Seal, and even Paul McCartney—as nothing short of magic.

I initially picked up Horn’s book because several people in the music world told me that it was great, especially what he wrote about Malcolm. I was a bit dubious at first because I find most of these memoirs not very good in and of themselves and geared for die-hard fans and music geeks. Because I am not a “muso,” I find this disappointing, but to my surprise, Horn’s book captivated me. It’s very funny and also very real. He brings a musical era to life and we learn how his skill with the latest technology, which he initially had access to through the money earned from “Video Killed the Radio Star,” made him one of the foremost producers of the ’80s. It was a time when technology was changing so fast that a track’s date of production can be pinpointed within months by the techniques implemented to make it. Happily, Horn explains these technical aspects in an accessible way for non-muso nerds like me to appreciate.

The lifetime of the postwar baby boomer generation is one of remarkable technological and social advance. Horn, like Malcolm, grew up at the tail end of what in Britain was an economy of necessity, where you only had what you absolutely needed. When I brought this up during our chat, he agreed: “I remember in the ’50s, nobody had anything. They could eat but there wasn’t lots of stuff around. Any little bit of stuff that you got was treasured.” A record player was a big deal, and besides live acts, you could only hear music on the radio—three stations: Radio Luxembourg, the BBC Light Programme, and the BBC Home Service.

Horn started out as a musician, following in the footsteps of and often stepping in for his father, an amateur bassist. His parents, though understandably doubtful about a career in music, were supportive: his father bought him studio time in the early ’60s, where he made his first record; his mother encouraged him to submit it to the local radio station, which remarkably led to airplay; his grandparents bought him new speakers after he blew out his first set by distorting the guitar sound incorrectly. These starts and stops (forays into more traditional jobs—a rubber company, a plastic company) eventually led to his working as a jobbing musician, writing songs and producing, culminating with the massive hit “Video Killed the Radio Star.” That song changed his life, affording him not only financial stability but the resources to invest in new technology and take creative risks. After touring with Yes, his favorite band, he wisely followed the advice of his manager and wife, Jill Sinclair, who told him, “As an artist, you’ll always be second division, whereas if you go into production, you can become the best producer in the world.”

Horn told me, it “took about five years to get from my first production to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ It was a good thing because by the time I got a hit, I kind of knew what I was doing. It wasn’t a fluke—obviously it’s a fluke when it’s such a big record—but I’d put in years in studios so I kind of knew how they worked. Going into the studio back then was very different from going into a studio now. . . . You couldn’t program it. It had to be played. So you had to mike up drum kits and pianos. People had to play together . . . that’s how we used to do it in the early days to eight-track.”

Horn’s first successes as a producer were with the band Dollar, hand-picked for him by Sinclair, and then with ABC. With Dollar he began to put together a team that included the gifted pianist Anne Dudley and one of the very first digital samplers, the Fairlight. The instrument was exorbitantly expensive, about the cost of a house, and Horn was one of the first handful of people to acquire one. “I was the first person to try to use the Fairlight on mainstream records,” he explained. “I did some things with it that really really worked and people didn’t know how I’d done it.”

Producing Dollar and ABC was straightforward, no matter how innovative Horn was with the Fairlight. Malcolm was another story entirely. Malcolm was familiar with the recording process but the recordings of the groups he’d worked with were basically musical performances in the studio (whether or not you thought punk was musical). Duck Rock was more of a concept, and in the context of its time, not even really music: Horn had to turn abstract ideas and a collection of seemingly random sounds that Malcolm had discovered in different parts of the world, and that appeared to have nothing to do with pop music, into hits.

“I decided to organize a tour to the places and origins of those exotic and magical sounds [many discovered in the Pompidou library],” explained Malcolm in a document he prepared to go with the album’s 25th anniversary rerelease, and he took Horn along. Malcolm would laugh and describe how he had fended off Sinclair as she demanded angrily over the phone, “Where have you taken my Trevor?” The answer was New York (hip-hop, rap), South Africa (township music), and Appalachia, where the square dance came from, the root of the unlikely but seminal single “Buffalo Gals.”

“Whenever I asked Malcolm about a possible single, he’d always say, ‘Buffalo Gals,’ which terrified me,” relates Horn. “How the hell were we going to make a corny old square dance into a hit single? But we soldiered on, mainly due to his blind determination.” Somehow Horn took the cry that a Zulu woman makes (“One night she [Zulu singer] told me about a noise that Zulu women made as they killed someone. She shook her whole body and made this bloodcurdling shriek that sounded like a war cry. I recorded it immediately—it’s the sound that starts ‘Buffalo Gals.’”); rapping and scratching from the World’s Famous Supreme Team, who hustled on the streets of New York; and Malcolm’s rapping (kept in time by Horn beating his chest), and turned all this into a mind-blowing classic that inspired multitudes and has been sampled in over 300 tracks, by musicians ranging from Eminem to Lana Del Rey, Dr. Dre, Public Enemy, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, and Neneh Cherry.

When “Buffalo Gals” was delivered to the record company, Malcolm was told it “wasn’t music” and that he was trying to “swindle” them again. But radio play and the public’s overwhelmingly favorable reaction saved Malcolm and the track. Horn told me proudly, “I remember one DJ who played it said, ‘You know what, I’m going to play that again.’ He played it a second time on Radio One because he liked it so much! It was so unusual.” He said it turned the rapper Rakim, initially unfriendly, into a fan: “Man you did ‘Buffalo Gals? And you did Art of Noise!’ They loved ‘Buffalo Gals.’ I got respect!”

Malcolm told me that the morning after he spent the night in a Los Angeles jail for speeding on Sunset Boulevard, the guard who arrived for the new shift noticed his name. “Malcolm McLaren? ‘Buffalo Gals’! He’s here? We can’t have that!,” the guard apparently exclaimed before releasing him.

Horn used some of the ideas from Duck Rock when he made another cutting-edge record, Into Battle with the Art of Noise (1983). This was the first release of his record company ZTT (Zang Tumb Tumb, after a sound poem by the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti), which he formed with Sinclair and the New Musical Express journalist Paul Morley. Into Battle was followed by ZTT’s first signing, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and another monster single, “Relax.” “It was an exciting time,” Horn remembered. “You could do audio gags on records that nobody had ever done before. I kept abreast of the technology. . . . Literally that week, a piece of kit came out and suddenly we could lock a drum machine to the Fairlight. That was the sound of ‘Relax.’” For Frankie’s next single, “Two Tribes” (1984), he enlisted the new Synclavier, which cost $350,000.

What is notable about Horn’s career is that although he made such enormous commercial hits, he continued to push artistic boundaries with commercially risky projects like the Art of Noise. But even those, like the Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” (1985), were successful. If you don’t know it by name, you’ll probably recognize it when you hear it.

And then there’s another crazy record: Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm (1985), which consists of the title track remixed in eight different ways. It started when Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records (who had also signed the Buggles), asked Horn to make a single remix of “Slave to the Rhythm,” a track originally written for the Frankies, for a greatest-hits album. “Delusions of grandeur!” enthused Horn when we spoke. “I love the track. . . . We got a bit carried away. . . . I thought it might be worth having because we tried so many different things. We had this amazing new technology”—the Synclavier, which is credited in the sleeve notes—and you could “do so many things with this one track.” Remarkably, when Horn proposed the novel idea of an album of remixes instead of a single track, Blackwell went along with it once he recovered from shock. The result is an iconic concept album with snippets of Jones conversing about her life, voice-overs by actor Ian McShane, and even a clip of Johnny Carson introducing Jones on The Tonight Show. Horn explained, “You wanted to do something with [Jones] because she was so interesting to look at. She was a fun person too. . . . It’s like the ultimate remix album.” It’s incredible that such a record was made, but the artistic faith was rewarded: Slave to the Rhythm was one of Jones’s most commercially successful albums, selling over a million in its first year, and the single became her biggest hit. But Horn contextualizes, “I think people were shocked that the song ‘only’ got to number twelve [in the UK] because up to then just about everything I’d done was such a big hit.”

When I asked Horn about the role of technology in his work, he answered, “Yes, I think technology always shapes music if you think about it. In the 1920s, the orchestra was at its peak—classical orchestras playing great works by composers who were like rock stars. That’s a machine—that’s all music machines: violins, double basses—you’re building those instruments, tuning them, teaching people to play them. Music’s always been about technology. The guitar back in the ’30s wasn’t considered a lead instrument because it wasn’t as loud as horns. Horns were really loud but the guitar wasn’t . . . they would amplify it by sticking a mike in it . . . the invention of the electric guitar was by Black blues players in Chicago and places like that, who took it and played it in a completely different way and turned the amplifier up.”

Meanwhile, Horn still gigs as a musician: most recently “I played with four of the guys who were in Dire Straits in a band called Dire Straits Legacy. It’s an eight-piece band and it’s all Dire Straits stuff. I play bass with them. It’s just for the fun of it. I’ve done it quite a bit. This year I played with Seal. I did a thirty-five-minute Buggles set and then a two-hour set with Seal playing music from his first two albums in America and Europe. I’m actually doing a TV show in Spain [in a few days]. I’m going to sing a song from Deutsche Grammophon.”

By “Deutsche Grammophon” Horn means his latest project, Echoes: Ancient & Modern, a vinyl album covering iconic songs from the ’80s and ’90s, released on that famous German classical-music label. Iggy Pop sings a very Iggy version of “Personal Jesus.” “It was originally acoustic,” Horn told me, “but Iggy wanted to put some punk guitar on it.” There’s also yet a new version of “Slave to the Rhythm,” this time sung by Lady Blackbird, while Horn himself sings an ethereal version of Roxy Music’s “Avalon.”

“It’s the music you listen to before you mate that generally is the music that stays with you. When you have children, music can fall to second place. . . . A lot of people who retire are interested in the music that was made when they were young, like the stuff in the ’80s so there is a certain market,” he mused. This may be partly why Horn’s tracks resonate so much today, with people who grew up with his hits now in middle age and thereby influential—whether in deciding what music is played publicly or passing on their tastes to their Gen Z and younger offspring. But on the other hand, these tracks are simply great!