I heard you on the wireless back in '82: How video and radio star Trevor Horn created the sound of the '80s, from the Buggles to 'Buffalo Gals'
After kicking off MTV with "Video Killed the Radio Star," the Buggles' Trevor Horn remained at the forefront of the 1980s' music revolution — but he says it was his work on "one of the very first real, classic hip-hop records" that earns him the most cred today.
When Seal announced his summer tour dates earlier this year, playing his classic albums Seal I and Seal II, it was exciting news. But nostalgic music fans were equally if not more thrilled about the bill’s quite surprising opening act: the Buggles, embarking on their first-ever full official tour.
Trevor Horn, who founded the short-lived but seminal synthpop band in 1977 with future Asia and Yes member Geoffrey Downes, could have easily signed up for of the many multi-artist new wave package tours that crisscross America every summer. But the 73-year-old superproducer, who has confounded expectations throughout his diverse career, tells Yahoo Entertainment that touring with Seal — the artist with whom he’s had his most long-running creative partnership — seemed “more interesting than being one more name on a great big ‘80s bill; I don't really fancy that. Basically, Seal wanted to do a tour where he played mostly stuff on the first two albums. And he asked me if I’d MD [music-direct] the band for him, since I produced both those records. And then his manager came up with this idea: ‘Why don't you be the support act — as the Buggles?’ And you know, I'm at that point in life where I can kind of do what I want, so I thought, ‘Oh, why not?’ So, that's what I'm doing.”
If Horn had never worked with Seal (or on his many other productions, ranging from Paul McCartney and Yes to the Coyote Ugly soundtrack and t.A.T.u.), and had only released one song during his career, he would still have a permanent place in pop-culture history with “Video Killed the Radio Star.” That song was famously the first video ever played on MTV, on Aug. 1, 1981, almost two full years after it appeared the Buggles’ debut album, The Age of Plastic. And the single’s prophecy soon came true, with Horn going on to produce many artists who dominated MTV’s first decade, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Pet Shop Boys, ABC, Grace Jones, Spandau Ballet, and Yes. “You could feel that everything was going to change. … Everything changed, and it changed very quickly over a few years, probably from ‘78 through to ‘83 or ’84,” Horn recalls. “That was the most incredible time in terms of music technology.”
Horn was at the forefront of music technology throughout the ‘80s and beyond, but he seems especially proud of the groundbreaking 1982 single “Buffalo Gals,” by ex-Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren featuring the World's Famous Supreme Team. “Buffalo Gals” was Britain’s first-ever scratching record — with producer and co-writer Horn himself composing most of the scratching — and it became an unexpected U.K. top 10 hit. It was later sampled or interpolated by Eminem (on “Without Me”), Neneh Cherry (on “Buffalo Stance,” of course), Public Enemy, Skee-Lo, Kylie Minogue, Nelly Furtado, and Sublime, and Horn says it was “one of the best records I ever did” that still tends to garner him the most cred. “Scratching was something that was pretty underground, and I managed to put it on a single that was a monster hit in England and Europe,” he says. “It's one of those records that if I ever bump into anybody from the hip-hop world, I get a lot of kudos from having made one of the very first real, classic hip-hop records.”
Below, Trevor reminisces about that landmark recording and his other classic productions from the ‘80s — a few of which he’ll actually be breaking out for the Buggles' tour — as well as how exactly that wacky “Video Killed the Radio Star” music video came to be.
Yahoo Entertainment: You’ve had such a long, varied, storied career, but obviously I have to start by asking about “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Do you have any insight about why it was chosen to be MTV’s kickoff video?
Trevor Horn: I don’t! They certainly didn't consult me! [laughs] But I have to say it was tailor-made for MTV, because the message was that, you know, video was going to overtake radio. And it did, for a couple of years, which was amazing. So, I wasn't surprised when they used it.
In the early ‘80s, there was definitely a vocal contingent of rock fans who hated MTV. I can imagine you catching some flak when the song’s prophecy came true — like, “Oh no, look what you've done!”
Well, I loved MTV for about the first two years, but then, like anything, you get very tired of it. And I started to realize after a while, “My goodness, I never saw a video for ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ by Bob Dylan, and yet that was one of my all-time favorite records.” I didn't need to see it on a video.
Music video as an art form really started in the U.K., which was why so many British artists dominated MTV in its early days. As a British artist, did you see this already see this video revolution coming to pass in 1979?
Yes, you could feel that everything was going to change. I was reading a lot of sci-fi at the time, a lot of J.G. Ballard, and the idea came from J.G. Ballard, basically, this idea that music was no longer something that you listened to: It had been distilled into just emotion, and you felt the emotion rather than hearing the actual song. That didn’t really happen, of course, but the thing that did happen in the late ‘70s was the techno revolution. Everything changed, and it changed very quickly over a few years, probably from ‘78 through to ‘83 or ’84. That was the most incredible time in terms of music technology.
Would you say the Buggles’ debut album The Age of Plastic is a concept album, then?
It definitely had an overarching theme, and that was songs about technology. I was trying to get away from the normal human relationship songs. … There were lots of references to old radio stations and things like that. The album just had an air of desperation about it at the time. If I could go back 40 years, maybe I would make it into a full concept album. [laughs]
I must ask about the “Video Killed the Radio Star” video itself, because it's so ingrained in people's minds. Jimbo from RuPaul’s Drag Race Canada even recently recreated it, shot-for-shot. And it was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who would go on to dominate MTV just two or three years later with all of the videos he did for Second British Invasion artists like Duran Duran. What memories do you have of making that video? It looks — and I mean this in the best possible way — kind of cheap. Cheap in a cool way, if that makes sense. It looks a little bit arts-and-crafts.
It was definitely arts and crafts! [laughs] It was all shot in one day. I think we were the first people that said to Russell, “Just do whatever you want. We'll do whatever you tell us to do.” I think both Geoffrey and I had figured out that by that point that we didn't have a clue about videos, and we would be much better in the hands of somebody who really knew what they were doing. And Russell did. My memories of making the video are showing up at a TV studio at sort of 8 o'clock in the morning, getting dressed in my outfit, and then just a series of movements. Russell said, “OK, lean into this light. Mime the first two lines.” And that was one take. It was like, “Take one! OK, next setup!” It was like 30 setups or something, in one day. It was amazing. It went so fast.
And the rest was pop history.
Well, when I actually saw the video for the first time, I was semi-horrified. I really liked the front part, where I lean into the light. I thought that was good. But then I hated the full-length shots of me playing bass. It put me off, really. I never wanted to be that kind of rock star, you know. But there you go.
How did it feel to become sort of a surprise video star, at a relatively advanced age? You were 30 years old when the song came out, and 32 when MTV premiered — which is young, but not by MTV standards.
Yeah, I was a late starter. I looked younger than I was, but I'd actually been a professional musician since I was like 17. And I'd done all kinds of work, as a bass player mainly. I didn't enjoy being a pop star very much back then, because I was used to playing, and being a pop star meant going all over Europe in a silver suit and miming on every TV show and answering loads of inane questions. The thing was, most people like us would be someone's pawn… but the fact that we'd written a song, and produced it ourselves, meant we were quite self-sufficient. We weren't a silly boy band or anything like that. So, the actual act of going all over the place and miming on TV left me pretty cold, to be honest. I was desperate to get back to something more real. And then, of course, we did a pretty mad thing: We joined Yes!
Well, let's talk about some of your other greatest hits, including your work with Yes. But I want to start with one of your earliest productions: ABC’s The Lexicon of Love. It is in my top five albums of all time, and it’s my go-to heartbreak soundtrack. It's the album I always put on when I am going through a breakup…
Hold on. I hope you don't have too many breakups!
No, not too many. But it has been very important album in my life!
That was the first album that I actually produced for someone else. I was very lucky, because the songs were just great. When I heard the songs, I loved them. I loved the lyrics, and how ABC were using dance music as a way of expressing themselves. … They wanted to make a record that could be played in their local club [in Sheffield, England], but would also have a certain literary edge to it. It was something different — that's the first thing that's struck me when I heard their music. I just loved [frontman] Martin Fry's lyrics.
That record has such a lush sound, too. Even though it sounded very modern and new wave, there was something old-fashioned about it — or maybe “classic” is the better word. Were you going for some kind of retro, orchestral aesthetic?
Yeah, a little bit. I was born in 1949, and the first music that I really enjoyed was actually old dance band music — old standards like Sinatra and that kind of thing. That was the first music that really turned me on. Rock ‘n’ roll actually took quite a long time to get through to me. It always sounded a little bit coarse to me, when I started out — which is the way it sounded to our parents, you know! [laughs] At the same time, I was very conscious of trying to make [Lexicon] competitive with the records that ABC were listening to that they really liked, like Chic. I wanted to be able to compete with that. I didn't want to make some kind of crappy English imitation. So, I worked really hard on it in that respect.
The result was very cinematic, almost like a James Bond soundtrack.
Well, I suppose being a producer is a bit like being a film director. When you're producing, your engineer is almost like your director of photography. And I was very fortunate: I had a great recording engineer [Gary Langan] who had a whole idea of how it should sound. Many things came together, is what I'm trying to say. I was lucky.
Let's move on to another album that was so important early on in your career: Duck Rock by Malcolm McLaren. The idea that the Sex Pistols’ manager would be an early adapter of hip-hop in '82, with such a trailblazing single like “Buffalo Gals” — and that you composed most of the scratching for “Buffalo Gals” — is mind-blowing to me.
It's funny that you would ask me about this record, because people don't often ask me about it! And yet I think it was one of the best records I ever did. Scratching was something that was pretty underground, and I managed to put it on a single that was a monster hit in England and Europe. Malcolm wasn't necessarily the most commercial artist; he couldn't sing very well, and he was rather odd-looking. But he had great ideas, and he had this idea that somehow all music from around the world was linked together in some way. So, we went all over the place. We went to South Africa, and we were there two or three years before Paul Simon did Graceland; we had that kind of South African township beat on the record. It's one of those records that if I ever bump into anybody from the hip-hop world, I get a lot of kudos from having made one of the very first real, classic hip-hop records. … The guy that runs the record label XL in England just told me how amazing it was that he had just discovered that I had made that record.
The 50th anniversary of hip-hop is this year, and in 1982, the genre was still not mainstream at all. But did you see this was the future? Did you know that hip-hop was basically going take over MTV, and create new video stars, in just a few years?
I could see that it was definitely coming on. What surprised me was how — what's the word for it? — un-conservative hip-hop was, how people were prepared to really try anything. I loved that. I did meet Grandmaster Flash at one point — the very first sort of scratching record was actually “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” — and Afrika Bambaataa, whose “Planet Rock” had a sample from Kraftwerk on it. Malcolm and I were pretty close behind all of that.
I guess it's all connected, because Kraftwerk was the gateway artist for you, right?
Oh, yes. When I heard [Kraftwerk’s 1978 album] The Man Machine, that made me realize that something was going to happen very soon. I could feel it. It was the first time I'd heard an alternative to a basic rock band. I grew up with the Beatles, and I loved them, but by the mid-to-late ‘70s, you could feel something new was coming.
And I suppose that — just like with hip-hop, with music videos, and with MTV — a lot of doubters and rock purists thought electronic music wasn’t going to last, either.
I know! It's amazing how these things stick around! [laughs]
Another production I definitely want to ask about is Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who just reunited at Eurovision. A lot of people thought they were a passing fad, actually. But it was such a big sound that you architected for them when you signed them to your ZTT Records label. I think because Frankie’s success was so brief, people tend to forget how massive they were for a while.
Yeah, like for a year they were huge in England. It was like the Second Coming. And then it sort of faded out. In a way, that [big sound] was their idea. When I met them, they said, “We want to sound like a combination of KISS and Donna Summer.” I thought that was an intriguing concept, but it was more difficult to do that back in 1983 than it would be now! [laughs] We really had to work hard to get it to work. I still think those Frankie records were some of the best-engineered records I ever made, the best-recorded. They still sound terrific, even now.
Frankie were very groundbreaking, not just for that gigantic sound, but for being an openly LGBTQ + band.
Well, it was an interesting idea that you had a band where two of the guys were very gay, and the other three were very straight. And when I first met them, they all got on really well; they would do interviews all sitting with their arms around each other on the sofa. And then somebody got a boyfriend and then the shit started, and that was the end of it, really. … They fell out amongst themselves. That was the first problem. … It's one of those things in the record business: You're constantly going into business with people who've never been in business, or people that perhaps you shouldn't necessarily go into business with. It can be quite difficult, quite a rocky road.
Let’s talk about your work with Grace Jones, who’s actually going to be headlining West Hollywood Pride next month.
Grace is really good fun. She’s a free spirit, and she'll try anything. She's much warmer than you'd think, as a person. … But she can be formidable, like anyone.
Your production on Grace’s Slave to the Rhythm was iconic. The title track — a song originally intended for Frankie Goes to Hollywood! — ended up becoming her biggest hit. How did you that come about?
Well, we had a version of the song, and [Island Records’] Chris Blackwell wanted Grace to have a single, and he loved the title. I think he liked the title more than the song, initially. And I was the same — I thought the title was better than the song! But when I heard Grace singing the song, we decided to rewrite it and change the feel of it. Instead of it being the very sort of techno 130 BPM thing that we did originally, we changed it to the go-go rhythm. When I said I was going to do it like that, everyone was horrified at the time; they thought I was mad! I must admit, I had my doubts a couple times. But it came out really well, that track. And she was amazing in the end.
Are there other times you can think of in your career when people told you were mad, but it all worked out and it turned out you were right?
It happened a couple of times. But it probably happened lots of times when they were right! [laughs] Actually, Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” wasn't an easy one, because I think a lot of people at the label thought that I'd done it in too organic a way and that somehow it should have been more techno-y. Obviously, there was nothing techno about “Kiss From a Rose.”
But speaking of techno, another big electronic song you architected was “Close (to the Edit)” by your production supergroup, the Art of Noise. The Prodigy even sampled that on “Firestarter.” I bet there are a lot of people who don’t realize that the guy from the Buggles and the guy from the Art of Noise are one and the same.
Well, people knew that in England, but yeah, you're right. The Art of Noise was basically exactly the same team that I used on Lexicon: It was me, myself, Anne Dudley, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan, plus [music journalist and ZTT Records co-founder] Paul Morley [who acted in ABC’s “The Look of Love” video]. That track is such a funny, abstract one to look at. I remember the music video, when we first saw it, it was directed by [future MTV Video Vanguard Award recipient] Zbigniew Rybczyński, and we were horrified, myself and Paul Morley…
Why?
Because the [actors] in the video were wearing jackets and tennis shoes, and we were afraid that people would think that was us! Because we would never have worn jackets and tennis shoes like that! That's how stupid we were. [laughs]
You mentioned earlier the 180 you took after “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by joining Yes one year later. And then, ironically, in 1983, Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” from 90125, which you produced, became a massive MTV hit. Basically, Yes became video stars! I recall there being a bit of backlash from some old-school Yes fans at the time, claiming Yes had “sold out”…
Well, I would agree with that if it was a sort of ordinary little pop track, but it was a pretty unusual record, so I didn't think they'd sold out. I thought it was like Yes doing a pop record, but all turbo’d up. You couldn't hear that track back in ‘83 and just let it go by you, especially if you were in the music business, because there were so many things in that record that I'd never heard before — even though I made it myself! I’d never really heard a record like that before. … Now, I was a diehard Yes fan, and I would never make the claim that 90125 was the best Yes album. For me, the best Yes album was probably Close to the Edge. But the thing is, bands need success to keep going, and 90125 put them back at the top, when they'd been flagging a little bit before.
Was the Art of Noise’s title “Close (to the Edit)” a nod to “Close to the Edge”?
Of course it was! I had this idea: I said, “Come on, we're gonna do a 20-minute piece of music with the Art of Noise, like ‘Close to the Edge.’” I like that format: a 20-minute piece that goes through various moves. And we started to do that, but we didn't get far. And then we changed the title to “Close (to the Edit),” because we edited it down! I believe that was quite a good title. … We're actually going to start playing that on this tour, only a shorter version of it, like two and a half minutes.
Oh, wow! Are there any other non-Buggles songs from your production discography that you’re going to break out for this Seal tour?
We might do a version of “Slave to the Rhythm” in L.A. We're doing [Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s] “Two Tribes” as an instrumental. And “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” because it's such a good song. But yes, we are going to do “Close (to the Edit).” In fact, we're rehearsing it for the first time [this week].
There are so many other songs and albums in your production discography that I could ask you about. But I will wrap by talking more about Seal, because he was the impetus for this whole Buggles tour, and that is your more fruitful professional partnership to date: You actually produced Seal’s first four albums. How did you two begin working together?
I was the third producer to work on [Seal’s 1990 debut single] “Crazy.” My late wife [British music executive and ZTT co-founder Jill Sinclair] kept saying she was looking for a “modern-day Nat King Cole.” She loved Nat King Cole. And then one day she came to me and said, “I found him!” And she played me the demo of “Crazy.” But when he was singing on the demo, I couldn't really make out how well he was singing. … Of course, she was furious with me: “He's brilliant! He's brilliant! You've got to hear him!” So, she dragged him in to meet me, and the first thing that struck me about Seal was what great manners he had, opening doors for people and just acting like a gentleman. I wasn't used to pop singers or guys in bands having good manners! [laughs] It's a rare quality. And what a voice! When I really heard him sing, I've got ears like a microphone because I’ve been listening to people through microphones for so long, and I could tell that his voice would record really well.
Is there anyone else you would like to record? You've worked with so many legends, but do you have a “dream collaborators” list?
Every time I bump into Sting, he always says to me, “We've gotta do it sometime!” But we're both getting a bit old now, so it probably won't happen. I used to have fantasies about Bob Dylan. I would’ve loved to have made one of his records, because it's so different to what I did.
The Buggles only released two albums during their career. Earlier in our conversation, you joked that if you could travel back in time four decades, you might remake The Age of Plastic as a concept record. In all seriousness, do you think this tour might open the door to create and release new music under the Buggles’ name?
I don't know. I'm thinking about it at the moment. I'm thinking about it. But pop music seems to be so rooted in a time. You can write new songs that use some of the same tricks or whatever that you used 40 years ago, but I don't know. … I might try something completely different, rather than trying to make another Buggles album.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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