Post your questions now!
He’s credited as the man who invented the 80s – or at least its sound, thanks to his early acquisition of a Fairlight sampler and a LinnDrum machine. Whoever else might lay claim to that title, Trevor Horn certainly predicted pop’s most visual era as half of the Buggles, with their massive 1979 hit Video Killed the Radio Star, and then capitalised on it in the decade to come. He collaborated with that great pop showman, Malcolm McLaren, cofounded the ZTT label and brought the world Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with their indelible imagery and pristine knack for controversy.
His work that decade is a murderers’ row of hits: ABC’s The Look of Love, Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm, Godley & Creme’s Cry, Pet Shop Boys’ Left to My Own Devices. He might as well have been the guy who invented the 90s, too: as part of the Art of Noise from 1983, Horn pioneered the sampling technology that would change the sound and scope of hip-hop in the years to come.
His success continued through the 90s – Horn was behind Seal’s eponymous debut album – and into unexpected places in the early 2000s: ersatz Russian lesbians tATu’s English market debut, 200km/h in the Wrong Lane, contains three Horn productions, and is an underrated millennium-era classic.
For better or worse (probably for better, to be fair), Lena Katina and Julia Volkova don’t appear on Horn’s most recent album, Trevor Horn Reimagines the Eighties, which employs Robbie Williams, Gabrielle Aplin, All Saints and Seal, among others, to do, well, exactly what it says on the tin. That’s the album Horn is touring this month – starting at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 27 July – and the occasion for his visit to Guardian HQ, where he will be taking your questions at 1pm BST on Tuesday 23 July. Post your enquiries below!
