Work To The Rhythm

Six decades into his career, Trevor Horn has finally released a third album under his own name. Echoes - Ancient & Modern finds the musician and superproducer infuse a second collection of reimagined pop songs with his magic. He discusses reworking 80s anthems with Steve Hogarth and Robert Fripp, the Yes years and why he loves nothing more than making mischief.

-  Johnny Sharp

"I always try to put two things together that don't normally fit," says Trevor Horn by way of trying to sum up a hugely diverse career as producer, musician and songwriter. That would explain the latest release to bear his name, which sees a number of curious marriages of artists and repertoire on a new album of covers.

Who else would commission Toyah Willcox and her prog-aristocrat husband Robert Fripp to tackle Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax? Or persuade Rick Astley to take on Yes's 1980s prog-pop chartbuster, Owner Of A Lonely Heart? Elsewhere, Steve Hogarth offers his reading of The Cars' haunting, Live Aid-associated lament Drive, alongside numerous other curious match-ups.

It's a convenient jumping-off point from which to discuss a career that has been reliably unpredictable. He may be best-known to most as the producer who helped define the 80s with a string of ingeniously engineered pop releases - while wearing none-more-80s hornrimmed specs - but he also played a notable cameo role in the history of prog as singer, then producer, of Yes.

The now 74-year-old Horn's new project is Echoes - Ancient & Modern, something of a follow-up to his 2019 set Trevor Horn Reimagines The Eighties, which also featured Hogarth among the line-up and also included a take on Owner..., on that occasion with Horn on the mic. The impetus behind it was Deutsche Grammophon.

"We were talking about doing an acoustic record," Horn explains. "But then I thought, there's plenty of other people that can make boring acoustic records, and I don't need to join them.