The Gonzo Daily: Trevor Horn talks Yes, Frankie, SARM and synths 30 years on

How do you feel looking back at thirty years since Welcome to the Pleasuredome, with a new era beginning at Sarm?

Trevor Horn: "It’s exciting, because lately we’ve had the phenomenon of a young person with a laptop sitting on top of a 96-fader board - know what I mean? The guys love it being in the studio; they’re loving the monitoring, air conditioning, all the good things about it, but they don’t need the SSL J desk.

"Sarm Music Village is a new kind of studio - there are actually nine rooms in there, but they can all be linked in different ways"

"Sarm Music Village is a new kind of studio - there are actually nine rooms in there, but they can all be linked in different ways. Two of them are proper high-end Sam Toyoshima control rooms and the rest are kind of a combination of things - they’re like project rooms, but they’re a very interesting combination.

"We’re coming online at the beginning of November, and we’ll have a month or two to get it all running properly. Music Village will have all the good stuff - class A electronics, best quality microphones, amazing monitoring, NEVE equipment and so on - with none of the things you don’t need. It’s the same kind of ethos as Sarm West."

Was the ethos of Sarm always to have cutting-edge tech?

Trevor Horn: "Well, in the mid-1970s Sarm was actually the first 24-track studio in England, and then it was the first 48-track. We used to call the sync machine Tugboat Annie - it would take 25 seconds back then to lock two machines together. Imagine mixing 90125 [Yes album] with a 16-track on one machine and a 24-track on another and taking 25 seconds before it locks!"

There’s no wonder you went away and did The Art of Noise as a break from making that Yes album…

Trevor Horn: "Well, the Art of Noise was just a lot of stuff we had kicking around, crazy shit we were coming up with while making other people’s records, and we just started to make tracks ourselves."

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