Trevor Horn book

I like the work of Trevor Horn. I don't regard him as a 'production god' or the new messiah, but there are quite a few records in my collection that bear his name. As a result, I took a great interest in his recently published autobiography. 

The book is generally quite good and is full of interesting stories. However, there are some aspects of the book that contradict other people's accounts and whole chunks of Horn's career seem to be omitted.

In the book Trevor repeats the story that the lady who says "Goodbye" in ABC's "Look of Love" is the actual girl Martin is singing about in the song. However, in a podcast first broadcast in April this year, engineer Gary Langan tells us the lady in question was actually the receptionist at SARM studios who happened to be his girlfriend and not Martin's. Who to believe?

Trevor recites a tale of meeting Michael Mertens in the canteen at Townhouse Studios following Propaganda's defection to Virgin Records. In the book Mertens approaches Horn and gets short shrift. In Mertens' version published on Facebook he merely says hello to Horn and receives an angry tirade in return.

I am not a Frankie Goes to Hollywood fan so I don't really know their history; but Horn's account of the band's demise and the subsequent court case seems relatively cursory to me. Maybe this is because Trevor regards this as a less interesting aspect of his career and he doesn't want to dwell on it. Maybe he doesn't go into detail because ZTT lost the court case. Either way, those looking for more information about the whole Frankie saga will be left a little wanting. 

There is no mention of recording "It's Alright" with the Pet Shop Boys and only some vague references to the creation of the album "Fundamental". Disappointingly there is no room for Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells II" and the chapter dedicated to Seal only discusses "Crazy".

I acknowledge you can fit everything into one book and at no point does Trevor state this is a definitive version of events; but I still felt a little short changed. Hell, the only production tip I got from the whole book is that tweaking a mix to get a good stereo field can be a waste of time: just pan some things hard left and others hard right. Easy. 

So whilst it is an interesting book, it is not perfect. This is clearly one man's recollection of events and as Winston Churchill wrote, "History is written by the victors."