Fact #167461

Trevor Horn (producer) : Jill (Horn's wife/manager, Jill Sinclair) got me Dollar to produce. I was pretty shocked that she wanted me to produce Dollar. I didn’t get it. But she said, ‘just do a Buggles record and they’ll front it’. And I was like, ‘Oh, I get that’…

The Dollar stuff was the first stuff I really produced, after being in Yes in 1982, and by that time I had a rig. Very few people had rigs back then, but I had one and it consisted of a Roland TR808 and a set of Simmons drum modules. Dave Simmons had modified my TR808 and put on a set of triggers so that the kick drum from the 808 would also trigger the Simmons kick drum. On top of that, I had a Roland sequencer. I've forgotten what serial number it was, but I've still got it somewhere. It had four buttons — 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D'. You put lists of notes in it and it played the list of notes. You sent a trigger to it. I used to use the cowbell from the 808 as a trigger — you sent it and it would pay through the list of notes. So you might put four 'G's and an 'A' and a 'B', and however you played it, it would loop that list of notes. That sequencer was hooked up to a Minimoog that had CV and Gate on it. And with that rig I thee wed! You know, those CV/Gate things were much tighter than MIDI. They were spot bollock on! Spot on. Much better feel than just your normal MIDI rig these days.

I could program in drums and very basic sequences using the Minimoog, and that's how I did the Dollar records.

I was thinking about Dollar, thinking about the two of them, and thinking about this world. And I had this idea that we would try and mix Kraftwerk and Vince Hill. Real MOR with this sort of electro rhythm section. Back at that particular point in time that was a reasonably radical idea. Nowadays that’s what every modern record is, just look at Kylie. But back then Kraftwerk were the bible. We were trying to do The Man Machine meets a sort of MOR record.

With me and Bruce (co-songwriter, Bruce Woolley), generally I write the lyrics and he writes the music. And I remember just talking to Bruce and somehow Hand Held in Black and White came up. The idea of something quick and this was Dollar – they meet, their lives are quick and modern and fashionable – they meet each other and they see a future. Then in Mirror Mirror, they’re looking at each other and realising how much they love each other but they’re also looking at themselves because they have so much vanity and that’s what’s going to betray them. And then in Give Me Back My Heart they split up and that’s the end of it. It’s very sad at the end. And then Videotheque’s like a postscript where they see pictures of each other as they go through their lives.

They were nice to work with. Thereza said, ‘You just make the record and we’ll front it’. And I thought, 'Well that’s an interesting idea'. As for David Van Day, I think one of the music papers when they interviewed David described him as being in some sort of Transylvanian mist about what was really going on. He didn’t really know.
(Source : interview by Ian Peel, Sound On Sound, March 2005)