The story of Trevor Horn and the Genesis Carpet Crawlers rework is one of the better anecdotes in British studio folklore: four members of the classic-era line-up in one room, one member requiring a separate trip to Switzerland, and Horn managing to deadpan one of pop history’s more audacious career suggestions to Phil Collins after a single take. In a 2019 retrospective conversation, Horn looked back on his decades of work bridging the worlds of prog and the pop mainstream.
The Genesis session: Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel and a trip to Switzerland
The Carpet Crawlers 1999 brought together the classic Genesis line-up to revisit a track first released in 1975. Horn recalled the logistics with some warmth. ‘The four of them, not Phil Collins,’ he said of the main sessions. ‘I had to go to Switzerland to record him.’ Collins, Horn noted, is ‘the loveliest man.’ On that first Swiss visit, Collins played drums and then moved on to backing vocals. After the first take, Horn delivered the line: ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of going solo?’
The whole experience, Horn said, was a pleasure. ‘They had great manners.’ His reading of the group’s internal dynamics is affectionate: Peter Gabriel is ‘the slightly crazy one,’ while Tony Banks is ‘the core of the group.’ Horn went further, naming A Trick Of The Tail as one of his all-time favourite albums, Los Endos as something he cranks up while washing the dishes, and Ripples as his go-to singalong, particularly when ‘it hits the big high note.’
Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells II and the tape that got wiped
Horn’s work with Mike Oldfield on Tubular Bells II produced one of the more harrowing studio stories he’s told. The sessions took place in Beverly Hills, during the riots, with Oldfield renting a house and playing essentially everything himself. Horn described it as a situation where Oldfield was ‘totally in control.’
Two weeks into the 48-track sessions, with Horn believing they were nearly finished, he arrived one morning to find colleagues looking at him with the particular expression that precedes bad news. Oldfield, who had just gone to bed, had changed the section featuring the ‘strolling player,’ Alan Rickman. He had wiped it. There was no undo button. ‘It was the only time it’s ever happened to me in 40 years,’ Horn said. When Oldfield woke and asked what Horn thought, Horn told him it would ‘take me a little time as I’d kind of liked the other one.’ He remained generous about Oldfield’s abilities throughout, describing him as ‘an amazing, extraordinary player, the way he comes up with the tunes.’ Horn added that Incantations, not Tubular Bells, was actually his favourite Oldfield album, particularly the Hiawatha section.
Prog in the pop charts: Frankie, Yes and the long track
Horn is frank about the intent behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome. ‘Oh, it was absolutely prog!’ The decision to build a long track came directly from his love of Yes’s Gates Of Delirium and Close To The Edge, records he describes as ‘just great when you were driving.’ He wanted to replicate the experience of ‘instrumental pieces of music with songs in that seemed to go somewhere.’ He believes Pleasuredome still stands up, and is quick to credit engineer Steve Lipson: ‘I think that’s some of the best mixed stuff I have ever heard.’
His relationship with Yes has remained close. He reworked Fly From Here with them and appeared onstage at the London Palladium with Steve Howe’s version of the group, which he described as having ‘the same excitement’ even if it can never quite replicate what came before. Horn is careful not to take sides in the band’s various factional disputes. He mentioned speaking with Trevor Rabin ‘just yesterday on the phone’ at the time of the interview, with plans to meet up in LA. ‘I don’t have beef with anybody,’ he said.
It’s a line that captures Horn’s position in the prog world pretty well: someone who came up loving Gates Of Delirium in the car, found a way to wire that same architecture into the top of the charts, and has never really seen the point of drawing battle lines between the factions that followed.
