OK another music book as an audiobook and once again it's an interesting story not particularly well told (but read OK, by the author). Trevor Horn has worked with some great, great people (Dollar, ABC) and some less great ones (Malcolm McLaren, I mean, really...) and made some great records. I enjoy the industry context and so on, and the weirdness between for instance him making a shit-hot pop dance record for Yes of all people (I'm talking 'Owner of a Lonely Heart' though tbh not one of my favourite records by a long chalk). This memoir contains the immortal line 'the year 1982 gave way to the year 1983'. Anyway I'm up to the bit where he's done Propaganda and he's about to do the Art of Noise (I assume) and it's still pretty interesting. But hell... why don't people write these things properly? Maybe there's actually no such thing as a proper way to do it.
Update 30/8: It gets worse towards the end. The worst worst bit is the bit in 1989 where TH works on some stupid Tom Waits cover* with Rod Stewart of all the fools, and there's an extended section (with bad gruff American accent no less) where Lester Bangs calls TH because he's writing sleeve notes for the Best Of that the track is supposed to be on. Lester Bangs had been dead for seven years by this time so I am going to say... that some books need a bit more judicious editing and fact checking.
* The song is 'Downtown Train'. I couldn't recall it when reading about it but the way it was discussed in the text made it sound really interesting structurally however when I started watching the video I realised that I did know the song, and it was not for me, and I couldn't in fact bear to watch or listen beyond the first 40 seconds or so.
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