ANNE DUDLEY
I was born Anne Valentino in
Beckenham, Kent – my brother is Bobby Valentino who plays the violin in
Hank Wangford’s band and used to be in the Fabulous Poodles. I also have
two sisters, Helen and Susan, who are twins.
What do they do?
They bum around, darling. In other words they’re still at college.
As a child I was precocious – I
played the piano but I used to play with soldiers not dolls and was
really butch and a tomboy. But I had piano lessons and really used to
enjoy practising, so I went to the Royal College of Music because I was
quite good. But I also had this side of me that was really baaad and I
used to play in all these jazz and pop bands in the evening – in fact
that’s where I met my husband, Roger. I married him very young actually.
I also met Trevor Horn who was playing bass very finely in this band.
He didn’t have much money and everything he touched used to go wrong, if
he got in a car it would break down. We played in places like
Tiffany’s, Wimbledon and the Orchid Ballroom – pretty non-cred, maaan.
I got my first proper gig playing
piano on ‘Playschool’ but I couldn’t stand the politics. Then I found
myself in Trevor Horn’s ‘A-Team’ and made all these wonderful records (Dollar, ABC, etc.) and met all these, ahem, wonderful people like Malcolm McLaren and tasted stardum. I arranged some brass (“Young Guns”) and played some keyboards (“Careless Whisper”) for Wham! and with ABC I played keyboards, arranged strings and did some tunewriting. Sometimes credited.
How many other names other names do you want me to drop? Lloyd Cole? Blancmange? A-ha? Paul McCartney?
Anyway I got roped into The Art of Noise because I was the only person at ZTT who knew middle C from a boiled egg.
Trevor Horn?
He dosen’t know a boiled egg.
Apart from that I wrote a song
called “Hide and Seek” which was on the Five Star album and was also
covered by New Edition – it was Five Star’s first flop. I also wrote
some songs for the album Helen Terry did last year with Don Was but the
record company didn’t release it.
Is that enough? I’ve got to go and do my hair now.
J.J. JECZALIK
I'm not entirely sure
As a six year old I was precocious. A
lot of people who could be seen to have ‘madd it’ tend to have been
precocious because they tend to be snot bags who are prepared to go and
bully people to get what they want. Being quite tall I was a lot taller
than I was old and this got me into awful trouble. I used to play with
the local lads of about 7 or 8 when I was 5 and once I was on the
receiving end of a brick that passed over my head – I had the where
withall to duck – and went through a neighbour’s kitchen. I didn’t quite
know what to do so I went to my mother and wept.
Did you know I’m a Taurean, like Duane – Taureans have a mutual disregard for other people’s talents.
Then I gave up a promising career as
a permanent academic to be a professional chancer. I had a degree in
Astrophysics from Durahm University (it should be noted that without
in anyway wanting to cast doubt on J.J.’s claim to have studied, or
wanting to call him a rotten liar, he was frequently spotted in the
geography department doubtless discussing U-shaped valleys and ox-bow
lakes) and I studied life forces for three years to do with the
relationship to the radar and the nagua of the inner and outer world and
psychomatic problems.
I gave all this up quite by chance
as it happens. I came to London for a year off before doing a Master’s
Degree in Birmingham and I discovered live music, notably a pub group
called Landscape – I promoted one of their gigs, then roadied for
Richard Burgess, their drummer (now a ‘respected’ producer) for a while.
Then I met The Buggles, started working for Geoff Downes (Trevor Horn’s partner in The Buggles) –
and he bought the ninth Fairlight ever made and then when he and Trevor
joined Yes I toured with them, which was foul, disgusting, awful three
months of American madness. It took me about six months to straighten
out my head.
Then The Art of Noise happened, I carried on programming the Fairlight for lots of people and doing some production.
Stephen Duffy?
Yes, I produced his biggest selling record actually (‘Kiss Me’ back when he was Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy)
– and the second fastest selling single of that year after Band Aid.
I’ve never met anyone like him – he’s quite talented. Originally they
just wanted me to re-mix the song but I had a meeting with his manager
and said that in my opinion it was too bad to remix and that they should
start over again, so they did.
The Pet Shop Boys?
Yes, I love them dearly. I’m glad they’ve got a number one in America (‘West End Girls’) because they’re now rereleasing the record I produced (‘Opportunities’) which stiffed heavily the first time. I hope it won’t stiff again…
GARY LANGAN
Do I have to start right from the beginning?
I studied piano from the age of 7 –
my father’s a musician and used to do radio show programmes like “Music
While You Work” so it was like father, like son. I sat through my Royal
College piano exams, then when I was about 14 I started following him to
sessions and decided I didn’t really like they playing side of things
by the actual business of making records looked a right lark. Despite
that I still took up trumpet for a while and played in a couple of dodgy
jazz bands and a couple of dodgy dance bands playing Glenn Miller sort
of stuff. I didn’t really enjoy it.
I finished school at 17 and got a
job at Trident Studios where David Bowie and Marc Bolan were recording
but then they decided I was too young. I was mortally disappointed.
Instead I decided to go to college for a year, got a degree in
engineering and was just about to go and work for Radio Luxemboug when
my dad met two people who owned Sarm Studios at a reception he was
playing at the Dorchester Hotel to celebrate Gary Glitter’s first
platinum LP. They gave me a job as a tape op and the first album I
worked on was Duane Eddy. Slowly I got more important – the first
session I assisted engineered was Lynsey de Paul. I was tape op on
Queen’s “A Night At The Opera” and witnessed all of “Bohemian Rhapsody”
which was fairly amazing. The whole thing was done in three bits and it
wasn’t until it was mixed that anyone heard it in its entirity. It was
about 5 o’clock one morning.
Then punk came along – that was
something I was never into. The only punk album I ever did was the first
Boomtown Rats LP, Bob was just as arrogant and stubborn-mined in those
days. He knew he was going to be a star, he had that look about him. But
the keyboard player used to turn up in pyjamas.
Then I met Trevor Horn – he came
waltzing through the door wanting to add a tambourine to this really
tacky project he’d been working on. So I worked with him on the Buggles
LP. After that he became the lead singer of Yes so I got involved in
that Yes album (‘Drama’) and then came Dollar and ABC and I
went freelance as an engineer. Trevor started telling me about this
bloke called Malcolm McLaren. I thought he was a charlatan but Trevor
would bring back these ethnic records. I’d say “You’re joking, you’re
out of your tree, Trevor.” But I still went around the world with them –
South Africa, New York, Tennessee.
Then we did the Yes album “90125”
and ABC phoned me up and asked me to produce their second LP “Beauty
Stab”. The Yes album took ten months before I left it unfinished and by
the end I was getting really bored and seeing little green men crawling
up the wall – you’d spend days and days trying different string out on a
bass guitar and then the bass player would complain about the air
conditioning had spoilt it.
One day we got this phenomenal drum
sound, the best I’d ever heard, sheer fluke and a week later I heard
that they were going to scrap it and thought this is a sacrilege there
must be something I can do with it. So I phoned up J.J. and said why
don’t you come down to the studio, I’ve got this idea. So he did and no
one had ever sampled a whole drum riff on a Fairlight before so we did
that and recorded more or less all of “Beatbox2” that night in three or
four hours, just about 5 minutes of this drum riff going round and round
with a few stupid things on top of it.
A couple of months later I played it
to Trevor and he nuts and took it to the head of Island Records, Chris
Blackwell, who played it in some New York clubs where they went mad. So
Trevor started to produce it as the first single for ZTT, the label he
was setting up withIsland, and it went horribly wrong and sounded like
some mega production so we went back to my original demo in the end –
the released version is pretty similar to that.
Apart from that I’ve been doing lots of remixing (Nik Kershaw, Scritti Politti, etc. etc,) and producing (Hipsway, The Dream Academy, Drum Theatre and the new Spandau Ballet LP).
Alright?
