34 MusicWeek 02.08.13 PROFILE SARM STUDIOS
‘THIS IS AN EXPANSION FOR SARM - WE’RE NOT CLOSING’
Sweeping changes are planned for Sarm. What lies ahead for the famous recording house?
STUDIOS BY PAUL WILLIAMS
A
day before Video Killed The Radio Star hit No 1 in the UK Trevor Horn walked into what is now Sarm Studios for the very first
time and was left totally unimpressed. He and his Buggles partner Geoff Downes were
eyeing up the premises to record there for a couple of days, but despite its glorious history as Island Records’ studios he took an instant dislike to it. As Horn recalls to Music Week: “We bumped
into Chris Blackwell and he said, ‘What did you think of the studio?’ and I said, ‘We hated it.’ He said, ‘I knew you would.’ It wasn’t our kind of place because it wasn’t in great shape.” He and Blackwell were in conversation again
three years later over dinner in 1982 when Horn asked him about the studios and the Island founder told him: “I’m just about to sell it to Richard Branson. Why, do you want it?” The ace producer felt a kick under the table
from his wife Jill Sinclair, but Horn says within just two weeks a deal was done and the two of them became the new owners of a building where legendary recordings by the likes of Bob Marley & The Wailers, Led Zeppelin, Queen, the Eagles and Roxy Music took place. It was later also where Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas was recorded. “When we took it over we borrowed a lot of money and we completely refurbished it,” he says. “We took out all the boards, stripped everything out, knocked down the control walls. We changed it completely.” The year in which Horn and Sinclair acquired
Sarm was a hugely significant one creatively for the one-time Buggles frontman because it included him recording there ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love, enhancing his reputation as a producer. It would be followed by him overseeing albums by the likes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Seal, Rod Stewart and Robbie Williams, all within Sarm. But that refurbishment was the last time Sarm had any kind of proper make-over and time has now caught up with the complex in Notting Hill. “Back in the Eighties and Nineties we were
known as being really cutting edge,” says Horn and Sinclair’s daughter Ally Horn (pictured), who is now managing director of SPZ, the company that looks after Sarm, indie publisher Perfect Songs and record label ZTT. “We’d like to get back to that. It’s been 30 years since these studios have been refurbished. We want to keep up to date. Quite often we see people putting their laptops on our desks.” The solution is a radical one, a far-reaching building project that will add an extra floor onto Sarm’s two storeys, take the studios underground and realise the commercial potential of the site via new office space and nine apartments. It will take something like three years to complete, forcing
RIGHT
Studio time: Sarm will close its doors for around three years as it undergoes redevelopment - its team will relocate to facilities nearby
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Sarm staff to exit at the end of August to a series of other premises nearby, including the former Virgin offices in Ladbroke Grove now owned by SPZ and to be named Sarm Music Village. The plan recognises just how long it has been
since Sarm was last modernised, but also the incredible changes that have happened to the studio sector in the subsequent three decades. “The whole design of these rooms is for people
to play together and for it to be recorded in a separate room,” says Trevor Horn. “The whole thing is designed for that and that happens so little these days. It’s still a lovely place to be; the sonics of the control rooms are all great. That’s still useful to people now, but there’s a much better blueprint for a modern studio than this.” Horn and Sinclair’s son Aaron Horn, a director of SPZ and member of the chart-topping Sam and the Womp, notes: “It’s not like the Nineties. Artists don’t get in for a month and do no work. They all work hard for a day or two because they’ve got a list of stuff they want to do - drums and good vocals through our mikes.” He explains, once the work is complete, Sarm will house two small studios and around nine programming rooms, while there will be one more studio that will be “a kind of mash-up” with isolation booths, a large mixing-style control room, a large live area and booth. “Then there is going to be another studio in that complex that’ll be two studios as such combined with another two over there and programming rooms,” he adds. “Technically there will be more space but more catered to what the market is like now.” Ally Horn says Sarm will be “more boutique and high end as far as the market is concerned”, while her brother suggests because of the number of other studios that have closed in recent years the market is “kind of flattening out”. Aaron says: “Loads of places have closed and there’s a business now which is much more based around producers and writers. They want to work in spaces which we can provide.” According to Ally Horn, business at Sarm over the last few years has been “really good”, including
Rihanna’s last album Unapologetic having been recorded there, while Mark Ronson has just spent three months on site and others such as Amanda Ghost and Liam Howlett use it as a base. “We went through a difficult phase but over the
last few years we’ve been packed,” she says. “We are going to have a couple of months where we don’t have much studio space in the transitional period. All the studios are booked until the day we shut.” When the staff move out at the end of this
month business will carry on as normal for SPZ, only over several locations rather than one. Besides Sarm Music Village, which will include nine or 10 programming rooms, a studio and office space, the group’s Music Bank rehearsal space will be used for recordings, while premises near Ladbroke Grove tube station have also been leased. In addition it is investing in a property in Lymington that will become Sarm South Coast and reinvesting in Sarm West Coast in Bel Air, Los Angeles. “We’ll be able to do pretty much everything that
we can do here,” says Ally Horn who stresses:“We’re very keen to let everyone know this is an expansion. We’re not closing down. This is not the end of Sarm.” For a place that her father hated when he first
clapped his eyes on it, Sarm is now poised for an exciting new future.
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