Paul Hardcastle’s iconic ‘19’ owes more than a little to serendipity and the limitations of the Emulator II sampler...
A UK number one single in 1985 (and international hit in 16 other countries besides), Paul Hardcastle’s ‘19’ was one of the first records to showcase the sonically manipulative powers of the sampler. With its stuttering “n‑n‑n‑n‑nineteen” hook locked to a rolling electro beat, it drew the listener into a spoken‑word commentary detailing the death toll of teenage American soldiers in the Vietnam War, and spotlighting the PTSD suffered by many of the veterans who returned home.
Hardcastle’s inspirations for ‘19’ included the Roland TR‑808 grooves of Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s early ’80s hip‑hop tracks ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Looking For The Perfect Beat’, and a TV documentary that he recorded one evening on a Betamax video tape, later sampling its narrator, Peter Thomas, as the lead voice on the track.
“I just happened to be looking through the paper and seeing what was on the telly later,” Hardcastle remembers today. “And it said, ‘Vietnam Requiem’, which was the story of the young kids sent to war in Vietnam. Now, I didn’t know nothing about Vietnam. I don’t even know why I recorded it. I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. I wonder if any of this could be made into a record... telling the story, over music.’”
Recorded using an E‑mu Emulator II sampler and a TEAC half‑inch eight‑track tape machine in the front room of his house in Leytonstone, East London and mixed at Sound Suite Studios in Camden, ‘19’ stayed at the top of the British singles chart for five weeks. Thanks to Hardcastle and his record label Chrysalis releasing remixes of the track during its chart‑topping run (‘The Destruction Mix’, ‘The Final Story’), it staved off stiff competition from Duran Duran, who had to settle for number two with their James Bond theme, ‘A View To A Kill’.
“Duran Duran were most probably the number one band in the world at that particular time,” Hardcastle laughs. “I didn’t have anything against Duran Duran.
“We turned those [remix] records around within days. Chrysalis were very good at that. I was working with a guy there and we would re‑edit the video for Top Of The Pops. You had different videos for it and the record stayed there.”
8 To 19
By the time ‘19’ was released in 1985, London‑born Paul Hardcastle already had a successful recording career up and running. Music was in his blood. Back when he was a kid, his American trumpeter dad, Louis, often invited his son onstage for guest turns at his jazz gigs.
A young Paul Hardcastle on drums with his father, Louis Hardcastle.
“We used to play a lot of American bases,” Hardcastle recalls. “My dad taught me to play the drums. I was about eight and I wasn’t a great drummer. But someone that could play the drums at that age, it was a novelty. I could also play the guitar. He got me a four‑string guitar and I could play sort of two or three chords on it. In the end, he said he found it hard to get shows without me.”
During his teenage years, Hardcastle’s passion for motorbikes took over, until he suffered a nasty accident. “I had three compound fractures,” he says. “I was in traction for three‑and‑a‑half months.”
His recovery period was to last a full 18 months, during which time Hardcastle swapped a video camera he owned for a Minikorg 700S synth and began dabbling once again with music. “Three or four years before, I used to go down to Macari’s in Charing Cross Road. They always had one, plugged in, and there was a slider on the front called a Traveler. And if you pressed it, it made that whoosh sound. And I thought, ‘Yes! I’m Simon House out of Hawkwind.’ I was a massive Hawkwind fan.”
At home, Hardcastle began teaching himself chords, by overdubbing individually played notes from the monophonic synth using two cassette machines. He then responded to a music paper advert placed by a Brit funk band, Direct Drive, seeking a keyboard player. “I had started listening to club music,” he says, “and I was starting to get OK doing bass synth and little lead lines.
“I joined Direct Drive and then we did a couple of demos. I was able to buy us a little Portastudio, the very first little [Tascam] four‑track on cassette. And we started to be able to make listenable demos, rather than just us live in a basement, which sounded terrible.”
Hardcastle’s first experience of a professional studio, a 16‑track named First Light in Penge, South London, was an eye‑opener — particularly when it came to the mixing stage. “We had tried to mix, but every single fader was at the top,” he laughs. “Everyone wanted to be heard more.
“In the end, the engineer saw we were really out of our depth. And he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just let me basically get some decent levels for you? And come back in a couple of hours?’ We came back and we were like, ‘Bloody hell, that sounds good!’ So that was, I guess, the first insight into knowing what a producer would do.”
In 1982, after two singles with Direct Drive, Hardcastle and the band’s singer Derek Green broke off to form a duo. Appropriating the First Light name for their new band, they released their self‑titled debut album the following year and a second album, Daybreak, in ’84.
When the pair split not long after, Hardcastle embarked upon a solo career with a cover version of New York electronic funk duo D Train’s ‘You’re The One For Me’ — a record that had blown his mind when he heard it in a club. “I remember hearing that record,” he says, “and thinking, ‘What the hell?’”
Following a similar synth‑funk path, Hardcastle’s breakthrough as a solo artist came in 1984, with his fifth single, ‘Rain Forest’, which reached number two in the US Dance chart, selling more than half a million 12‑inch singles. Back in London, this caught the attention of a young Chrysalis Publishing A&R man, Simon Fuller, who invited Hardcastle to come in for a meeting to let him and his colleagues hear any other material he’d been working on.
One of the tracks Hardcastle played them was an early version of ‘19’. It baffled the Chrysalis personnel, but so enthused Fuller that he offered to quit his job to manage Hardcastle. “I said to Simon, ‘What does a manager do?’ And he said, ‘I suppose I just take all the crap for you really.’ I said, ‘All right then, let’s do it.’ Two to three months later, we were on top of the world.”
Emulator Influence
The distinctive beats on ‘19’ (as with ‘Rain Forest’) had been created using a Roland TR‑808 that Hardcastle had hired for a few days. “I just put beats down [to tape] because I knew that we had to take the machine back. I did four or five. That’s where ‘Rain Forest’ came from, and with ‘19’, I had a similar type of beat.”
Hardcastle’s synth workhorse at the time was the Sequential Prophet‑5. “Always the Prophet,” he says. “The first time I ever saw and heard a Prophet‑5 was Andy Stennett of Freeez on Top Of The Pops doing ‘Southern Freeez’ in 1981. It went into this really nice, sort of pad type string sound and I thought, ‘God, that sounds great.’ Until I saw the price (laughs). I’ve still got my original one.”
Paul Hardcastle still owns the Sequential Prophet‑5 he used on ‘19’.
The early version of ‘19’ that Hardcastle played Simon Fuller already featured its signature orchestral stabs, created using the Loop Editing System of the AMS DMX 15‑80 Digital Delay Line. “This was before me having a sampler,” Hardcastle points out. “And so we were using an AMS, that you could put sort of like a second into, for the orchestra stab. So when you hear ‘dat‑dat‑dat’... that’s just made pressing that button.”
Hardcastle’s eureka moment with ‘19’ followed his acquisition of the 8‑bit Emulator II sampler. “Basically, I just felt there was something missing in ‘19’,” he says. “Simon managed to get me the money from Chrysalis to be able to buy an Emulator. It was one of the first ones that had come out. I remember this big box arriving at my house where I was living with my parents and my girlfriend in Leytonstone, and thinking, ‘Wow’. The sounds were obviously all on [five‑inch] floppy disk and the first sound I heard was the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ [factory vocal patch]. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Hardcastle proceeded to record parts of the narrative from the Vietnam Requiem documentary from his Betamax video onto his TEAC eight‑track, before relaying the best sections into the Emulator II. He started with the lines, 'In World War II, the average age of the combat soldier was 26. In Vietnam, he was 19.' “I thought, ‘That sounds good against this beat,’” he recalls. “And I just dropped other bits into it, y’know... ‘None of them received a hero’s welcome.’.”
The limited amount of sampling time available in the Emulator II — a whole 17 seconds in total, which could be divided up into one‑ or two‑second snippets or used in one splurge — was to actually aid Hardcastle creatively when it came to inputting narrative snippets from the documentary into it.
“That’s the reason why you only get, ‘In Vietnam he was 19',” he explains. “That did me a bloody good favour, because you can imagine if I’d have had all this sampling time, that little chorus would have never happened. I would’ve put 20 minutes’ worth of sampling in it (laughs). I mean, I could fill up a 24‑track tape reel quicker than you could down half a pint.”
Once he’d carefully chosen which bits of voiceover that he wanted to sample, Hardcastle then began to manipulate them. “I thought, ‘Right, let’s start using this sampler now. 'In Vietnam, he was 19’... click, that was the end of the sample time. And I just hit the key — ‘in, in, in, in Vietnam.’ Then I cut it up to the ‘19’ and hit the key and I just remember thinking, ‘F**k me, that works.’ ‘N‑n‑n‑n‑nineteen.’
You know when you do something and you forget about it, and it sounds great again after? I just amazed myself: Oh, wow, this is a hook!
“So, I put it down and then I went out with friends. I came back and I thought, I’ll just have a quick listen to that mad thing I was working on. ‘Hey, that sounds pretty good.’ Then all of a sudden it was like, ‘N‑n‑n‑n‑nineteen’ and I went, ‘Shit.’ You know when you do something and you forget about it, and it sounds great again after? I just amazed myself: Oh, wow, this is a hook!”
Running Out Of Tracks
Hardcastle then added other key sounds to the ‘19’ multitrack, including a synthesized ‘whu‑ow’ on the Prophet‑5 that became a sonic feature of the track. “That sound I’d used on ‘Rain Forest’,” he explains. “Like a piano player [runs their hand] from the top to the bottom of the keyboard, it was basically me with my left hand, sort of going up, dow‑wwwah, and then with my other hand [opening up the filter]. You could actually go and make that now in two seconds, if you wanted to. Any old synth, just get a sound that’s got tons of resonance. Just turn the resonance up to full and you’ll have that sound.
“I also had just got a [Yamaha] DX7. There was the remix, ‘The Destruction Mix’, that had sort of like a marimba‑y sounding thing. Because ‘19’ was very dark, I just played some minor chords to it. ‘Log Drum’ was most probably what I used, played higher up the keyboard, and I just remember going ‘dt‑dt‑dt’ and it worked perfectly. There was no sequences, obviously.”
Melodically, ‘19’ relied mostly on its synth hook lines, until Hardcastle decided to bring in a session singer, Janice Hoyte, to perform an additional top line.
Melodically, ‘19’ relied mostly on its synth hook lines, until Hardcastle decided to bring in a session singer, Janice Hoyte, to perform an additional top line. “I just said to Simon [Fuller], ‘I need someone. I think it would be a good idea to break it up and have some sort of female chorus type of thing on it to give it more colour.’ So he got me a vocalist. And I had just written these few lines, y’know, ‘All those who remember the war/They won’t forget what they’ve seen...’”
Track sheets for ‘19’.
Hoyte was recorded at Sound Suite Studios in Camden, London, where Hardcastle also mixed the original version of ‘19’ (and completed its later remixes). “We took the eight‑track into Sound Suite, bounced it over. And we had Dolby then which took a lot of the noise down. Because we hadn’t done the vocals by then, it was raw... just the drums, the bass synth, the chords, and the noises.
“I was to and fro to the studio, y’know. I’d take a mix home and I’d think, ‘Hang on, let me just bounce what we’ve done from 24‑track back to the eight and add a few more bits that I want to do.’ Then, I’d take it back and put those bits onto the 24‑track as well. We ran out of tracks in the end because I’d done so many remixes of it.”
Part of the international success of ‘19’ was down to the fact that Hardcastle and Fuller shrewdly employed newscasters in different territories to translate the spoken word parts of the track into French, Spanish, German and Japanese.
“The French one and the Spanish one didn’t work, in my eyes,” he admits. “I think the German version really, really stands up because of the way their language is very stark.” Later, given how many remixes he ended up creating of ‘19’, Hardcastle wished he’d made copies of the master tape.
“What we should have done really was had the master copied 10 times,” he says. “The multitrack, there’s not a spare bit of silence on it.”
Hot Remixer
Following the success of ‘19’, Paul Hardcastle became much in demand as a remixer for the major record companies, often those keen to add the same sampler tricks to hits from their back catalogues and give them an ’80s makeover. Hardcastle’s first commission was from Island Records to rework Jamaican reggae/funk band Third World’s 1978 hit, ‘Now That We Found Love’.
“I really did go out on an edge on that one,” he recalls. “They said, ‘We want you to make it really, really different.’ And I suppose there were expecting the ‘n‑n‑n‑n’ and all that. Well, they got a little bit of that...
“But I actually asked them to copy the 24‑track and wipe it, basically. All I wanted was just the vocal and the hi‑hat left in it. And I just replayed everything. I remember playing along with a Linn Drum to the hi‑hat, just to keep in time. It took a couple of goes because there was no [audio] quantise in those days, y’know (laughs).
“I just started redoing the drums, put different chords on it, put a lot of keyboards on it, bass synth.
“I took it into Island Records... and I’m not joking, they were all dancing around the bloody office. I came out on a high, thinking, 'You must be doing something right in this business, now, Paul.' Then the offers all came flooding in. And I did a year’s worth of remixes for totally different people from Ian Dury & The Blockheads to Five Star to Phil Lynott. I mean, I was the golden boy at that time, remixing everything.”
Paul Hardcastle: I did a year’s worth of remixes for totally different people from Ian Dury & The Blockheads to Five Star to Phil Lynott. I mean, I was the golden boy at that time, remixing everything.
At a certain point, Hardcastle made the decision to have a break from remixing to concentrate once again on his own records. Then one offer came in that he couldn’t turn down: the chance to rework D Train’s ‘You’re The One For Me’, the record that had inspired him at the start of the decade. “I went (instantly), ‘I’ll do it,’” he laughs. “I spoke to [singer] James Williams on the phone. I’m thinking, Jesus Christ… I’m about to f**k around with this guy’s track and he’s like a hero.
“I changed quite a lot about it,” he says of the ’85 version, which reached number 15 in the UK. “Put a solo on it. I always used to add my little sort of Clavinet sound from the Prophet‑5. That was the first time I ever did Top Of The Pops. It was just a fantastic time in my life.”
Legacy
After ‘19’, Paul Hardcastle had a string of other UK chart hits. The initial pressure for a follow‑up single resulted in the high concept ‘Just For Money’, a track themed around a heist, featuring the voices of Bob Hoskins and Laurence Olivier (which ironically only made it to number 19, despite its lavish £200,000 video).
Hardcastle fared better commercially in 1986 with his number eight hit, ‘Don’t Waste My Time’ (featuring singer Carol Kenyon) and with ‘The Wizard’, which became the Top Of The Pops theme tune for five years between 1986 and 1991. The latter track made heavy use of Hardcastle’s new $16,000 NED Synclavier sampler/workstation, paid for with the royalties from ‘19’.
Meanwhile the commercial appeal and cultural impact of ‘19’ endured. In 1988, the track inspired a spin‑off game for the Commodore 64, titled 19 Part One: Boot Camp. Much later, in 2019, the radio station Absolute ’80s created a remixing app for iPad that allowed users to rebalance and effect the original stems.
In 2015, for its 30th anniversary, Hardcastle released an entire album of new and old remixes of ‘19’. “I did 12 new ones, basically,” he says. “I thought, ‘Y’know what? Let’s get the old girl out one last time.’” Among the new remixes, the ‘Cryogenic Freeze Remix’ expanded on the electro foundations of the original, while the ‘PTSD Mix’ was much tougher and more modern‑sounding, verging on drill.
“We gave the profits to a charity called Talking2Minds that helps soldiers with PTSD,” Hardcastle says of the latter mix.
“I had tons and tons of letters, y’know, I’m talking 10,000, from American veterans back in the ’80s. They just didn’t understand why a young British guy was taking on their fight... because they had to fight to get recognised. And as the track says, ‘None of them received a hero’s welcome.’ They used ‘19’ when they marched through Washington on their protests. I’ve had at least eight or 10 letters that say, ‘Dear Paul, thank you for saving my life.’ What more could you want?”
What’s Going On?
Elsewhere on the remix album, the downtempo ‘NUA Remix’ featured Marvin Gaye’s iconic vocal hooks from ‘What’s Going On’ alongside ‘19’s stuttering interjections. The suggestion that the two tracks could work together in fact came from Hardcastle’s father, Louis.
“‘19’ was really all about smashing it in your face,” Paul stresses. “But you listen to the one where it’s slow, and it works in a totally different way. Because it makes it very, very sad, having Marvin in it: ‘Brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying,’ and then it goes, ‘the average age was 19’. It was just like, 'Woah'. I felt like I really created something special.”
The people who administer Marvin Gaye’s estate agreed and gave Hardcastle clearance to go ahead with the release of the track. “That took a year,” he points out. “I remember getting the email from the woman that was doing the clearances for me: ‘Dear Paul, good news. We’ve finally got clearance for you.’ It’s like watching your team win the FA Cup when you’re told you can use Marvin Gaye, and it’s legal...”
The legacy of ‘19’ also extended to the name of Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment management company, which famously launched the career of the Spice Girls. Hardcastle also wrote the score for their 1997 film, Spice World.
In terms of his own subsequent career, Hardcastle has gone on to release a series of smooth jazz albums, both under his own surname and as the Jazzmasters, many of which have made the Top 5 in the US Jazz chart.
“It was a career change, obviously,” he says. “And the career change really turned into going back into sort of like the ‘Rain Forest’ type of stuff.”
Nonetheless, Paul Hardcastle is still clearly very proud of ‘19’, his first big success, and the track that made his name. “It’s the same with both me and Simon Fuller,” he says. “Y’know, we talk sometimes, and we go, ‘What if we’d never done this?’
“People say, ‘Do you ever get tired of hearing “19”?’ I say, ‘No’. Well, put it this way, I don’t ever play it myself but when it comes on the radio or something like that, I sort of smile.”
Ultimately, Hardcastle reckons that, sampling novelty aside, it’s the anti‑war message of ‘19’ that’s ensured that it’s become a classic track.
“It was very different,” he says. “It was very truthful. It was stark, it was in your face. And I think a lot of people appreciated the fact that I had the guts to basically do that.
“Another point, which I find very important is in the US you can’t get a beer ‘til you’re 21. And you can go out at 18, 19, and be dropped off in a f**king jungle. Basically, I call it a musical documentary. It was just letting people know, in a different sort of way, what happened.”
Paul Hardcastle’s box set Nineteen And Beyond 1984‑1988 is out now.