The Secret Discography: Proto-"Owner"

One of a series which examines Trevor’s musical career in South Africa.

Recently an item was posted in the news section of Trevor's site to note that "Owner of a Lonely Heart" has passed the seven million mark in sales worldwide, and goes on to relate how the song came to be written.  A useful verification is found in the mention of the year of the song's composition, 1979.

The year is significant to me because of a theory I developed back in 2011 after hearing a song Trevor produced for Rene Arnell (nee Veldsman) from her album Call Me, which was also recorded and released in 1979.  It's called "Paying My Dues" and was written by Rene and Cynthia Schmacher.  Trevor produced Call Me during the same period of time he was working at RPM Studios in Johannesburg on sessions for Face To Face as well as the second release for the studio-based ensemble Disco Rock Machine.

Trevor and Rene were both session musician veterans of long acquaintance and Rene also contributed vocals to the song "Could There Be" which appeared on the original version of Beginnings, backing vocals over the whole of Face To Face (mostly notably on songs like "I'm Old Enough (To Make You A Woman)" and "Now") as well as lead vocals for Disco Rock Machine.  She went on to form Via Afrika, serving as their bassist and vocalist; the band was best-known for their single "Hey Boy."

Here is the song in question, which was the b-side for the single "Sooner Or Later."

As seen in the comments, I am not the only one who sees similarities between it and Trevor's best-selling song.  However, those observations arose because I had made a comment of my own in the Yesfans community.

This one made me giggle because the arrangement is a sort of proto-"Owner" in that it's got a simple driving riff and lots of little accents which do that same "Surprise!" kind of thing and then the big chorus. I wonder what he was listening to in London which eventually led him in that direction.

I'll leave it to each reader to judge, there may be those who don't hear a resemblance, and I acknowledge - with "Owner" a part of my fandom DNA (as with all the people who became fans of Trevor's via YesWest) - that anything even remotely like it will cause that association to emerge.  But I don't believe it's mere coincidence...though it is a "chicken-or-egg" question.  "Owner" was going to be written at that time - there was no stopping it - and perhaps the seeds of it emerged during those sessions or it so absorbed his imagination in the writing that it began suggesting itself in other situations as well.  Trevor is just as gifted an arranger as he is a musician, songwriter, engineer and producer - and much of his work during the South African years supports this assertion.

I made the following observance before I heard "Paying My Dues" when discussing the various melding of styles within "Owner":

So when you stop to think about it…the dance factor inherent in “Owner of a Lonely Heart” owes a lot to Trevor’s nascent experiences in disco as much as to the New Wave trend which had overtaken the market at the time he wrote the song. After spending a few years trapped in the pub rocker genre prison Chrysalis needed him to be in so they could market him, he once again began writing songs which reflected the true breadth of his musical history: rock, pop, and yes, even disco. The extent to which those influences were then absorbed and redefined adds yet another layer to a fascinating history…and lots of great music. 

But at that point I was not aware of the year Trevor first began writing the song.  So now I would posit that those same impulses were there as always, but just as a natural state rather than an expression of circumstances.  Trevor's musical imagination is inherently capable of dynamic audacity, and perhaps there is none so popular an example as that song which is both wholly of its time and completely outside of it as a modern classic.