At times it's hard to pick out what's Ann Dudley and what's Fairlight but it's so big and bright and shiny it doesn't matter.
The strings and brass were all real, arranged and conducted by Dudley and recorded at Abbey Road and Advision. The Fairlight at that point was being used for effects, overdubs and editing. Page R had not appeared by then, so it couldn't be used for drum sequencing.
Dudley had been brought in by Horn as a session keyboard player for the recording of Poison Arrow. Stephen Singleton wanted John Barry-style pizzicato strings on The Look Of Love, and Horn, who had bad experiences with string sections, wanted to do it using a string machine. Singleton brought in an Adam Faith record, played it to Horn and said 'A string machine will never sound as good as that!', Horn relented and the record company agreed to finance it as Poinson Arrow had been a hit. Horn asked Dudley to arrange and conduct the session while he stayed in the control room smoking dope. They then wanted Dudley to put strings on everything by the time they came to record the album.
On Poison Arrow, the first track Horn did with them, he took their demo and sequenced the drums on a TR808 and the bass on a Minimoog and got David Palmer and Mark Lickley to play along to them (though a Simmons SDS-V triggered by the 808's sequencer still can be heard in the final mix and all over the subsequent album). By the time it came to record the follow-up The Look Of Love, they had already done the bass on a Minimoog and Palmer had obviously got the message as he'd gone out and bought a LinnDrum. Horn also insisted that the woman's voice saying 'Goodbye' had to be Fry's ex-girlfriend.
Horn was responsible for them writing All Of My Heart, as he said the album needed a ballad, an idea they originally met wih ridicule. He was also the cause of Mark Lickey being sacked and replaced by Brad Lang during the Lexicon Of Love sessions. He said that Lickley was holding them back and they needed a Bernie Edwards-type bassist (they later worked with Edwards on The Night You Murdered Love). With the arrival of Lang and with Dudley also playing keyboards, a lot of the album was recorded live without the need to play along to sequenced parts. To record Fry's vocals Horn would reserve seven tracks on the 48-track and get him to run through the song seven times. He would then patch together the final vocal take from the seven takes, rather than getting Fry to do retakes of individual lines or sections.
