Rupert Hine
Born in 1949, Rupert released his first single, ‘The Sound of Silence’ when he was only 16 years old. It failed to chart, and it wasn’t until five years later that Rupert released his first album, ‘Pick Up A Bone’, followed by ‘Unfinished Picture’ some two years later. While he continued to develop as an artist, fronting Quantum Jump in the 70s, and then releasing his best-known solo album in 1980, ‘Immunity’, he was also developing as an arranger/programmer and producer. He honed his skills with bands that needed broad production skills, such as Camel, Saga and Chris De Burgh; with co-conspirator and engineer Stephen Tayler, in 1981 he turned his hand to pop, recording Howard Jones’s debut album ‘Humans Lib’ and Tina Turner’s comeback ‘Private Dancer’ in close succession. It was nothing unexpected for him to switch genres at the drop of a hat – “I always liked each project to be different to the last, and ideally to anything I’d done before,”, he says.
Rupert continued to make his own solo albums, ‘Waving Not Drowning’ (1982), ‘The Wildest Wish to Fly’ (1983) and 1986’s concept album ‘Thinkman’, a fictional account of musicians against media manipulation. “They were supposed to be media terrorists,” says Rupert, “righting wrongs in the classic Robin Hood tradition, inside global companies.” In reality, the band was made up of trained actors who played their part in press interviews. Much to everyone’s astonishment, the ruse was taken seriously. “We were never actually asked, ‘is this true?’” says Rupert. “My own theory is that it was such a great story, why should they worry about it? They wanted it to be true!”
Following work with The Thompson Twins, The Fixx, Saga (again), his then-partner Stevie Nicks and others, in 1989 Rupert was invited to produce two albums for Rush, namely ‘Presto’ (on which he supplied additional keys and vocals) and ‘Roll The Bones’. In 1995 he recorded his most recent solo album, ‘The Deep End’. More recently, Rupert has worked with Suzanne Vega (“trying to bring groove back to her, like the DNA remix of ‘Tom’s Diner’,” he says), Duncan Sheik and Teitur, and has taken an executive producer role with Martin Grech. “I’m only interested in what it is the artist has to say, and therefore they’re the only artists that I’m attracted to. I cannot possibly make a record that’s simply entertaining,” he says. “I can’t be responsible for adding one jot of meaningless music.”
Ever the maverick, Rupert has very clear views on the way music is going. “The entire record industry is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he says, “but then there’s the music business. What I’m interested in is the stripped down next generation, which will be all about scaling back down to the kind of models that started each of the cycles of over fifty years of popular music.”