"There were times recording Rosanna – and Africa, too – where we literally had one spare track. Just the one!”: Toto’s Steve Porcaro on the perils of recording live to analogue tape, and what happened if you were the one who messed up the crucial take

Rosanna Arquette and Steve Porcaro.

It might be regarded as one of the best-sounding songs in rock history - it won the Record of the Year Grammy in 1983, in fact - but the technical limitations of the time meant that the recording of Toto’s Rosanna (possibly named after Rosanna Arquette, Porcaro's girlfriend at the time) wasn’t quite as smooth as the end result.

Speaking to MusicRadar, Steve Porcaro - the band’s keyboard player and resident synth boffin - says: “What you"ve got remember is that, back in the early-’80s, nobody had heard of Pro Tools and nobody had a professional studio on their laptop. We were recording live to tape on 24-track machines.”