The Fairlight’s grainy, low-resolution samples have a particular character and charm, a “veiled, indistinct quality,” as critic Timothy Warner puts it. On the Art of Noise records, the samples often have a faded, Pathé newsreel aura.
Into Battle
sounds a bit like hip-hop might have had it been invented in Europe in 1916. Morley envisioned the whole ZTT aesthetic as a flashback to the 1910s and 1920s, futurism and surrealism and all the other great manifesto-mongering isms of that era. His slogan for ZTT was “Raiding the twentieth century.” As Greil Marcus would later do in
Lipstick Traces,
Morley traced punk back through situationism to what he calls “the great sense of play and provocation” animating Dada. Art of Noise’s absurdist collage of beats and pieces, its “flung together” messthetic of “inconsistencies, hyperbole, non sequitur, and conflicting themes,” as Dudley put it, was actually much closer to Dada than the carnage-crazy Italian futurists. At the same time, it anticipated the fin de siècle sounds of sampladelic genres such as hardcore rave and Big Beat. By the nineties, what had made the Art of Noise eccentric—instrumental dance music that relegated vocals to being just another texture, while turning drum sounds and effects into hooks—was totally normal.
If Dudley, Langan, and Jeczalik were the musical core of the Art of Noise, and Horn was its musical director, Morley’s role was the organizer of meaning and maker of mischief. “I acted as if I was in the group,” says Morley. “There was a lot of high-tech jamming, so it was quite formless, and I helped Trevor edit it together. But even if I’d only thought of the name the Art of Noise, I think that was enough. I did take credit because I named all the songs.” As Dudley puts it,
Into Battle
’s standout track “Moments in Love” “is not ‘Moments in Love’ without the title. That’s incredibly important, almost worth half the publishing credit!” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine this gliding moonwalk of glistening idyllictronica being called anything else, so exquisitely does it capture the “wide asleep” feeling of falling head over heels.
Fundamental to the Art of Noise concept was anonymity. At their first group meeting in February 1983, they all agreed that no photos of the group would appear on the records or in interviews, they’d never appear in the videos, and there’d be no lead singer. This was partly a pragmatic decision, given that none of the group were exactly pop star material. Morley turned this facelessness into a provocation. “All the Art of Noise is, is taking the piss a little out of pop groups, which is why the first photos we sent out were of spanners [wrenches] and roses,” he told
NME
. As he later pointed out during a ZTT showcase at London’s Ambassador’s Theatre, “a spanner is intrinsically more interesting than the lead singer of Tears for Fears.” The side effect of this anonymity, though, was that Morley became the Art of Noise’s spokesperson in interviews.
Much later, when it all went sour, Jeczalik would quantify Horn and Morley’s combined musical contribution as slightly less than 2 percent. But Dudley is much more generous. “Paul, to his credit, was the entire creator of all the titles, the artwork, the manifestos. He gave us an identity. None of us had really intended to be a band, but Paul got very excited by it and swept us along with his enthusiasm. Without him, we wouldn’t have existed. We would’ve been a bunch of session musicians. He gave us the name and we thought we ought to live up to it because it was so good.”
The Art of Noise, and ZTT in general, represented Morley’s fantasy of an alternate pop history. What if European culture just carried on from where it was just before the Second World War, unaffected by the arrival of rock ’n’ roll, and instead generated its own totally un-American version of pop music? The third ZTT release,
Propaganda Present the Nine Lives of Dr. Mabuse
by the Düsseldorf group Propaganda, represented the next stage in this master plan of raiding the (early, European) twentieth century. “The children of Fritz Lang and Giorgio Moroder” is how
NME
’s Chris Bohn tagged Propaganda. Inspired by Lang’s expressionist trilogy of movies about a shadowy master criminal, “Dr. Mabuse” was epic Eurodisco, for which Horn and engineer Steve Lipson constructed a monumental edifice of arching synths and percussion as imposing as marble colonnades. Propaganda’s conceptualist, Ralf Dorper, justified this “very bombastic sound” to
ZigZag
. “The character Mabuse was symbolizing something extraordinary, something more or less unreal, so we had to have an unreal production.” Formerly in metal-bashing pioneers Die Krupps, Dorper was a fanatic cinephile who preferred movies to music. “Cinema is much more inspirational to me,” he declared. “It’s much more multi-leveled: you have a storyline, a setting, a soundtrack.”
Propaganda’s ambition was as grand as their sound. They wanted to be the biggest German band in the world. Released in February 1984, “Dr. Mabuse” peaked at number twenty-seven on the U.K. charts. That would normally have been a decent result for a new band and a young label, but “Mabuse” had already been horribly eclipsed by the gargantuan impact of ZTT’s second release, “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
HORN FIRST SAW
Frankie Goes to Hollywood on a British new music TV show called
The Tube
. The Liverpool group had been given a small budget to do a slightly cleaned-up remake of their own ultra-sleazy promo video, which the band had filmed in the hopes of getting a record deal. The look was striking. Singer Holly Johnson and backing vocalist Paul Rutherford pranced in leather fetish wear. The sound, scrappy funk rock, had a crude but lusty energy. “More a jingle than a song,” is how Horn describes the original “Relax,” but then the producer actually preferred half-written tunes to professionally finished songs, because there was potential for him to “fix them up,” inflate them in his inimitable style. Morley, initially more doubtful, liked Frankie’s hard-core gay element. “I kinda thought it could be the fun I wanted to have, to invent a pop group.” Not that he had a blank canvas. The kinky S&M image predated Frankie’s falling into ZTT’s clutches. So did the basic disco-metal sound and the group’s balls-out attitude, as distilled in the Liverpudlian expression “Give it
loads
!” which became Frankie’s catchphrase and rallying cry.
What Frankie really brought to the table was a characteristically Liverpudlian commitment to being entertaining. Like Ian McCulloch, Johnson and Rutherford had that innate belief that they were
already
stars, only the wider world had yet to catch on. The pair were veterans of the glam-turned-punk milieu centered in Liverpool’s nightclub Eric’s. Rutherford had formed Liverpool’s one proper London-style punk band, the Spitfire Boys, whose claims to fame were that they were all gay, lived together in one room, read Genet, and never rehearsed. “One week if you wore makeup you were a queer, the next you were a punk,” Rutherford recalled. It didn’t make much difference either way, you still got beaten up. Bowie-boy Holly Johnson fearlessly affronted the straights with his extremist hairstyles, alternately dying his social-security number into the side of his head, getting a mini-Mohawk, and shaving his scalp and painting it red and green. “Decadence was the key word then,” he recalled.
Johnson joined Big in Japan, Liverpool’s glam-punk supergroup, whose members all went on to pop success of one sort or another. Fame eluded Johnson until, after various failed ventures, he finally hooked up with Rutherford and the three hetero members of Frankie—Peter “Ped” Gill, Mark O’Toole, and Brian “Nasher” Nash, collectively known forevermore as “the Lads.” The name Frankie Goes to Hollywood came from a picture stuck to the wall of the band’s dank rehearsal cellar. Taken from an old glamour magazine, it showed a young Frank Sinatra getting off an airplane in Los Angeles and being greeted by screaming teenyboppers. It symbolized Frankie’s determination to be stars at all costs.
Unfortunately, Frankie’s lust for fame was so fierce that they signed the lousy contract dangled by ZTT (a £250 advance for each of the first two singles, with a meager royalty rate of 5 percent). They also buckled when Jill Sinclair made the deal conditional on Frankie’s signing their song publishing rights over to ZTT’s sister company, Perfect Songs, for a miserly advance of £5,000. “That’s the embarrassment I have really,” admits Morley, comparing the contract to a “1950s deal,” with the recording, publishing, and studio (Frankie’s records would be made at Horn’s SARM studios, ensuring an extra stream of profit for what Morley calls “the family”) all “locked in with the same company. You can mount a case, but it was an unfair monopoly.” In the long run, this greed would come back to bite ZTT.
Once Frankie were securely indentured, Morley went into overdrive, mapping out the Frankie marketing campaign as a military assault on pop. There would be a perfect conceptual sequence of singles tackling the biggest possible themes (“sex, war, religion”), while the videos and packaging would maximize the shock impact of Holly and Paul’s hard-core homosexuality. Explicit gayness was one of pop’s few remaining taboos. Boy George opened the closet door, but only the tiniest crack. Ultimately he was too cuddly, coyly masking his sexuality with statements such as the famous declaration that he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex. Pop was long overdue for something that was fully “out,” that carried the scent of semen and the acrid, dizzy-making tang of amyl nitrite. Frankie led the way, closely followed by fellow Liverpudlian Pete Burns of Dead or Alive and by Bronski Beat. The latter, whom rumor had it turned down ZTT’s advances, represented the responsible side of gay pride, the struggle for dignity in the face of bigotry. Frankie, by contrast, were rampantly pleasure principled, and thus far more threatening. Bronski’s singer, Jimmy Somerville, dapper but basically ordinary looking in his jeans and Ben Sherman shirt, communicated the idea that “we’re just like everybody else, except in bed.” Johnson, and especially Rutherford with his clone mustache, transmitted something more confrontational. As Johnson put it, “There’s no pussy-footing with us. We are into
pleasure
and we think that what has been regarded as a sexual perversion should be brought into the open.”
Imagine if someone had wanted to re-create punk but had only a single surviving relic to work from: the infamous T-shirt worn by Sid Vicious of two cruising cowboys in leather chaps and little else, their giant cocks hanging down and almost touching. “Morley had his strategy all worked out, he wanted it to be like the Sex Pistols—all the outrage, controversy—but this time with all the sex,” Rutherford recalled. Crucially, though, Frankie were the
disco Pistols,
what punk would have sounded like if modeled on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” rather than the Stooges’ “No Fun.”
Yet the conditions under which Frankie’s records were made couldn’t have been further from punk’s spirit. Far from “doing it yourself,” the band ended up excluded from the recording process by their producer. “Relax” displayed Horn’s maniacal perfectionism and his willingness to disregard the musicians he was supposedly working with and for. He quickly came to see Frankie as an obstacle to his vision. In the studio, overawed and intimidated by Horn’s reputation, the band was too nervous to make suggestions. In his autobiography,
A Bone in My Flute,
Johnson admitted, “Whatever he said we went along with. On one occasion, Trevor said to me that he had considered sacking the musicians from the band, leaving just Paul and me to front the act.” After an abortive attempt to get the Lads to play to his satisfaction, Horn hired the Blockheads, the accomplished funkateers who’d once backed Ian Dury, but the results weren’t modern sounding enough. Eventually, a high-tech version of “Relax” was constructed with the rhythm programming assistance of Art of Noise’s Jeczalik and keyboard work from session player Andy Richards. Apart from Johnson, the band twiddled their thumbs in Liverpool while the definitive version of “Relax” was made at Horn’s West London studio. “I was just…Look, ‘Relax’
had
to be a hit,” says Horn with a mixture of self-justification and guilt. In the end, the sole sonic contributions from the band, besides Johnson’s vocals, were samples of the group jumping in a swimming pool. Yet Horn later admitted, “I could never have done these records in isolation. There was no actual playing by the band, but the whole
feeling
came from the band.”
“Relax” sounded colossal, as well it should have after Horn had lavished £70,000 in studio time on it. But Horn claims that its monumental quality owed less to his production tricks than the key it was played in and the instrumentation used. “‘Relax’ is perfect because it’s in E,” he says. “The most satisfying note on the bass guitar is bottom E and that’s what’s running through the whole song.” Technology did play its part, though. A new device enabled Horn to lock the Fairlight-sampled bass pulse in superhumanly tight synchrony with the four-on-the-floor Linn drum machine. The pumping bass and pounding kick drum fuse in a love action of thrust and grind. In his memoir, Johnson describes how “Relax” merged “rock edge” with the Hi-NRG disco that ruled gay clubs in the early eighties. DJ/producer Ian Levine, the pioneer of this sound, defined Hi-NRG as “melodic, straightforward dance music that’s not too funky.” The nonfunkiness was crucial. Slamming rather than swinging, Hi-NRG’s white European feel was accentuated by butt-bumping bass twangs at the end of each bar.
“Relax” tapped into Hi-NRG’s remorseless metronomic precision and orgiastic vibe. “As we were making ‘Relax,’ I became more and more convinced it was all about sex,” recalls Horn. “It was like a shagging beat. Also the more I met the guys, I thought it was about sex. They were
obsessed
with it. By the end we were thinking of giant orgasms.” Horn filled the record with “imaginary mayhem,” synth whooshes, gasps and exhalations. The whole song is suffused with a preorgasmic glow. Two-thirds of the way through, “Relax” ignores its own advice—“Relax, don’t do it/When you want to come”—and erupts with a crass but hilariously liquid simulated ejaculation. The spasming drumroll at the end of the single feels like an amyl rush. The protracted and abstract “Sex Mix” was even more blatant with its rubbery squelches, bathhouse splashes, boystown gang chants, slurping sounds, and Holly leerily slurring stray words such as “awesome” and “feel.” Ironically, the song’s original concept was “If you wanna get on top of a situation, you’ve gotta work hard to do it,” Johnson told the
East Village Eye
. “The sexual innuendo was put upon it later.”