“I’d spent a whole year wanting to belt Paul,” Horn laughs. Morley had interviewed the Buggles and headlined the feature DIRTY OLD MEN WITH MODERN MANNERISMS, meaning that they were just prog-rock session hacks disguising themselves as New Wave. “He wasn’t wrong in a way,” concedes Horn. “It was one of the Buggles’ failings that we didn’t have a manifesto. When I was working with ABC, I watched Martin Fry and saw how well he had the music paper thing worked out.” Morley and Horn both had cameo roles in “The Look of Love” video and, on the set, Morley tried to kiss Horn. “I was taken by surprise and pushed him away!” Then Morley profiled Horn for NME, hailing him as the hippest producer of 1982. “In the interview, he took all the things I said and presented my ideas so much better than I did,” recalls Horn. “I was impressed.”
Morley, meanwhile, found himself in a similar quandary to Horn at the end of ’82. After six years of crusading for postpunk and New Pop, he felt exhausted with music journalism and quit his job as a staff writer at NME. In the age of glitzy, full-color magazines like Smash Hits and the Face, the monochrome music papers were no longer at the center of pop culture. The blander Wham!-Duran types were ousting the brighter minds that Morley had championed and it felt like the music business, for so long thrown off balance by punk, was now back in control. “By 1983, both Trevor and me were questioning the value of what we did, from our different positions,” recalls Morley. “I was going through a period of guilt, feeling that all I did was comment and carp from the sidelines. As a critic I’d tried to make things happen, but ultimately I felt parasitical. I had this romantic idealism that I should contribute.” Then Horn called Morley up and said, “Let’s have an adventure.”
Creating an identity for Horn’s label—christened Zang Tuum Tumb—came naturally for Morley. He’d always celebrated those independent labels who managed to shed the dowdy-shopkeeper aura that often clung to all things “indie” and instead cultivated a mystique through seductive packaging and witty allusions. Fast Product was a favorite for its design sense, as was Factory for its gorgeous, enigmatic artwork and dadaist japes, such as giving catalog numbers to things that weren’t records. “Even moods and sneezes got cataloged,” claims Morley. “And a cat.” Morley was also influenced by arty European labels such as Sordide Sentimentale and Les Disques Du Crepuscule, the latter run by a clutch of Factory-worshipping Belgian aesthetes who released esoteric compilations such as The Fruit of the Original Sin. Other Morley faves included Fetish, which had groups such as 23 Skidoo and covers designed by ultrahip graphic artist Neville Brody, and ZE.
Although often described as ZTT’s marketing director, Morley never had an official title. “I worked like a fucking demon, to be honest. I did about five jobs—A&R, helping design sleeves, commissioning, writing all the label copy, the sleeve notes.” Playful, pretentious (in the best sense), and liberally peppered with quotations from philosophers and novelists, Morley’s notes became ZTT’s hallmark, captivating some with their wit and intellectual panache, while irritating others immensely. Although Horn himself didn’t always understand what Morley was on about in the sleeve notes, he says, “I loved the idea of a manifesto, because musicians are rarely any good at romanticizing themselves. Unfortunately, those sleeve notes caused Paul to fall out majorly with most ZTT artists quite quickly.”
ZTT’s output was divided into two streams, the Action Series and the Incidental Series. The latter consisted of experimental and contemplative music. In a piece for NME grandiosely titled “Who Bridges the Gap between the Record Executive and the Genius? Me,” Morley argued that a new “blockbuster” mentality had taken over the industry and it was rendering extinct cult figures such as John Martyn, the kind of “midlist” artists once allowed to make record after record with only middling sales. The Action Series, meanwhile, was designed to compete in precisely this brutal new chart pop realpolitik oriented around singles and videos. The word “Action” signaled ZTT’s aggressive intent. “I was sick of the people that were getting all the attention, such as Gary Kemp and Simon Le Bon, so I wanted to muscle in, push these offensive characters aside,” Morley told Melody Maker. “We hate videos and all that rubbish, but unfortunately we’re stuck with it now,” he told another interviewer. “So our philosophy is to get in there and do it better, to do it richer.” If Horn’s job involved ensuring ZTT records sounded sensational, Morley’s was to engineer sensations that convulsed their way through the media. Like McLaren before him, Morley wanted to use hype, scandal, and staged confrontation to conjure instant pop myth.
Zang Tuum Tumb was a phrase Morley found in Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto for a futurist music, “the Art of Noises.” In it, Russolo quoted from a letter by the movement’s leader, F. T. Marinetti, who used onomatopoeia to poetically describe a battle during the Balkan Wars. “Zang-Tumb-Tuumb,” as Marinetti rendered it, evoked the sound of Bulgarian siege cannons bombarding the Ottoman Turks. The military connotations of Zang Tuum Tumb appealed to Morley’s sense of the label as declaring war on a New Pop gone wrong. In this martial spirit, the first Zang Tuum Tumb release was Into Battle with the Art of Noise.
Although the McLaren album laid the groundwork for the group, the actual trigger for the Art of Noise came from something far less cool: Horn and his crew’s nine months of laborious production work on Yes’s 90125. During one of the many recording session hiatuses, Jeczalik and Langan got bored and started messing around on a Fairlight CMI Series II sampler, the first keyboard-based digital sampler. They took Alan White’s drum track from an aborted Yes song as raw material, but instead of the usual practice of sampling individual drum hits they shoved a whole drum break into the Fairlight. When Horn heard the crashing monsterfunk stampede of looped rhythm, he realized that Langan and Jeczalik had unwittingly reinvented hip-hop’s wheel. When it came to making rap records, hip-hop producers in those days used drum machines or live musicians, simply because the Fairlight sampler was priced out of their league. Beating the likes of Marley Marl to the punch by a couple of years, the Art of Noise pioneered one of the foundations of hip-hop: the sampled and looped break beat.
Sampling was at the core of the Art of Noise. In the early eighties the only people who could afford Fairlights were art rock superstars such as Yes, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush. But being a wealthy superproducer and a fiend for state-of-art machinery, Horn owned a Fairlight. In Jeczalik, he also had a burgeoning sampler virtuoso, which was fortunate, because in addition to its prohibitive cost, the Fairlight was “very difficult to operate,” says Anne Dudley. “It also sounded dreadful,” she says, at least by today’s standards. The Fairlight reproduced sampled sounds at low resolution and could only capture 1.2-second sound bites. Yet restriction proved to be the mother of invention. “We had to be incredibly ingenious to make this thing work,” says Dudley. “I had to think of ways of using short sounds all the time. That’s why Art of Noise’s music is so stabby.” You can hear this on “Beat Box,” the track built around the Yes drum loop, and throughout the Into Battle EP. Everything is staccato and punchy. Clipped orchestral fanfares jab and joust. Sampled vocals, stretched across the octaves of the Fairlight keyboard, are played in stuttering patterns. A baritone belch becomes a strange oompahlike bass pulse. Bright bursts of unidentifiable sound ambush your ears. It’s like being in an audio cartoon version of Marinetti’s Balkan battlefield.
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 sen
se 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.”
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