QUESTION: If Horn is the heart of the Art Of Noise, who are the nose, ears, brain, neck, elbows, legs and big toes?
Answer: J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan and Ann Dudley, the
production team who worked with Trevor Horn on Malcolm McLaren’s “Duck
Rock”.
The Art Of Noise were responsible for the opening shot in
the Zang Tumb Tuum label’s campaign of action: a voluptuous and
frequently vociferous offering that simultaneously (a) avoided the
single/12 inch single/album format, (b) instituted a re-ordering of
sound quite unlike any other, and (c) reached number one in the US dance
charts.
In England some would call it a crock of crap, but me, I
liked it. Several months after its inception, “Into Battle” and its
recent sibling “Beatbox” stand as two of the most appealing visionary
records of the past six months. A bom-bom dance beat fabricated from the
human voice, car ignition motors performing paradiddles, blownacross
milk bottles (a sonata of sour cream?) and the scarcely-noticed
incidents of domestic life became part of pop, the fabric of a new rock
‘n’ roll… or you could point to the funk and say it was soul.
Who cares? What the music is doesn’t matter so much as
what the music isn’t. There is always a joy to be had from the
uncovering of the new, the glimpse of the unseen, and while the Art Of
Noise, like most developments in popular music, do not spring from
nothing, it’s their fresh way of dealing with materials, ideas and even
cliches we already know backwards from some other context that gives
them their dynamic thrust.
AoN toy with sounds, toss them back and forth across the
studio, indulge themselves in the wonders of studio technology for the
pure sake of discovery. It’s a music that takes itself seriously and
wears a smile at the same time, wandering through the blurred border
regions between parody and tribute to throw forward an intriguing sense
of ambiguity.
Albert Goldman had an astute insight into the workings of
innovation in pop culture when he wrote the following about the early
Sun-period Elvis Presley: “During these years he used his talent to
create a music that was essentially playful and parodistic. Approaching
the pop song in this spirit, he established the basic aesthetic for rock
‘n’ roll. Rock is not simply an amalgam of blues, country pop, etc.
This is to define it by its sources and substances instead of its soul.
The music’s essence lies in its attitude.
“The attitude first comes to expression in Elvis, then in
Little Richard, and then in the Beatles. All of these singers are at
bottom parodists. They assume the identity provided by a particular
style; then, working behind this mask, they achieve the exhilarating
freedom of the ventriloquist talking through his zany dummy. Inevitably
they tend towards falsetto and caricature… The important thing is to
recognise that the root of rock is the put-on and the take-off.”
In Sarm West, the West London recording studio owned by
Trevor Horn and his wife/business partner Jill Sinclair, appointed press
handler Paul Morley leans forward to consider the words. To ensure
objectively he hasn’t been told who wrote them or who they are about.
He’s simply been asked if they could fruitfully be applied to the AoN.
“Yeah, I’d certainly agree with the put-on and the
take-off bit. That’s been a very important element of what we do in this
blue building. Parody… you see, people always accuse what we do of
being serious. This is a distinction I try to make, I never quite pull
it off, but those people who accuse you of being serious simply because
you try and do it with an attention to detail and try to do it well,
they’re usually people that do things so seriously, they’re so inhibited
and rigid.
“The people who accuse you of being intellectual are
usually the ones who are taking you seriously and don’t see what you’re
trying to do is put-on and take-off. And there’s a certain thing opposed
to the word ‘art’ or the word ‘intelligent’. It’s strange, actually,
because from intelligence surely will come all the radicalism and all
the discovery and innovation people always seem to be thirsting for in
their whining about blandness.”
THIS is not to be the usual “band interview”, as the
presence of Morley obviously signifies. Jeczalik turns up towards the
end but by then the most interesting ground’s already been covered. Far
from reflecting some awkwardness or casual perversity, the AoN’s
“anonymous” image is a deliberately planned style of presentation. The
style of their photographs (no faces shown, often no bodies shown)
mirrors a profile kept carefully in the shadows.
Morley, former pet enfant terrible on the NME and now a
member of the ZTT board, assumes the role of thinker, schemer. If Horn
is the heart of the Art Of Noise, Morley’s the dreamer. As a writer
whose prose finally degenerated into a tediously’ obscure form of
self-indulgence, it’s interesting to find that in person he’s lucid and
direct. He virtually interviews himself, gabbling through his ideas at a
furious number of words per minute.
The Art of Noise came together during the time when
McLaren wasn’t in the studio for the recording of “Duck Rock”, he
explains. Horn, Fairlight operator Jeczalik, engineer Langan and
classically trained musician Dudley would mess around in the studio,
come up with odd combinations of sound.
“And then, because we wanted to develop the unit, the
fifth part became… not necessarily me, but the record label, in a way,
they became the frame so that the AoN didn’t become an anonymous,
nonsensical thing. Instead of McLaren it was ZTT who gave it shape and
content.
“I hated the stereotypical notion of the pop group, and
what we’ve tried to do with everything we’ve signed - though it wasn’t
so obvious with Frankie - was a unit of communication that wasn’t ‘the
pop group’ or ‘the rock group’, because it seemed the very format was
stifling the amount of creativity or invention that could come through.
So the AoN was set up as a kind of innovative idea to the group.
“At the moment there’s a demand for the instant hit - Nik
Kershaw, Sade, Fiction Factory, it’s all ‘Gotta have a hit’ - and we
put them on a thing called ‘The Incidental Series’, as opposed to our
‘Action Series’, which was mainstream to compete in the charts with the
Spandaus and Nik Kershaws, because we wanted to try and generate the
kind of patience there used to be once upon a time where a record label
was interested enough in the music of the group as banal as that sounds -
to encourage them to find out themselves. So we wanted to see how
patient we could be, how far we could take it without people actually
knowing what was going on. In England, especially, people got very
self-conscious about that.”
Is this because people have been conditioned to be spoon-fed?
“They are being spoon-fed, and that’s why they respond
with complete bafflement to AoN, if at all. The response in England was
classic indifference. That was quite enjoyable to one extent, because it
was a very interesting music and people who’d been decrying the
blandness of last year, when something did come along that was trying to
experiment in an accessible sense - as opposed to a nonsensical German
messing around with noise - there was complete indifference to it.”
Was it any great surprise that the record had been so well-received in America?
“No, in a way it was inevitable, simply because there’s a
naturalness there that we don’t have here any more, ie they didn’t
wonder why it was done, what label it was on, what it meant, for them it
was just a noise, and they responded to it naturally. In America, New
York especially, AoN are thought of as being a black group, and that’s
interesting as well. Whereas over here the Face/ID trendsetters were
actually responding to sub-standard AoN music, but that was trendy.”
Morley speaks of “dredging up” the European tradition and
applying it to “a pop context”. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising; the
style of ZTT’s press handouts and sleeve notes is obviously inspired by
the Italian Futurist manifestos, and I’ve always suspected he’d defend
the more outrageous excesses of his pickled prose with references to the
absurdism and desire to shock of the Dada-ists. An inkling that turns
out to be not so far from the truth.
The European-ness of ZTT’s Propaganda is obvious, the
Teutonic flavour of their “Dr Mabuse” underlined by the echoes of German
Expressionism in the video. But what about AoN?
“In a way, they are raiding the 20th Century, in terms of
it being an incredible century in terms of what’s happened, in terms of
discovery, and combat, the fury of the century, the tension of it. Rock
groups just seem to borrow from within a very specific era for their
stuff, so it gets weaker and weaker until it just disappears into a puff
of Howard Jones.
“What I wanted to do was to reconstruct to that time in
the 1910s and the 1920s of Surrealism and Dada-ism and Futurism that
just seemed to be completely lost - the war just destroyed it. To me,
there was a great sense of play going on there, and also provocation,
and I felt that rock in its known types of provocation had died a death.
Punk was the last kick of provocation within rock. So I wanted to
dredge up some of this idea of play and apply it to this context.
“So that’s the European tradition I’m talking about, that
sense of classic ideals and very much a sense of comedy, in fact, ZTT
is a very funny label. Not many people get the joke but in fact it is,
it’s meant to be hilarious. Those that do get the Joke have a good laff,
because it’s meant to be funny, Trevor Horn is a master comedian,
y’know.
“Because of certain aspects of our post-Factory
presentation, or whatever you want to call it, people think it’s
over-intellectual, too serious; ‘Art Attack’ as some teenybop mags have
called it. What it usually is is simple intelligence, simple creative
energy. It’s always misinterpreted as something as dull as art.”
I’d go beyond characterising the AoN as European to see
them as part of a current process of internationalism of music that
transcends not just statelines but also crosses the Atlantic, a blurring
of boundaries to form a music that owes allegiance to no single nation
or narrowly defined cultural tradition.
That in New York “Into Battle” is seen as part of
Electrofunk is instructive, for the electro/hip-hop scene is a ship
adrift on international waters. Recorded mostly in New York, its sources
are primarily black American vocal traditions and German electronic
music. But Kraftwerk draw on funk rhythms from black America and
repetitive patterns inspired by the systems composers, themselves fired
by the music of the Third World.
It’s not at all surprising that New Order should record
with Arthur Baker or that the most belly-rumbling electro record around
should be a collaboration between German punks Die Töten Hosen and New
York rapper Freddy Love. Neither should it come as a shock that a
British record should provide the model for the latest Bill Laswell
project. “Matrix” is essentially Laswell’s answer to the AoN, even
borrowing the 12 inch/45 rpm format of “Into Battle”. Maybe the only
surprising thing is that, given the extent of the internationalisation
of the world’s economy, music scenes have previously been so parochial.
“What I find interesting about AoN,” says Morley, “is
that it fulfills a certain plan - that in Europe they’re acknowledged as
an avant-garde group, like King Crimson maybe, and in New York they’re
acknowledged as a dance group. I mean the only area where they’re
completely ignored is England. But I find it interesting that the
Europeans have responded to a certain part of it - maybe the cut-up
technique of Faust, or something, or the sheer bombastic-ness of Van De
Graaf Generator that occasionally creeps in and in New York people just
respond to the dance feel.”
WHAT I find interesting and, curiously, paradoxical about
Morley’s despair at the self-consciousness of response in Britain is
the very selfconsciousness with which he speaks of AoN and its place
within ZTT, the self-consciousness of its presentation and style. He
admits that part of his motivation is to get people “puzzled”, to
present “a challenge”. Given Morley’s imaginatively thought out
propaganda offensive it’s easy to assume that a similar
self-consciousness was at work in the studio. But when I comment that
“Beatbox” seemed to have added quite deliberate references to rock ‘n’
roll, as if they were slyly giving their own rebirth, of the form, he
shatters an illusion.
“No, that’s simply how it came. I mean Guy Langan is a
rock ‘n’ roll guitar player, Ann Dudley is a great classically trained
pianist. They’re not young people making pop music, to appeal to a Smash
Hits market, they’re just old-fashioned blowers they just go into a
studio and blow, they get on with it. Naturally. They don’t care about
what it means or what it is or any trend or anything, so that introduces
an interesting freshness to it.”
What comes across with great strength from the AoN is the
sense of breeziness, of curiosity. Some of the greatest music arises
not from a preplanned scheme or genius-like vision but from the natural
instinct of inquisitiveness. I say “natural”, but frequently wonder if
everybody possesses this quality, often get disappointed and annoyed
when people are given the resources to produce a brain-teasing music and
then fail to use them or even begin to explore what their equipment can
do.
Modern studio technology possesses a mind-boggling
capacity for creation if put into the hands of those who hunger for
exploration, invention and just simple fun. Anyone who’s ever tinkered
around on a synthesizer knows that it’s capable of throwing up
fascinating sounds.
So why are synthesizers so frequently under-used?
“That’s the point,” says Morley, “There’s no need to go
in with any plan, it just comes up. It’s an accidental music. I agree
with you. I can’t understand how when you review the singles you get 90
singles, why 89 are so awful… because that beautiful room in there” (he
points towards the studio) “is gorgeous.
“Anyone who has any dedication to what they do, any
creative energy, can not go into a room like that and come out with some
awful record. I don’t know what happens. AoN records sound like they’ve
been made in that kind of room, whereas you hear Howard Jones or Nik
Kershaw or the Thompson Twins, it sounds like it was made in a mental
hospital or something. It’s almost as if they’re scared of that room.”
Hearing such wonderfully wicked vitriol, I could almost
forgive Morley for making Haircut 100 respectable. I’ve always felt that
Morley’s sloppily defined new-pop ethnic helped pave the way for the
new-MOR, in the same way that Callaghan’s social-service-cutting Labour
Government softened people up for the Tory onslaught. Those who sow
should reap, you might say.
Me? Okay, I forgive. Bitching between writers is like a
couple arguing over who didn’t put the cat out in front of their
friends. And quite frankly, that was then but this is now. The subject
of this feature is: The Art Of Noise.
Let us hear what JJ has to say. “The only thing the Art
Of Noise has is life, joy, fun. That’s what we’re all doing it for,
we’re having a good time. Hopefully other people can buy the records and
enjoy some of the lunacy.”
Does it take very long to construct an AoN track?
“It varies. Some are very immediate. ‘The Army Now’ was
half an hour’s work. We left it because it had something that reworking
would have lost. ‘Beatbox’ has been reworked several times, so there are
no hard and fast rules.”
Much music seems to have lost a sense of dialectic, a
sense of struggling against something. Do you think there are other
musics, maybe very different to AoN, that will encourage a healthier
climate that will enable you to flourish or do you have an essentially
pessimistic view?
“No, it can only get better, because I see the AoN as not really ridiculing the situation at the moment but challenging it.”
Tell me about the relationship between AoN and ZTT.
“Their view of AoN is contrary to the way conventional
record companies sign bands these days. It’s like Paul said, artists
nowadays do records and the turnover rate of bands is frightening and
there are very few bands who actually have a long-term plan. Record
companies are not prepared for something that may start to turn over a
profit in X months or Y years, it’s generally singles deals and ‘If we
make a bit of money on this we’ll do an album’.
“It’s a unique situation… it can only get better.”
The final word goes to Morley: “It’s a jazz music,”
(though JJ disagrees), “and 90 per cent of it is improvised. And it’s
going back to a very old-fashioned idea of enjoying music for the sake
of it. Now you’re not allowed to do that these days very often. So we
incorporate a certain kind of calculation, the kind you need to compete
with biggies like EMI and CBS. Our idea is that we want to calculate and
manipulate but based on inspiration, based on something with
imagination and delight for people. I don’t know why. “The Seventies was
dominated by ageing hippies, maybe I’m just an ageing punk.”