THE MARRIAGE of these three highly
acute minds seems to have been one of the few inspired things to happen
in pop music this decade.
With an opening chapter in Dirty Old
Men With Modern Mannerisms (Paul’s 1980 article on Trevor’s group
Buggles), it’s a brilliant story for all concerned. Horn is the single
most extraordinary record producer Britain has ever known, Morley pop’s
most extreme and hilarious scribe, Jill the business brain that keeps
them both sane. Trevor’s bizarre career has taken him from ten years of
sessions to Yes to Dollar to ABC to McLaren and now to this: just as
Paul’s nib-pushing took him from The Buzzcocks to Quentin Crisp to Meat
Loaf and finally back to himself. A pair of comedians, they claim: the
one a visionary of sound, the other of language.
Together they’re beautiful, although
only occasionally will they bump into each other. “Sometimes we just
meet in the corridor,” says Paul, “and it ends up on a record. The
Patrick Allen thing came about like that, and the same happened with
Christopher Barry doing Reagan.”
With just a few records they’ve
achieved a magnificent amount, and they know it. ‘Relax’ is the fourth
best-selling British single of all time, ‘Tribes’ the eleventh. Neither
is lording it over anyone, though. The humour is much too vital for
anybody to start getting complacent or flashy about things. The figures
don’t interest Horn or Morley so much as the commotion Frankie stirred,
the excitement of the forbidden that a 25-year-old like myself perhaps
can’t understand.
“Every record company panicked after
‘Two Tribes’, coz all they’d ever done was stick a record in a bag and
stick it out — treating consumers like morons. Young people today have
got other stimuli, they’ve got Spielberg! The Young Ones! Their language
now is a lot richer, a lot more eccentric than record companies give
credit for. They demand more from it. They are a bit nihilistic.”
Right now the full promotional
propaganda is about to go into action for Frankie. While Horn is hidden
away in the studio, adding final touches to the double ‘Welcome To The
Pleasure Dome’, Morley twiddles his thumbs and dreams up ever-more
absurd gambits to hype it. At the moment, he’s toying with the notion of
giving away free vibrators.
“We’re trying to do what we did with
‘Two Tribes’, make it part of public language. Being a, ahem,
semiotician, that’s what interests me, to involve it.”
At three or so o’clock of a Friday
afternoon, Paul Rutherford enters bearing a copy of the Bowie album.
“Stop everything!” commands Morley. “Barney, take this down: ZTT PLAY
BOWIE ALBUM! Call the NME! Call The News Of The World! Actually, The
News Of The World just called us. Apparently they’ve got some
15-year-old who claims to have been fucked by Mark O’Toole.”
Frankie just Came Back From
Hollywood, actually, after recreating their video for a Brian De Palma
film called, irresistibly enough, Holly Goes To Hollywood. Rutherford is
still brimming with the funkiness of it all. As a tribute he plays
‘Erotic City’, the American B-side of Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’. ZTT’s
girls are all over him..
THE PRIVATE MOMENT
MORLEY IS a gas. Someone told me he
was going mad, drinking, doing cocaine. I’ve never seen anyone so calm,
so easy, so relaxed. Paul Morley is NOT WIRED, just full of love. I
discover we share an adoration of the late Eric Morecambe.
What happened in the minds of Frankie fans, Paul?
“Probably not a lot. You know I’ve
always been a bit pissed off with people like Weller and The Clash and
Killing Joke, these people who say there can be some kind of polemic
within pop. Well, ‘Two Tribes’ was trying to prove to people that it’s
impossible. I mean, we get to number one for nine weeks with an
explicit, extravagant anti-war thing with the real government warning on
there and the next week it’s George Michael taking over at number one,
and that’s the end. Nine weeks, and nothing’s happened. I like that in
away. Because… what can happen?!? So what it really comes down to is
what Trevor’n’me are involved in — which is the private moment.”
What I liked about Frankie was the
sense of communality. There’s something refreshingly humble and ordinary
about Holly Johnson which means he’s not the focal “point” of the
group. He’s so uncamp. Indeed, if truth be told, he’s a good deal less
“faggy” than most pop’s hetero pin-ups. Partly this was achieved by
Morley’s substitution of T-shirts for pin-ups, nagging words for images.
“What persuaded me was reading
Katharine Hamnett saying she wanted the T-shirts ripped off, which
reminded me of Mark P, saying he wanted Sniffin ‘Glue to be ripped off.
And I mean, I did a fanzine, so when I read that I thought, great,
fanzine T-shirts! I thought it was funny reading Murray and Bowie taking
the piss in NME. I mean, 12 years ago Murray was interviewing Bowie,
and 12 years later Murray is interviewing Bowie! It’s like, what’s
happened?’
EURO-GIRLS 1: ANNE (CERTAIN)
THE FIRST of ZTT’s new school we
meet is the gorgeous Anne Pigalle, a rive gauche beauty with Juliette
Greco cheekbones who first came over to London in the Vic Godard/Wag
Club days and took her name from Paris’ infamous street of shame. She’s
23 and all dressed in black. Paul says she is a cross between Edith Piaf
and Leonard Cohen and when she lets down her hair I fall in — ‘ow you
say — lerve.
“What I like to do in my texts, I
always make a twist, you know, it’s always on two levels, always to do
with love but always something going weird or wrong. I think that’s the
way you make things iteresting, by mixing things together. Sometimes if
you do something just straightforward, it can be totally brilliant, but
it’s very rare. That is not to say that you tell everyone, look, the
trick is here! I try to keep it simple. It interests me to put my
thoughts in words.”
Her songs are electronic Sade, jazz ballads with a wistful edge of sleazy melancholy.
“I could say it sounds French,
couldn’t I? But that doesn’t mean much. I thought the name Pigalle was
good, because it was a bit of a joke. Obviously, I am not a prostitute,
but I quite like the ambiguity, and also that you could put that name on
a public spot. In France, people think it’s really shocking. I thought
it was good to suggest the French thing, and still make it a street
thing, but not just a kind of tourist hole (!), I thought it was quite a
good idea. In France, it’s fair to say that there hasn’t been anything
worthwhile for ages, and I think this will be very big in France.”
The danger is of being too stylised.
You could probably learn a lot about Anne and her image from Paul
Webster and Nicholas Powell’s new account of Left Bank life
Saint-Germain-des-Pres (Constable).
“I like to use that for people to
understand something about me. It’s quite hard for people to listen to
somebody who’s got a French accent, they think it’s stylish but they
don’t think it’s their thing. Therefore I am approaching people through
what they know about the French. After all, it’s French culture that
brought me up, and that is what I am strongest to express.”
You do look the Greco type.
“Mmm,” she sighs wistfully, “I get
the Maria Callas as well, so it’s not too traumatic. For me, looking at
the styles at the moment, it’s very French, but they’re only into the
clothes aspect, and the only people that get to express are people like
Sade, who are very self conscious. I don’t think Sade gives much, you
know, she’s nice blah blah blah, but that’s all. I think I am attracting
people by the French thing, but then I am offering them something else,
something more.
“All I do is really how I feel. If I
don’t feel something I don’t do it, and if I’m in a bad mood, well,
you’ll see I’m in a bad mood. I think if you try hard to smile and look
like everything’s great, it sounds silly. I don’t like the idea of
putting on a face, I think you have to be true to yourself. That is what
rock was originally about, and now we’re getting into all this stylish
stuff, which they think just has to be good, but it seems to be stopping
there.”
Anne’s songs include ‘Hey Stranger’ —
“about being foreign and always having to prove something” — and ‘The
Thousand Colour Waltz’.
“That’s a very Brechtian type of
song. All the verses are about things that are bad in the world, but all
the choruses are about hope. Maybe it’s a hippie song.”
The single, ‘Why Does It Have To Be This Way’, will be “a bit Spanish-influenced, and also a bit James Bond…”
What has ZTT done for your career so far?
“Well, they’ve made me wait a lot.
That pissed me off for some time, but now I’m starting to accept it. The
more time you put into something, the better it is.”
EURO-GIRLS 2: CLAUDIA (ACTION)
“DO YOU have a light?” inquires charming Claudia of Propaganda.
“I’m sorry, no one smokes at NME anymore. Paul was the last unhealthy
writer. That’s why he had to go. (Actually, I’m slandering him: Paul Morley doesn’t smoke.)
Propaganda were the name behind the
mighty ‘Nine Lives Of Dr Mabuse’, the group Chris Bohn called “the
children of Fritz Lang and Giorgio Moroder”. They are the ZTT act who
most consciously fit the label’s tactics of media dissemination and
disinformation, though ‘Mabuse’ was essentially a straightforward disco
melodrama — Horn’s Wagnerian Kraftwerk. (He says it’s essential to
preserve the steeled Euro-ness of Propaganda amidst all the boxed
American beats.)
The group’s principal strategists
also happen to be away, and Claudia, who was still a schoolgirl only a
year ago, doesn’t claim to speak for them.
“At the moment we are waiting for
Trevor to finish mixing the Frankie album. After that he has one week’s
holiday and then comes back to work with us. I think he needs a holiday.
The others are in Germany, and maybe you know that Ralf (Dorper) is,
working in a bank, and Michael (Mertens) is working in opera. Ralf is a
very clever money man.”
Claudia has been living here five
months. “It’s much better here” is all she says, though she can’t
understand what happened with ‘Mabuse’.
“We went to number 27 in the charts,
and Top Of The Pops didn’t want to show us. It was very strange. Maybe
it was because of ZTT and the ban on ‘Relax’. Maybe because we came from
Germany. It is very strange, because if Gary Glitter can come in Top Of
The Pops when he’s 46… don’t you think so?”
Perhaps ‘Duel’, the single to be
released at the end of December (“or maybe the first of January”) will
be treated better. What’s it like?
“It will be a pop song, that is what
it will be. Very, very different from ‘Mabuse’, because we always want
to have our songs changing. ‘Duel’ will be a pop song, like in the ‘70s.
The mood shall be very… rock’n’roll, something like that. Well, not
rock’n’roll, really, but…”
What about the album?
“The first side of the album shall
be a long, long version of ‘Dr Mabuse’, different from the seven and 12
inch. This follows ‘Discipline’ (the ol’ Throbbin’ Gristle chestnut),
and on the second side will be five other songs. ‘Mabuse’ is still
selling, about 500 a week. I think we are 140 in the chart. ‘Mabuse’
came at the same time at Frankie Goes To Hollywood, so that ZTT was
concentrated on them, and it was not good for us. Now we want to do
things three months later than Frankie.”
What I’ve heard are demos of ‘P.
Machinery’ (though I hear “missionary”) and a hypnotic arrangement of
Josef K’s ‘Sorry For Laughing’ which features a madly insistent syndrum
beat and sounds like a futurist Shangri-Las.
How do you compare yourselves to the rest of pop music?
“I think ‘Mabuse’ was very, very
different from everything. The people had to get used to the song, and
you have to hear it about ten times till you can like it; it’s so
different, so strange. We didn’t expect it would be a success in
Germany. In Dusseldorf, they were very jealous of us. Not Kraftwerk,
Kraftwerk is very nice. But the others are very jealous when they know
you have a contract with Trevor Horn. I don’t like the Dusseldorf scene.
I like Berlin and Frankfurt. The music they are making there you can’t
compare with English music. There are still people there who are doing
it for themselves, for their own enjoyment.”
She chuckles her sweet laugh.
TREVOR
TREVOR HORN has been padding around
in the same track suit for days. Occasionally you’ll see the goggles
floating towards you down a corridor and he’ll say Hi in his soft,
gentle voice. He’s usually en route to the kitchen to get a Bounty.
As his wife says, “he’s much more normal than Phil Spector”.
“At first, Jill never forgave Paul
for slagging me off that first time in NME, she really had it in for
him. And when ‘Relax’ was banned, quite a few people were suggesting it
was somehow Paul’s fault, and we’d be better off without him. However,
she never subscribed to that.
“I always thought that the idea of
someone who’d been such a father-figure of negative journalism having a
go at it himself was great, and would be bound to cause trouble. Plus I
began to see that a record company would need someone who could
visualize it, who could dream it up, someone who could be the soul of
it.”
Trevor’s tried to start a company
before. It didn’t work. In fact, he’s tried lots of things before, and
they haven’t worked either. He’s even tried the classic path of the hit
record producer.
“What normally happens to producers
is that they go mad. The rewards for producing big American groups are
so enormous, in comparison with producing a new band for a new label — I
mean, you’re talking about the difference between £10,000 and £¼
million. Producers go bonkers, plus more often than not these groups
have incredible internal problems, through drugs, family problems, money
problems, and politics, and as a producer you have to cope with the
whole thing.
“Generally, you end up living in
California, with loads of money, and it’s a whole trip, and I didn’t
really fancy that. The Yes album was enough, but even before the Yes
album I’d been so cheesed off watching people that I’d worked with, like
Dollar, go down the drain through their own stupidity.”
What do you think of Paul’s
description of the company as “a pop world within a world”? The
temptation is to see it as two geniuses with a galaxy of stars
agglomerating around them.
“Wow! It certainly doesn’t feel like
that! I mean, I’m quite anxious that we present a wide spectrum of
music, rather than being stuck in one area. I don’t like to think it’s
all me and Paul, and it isn’t. I also don’t like any Phil Spector
comparisons, because I don’t honestly think Phil Spector was that good.
He was good a few times, but not in my mind consistently, and not with a
great deal of versatility. I mean, I’ll never forgive him for what he
did to The Beatles, and I think George Martin was much better than him.
“I’m afraid that pushing ZTT as me
and Paul will scare people off and make them think we want to change
what they are. You see, I don’t think you can ever set up a pop factory,
because if you’re talking about pop factories, you’re talking about
Chinn and Chapman and people like that, and sure, they were pretty
entertaining records, but I’d like to think that we could use ZTT to
make people listen to things they’d never normally listen to. And in any
case, there’s not many pop records I hear on the radio that would make
me want to start a pop factory.
“If by establishing a name for
ourselves we can cut out the middleman, we might get people to listen to
Andrew Poppy. But these are early days yet.”
Does your career strike you as strange when you look back on it?
“Yes, it does. And that’s only my
career as a producer! I mean, there must be a hundred bands in England
who can say they had me in them at one time or other. My first ever
professional engagement was at the Isle of Man Old Tyme Dancing
Festival, so I’ve never really seen too many barriers between different
sorts of music! Before I was a producer, I didn’t really understand that
much about music, so I was just playing for anyone that would pay me.
“I’ve always tried never to do the
same thing twice, because I get really bored and I find I lose a lot of
freshness. I hear 12 inches now that sound like the Art Of Noise with
exploding voices and everything, and I haven’t done one of those for
ages; I’ve tried to do every1hing but that. Y’know, the Propaganda 12
inch was meant to be a 12 inch that was orchestrated, instead of being a
bunch of random mixes of things. Sometimes it gets very tough to think
of something new to do, but the best way is just to keep moving. Very
much a turning point was deciding to do Malcolm McLaren instead of
Spandau Ballet after ABC, where I opted to go for the daft rather than
the obvious.”
How long has it taken you to master the range of equipment you use?
“None of that’s really important,
actually. All the equipment, the Fairlights and so on, are just another
passing fad. I’m even beginning to hate all of that stuff, which is why I
like Frankie’s version of ‘Born To Run’ so much.
“If I’m obsessed with one detail,
it’s generally a very important one. I always ask myself at the end of a
record, do you feel satisfied? Has it done anything for you? And
whatever I do comes much more from that — from sitting in bandrooms for
ten years listening to records — than from any mastery of computers. You
ask anyone I work with, I never touch anything. I’ve got no idea of how
to work a Fairlight, but I know exactly what it can do. I don’t even
know what I want half the time, all I know is what I don’t want.”
Has anyone adequately described your sound?
“Well, a producer has got to be the
hardest job for anyone to understand, especially a music critic. I mean,
you can’t fail to notice that sometimes people do really well with one
producer and not so well with another, and it must concern you exactly
what a producer does. I’ve never really been able to explain it myself,
it’s such an enormous question. I’ve certainly never looked for anyone
to describe my sound, I’ve read a couple of good appraisals of things
that I’ve done that I thought were quite well put, but that’s all.”
What are you most looking forward to?
“I guess I’m just looking forward to
the next thing. We’re building a new studio, and this has been the
first year and I’m looking forward to the next year, just hoping that we
can keep it together and keep all the records good and… God, this is
why I never do any interviews, you always end up saying such boring
things!
“But no, we’ve got to keep on our
toes. There will always be groups around who are average and who sell
records and make money, and when I listen to their records I can see
that they’re basically just doing business, like trading, and I want us
to kind of kick them up the ass and make sure they do better! They’re
got to make better records, they’ve got to think, they’ve got to work at
it. I mean, there’s no rules to this business, there’s no reason why
one shouldn’t sell 40 million copies of a single record in this country.
The business is as good as people make it.
“We’ve got to make the marketplace a more exciting place for everyone to be.”
THE ART OF NOISE (INCIDENTAL)
WE’VE JUST listened to Side One of ‘Welcome To The Pleasure Dome’. It sounds like Raiders Of The Lost Ark of pop music.
Paul decides to speak on behalf of the Arts.
“The Art Of Noise comes from an
early decision of mine, that (whispers) I hate pop groups. I mean, you
know as well as I do that a lot of groups are well stupid, and yet
they’re suddenly in this position of being able to talk a lot about life
and the world and themselves, and the haven’t got a clue. They’re not
very literate, they’ve got no experience or knowledge. And what I’ve
always found very funny is, like, the idea of the pop group doing their
serious photos.
“We’ve just been looking at photos
of Savage Progress, they way they all look like (a pompous pose I cannot
reproduce for you, reader) and, I mean, who do they think they are?!?
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 and roses.”
THE FIRST deliciously mad Art of
Noise album is finally being released here this month after being on
American import for the best part of the year. How to describe this
riotous jam of spliced tape and Fairlight fantasia?
“Sounds and textures that make you
go ‘ah!’” said Thereza of Dollar of the Horn of Plenty sound. (Use that
in your next campaign, Paul!) It’ll have to do for now.
“Art of Noise make sounds that are
bunged together in a parody of a song, and around that we’ve taken the
piss out of all the ‘artistes’.”
ZTT seems to be about the dialectic of private moment and public event.
“The private moment is all that’s
there, really. The public exhibition is the joke. To me, maybe 15
minutes into the Frankie album there lies the most revolutionary moment
of your life. Everything else is the play.”
Does pop music have any altruistic value at all?
“You see, to me it made the world a
better place, therefore is does make the world a better place, because
my belief must be the same as my faith. So, yes. But you’re talking a
bulk, a mass movement, actually making the world in all its details and
quality better, and I don’t believe that.
“I understand your celebration of
America, but sometimes the way I see America is a saturation of
indigenous European culture. I mean, I used to go over to Europe, and
all the kids looked like they were from Indianapolis or Des Moines.
Their natural culture has been washed away, and so I wanted to try and
recover some of that great wayward Surrealist spirit of just before the
war, which was one of the great comic events of the century. That was a
major part of calling it Zang Tuum Tumb, which then reduces to ZTT, as
they all do, like EMI, CBS, PiL, ABC, you know, the universal initials,
all that classic capitalist way of doing things.”
Will the games ever lose their entertainment value for you?
“No, because the game changes every
week, really. But anyway, the playful element mainly comes out of taking
the piss out of a record industry. I myself am probably quite serious
about introducing people to the possibility of choice. I know that in
the private moment you can achieve or receive something spellbinding
intensity. I also know that in the public sphere you can do a similar
king of thing, but the only way I’ve seem that you can do this is by
comedy, because comedy is in itself a kind of tragedy. If you see what I
mean…
“Frankie was my proof of the private
moment in a public way, because it did cause a phenomenon. It was what
some people would term intellectual. In fact, it’s the kind of thing I
get really pissed off about, that if you’re quite knowing they accuse
you of some kind of elitism or dryness. To me it’s the other way round.
Eric Morcambe was probably one of the most knowing people who ever
lived. He could make people laugh, which is a very wonderful thing to
do. D. H. Lawrence was a comedian, too.”
Why did Art of Noise happen in America and not here?
“What happened in America is something that I enjoyed, being a theoretician.
“‘Beatbox’ emerged out of Trevor’s
period in New York when he was wandering around Harlem and seeing people
dance to ‘Buffalo Gals’ and they were laughing at him, little knowing
that he’d done that piece of music. For that reason, The Art of Noise in
America because really whimsical. To me The Art of Noise are like God’s
backing band, because The Art of Noise does deal directly and
unselfconsciously with the private moment, y’know, and ‘Moments In Love’
is the classic version of that. To me, it’s the greatest love song ever
written, because all it says is moments in love, and it just goes on
and on.
“To me, The Art of Noise aren’t a fad, they’re both the ultimate joke and the ultimate seriousness of pop music.
“The funny thing about Trevor is
that it’s so unselfconscious. He doesn’t give a shit about people like
you or me, he just gets on with it. He never goes out, he doesn’t know
what a disco is even though he was the creator of these 12 inch
extravaganzas. He’s a comedian, the Bernie Winters of ZTT. I’m the
Bernard Manning.”
The next Art of Noise project is a
soundtrack for ZTT’s feature film The Living End, which Paul has written
and Godley and Crème will direct.
“It’s all about faith, Barney, Faith
in a… huge sense. I’m really dealing with WHY. I mean, I know how bad
this looks in print! No, the film is really about Leslie Crowther, and
y’know… why? WHY DOES LESLIE CROWTHER EXIST?”
What should I ask Jill?
“Ask her about the morality of it. I
wonder whether sometimes she isn’t a little bit disturbed by what goes
on. She’s a parent and all that, and in many ways a very conventional
kind of parent, very protective. I’d be interested to know what she
feels.”
How many children has she got?
“Two.”
And they like what, Thompson Twins and Durex Durex?
“The oldest one’s two and a half. I think she’s interested in Schoenberg at the moment.”
JILL
A PAUL Morley request, Ms Sinclair: did you feel there was anything immoral about ‘Relax’?
“Pass, pass. Is this how the tone of
the article is going to be, cos I’ve never managed to read one of his
articles from beginning to end. I can’t even read his press releases.
“But no, I don’t think Frankie’s the
slightest bit immoral, they’re absolutely the most normal people you’d
ever wish to meet. They remind me very much of the boys I used to teach
when I was a teacher. It’s a typical Morley question, which he’
prevaricate and waffle around for hours. Really, I don’t see any moral
problems about ‘Relax’ at all.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she adds in mock-meek schoolgirl smirk. “I hope I haven’t disappointed you.”
Has teaching given you a base from which to run this burgeoning empire?
“When you’re a teacher you have to
be able to suss out who the troublemakers and ringleaders are going to
be, and I taught in a very rough school. The teacher I replaced has left
because she’s been punched in the stomach. None of my kids murmured to
me, since I was very authoritarian. I’m told I have a very unsettling
manner. I was one known as the Iron Lady Of The Music Business, and
parallels between Margaret Thatcher and myself have been made.”
So no one in the ZTT classroom has punched you in the stomach yet?
“Not quite, no.”
Jill Sinclair was running the
original Sarm studio in Whitechapel when Trevor did a session there as a
bass player. She it was who originally bought ‘Video Killed The Radio
Star’, signing it to Sarm Productions.
“We stayed laying the ‘Video’ tracks on a Wednesday, and by Friday we were living together.”
It’s reasonable to say that without
Jill, Trevor might never have worked with Dollar, ABC, or anyone. She’s a
tough, unsentimental woman who knows what her husband can do and how he
can get to do it.
“My interest in pop music is very
little. I can honestly say that I hadn’t bought an album before I joined
the music business. I mean, I listened to a few old Genesis albums, I
liked Nillson, light classical music — not that guy Trevor’s into… um…
Stravinsky — and that’s about it. I’m a typical punter. In other words,
if I like something, it’s going to be a hit.”
Do you think that every company needs someone like you?
“Well, we’d go bankrupt if Paul was running this company.
“Paul and I do have an understanding
now, and thought we may jibe each other, I respect him tremendously. I
think he’s the best at what he does, I really do, but I’m happy that
he’s prepared to do it within a framework now.
“Paul, if you ask him, didn’t really
want to sign Frankie. I remember him being worried because Holly had
been in Big In Japan and a few other bands and he wasn’t sure about
that. But Trevor said we can make a hit out of ‘Relax’, so we signed the
deal in September ‘83, and Trevor did the record before going off to do
some preproduction work with Foreigner.
“In those three month, Paul and I
were as near to murdering each other as we’ll ever be. At the time, he
was totally uncompromising; he didn’t understand any aspects of the
business at all. I spent 90% of my time mopping up after his mistakes.
He’s got superb ideas but we are working in a business, and in this game
you can bend the rules, but you can’t break them.”
Are you and Trevor workaholics?
“We both enjoy our work, but we also
enjoy our leisure time tremendously. I love riding, Trevor goes out in
the boat. We’ve got two kids. We live in the country, well not “country”
country, it’s Elstree, about half and hour outside London. We’re not
workaholics insofar as we are capable of intelligent conversation
outside the working atmosphere.
“Trevor’s a perfectionist, but he’s
much more normal than Phil Spector, probably one of the most normal
people you’d ever wish to meet. He’s a wonderful husband and father,
even though I don’t think he could be married to anyone else, because no
one could take him coming in at 4.30 after he’s been mixing all night,
and get up and have a cup of tea with him and ask about it.”
ANDREW (INCIDENTAL)
ANDREW POPPY is ZTT’s systems man,
Morley’s archetypal loner. Some of his long orchestral pieces in the
Philip Glass mould will emerge in the New Year. He does not resemble a
pop star. How does it feel to be on this label, given that you’re not Frankie Pt V?
“It feels quite natural in away,
When I came round to ZTT, the only thing they’d put out was the first
Art of Noise 12 inch, and I thought, well, this just sounds really
interesting. I’d been round all the other labels, and CBS were vaguely
interested, since they’ve had Philip Glass. They thought, well, maybe
there is an area here, but what they do in actual fact is pussyfoot
around the whole thing. EG were really interested for about a year and a
half, and it was exactly the same story. I left a tape with Paul, and
he called me back almost immediately, saying this was exactly what he
wanted form the label.”
Paul told me he wanted one obsessive hermit on ZZT. Do you fit the part?
“Well, you could slant me so many
different ways, coz I’ve played in rock bands, and I didn’t study the
piano single-mindedly from the age of six. There was never any chance of
me being a concert pianist, even if that was what I’d wanted to do. I’m
in an area that’s opening up, where boundaries start to break down.
“One of the things I found really
interesting at university was that you’d find these people who were
being taught very seriously about music, and pop music would never enter
into any discussions, and then you’d go to a party and what you’d have
on would be Joan Armatrading!
“I suppose the area I’m in, and
which Glass and Steve Reich are in, is an area which actually exploits
that contradiction. It’s like Steve Reich says on the sleeve note to his
last album, that you can’t not acknowledge that Charlie Parker’s
happened in this century. If you’re ignoring that you’re post-Parker,
then you’re ignoring part of your position in the century.”
This is Andrew’s first foray as an
independent composer, His work has included accompaniment for dance
groups, teaching music courses at art school, and arranging much of the
two Psychic TV albums. ZTT expect great things of him.
INSTINCT (ACTION)
INSTINCT HAVE been signed to the
label for just one month. They are Simon, James, and Angela from Pigbag,
who left the Bristolian combo because they wanted to write some songs.
At present they refer to themselves as a songwriting team, with other
musicians to be brought in for live shows. They’ve stockpiled enough
material for two albums. Clearly they possess the kind of patience ZTT
acts will need as they start queuing up for Uncle Trevor’s services.
Simon: “The stuff is rhythmical,
it’s dance orientated, but it’s quite difficult to see what’ll come out
of it. That’s one of the things about working with Trevor. I want to
make music that’s very exciting, but not in an obvious kind of way.”
What if Trevor builds your stuff into massive neo-Spectoresque cascades?
“Well, we’ve got big-sounding songs anyway.”
SO THAT’S that, for now.
ZTT are literally about to explode
over Young England, with advance orders for ‘Pleasure Dome’ already well
in excess of a million. Trevor’s gone back to the board to complete
some mega-mixes of ‘Relax’ and Tribes’, Jill is asking her secretary to
let in some “little man” who’s got stuck on the roof, and Paul… well,
Paul’s got to rush off to save his girlfriend from a kangaroo that just
leapt out of the fridge. Or something.
Paul, when did you realize ZTT was going to break?
“When Trevor rang up and said he’d
shown the ‘Relax’ video to Yes, and they’d gone, look at the state of
them! When Yes say No, it’s definitely a Yes.
