Forty Releases for 40 Years of ZTT

ZTT 40 Periodic Table3Unknown to all but the most observant fans, Ian Peel – keyholder to the ZTT vaults and curator of the label’s reissue series for the last 30 years or more – has been celebrating their four decade anniversary in 2023 by compiling 40 digital releases from the deepest depths of the tape cupboard. Working as The Dream Department alongside Philip Marshall – who has been adding appropriate period visuals to each release – they’ve been giving the complete or expanded treatment to the label’s 80s and 90s output for everyone except Frankie, Seal and 808 State (who they extensively covered a couple of years back). Having visited the ZTT archives with Ian over a decade ago I can attest to the sheer volume of music that is on tape but it’s still a surprise to see what’s coming to light over three decades after it was recorded.

ZTT debuted in 1983 with two different series’ – Action (for pop) and Incidental (for more experimental fair), a concept dreamt up by publicist Paul Morley to separate different strands of their output. A Certain series was added for the surreal cabaret of Anne Pigalle in 1985 and a Fatal series was mooted but never materialised. When the label moved from Island to Warners in the late 80s these disappeared, as did the playfulness that Morley bought to the sleeve and promo art – something Ian resurrected when he started working on the back catalogue in the 90s, at first with ZTTTen, then creating the Artefact Series for the physical reissues from 2005-2011, followed by the Element Series from 2008-2019. Once the label passed to Universal in 2019 he started the Definition Series, releasing expanded digital singles for the likes of 808 State, Propaganda and MC Tunes among others. There was even a briefly resurrected Fatal(e) Series for the ex-ZTT Propaganda releases and an Adventure Series for The Art of Noise but I digress…

The digital releases have gone into overdrive in 2023 but sadly Universal seem uninterested in promoting anyone but the big guns so, unless you follow Ian’s Twitter feed, you probably wouldn’t be aware of much of this. Ian knows the catalogue and the archive inside out, having spent years cataloguing it from the master tapes, along the way discovering all manner of hidden, lost or unreleased treasures. Using this knowledge he’s enhanced the Definition Series – think also ‘Definitive’ – under the ZTT40 banner to celebrate four decades of the label’s esoteric output. 40 digital singles or albums with mulitple single mixes, demos, live takes and more – shining a light into the darkest corners of the vault, exhuming and digitizing songs for the first time, long left to fester on maganetic tape.

Streaming services notoriously don’t like record label data, preferring to catalogue releases by artist, title or album, so looking for ZTT records on Spotify is not going to net you much. Similarly they’re not big on details so, once you’ve found a release, the most you’ll get is a tracklist, running time and year of release. Frustratingly limiting in the case of a project like this where some songs were released, some weren’t, some appeared later in different forms, thus rendering the historical details of such an endeavour invisible. And collectors and fans are nothing if not concerned with the details, it’s the small print that interests us, context is everything, when a song dates from being one of the foremost.

I asked Ian about this process, keen to learn more details about his history as the label’s curator, his treatment of the archive and what may be on the horizon. What follows, I can safely say, is the most indepth article ever about ZTT’s back catalogue reissue programme and even this only feels like it’s scratching the surface. Many thanks to Ian for going above and beyond and even supplying photos to illustrate, strap in as this is a long one.

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The Art of Noise/Revision at a festival date this summer, L-R: Ian Peel, Gary Langan, JJ Jeczalik, (note the Nasty Rox Inc. promo T-shirt)

What was the plan and thinking behind this series of 40 weekly digital releases?

Ian: I wanted to do something suitably ambitious and memorable to mark 40 years of ZTT. One release a week for 40 weeks. I also wanted to use it as a chance to bring slightly disparate chapters of the story together and present a cohesive vision of an auteur label that rivalled and, in many ways, outstripped Mute, Factory and 4AD. I realised that I’ve been working in, on or for ZTT for 35 years, which must be some sort of record, but this has been one of the most enjoyable projects to put together.

I approached it in the same way as all the other ZTT releases, box sets and compilations I’ve put together which now go back more than 30 years: as a chance to continually reinvigorate the myth of the label. And a chance to work so hard on it that 00s Leilani could sit naturally alongside 80s Propaganda and 90s Shades of Rhythm. The best way to do this is with a series, with consistent curation and an overarching plan (even if the plan took a few twists and turns along the way).

It was also a chance to release a huge amount of material that had never been heard before. And to explore some of the artists that recorded and worked hard for the label but who were never properly ‘taped and brochured’. It would be unthinkable to not go back and complete the digital catalogues of the likes of Anne Pigalle, Act, S/O/R and All Saints once this anniversary has passed but, for a lot of artists and projects, it felt very much like a case of ‘if not now, then when?’.

It’s been like writing an audio history of the label–especially as there are chapters in the story that I know took place behind the scenes, but which never actually resulted in records being released. I’ve tried to fill in the blanks, like pointing to ZTT’s momentary dive into acid house with singles like ‘Spectrum is Green’ by Acid Rox Init. Or one of the foundations of the label’s almost-comeback in the early 00s, with ‘Craving’ by Aurora and the Davids Daughters album. None of these were ever released, to say nothing of the 12” and remix 12” of the great lost early ZTT single, Instinct’s ‘Sleepwalking’.

The other exciting thing about the unreleased material is it needed artwork, so I have to say Philip Marshall, who I have been working with on ZTT projects since the start of the Element Series, has created some brilliant work. You can totally imagine the ‘Spectrum is Green’ sleeve racked in Our Price alongside something like Sputnik’s ‘S.U.C.C.E.S.S’. The Time Unlimited cover is a work of art. Likewise, the Leilani cover – the photo that was originally earmarked for her LP looked, in hindsight, like a throwaway pin-up poster, so instead we went with something much more mature and intriguing.

And if I’d found records like ‘Das Psych-oh! Rangers in The Blue Building’ and Nasty Rox’s ‘Ninth Wonder’ in a high street record store back in the day I would have bought them in a heartbeat on looks alone.

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Did you have a free hand as to who and what to include?

Yes, absolutely. And that hasn’t always been the case, by any means. But with this project I can say that this is the ZTT music that I love, that I think changed the course of history and that I could happily listen to all day.

It’s only slightly skewed in that I’d already put together the entire 808 State, Propaganda, 90s-era Art of Noise, Kirsty MacColl and MC Tunes catalogues for digital already. It’s my version of ZTT and my vision of ZTT but excluding those artists and also some that could not be included due to rights.

Certain artists that released music on ZTT – but which I felt were never part of the original (or any true) ZTT ethos – were not included: The Frames, The Marbles, Shane MacGowan, Sinead O’Connor, Raging Speedhorn and Lisa Stansfield. All great artists in their own respect, but I don’t think anyone ever became a ZTT fan after buying one of their records.

Conversely, I was excited that the series could include so many artists that were in the label’s original spirit but came after the Island Records era, like Mantra, Shades of Rhythm, General Max, Solid State Logic, Glam Metal Detectives, Lee Griffiths, and so on. They’re all now properly glued into that spirit I hope, and I’ve tried to show how that initial spirit extended way beyond 1988.

You mentioned some artists couldn’t be included due to rights. Which were they?

Hoodlum Priest was deemed off limits on account of samples. Which is a shame, as they were Trevor’s dream ZTT group at one point. And as the project was lead from the UK, releases that are controlled out of the US end of Universal could not be included. So that put a line through Grace Jones’‘Slave To The Rhythm’, Tom Jones’‘The Lead and How To Swing It’, Wendy & Lisa and the ‘Toys’ soundtrack, and also Roy Orbison’s ‘Wild Hearts’.

The Tom Jones material was always a bit of a curveball but it would have made sense if the 40 had included the two six-minute Youth remixes of his cover of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’. There’s also Frankie Goes To Hollywood but I think it’s clear from the two Frankie releases over the last couple of years (2022’s budget-price ‘The Essential’compilation and the digital single of ‘Sped Up’ and slowed down TikTok remixes of ‘The Power of Love’), neither of which have been on ZTT, that Universal sees them in their own particular way.

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Late 00s and the very start of the Sarm/ZTT tape archive – “note the Frankie film tins, and initial complete lack of order (and even shelving)” (photo: Aaron Horn)

Was everything planned completely in advance or were there changes along the way?

The beauty of a digital series is that nothing goes off to be physically manufactured, so there’s always scope to make a few changes. Initially I had the idea that every fifth release would be from Act, because I’d already got that catalogue completely researched and restored for a digital roll-out early on in 2023.

But the more I got into it, the more I really didn’t want to dwell on any one group more than another, so I parked that idea after the second Act single went live in May. The only exception was –as there was a lot more to do with the 80s-era Art of Noise catalogue, and September was the 40th anniversary of ‘Into Battle’ – the series went on a bit of a detour into AoN-land for a few weeks.

The other swerve came as, in the summer, I finally tracked down recordings of Anne Pigalle, Propaganda and others at 1985’s ‘The Value of Entertainment’ concert. I’d been looking for those tapes for more than 20 years. It turns out they were in the Island Records archive within the Universal vault. That was a perfect ZTT40 release, so I managed to get the multitrack to Gary Langan and get some space in his diary so he could mix and produce them into a final release. (There’s lots more on that particular release on the Art of Noise Facebook page here.)

How does this series differ from what you put together for the thirtieth anniversary?

At that point it was still very much the CD age, so you were limited by what you could include: it had to fit to 70 mins (though I tried to stretch every single one to 73 mins), it needed to get retailer interest so certain tracks and mixes had to be included no matter what.

At that point Sarm Studios still existed and I was working there as label manager of ZTT and marketing manager of all the businesses in the group. I’d renewed the Union Square license and set up new partnerships for North America and Japan. So rather than one 30th anniversary CD, at least I could come up with three 2-CDsets – the London, New York and Tokyo Editions – and include tracks that might not work in one territory in another.

Other differences are where the artists in question are at, and where the tapes are at. For example, I approached Leilani about her unreleased album in 2012 and – perfectly understandably – she wasn’t quite in the headspace for it. Ten years later she really embraced the idea of it being released. In fact, this was one of the factors that spurred her on to apply for ‘Survivor’ on BBC One, where she was the winning woman. And those two factors combined inspired her new music with Philip Jap which has come out in the last few weeks.

Likewise, I’ve never seen members of Instinct talk about their time on ZTT. But Angela Jaeger has been sharing news of the Definition Series editions on socials. In terms of the tapes, in a much more practical sense, things like the DAT archives – of Time Unlimited, Sun Electric, Tara, All Saints and Shades of Rhythm – they just hadn’t been properly transferred and archived at that stage.

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Ian inside his infamous ZTT tape library in 2014

OUTSIDE WORLD AND INSIDE ZANG TUMB TUUM

Can you give us an encapsulation of your interest in ZTT, l first became aware of you from the ‘Record Collector’ overview of the label in the 80s…

To begin with, when ZTT was at its initial peak, I was a bit of a ‘Smash Hits’ addict and saw it through their eyes in a way. I used to write letters to Silvia Patterson which she edited quite heavily but I didn’t mind as they would end up in print. ‘Smash Hits’ coverage of ZTT was really interesting and quite daring for a mainstream pop magazine. Like doing two pages on Anne Pigalle and two on ‘The Value of Entertainment’. They once wrote about an unsigned group called Das Euphony Kiks, which lead them to being signed to the label, as Das Psych-Oh! Rangers.

When the Art of Noise left the label, I thought it was all over. But then I entered a ‘Smash Hits’ competition to win their first post-ZTT single, ‘Legs’ (on 12”, promo T-shirt and 12”‘Inside Leg Mix’ promo VHS video) and won, so that hooked me back in and lead to me following the group on China Records a/k/a The Adventure Series.

In 1987, ‘Record Collector’ magazine trailed a ‘coming soon’ piece about the label that never appeared, so I wrote to them to ask when it was coming out. They wrote back to say the journalist had given up, so could I please write it?

It became a three-part special that was published in October, November and December of 1988, and I carried on writing for ‘Collector’, on and off, from then on. It led to me joining DJ magazine and writing a full-page column for them for 11 years. DJ was fortnightly then, so that was about 300 issues of the magazine.

That was across the whole of the 90s and into the early 00s, so I used the DJ mag column at times to catch up with ZTT artists, like Art of Silence, Debussy-era Art of Noise, 808 State, and to interview artists who had been inspired by the label like The Orb, The Black Dog and Scanner.

There was also your ‘Outside World’ zine in the early 90s…

After the ‘Record Collector’ articles, I wanted to carry on writing about the ZTT world and was inspired by a couple of other fanzines at the time — ‘Telegraph’ about OMD and ‘Conductor of the Masses’ about Jean Michel Jarre. So I decided to put together a ZTT fanzine.

The first one was full cut-and-paste style with scissors, Letraset and gluestick. For content, I had my ‘Smash Hits’ collection and all the ‘Collector’ research to draw on. My brother Ken Peel who is an electronic musician, had a great collection of magazines from his world like ‘Music Technology’, ‘Electronics & Music Maker’ and ‘Making Music’ that I could draw on.

By the second issue in 1991, I’d discovered Macs and laser printing. By the third issue in 1992 I’d discovered email and connected with contributors around the world. Not least Philip Marshall who wrote about Sense (of Island) and Teutonic Beats for the zine. It was the start of a great friendship and working relationship.

The zines were labours of love in that Issue 1 came out in the summer of 1990 and it took me a year to get Issue 2 out and another year for Issue 3. It also took an incredible amount of work placing ads and taking and dispatching orders. But people seemed to like it. It got a great review in i-D magazine. Teletext had a music reviews section and the guy that reviewed it there is now one of the most prolific writers for Classic Pop (Ian founded Classic Pop magazine in 2012).

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How did you get the prime job of chief archivist for the label?

It was as a result of producing ‘Outside World’. I thought Issue 1 was OK, but I was pleased with Issue 2 and sent a copy to the ZTT office at Sarm Studios along with the ‘i-D’ review. They loved it and invited me in for a chat where they asked me to work as an A&R and marketing consultant. It must have been December 1991. In that meeting I was one of the first people to find out that Seal had shaved his head as they showed me the first cut of Wendy & Lisa ft. Seal’s ‘The Closing of The Year’ video.

They were trying to figure out what to do for the tenth anniversary campaign, so I put together lots of material and ideas that went into Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Bang!’ and ‘Reload!’ compilations, the ‘Zance’ comp as well as the CD reissues of the early albums.

That was the extent of the back catalogue marketing for the tenth anniversary. It was the early 90s so everyone was focused on the future so the majority of my work was on D2C (direct to consumer) campaigns for new artists like All Saints and Tara. The only territory that was interested in rare bonus material was Japan, so I put together extra tracks for the 10th anniversary CD reissues that were released there, which was simply called the ZTTTen Series.

The Grace Jones and Frankie remixes from that time (around 1992) did really well but there were also lots of other remixes of all the other early artists that never came out. There was a funny highlight from the ZTTTen Series when I worked with a TV show called ‘Naked City’ for which Caitlin Moran interviewed Paul Morley and Paul Rutherford.

I was also pitching to work with another label called Solid Pleasure. Formed by Yello, and alerted to me by Philip Marshall originally, some of their brilliant releases included a collaboration with Ralf Dörper (under his Technocrats alias) called ‘Qtopia’ by ST Melody.

Naked City needed some Frankie merchandise to shoot for the segment, so I sent them ‘Frankie Say ARM The Unemployed’, ‘Frankie Say WAR! Hide Yourself’, and ‘Frankie Say BOMB Is A Four Letter Word’. But to help prove a point to the other label I wanted to work with, I printed up one saying ‘Frankie Say SOLID Pleasure’ and sure enough they shot it on a rostrum camera and it appeared on Channel Four.

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Another Art of Noise festival date in summer 2023 (with a ‘Value of Entertainment’ T-shirt this time). (photo: Marc Pinder)

Can you give us an overview of how and when you started a new strand of releases for the label with the Artefact Series in the mid-00s?

In the mid-00s, back catalogue marketing was becoming properly established, as was interest in ZTT’s history. At first, Jill Sinclair had random members of the in-house staff of the time put together some back catalogue releases: someone who loved Propaganda rustled up a p:compilation, the most important person in the hierarchy got Frankie, and so on.

What resulted was a disparate bunch of products from a disparate bunch of people. No cohesion at all as they had very little understanding of the ZTT world, no energy for a label identity, and were far more excited by the ‘pub rock’ music of the Stiff Records catalogue that the label also owned.

As a result, there were things like FGTH’s ‘Twelve Inches’ and Propaganda’s ‘Outside World’. Products that sound easy to execute in theory but, as the finished releases prove, much harder in practice. There were also digital releases like ‘The ZTT Singles’ (random CD singles from different artists squeezed together onto digital albums with Ariel-font artwork) and it still pains me that some of those are still online. Though to be fair, when they were put together, no one knew if iTunes would ever take off and Spotify hadn’t even been launched, so you can perhaps understand them being thrown together (artwork and all) in about five minutes.

I was called back in when that team, who left soon after, hit a roadblock when Jill and Trevor Horn began to talk about more expansive and detailed deluxe reissues for the likes of Andrew Poppy, Art of Noise, Anne Pigalle and 808 State. I dived headlong into all of them and started the Artefact Series.

It was an exciting time to be involved again because I could see the past was merging with the future. Trevor, Paul, Anne Dudley, JJ Jeczalik and Gary Langan were all happy to talk about the Art of Noise for the first time since their split in the mid-80s, which lead to the ‘And What Have You Done with My Body, God?’ box set. Many of the tracks didn’t have titles, so Paul gave me a list of new Art of Noise song titles and said – including for the name of the actual box set – just use the titles that the music pulls you towards.

Jill had got the rights to The Buggles’ second album back from Carrere Records, so that was put in the mix too, and Trevor was really excited to go back to those recordings and find unreleased tracks for the second disc. He continued the flow and built on some of them for Yes’s ‘Fly From Here’ album.

My series highlights are maybe Artefact 12: the London and Tokyo ‘Art of ZTT’ exhibitions, Artefact 13: the FGTH ‘Return To The Pleasuredome’ box set (the title of which was an intentional precursor to ‘Inside The Peasuredome’) and also (again intentionally) Artefact 08: the four deluxe expansions of the 808 State albums. The plan was to release those on 8.08.08 but there were a few delays. I did manage to issue the press release announcing them on 8.08.08, though.

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Ian and some of his vinyl archive at ‘The Art of ZTT’ exhibition in London, 02 Oct, 2008 before it moved for a second installation in Tokyo (photo: Mark Nicholson)

As this is Trevor and Jill we are talking about, at the helm of both the label and studio at that time, any type of catalogue marketing was based around making something new as well. And at that time, it was live events. So I wrote the souvenir programme for the ‘Produced By Trevor Horn’ concert at Wembley. This was a major deal for the family and everyone at Sarm. Prince Charles visited the studio the week before the concert; I was writing the programme and interviewing Trevor as he was trying to learn the bassline for Close (To The Edit) and listening back and loving the early Dollar singles in his suite above Studio One.

The live event to follow Wembley was to be an open air ZTT takeover of Trafalgar Square. Just as the Pet Shop Boys did the same year with Battleship Potemkin. The head of the ICA at the time was a big ZTT fan and approached the label about a joint project where the ICA took over the space and Trevor/ZTT curated it (as The Art of Noise). It had the working title of ‘ElectronICA’. I wanted to call it ‘Artefact’ to properly launch the series (and a new start for the label) and put together plans for guests and setlists.

The day before what was scheduled to be the first meeting for Trevor and Jill to visit the ICA to properly start planning the event was the day of Jill Sinclair’s accident. Of course, that meant Artefact was over and the trajectory of label changed forever.

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With the SPZ (SarmStudios/Perfect Songs/ZTTRecords) team in 2012 in The Blue Building; Ian at the back and, coincidentally, on the left is Perfect’s Melanie Redmond who was the backing singer in The The’s ‘Versus the World’ touring line-up.

ACTIONS/INCIDENT AND ELEMENT/DEFINITION

How did you come to resurrect Paul Morley’s Action and Incidental series?

In the mid-00s, I was also running media relations and the website for ZTT (and also for sister companies Sarm Studios, Perfect Songs, Stiff Records, Horn Brothers Pictures and Music Bank). I was pretty proud of the press we were getting, not least a half-page piece in ‘The Guardian’ on the Andrew Poppy box set. People were really starting to reassess ZTT and also 80s music in general around that time. I showed the press book to Jill Sinclair and I remember she dispensed a typically dry but inspiring pearl of wisdom. “When it comes to press coverage, don’t read it, weigh it.”

It was that same meeting that I was given a bunch of old folders to work through in the hope that some of it would be useful for reissues. Most of it was archive press coverage but it also contained dot matrix-printed and hand-typed lists of the early releases and series: Action, Incidental, Fatal, Perfect, Certain, and IQ. They had exact release dates, for example, for each of the different editions of ‘Relax’, all of the singlettes and so on, as well as catalogue and series numbers. The brief was simple: “if you think any of it’s of use, just take it and run with it.”

When some of the catalogue releases began to feel like ‘frontline’ records, that was when I knew the Action Series was back. Like when I worked with Claudia Brücken to get a new single and video recorded and released as part of her ‘ComBined’ compilation, or came up with a Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Maximum Joy’ 7” picture disc for Record Store Day.

I signed Aaron Horn and Alex Preager’s A Theory project to ZTT and they seemed like the perfect group to bring the Incidental Series back to life. And there were countless smaller incidents that have been catalogued along the way: one of my favourites – the perfect modern-day entry into the Incidental Series – is ZTIS 304: a sample of Propaganda’s ‘Dr Mabuse’ when we licensed it to appear in the opening track of Foxes’ 2014 debut album, ‘Glorious’.

The longest strand of ZTT releases in its history must be the Element Series, surely? There must be roughly 50 physical editions across a ten-year period?

In 2008, ZTT signed a licensing deal for Europe with Union Square Music. They specialised in back catalogue and it was an era where there was still a market for classic albums being celebrated as 2-CD sets. I was working for ZTT and Sarm Studios and USM hired me to put together these releases. It started off with 2-CD sets but grew and grew to take in vinyl and eventually the ‘ultra-deluxe’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set, which I called ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’. When Union Square was bought by BMG in 2016, they gave a copy of it as a gift to each member of the BMG board at the signing meeting.

When the license started, around 2009, the very first release was what they called a ‘vanilla repress’ of ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’. All old copies had to be removed from sale and replaced with their identical (save for the barcode) repress. Rather than just add the barcode, I realised this was a chance to start a new series. The Warners era had the ZANG catalogue numbers, so I added ‘TUMB 1’ as a catalogue number to on-body artwork. But after that I came up with a better title – relating to each release being like elements or parts of the periodic table of ZTT. So the TUMB series stopped there and the Element Series began.

What made the Element Series exciting for me was that, over at ZTT, I was given the job of archiving their complete tape library as well as all tapes of Stiff Records and Perfect Songs (ZTT’s publishing company). Actually, I made it a library after about a year because, to begin with, it was just a big pile of tapes in a completely random order. Anything they had kept anywhere, all delivered to a storage unit in Slough, and the keys delivered to me. My best guess was that there were 100,000 tapes: 2” reels, ¼” reels, DATs, F1s, videos, CDRs and cassettes. This meant that, for the first time, archive reissues could contain music that no one had ever heard before.

There was also, upstairs, a complete paperwork archive to deal with, which is a separate story in itself. But I can say that having found the original contract between Trevor and Jill and Island Records, ZTT was not originally going to be called ZTT…

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“I spent a lot of the 00s ferrying tapes from Sarm Studios to Avance Music Research in Manchester to be baked and transferred. Occasionally I used FX Copyroom in London if things were urgent and hand-carried them there. I’m on a very late-night mission here with the master tape for one of the 12″ mixes of ‘Cry’ by Godley & Creme.” — IP

ZTT seemed to have somewhat of a reboot around the time of the Element Series, and I guess you must have been working at Sarm Studios in its final days?

I was there literally in the last weeks of Sarm Studios cataloguing everything on the walls, the gold discs and awards and illuminating framed letters… Then, when the demolition started, we were back in there filming an April Fool’s video for YouTube with Trevor and Lol Creme about vacuuming the vibes out of the concrete.

That was around 2017 but, five years before, everything was on a roll and it was a bit of a rebirth. Stiff Records signed Sam And The Womp and had a No. 1 with ‘Bom Bom’. (Although I always thought they were way more of a ZTT act, especially with the more KLF-like early single mixes.) Perfect Songs placed ‘The Power of Love’ in the Christmas John Lewis ad, which lead to another No. 1 with Gabrielle Aplin. Another Perfect project reached No. 3 (Sonnentanz by Klangkarussell ft. Will Heard). It was a small team of no more than a dozen of us across ZTT, Stiff, Perfect and Sarm Studios so there was quite a buzz again, thanks in part also to Ken Horn, Trevor’s brother (and television producer), who was a very stabilising factor following various haphazard appointments after Jill’s accident.

The studios were doing well at that time, too. I remember hearing Justin Parker writing Rihanna’s ‘Stay’ in the room above the ZTT office. I held the fort on reception once and had Jessie J, Jon Bon Jovi and a reformed Take That to deal with in the space of an hour. But I was most excited about the Element Series: the 2-CD edition of Propaganda’s ‘A Secret Wish’ equalled the original’s chart placing (a fact I proudly told Steve Lipson). And the 2-CD of Frankie’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ eventually earned a gold disc.

I wrote up a complete list of all the Elements of Zang Tuum Tumb for the inner sleeve of 2021’s Record Store Day edition of ‘Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Noise?’. One of my personal favourites from the Element Series is ‘Frankie Said’ as it gelled everything together in one release: the title was a new one courtesy of Paul Morley, Philip did a great job blending ‘Liverpool’-era photography with ‘Pleasuredome’-era graphics. And I was determined that, even though the brief from Union Square was a ‘Best Of’, the dedicated people who buy every ‘Best Of’ should get to hear surprising, unreleased versions of all the tracks.

It timed with ‘The Power of Love’ going to No. 1 again, and I discovered the incredible, unreleased orchestral session from the Frankie original. Like so many unreleased mixes, it was untitled so for this one I took a line from one of the single sleeves for it: ‘Best Listened to By Lovers’. It was also one of the releases, alongside ‘Zambient One’, that I put together with Ian Usher (who signed Sam And The Womp). The great thing about working with Ian was that he would rein me in when I went too far with certain ideas but, at the same time, he would go way too far with something else and I’d be there to rein him in.

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Arriving in Tokyo in 2017 for live Art of Noise dates with Anne Dudley (centre) and team (photo: Martha Langan)

More recently you’ve put together the Definition Series of more than 100 digital releases. How did these come about?

By the time Union Square/BMG’s license expired, ZTT had been acquired by Universal Music. So that seemed like the moment to stop the Element Series. Not least because anything placed on streaming or download platforms by BMG was taken down. It felt like the right moment to ask, what is the definition of Zang Tuum Tumb? And I realised that you could answer that with any one of a vast number of records. So that’s how the Definition Series started.

It began with a massive dive into 808 State and it was a joy to be able to finally get records like ‘The Extended Pleasure of Dance’ and all ‘The Tommy Boy Mixes’ released. It’s also been a chance to make sense of the Propaganda digital catalogue and include the lost, final single ‘Sorry For Laughing’.

Can you give us some clues to some of the missing pieces, like Element 18, the Adventure and the Fatal(e) series’?

Yes and there’s so much more to say – we’ve not even touched on the Certain, Perfect, Zambient and ZACID Series. To say nothing of NRO, ZANG, XZIP and ZTE…

The Fatal Series was Paul Morley’s moniker for releases that perhaps signalled the end of something rather than the beginning. Esquire’s 1987 album (which was originally set to be released on ZTT) would have been ZTFS 1, and I placed the prospectus document that led to the sale to Universal as ZTFS 2.

Two singles, when they appeared on recent Record Store Day box sets that should have been massive but weren’t even released were ZTFS 4 (Propaganda’s ‘Frozen Faces’) and ZTFS 5 (Art & ACT’s ‘Life’s A Barrel of Laughs’). When I put together Propaganda’s post-ZTT work on Virgin records for deluxe digital editions about three years ago, it seemed logical to mark them up as the Fatal(e) Series.

As for Element 18, that was a deluxe 2-CD Propaganda compilation, covering all eras of the group, pre-and post-ZTT. It was to start with the original ‘3D’ trilogy from before they even arrived at Sarm: ‘Duel’, ‘Doppelganger’and ‘Disziplin’. And, to cover the later years, Michael Mertens supplied some great material including ‘Who’s The Fool?’ from the 2000 reunion, a new track called ‘I Am A Cathedral’, and a previously-unreleased collaboration with Karl Hyde of Underworld. But it was parked – and eventually replaced with the ‘Noise and Girls Come Out To Play’ compilation – as the group could not reach an agreement with Union Square.

As for the Adventure Series, that’s Art of Noise post-ZTT. The original edition of ‘In Visible Silence’ mentioned it, and I’ve carried it on with all of the releases I’ve been working on for Warners. It’s lead to the Art of Noise/Revision live project I’m part of with JJ Jeczalik and Gary Langan, that we performed to more than 30,000 people at festivals last summer.

Some of our Art of Noise/Revision guests recently have included Afrodeutsche, Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Neal X, the actor David Tennant, Chilean genius Raimundo Ladrón de Guevara, Paul Morley, Tom Jones and Donal Hodgson (who was also the MD for the Frankie Goes To Hollywood reunion show at Eurovision last May).

Although it possibly works best indoors, recent full-length shows – like the residency we did at The Jazz Café last January (which had a wonderful opening set from someone called DJ Food…) – start off with Adventure 09: ‘Canticles of The Moon’, a piece I worked on with Anne Dudley that blended her ‘Ancient and Modern’ album with Apollo moon landing footage.

Now that the ZTT 40 series is complete, I can happily get back into the headspace of Adventure 04: the ‘Producer’s Cut’ of ‘Below The Waste’ and its accompanying single, the ‘Outer Heat EP’.


Adventure 09: Canticles of The Moon Landing, Art of Noise live at The Jazz Café

40 DEFINITIONS OF ZANG TUUM TUMB

The complete Definition Series for 2023’s 40 fortieth-anniversary weekly releases:

1.Act–‘Snobbery & Decay (Showtime)’: single, 31.03.23.
8 tracks, 3 of which new to digital (download/streaming) platforms and previously cassette-only

2.Leilani–‘Precious Treasure’: album, 07.04.23.
12 tracks, 11 of which previously unreleased. Also catalogued at IQ 11

ztt40 03
3.Nasty Rox Inc.–‘Ca$h (Deluxe Edition)’: album, 14.04.23.
20 tracks, 6 of which previously unreleased and 14 returning to digital

4.All Saints 1.9.7.5.–‘Silver Shadow’: single, 21.04.23.
7 tracks, 1 of which previously unreleased and 6 new to digital

5.Glenn Gregory & Claudia Brücken–‘When Your Heart Runs Out of Time’: single, 28.04.23.
5 tracks, 4 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only and 1 returning to digital but this time from original master tapes (previously was a vinyl rip)

6.Act–‘Absolutely Immune (I)’: single, 05.05.23.
6 tracks, 1 of which previously unreleased

7.Mantra–‘Rise’: single, 12.05.23.
4 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at ZANG 37

ztt40 08
8.Instinct–‘Sleepwalking (A Waking 12”)’: single, 19.05.23.
3 tracks, 2 of which previously unreleased and 1 returning to digital. Also catalogued at ZTAS 11

9.All Saints 1.9.7.5.–‘If You Wanna Party (I Found Lovin’)’: single, 26.05.23.
4 tracks, all new to digital

10.Das Psych-Oh! Rangers–‘The Essential Art of Communication’: single, 02.06.23.
4 tracks, all new to digital and previously vinyl-only

ztt40 11
11.Anne Pigalle–‘Souvenir d’un Paris’: single, 09.06.23.
4 tracks, all returning to digital. Also catalogued at CERT 3

12.Lee Griffiths–‘First Things First’: single, 16.06.23.
4 tracks, all new to digital

ztt40 13
13.Instinct–‘Sleepwalking (A Sleeping 12”)’: single, 23.06.23.
4 tracks, 3 of which new to digital and 1 returning. Also catalogued at 12 XZTAS 11

14.Glam Metal Detectives–‘Glam Metal Detectives (Expanded Edition)’: album, 30.06.23.
15 tracks, 14 of which new to digital and 1 returning

ztt40 15
15.Andrew Poppy–‘32 Frames for Orchestra’: single, 07.07.23.
5 tracks, 1 of which returning to digital (and previously only available in Europe) and 2 of which returning to digital (and previously only available in North America)

16.Nasty Rox Inc.–‘Escape From New York’: single, 14.07.23.
6 tracks, 5 of which new to digital.

17.Davids Daughters–‘Chemistry’: album, 21.07.23.
10 tracks, 8 of which previously unreleased and 1 new to digital. Also catalogued at IQ 21

ztt40 18
18.Art & Act–‘Life’s A Barrel of Laughs’: single, 28.07.23.
5 tracks, 4 of which new to digital and 1 returning. Also catalogued at ZTFS 02 and ZTPS 05

19.Tara–‘Save ME from mySelf’: single, 04.08.23.
9 tracks, 3 of which previously unreleased and 6 new to digital

ztt40 20
20.Propaganda–‘p:Machinery (via T-Empo/Nicolosi)’: single, 11.08.23.
4 tracks, 2 of which previously unreleasedand 2 new to digital. Also catalogued at ZTFS 11

21.Shades of Rhythm–‘The Sound of Eden (Every Time I See Her)’: single, 18.08.23.
6 tracks, 1 of which previously unreleased, 1 new to digital and 4 returning

ztt40 222
22.Nasty Rox Inc.–‘Ninth Wonder’: single, 25.08.23.
5 tracks, 3 of which previously unreleased, 1 new to digital and 1 returning. Also catalogued at NROX 3

23.The Art of Noise–‘(Share) Moments in Love’: single, 01.09.23.
8 tracks all of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only. Also catalogued at XTPS02 and WEEPS 2

24.The Art of Noise–‘Close (To the Edit)’: single, 08.09.23.
6 tracks, 2 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only and 3 returning

25.The Art of Noise–‘Closer (To The Edit)’: single, 15.09.23.
7 tracks, 5 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only. Also catalogued at XTPS01

ztt40 26
26.‘Worship with The Art Of Noise’: album, 22.09.23.
18 tracks, 8 of which new to digital

27.The Art of Noise–‘Beat Box (Diversions Zero to Seven)’: single, 29.09.23.
8 tracks, 2 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only, 2 new to digital and previously vinyl-/cassette-only, 1 new to digital, 3 returning. Also catalogued at XTIS 108

ztt40 28
28.Shades of Rhythm–‘Fear of The Future EP’: single, 06.10.23.
8 tracks, 7 of which previously unreleased and 1 returning. Also catalogued at ZANG 28 and ZACID 05

29.Public Demand–‘Invisible’: single, 13.10.23.
6 tracks, all new to digital

ztt40 30
30.Acid Rox Init–‘Spectrum Is Green’: single, 20.10.23.
5 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at NROX 4 and ZACID 02

31.Aurora–‘Craving’: single, 27.10.23.
7 tracks, 6 of which previously unreleased and 1 new to digital. Also catalogued at ZANG 99

Tara - experience
32.Tara–‘Experience EP’: single, 03.11.23.
5 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at ZANG 61

33.Solid State Logic–‘Rise’: single, 10.11.23.
6 tracks, 3 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only

34.General Max–‘We Can Do It’: single, 17.11.23.
4 tracks, 3 of which new to digital and previously vinyl-only and 1 new to digital

35.Sexus–‘The Official End of It All’: single, 24.11.23.
10 tracks, 3 of which previously unreleased and 3 new to digital and previously vinyl-only

ztt40 36
36.‘Homage to The Blessed–Das Psych-Oh! Rangers in The Blue Building’: compilation, 01.12.23.
8 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at IQ 19

37.‘Poetry in Motion–Time Unlimited on Zang Tuum Tumb’: compilation, 08.12.23.
16 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at IQ 12

ztt40 382
38.‘The Value of Entertainment–Time Capsule Highlights’: compilation, 15.12.23.
5 tracks, 4 of which previously unreleased and 1 returning to digital. Also catalogued at IQ 13

ztt40 39
39.‘Repetition Plus Variation–Propaganda Live at The Value of Entertainment’: album, 22.12.23.
6 tracks, all previously unreleased. Also catalogued at IQ 18

ztt40 40
40.‘Will the World Remember?–Sun Electric on Zang Tuum Tumb’: compilation, 29.12.23.
12 tracks, 11 of which previously unreleased and 1 new to digital. Also catalogued at IQ 20

Currently Ian has compiled a playlist of a track from each release on Spotify which will in turn lead you to each entry, this is the only way to find all 40 in one place if you want to listen to the set.

For those wanting to avoid Spotify/amazon/itunes due to their lack of high quality options, quite a few of the releases are available in proper 320/FLAC form here : https://uk.7digital.com/
Derek and Stefan also pointed to the catalogue being available on qobuz

There’s also an incomplete fan-maintained list on Discogs that sets out each of the 40 entries (plus a few pre-40 releases) with track titles, times and some notes where known. There are many treasures to be discovered along the way and I’m looking forward to seeing what 2024 brings as we enter the 40th anniversaries of ‘Two Tribes’, ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ and the whole summer of Frankie of 1984.

The Art of ZTT updates

I found some time to add some more to my Art of ZTT blog, we’re on to Propaganda‘s ‘Dr Mabuse’ now with interviews with John Stoddart, Paul Morley, David Smart, Lo Cole and Garry Mouat to come this year… I’ve had to start watermarking some of the content as it’s been shared around on certain social networking sites without credit.

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so80s ZTT editon by Blank and Jones

Forthcoming mix set by Blank & Jones for the So Eighties series where they’ve been given access to the master tapes for some of ZTT’s classics. Here’s the cover, which was made with a little help from my image archive, and a short video of them in the studio going through the process, they’re keeping the mixes in a classic sense rather than trying to update the sound into todays styles.

Art of ZTT updates

My other site – Art of ZTT – is finally getting some updates after I’d let it languish all summer. It’s a design blog showcasing the design work of XL and the work they and assorted photographers did for the Zang Tuum Tumb label which was a huge influence on me in my teens. The label is 30 years old this year and putting out several compilations in early 2014 with rarities and wonders from their archive.

Yesterday I went to see photographer John Stoddart who shot Frankie Goes To Hollywood before and after they were famous and an interview with him will be online soon. Recently put up is an interview with Yvonne Gilbert, the artist responsible for the iconic two bodies image on the sleeve of ‘Relax’. I’m working my way through their releases, semi-chronologically so next year will be a big one.

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ZTT turns 30

The great Zang Tuum Tumb Records turns 30 years old this month and to celebrate they have a compilation out called ‘The Organization of Pop’. I’ll be reactivating my dormant Art of ZTT site to post a host of updates later this month too featuring exclusive images from some of the people who were there at the beginning.

The label issued a short press release last week with the phrase, ‘Today is officially the end of the beginning.”


Looking down the track listing there aren’t too many surprises in the form of unreleased gems but the inclusion of both Grace Jones and Seal as the first two tracks hopefully means that some sort of legal agreement has at last been worked out and we can expect to see proper reissues of their work in the future. Also note that this is the New York Edition – further London and Tokyo Editions are planned for next year…

ZTT Records Presents The Organization of Pop (New York Edition)
Music From The First Thirty Years of ZTT Records

Disc 1: The Organisation of Pop (the Action Series, from ZTT)

• Grace Jones – Slave To The Rhythm
• Seal – Kiss From A Rose
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (New York Mix)
• 808 State – Pacific (Justin Strauss 0101 Mix)
• Art of Noise – Beat Box
• Propaganda – Dr. Mabuse (Abuse)
• Tom Jones – If Only I Knew (Cold Stop Version)
• MC Tunes vs 808 State – Dance Yourself To Death (Dust Brothers Radio Edit)
• Propaganda – Sorry For Laughing (Unapologetic 12” Mix)
• 808 State – Cubik (Pan American Excursion)
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes
• Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor – Haunted
• The Frames – Star Star
• Art of Noise – Moments In Love (Beaten)

Disc 2: The Disorganisation of Pop (the Incidental Series, from Zang Tuum Tumb)

• The Buggles – We Can Fly From Here (Part One)
• The Frames – Say It To Me Now
• Shane MacGowan and Maire Brennan – You’ve The One
• Lee Griffiths – Sweet Baby James
• Das Psycho Rangers – Homage to the Blessed
• Art of Noise featuring Rakim – Metaforce
• Nasty Rox Inc. – Escape From New York (12” Mix)
• ACT – Snobbery & Decay (That’s Entertainment Mix)
• The Buggles – I Am A Camera (12” Mix)
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Fruitness Mix)
• Lisa Stansfield – The Moment
• The Buggles – We Can Fly From Here (Part Two)
• Andrew Poppy – Kink Konk Adagio

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New ‘Art of ZTT’ blog online

I’d like to bring your attention to a new blog I’ve set up about the Art of ZTT Records (or ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art of Zang Tuum Tumb’ to give it its full title).

For years I’ve been collecting everything I can find from the early 80’s incarnation of this label and tracking down the designers and photographers responsible for some of the artwork. It’s a constant work in progress, starting off as a possible magazine article then progressing to a book idea and now, finally, I’ve decided to make it a website.

Inspired by Paul Gorman‘s rehabilitation of Barney Bubbles‘ work into today’s design community I hope the same can happen for the work of ZTT as it was hugely influential on my own desire to design for the music industry. XL, Accident and The London Design Partnership aren’t exactly household names in the same way as Vaughn Oliver and Peter Saville are but I think that the work they produced for the label in their golden age is at least an equal of the Factory and 4AD portfolios.

The site will eventually feature sleeves, promo posters, print ads, photos, exclusive interviews and associated ephemera connected with the label, its artists and designers. At the very least it should be an exhaustive gallery of an innovative label with a host of rare and forgotten imagery.

Classic Pop magazine – 4 pg XLZTT design article

Just out is issue 3 of Classic Pop magazine with a 4 page article I co-wrote with editor Ian Peel about the 80’s music design work of the XL design studio. You don’t hear much about them but they’re a big passion of mine because they largely defined the look of the Zang Tuum Tumb label from 1983 through to the end of the decade, greatly influencing myself in the process.

Whereas some had Saul Bass, Hipgnosis, Peter Saville or Vaughn Oliver, I had XL who, in conjunction with press officer Paul Morley and another group, The London Design Partnership, created the look of my favourite record label of the 80’s. They did many other sleeves for pop acts on other labels as well but the combination of their work with design briefs from Morley (collectively XLZTT) really stands out from the pack and it’s this that we focus on.

ZTT – The Art Of The 12″ vol. 2

First look at the cover and tracklist for next February’s second ‘The Art of the 12″ Two’ compilation via the ZTT Facebook page!

Disc One:

01. ‘you are warmly invited to come inside’

02. Frankie Goes to Hollywood: ‘Two Tribes’ (Keep the Peace) *

03. Paul McCartney: ‘Spies Like Us’ (Art of Noise Remix) **

04. Godley & Creme: ‘Cry’ (Extended Remix) *

05. Instinct: ‘Swamp Down’ (12” Mix) **

06. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: ‘Julia’s Song’ (Extended Version) *

07. 808 State Vs. Art of Noise: ‘Moments in Love’ (Massey Mix One) **

08. Thomas Leer: ‘Heartbeat’ (Extended Mix) *

09. ‘bassline interlude’ **

10. Act: ‘Chance’ (Whammy Mix) **

11. Frankie Goes to Hollywood: ‘War’ (Coming Out of Hiding) **

12. Propaganda: ‘Dr Mabuse der Spieler’ (An International Incident) *

 

Disc Two:

01. Scritti Politti: ‘Absolute’ (Version)

02. Art of Noise: ‘Close Up’

03. Propaganda: ‘Sorry for Laughing’ (12” Mix) **

04. Das Psych-Oh! Rangers: ‘He He Radical’ (Episode 2) *

05. ‘piano interlude’ **

06. Nasty Rox Inc.: ‘What Is It’ (Live Instrumental Wonder) **

07. Mint Juleps: ‘Every Kinda People’ (Parts I, II and III)

08. Anne Pigalle: ‘Hé Stranger’ (Parts I, II and III)

09. 808 State Vs. Art of Noise: ‘Moments in Love’ (Massey Mix Three) **

10. ‘the flash forward’

11. Frankie Goes to Hollywood: ‘Relax’ (Man Has a Sense for the Discovery of Beauty, Part I) **

12. ‘zang tuum interlude’;

13. Art of Noise: ‘Close Up’ (Hop)

14. Propaganda: ‘Dr Mabuse’ (Special Instrumental Mix) *

15. ‘cadenza’

** previously unreleased

* previously unreleased on CD

 

It’s out on Feb 20, 2012 on Zang Tuum Tumb

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ZTT reissues out today minus Frankie…

Back in December I posted about three forthcoming releases on ZTT: Claudia Bruken‘s ‘Combined’ compilation, Frankie Goes To Hollywood‘s ‘Liverpool’ expanded edition and ‘The Art of the 12″‘ overview covering the label’s famed 12″ remixes from the 80’s and beyond. They are released today but only two will be available due to an 11th hour pulling of the ‘Liverpool’ release for reasons yet to be explained by either the record label or members of the band. Speculation is rife on the Alternate ZTT board as to the cause of this last minute recall as copies have been around for a few weeks now in industry circles with a few even turning up for sale on the continent before the release date. The main culprit seems to be (and this is pure speculation based on what has been said online) the appearance of several tracks as bonuses which had both hardened collectors and members of the band scratching their heads in puzzlement as to their origins.

2 +1

In this internet age it’s rare that any scrap of information slips past uber-fans, some known for collecting every known foreign pressing of each release alongside demos, live recordings, session tapes and any scrap of print relating to their favourite bands. For instance it’s well known to the average Frankie fan that the band recorded a demo version of ‘Slave To The Rhythm’ before the song was immortalised by Grace Jones at Trevor Horn‘s hand, but few have ever been lucky enough to hear it. But when a track list for the expanded version of ‘Liverpool’ appeared last December, several tracks were complete unknowns to the legion of online fans, with one member of the band who frequents the boards even asking if anyone knew what they were or had mp3s of them.

Liverpool deluxeI was lucky enough to receive a copy over a week ago from an industry source and the tracks in question sound like demo ideas, jams or basic track building, including a vocal-less cover of the Rolling Stones‘Satisfaction’. Frankie did many cover versions, both released and unreleased, over the course of their short career. Some were for B-sides, some were simply a way to let off steam and take a break during recording sessions that stretched for months during the making of ‘Liverpool’. Holly Johnson tweeted last week that he had no problem with the release and a statement is promised soon, interesting…

Fortunately we are in the middle of the biggest archive reissue / remaster / repackage period of ZTT’s history at the moment – courtesy of Ian Peel –  and the other two releases can tide us over until any problems get ironed out with Frankie’s second coming (sorry, couldn’t resist). Art of 12"I’ve not received a copy of ‘Combined’ yet but ‘The Art of the 12″‘ 2xCD compilation is one of the best from the label, including several completely new and unreleased gems from the archives that add a few more pieces to the puzzle that fans of the label strive to unravel to this day. Newly unearthed versions of classic’s like Frankie‘s ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘Relax’, Propaganda’s ‘Dr. Mabuse’ or Nasty Rox Inc‘s ’10th Wonder’ sit alongside extended workouts of ‘Moments In Love’ and ‘Close (To the Edit)’ by Art of Noise, ‘Pacific’ and ‘Cubik’ by 808 State and Act‘s vastly underrated ‘Snobbery & Decay’.

A couple of infamous ‘lost’ ZTT groups have tracks presented for the first time too – Instinct, who only had one track appear on the label previously before disappearing into the vaults, have what was to be their first single debuting 25 years later. Also another piece of the Art of Noise puzzle is here for the first time to tantalise us – a glimpse of what Paul Morley and Trevor Horn did next after the rest of the band jumped ship and played the Pop game. The group Art & Act were bandied about in various press releases at the time but nothing was released until an AON box set a few years back yielded a few snippets. Here we get 8 minutes of a group that could have been but wasn’t destined to be until over a decade later with the reformation of three of the Art of Noise proper. Both absolutely essential for any ZTT fan.

Art of 12" inside

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ZTT re-issue series rolls on

18068871x18068872x18068873x You wait for ages (well, not that long actually) and then 3 come along at once – loving these ZTT reissues from Salvo. A fanboy’s wet dream come true and more archive excavations than straight represses. Due early next year…

‘Liverpool’ tracklist:

Disc 1:
1. Warriors Of The Wasteland
2. Rage Hard
3. Kill The Pain
4. Maximum Joy
5. Watching The Wildlife
6. Lunar Bay
7. For Heaven’s Sake
8. Is Anybody Out There?
9. The Waves
10. “Pamela”
11. Pocket Vibrator
12. Suffragette City
13. Roadhouse Blues
14. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
15. (Don’t Lose What’s Left) Of Your Little Mind
16. Rage Hard (Voiceless)

Disc 2:
1. Rage Hard (Montreux Mix)
2. Warriors Of The Wasteland (Montreux Mix)
3. Warriors Cassetted (Featuring Highlights From Both The 7″ And 12″ Single, Warriors Of The Wasteland, The Twelve Wild Disciples Mix And A Phenomenon Of Megabytes)
4. Drum Loop (Monitor Mix / Wisseloord Sessions / November 1985)
5. F*** Off (Monitor Mix / Wisseloord Sessions / November 1985)
6. Wildlife Cassetted (Featuring Orchestra Wildlife, Watching The Wildlife (Hotter), The Waves, Bit 1, Bit 2 And The Frankie Condom Mix (For A Wilder Time)
7. Our Silver Turns To Gold (Monitor Mix / Ibiza Sessions / May 1985)
8. Delirious (Monitor Mix / Ibiza Sessions / May 1985)
9. “Stan”
10. For Heaven’s Sake (Monitor Mix / Wisseloord Sessions / March 1986)

‘Art of the 12″ ‘ tracklist:

Disc 1:
1 Propaganda – Jewelled 7:48
2 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Rage Hard (The Young Person’s Guide To The 12” Mix) 12:07
3 Art Of Noise* – Closely Closely (Enough’s Enough) 7:10
4 Act – Theme From Laughter (06.12.87, Extract) 1:08
5 Act – Snobbery & Decay (Extended, For Stephanie Beacham) 8:31
6 Instinct (7) – Sleepwalking (12” Extended Mix) 9:36
7 Art Of Noise* – Moment In Love 1:12
8 808 State – Cübik (Kings County Perspective) 6:00
9 Nasty Rox Inc. – 10th Wonder (12″ Mix) 7:02
10 MC Tunes Vs. 808 State – Dance Yourself To Death (License To Thrill) 5:40
11 808 State – Pacific 909 (Mellow Birds Mega Edit) 7:05
12 Art Of Noise* – Moments In Love (Beaten) 6:58
13 Propaganda – Testament Two 0:24

Disc 2:
1 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love (Singlette Mix, Extract) 0:28
2 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (Sex Mix Edit) 8:15
3 Anne Pigalle – Souvenir d’Un Paris (Mix Aguicheur) 7:14
5 Glenn Gregory & Claudia Brücken – When Your Heart Runs Out Of Time (6’20”) 6:20
6 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Warriors (Compacted, Extract) 0:51
7 Andrew Poppy – 32 Frames (Drummed Up) 8:33
8 Propaganda – Dr Mabuse (12″ Master Mix For Germany) 6:13
9 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes (Hibakush-ah!) 6:59
10 Art & Act (A pArt Of Noise)* – Life’s A Barrel Of Laughs (Out Of This World Mix) 8:05
11 Art Of Noise* – Dreaming (Silver Mix, Extract) 2:00
12 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Pleasurefix) 9:37
13 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Only Star In Heaven (Starfix) 3:47
14 (lomax•)* – Waiting In Vain (Extended Dub) 4:44
15 808 State – Pacific (Bonus Bird Beats) 2:58
16 Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Rage Hard (++, Extract) 0:22

‘Combined: The Best of Claudia Brucken’ tracklist:

1. Dr.Mabuse (A Paranoid Fantasy) – Propaganda
2. Duel – Propaganda
3. (The Beta Wrap Around Of) P:Machinery – Propaganda
4. Absolutely Immune – ACT
5. Snobbery And Decay – ACT
6. Femme Fatale (The Woman With The Orchid) – Propaganda
7. Absolut(E) – Claudia Brücken
8. Delicious – Andy Bell And Claudia Brücken
9. Cloud 9ine – Onetwo
10. Thank You – Claudia Brücken
11. Sequentia – Onetwo
12. Light The Way (Radio Seduction Edit) – Chrome Seduction Feat. Claudia Brücken
13. This Is Not America – Claudia Brücken And Paul Rutherford
14. Night School – Claudia Brücken
15. In Dreams – Claudia Brücken And Andrew Poppy

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The mystery of the John Peel Frankie Goes To Hollywood tape

Peel tape box
Recently I was lucky enough to accompany my friend Eilon Paz of Dust & Grooves to Peel Acres – John Peel‘s family home and site of his incredible record collection. We’d been granted a visit by Tom Ravenscroft, one of John and wife Sheila‘s four children and renown BBC 6 Music DJ in his own right. We were getting an exclusive look into his archive for the follow up to Eilon’s 2013 book on vinyl collecting, Dust & Grooves – due out next year. This piece isn’t about the whole visit though – for that you’ll have to buy the book and see all the amazing treasures we found – but about something that was discovered before we arrived that I took a special interest in. On the drive up from the station Tom revealed that the week before they’d uncovered a huge stash of tapes from a hidden cavity in the floor below John’s studio, previously some sort of sunken sitting space that had been covered over decades before for space and safety reasons. In amongst the hundreds of cassettes were demos and submissions from hundreds of bands, some unknown and unsigned at the time and one name sprang out at me from the list he reeled off – Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of both the band and their label, ZTT so an early demo from them was of interest despite having heard pretty much everything that’s ever come to light from their recorded history (plus plenty of material yet to be officially released). Even better was that there was a personal letter enclosed as with many of the things we found that day. Once in the house and faced with the mammoth task of even knowing where to begin, Tom kicked things off by retrieving the tape from a small pile of the more interesting finds he’d pulled from the boxes. Extracting the letter, he began to read and by the time he’d finished I was more confused than when he started. See for yourself, most Frankie fans will be similarly scratching their heads.

FGTH John Peel letter web
Three things that instantly jump out are: who was A.K. Reynolds? There was no one of that name in the band. The track titles – I’d never heard of any of them – and the time frame – recorded ’77 – 80? The Frankie that became world famous didn’t form until 1982 but this letter was from a Liverpool address and the writer a bassist, as was Holly Johnson originally, the band’s vocalist, when he was a member of Big In Japan. Maybe this was a pseudonym and he’s sent some solo material to John in the hope of getting airplay? There couldn’t be two Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s, the name was too unique, taken from a page of Guy Peellaert‘s 1973 book, ‘Rock Dreams’ which Holly had then adapted.

GuyPeellaert Frank Sinatra I decided to consult Holly’s 1994 autobiography, ‘A Bone In My Flute’, as his recall of the early Liverpool years is extremely detailed, hoping I’d find a reference to the name or address on the letter. Eventually my patience was rewarded on page 132 with first, the writer’s name, and simultaneously the origin of the band’s moniker.

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The band Holly formed with Ambrose Reynolds – the A.K. Reynolds who wrote the letter, also a bassist – were Frankie Goes To Hollywood mk1. Steve Lovell and BF Tin were also members and I’d say that the time frame here was about 1979/80 although it doesn’t explicitly say in the book. Ten pages later there’s another clue as to those sessions as Holly meets and starts writing songs with Peter Gill, Brian Nash and Mark O’Toole in the embryonic stages of what we now know as Frankie, when they were part of a band called The Dancing Girls and later, Sons and Egypt.

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As nothing came of Frankie mk1 I’d hazard a guess that Ambrose sent the recordings (or some of his own maybe?) to John and used the name? Holly released at least one solo single between Frankie mk1 and 2 so there was a gap, it’s a pity I didn’t see if there was a date on the letter. Looking up Reynolds on Wikipedia shows that he was pretty active on the music scene around Liverpool, later teaming up with ex-Big In Japan vocalist Jayne Casey to form Pink Industry and starting Zulu Records together, but one paragraph stood out:
“In 1980, Reynolds formed a new band, Frankie Goes To Hollywood with Holly Johnson, BF Tin and Steve Lovell. The name is a matter of contention; Johnson wanted to call the band Hollycaust, Reynolds disagreed, Johnson responded “we could call it anything”; his eyes then drifted to a poster on the wall of Frank Sinatra (from a book called Rock Dreams) as he read out the caption, saying disparagingly, “we could even call it Frankie goes to Hollywood, it doesn’t matter”, at which point Reynolds said, “yes, that’s what we SHOULD call it, it’s original and different”. The band split up soon after that, and Reynolds continued to work under that name until 1981, when Johnson began using the name for his more successful band of the same name a few years later.”

So there we have it, the contents of the tape are from the little known – and I suspect even lesser heard – Frankie Goes To Hollywood mk1 although whether any of the recordings include Holly’s contributions we may never know. Thanks to Tom for bringing it to light and Eilon for inviting me along, we found some great stuff but you’ll have to wait for the book next year to see and read about that. Thanks also to Tom’s mum, Sheila for her hospitality, here we are together with a John Lennon promo pack, shot by Eilon (can you tell by the superior quality?).
Take a look at the Dust & Grooves website and give Eilon a follow on Instagram as he continues his Vinyl Nomad tour (inc more photos) – he’s off to Japan next week!
This has been another DJ Food digging mystery solved…

DJ Food & Sheila Ravenscroft
PS: There was also a nice additional passage in Frankie member Brian Nash‘s autobiography remembering John:

Nasher 1
Nasher 2

Mixcloud Select 165: Solid Steel 80s Show 20/04/1998

MS165 tape
It has to be said that looking back at the 80s was not on many minds during late 90s. The business of nostalgia wasn’t rearing its head in the dance music world after a decade of year-on-year musical innovation with new genres and styles springing up seemingly annually. I remember the early years of library music, Moog and easy listening compilations around this time, some licensed, some bootlegs and the worlds of soundtracks, Krautrock and music concrete / tape music being explored more and more by diggers who had exhausted the funk, soul and jazz genres. 80’s pop was something very few were looking at which is why I was royally taken the piss out of when I announced I was going to do an 80’s mix on Solid Steel.

Not that this was full of Rick Astley, Kylie or Madonna bangers, the track listing still stands up IMO and I haven’t change my opinion of any of these tracks since the first time I heard them. The The need no introduction, the Energy Mix of ‘Infected’ was hidden away on a 12” B side and is aptly named. My tape crashes in part way through so I’m not sure what, if anything, preceded this but I’d wager it was the opener. Sigue Sigue Sputnik still invite ridicule today although the critics are kinder to them now than they were back in the 80s where they were really one of the last great bands pedalling any kind of danger into the charts before SAW fully took hold or the end of the decade welcomed dance music and Madchester into the top 40.

The Pop Will Eat Itself track is essentially their cover version of the Dirty Harry theme and is technically a 90s release but they were another band who were rarely given kudos even though their This Is The Day… This Is The Hour… This Is This! LP is a lost sampling masterpiece. Propaganda get a big chunk of the mix with multiple versions of their incredible ‘Dr Mabuse’ debut single and are trailed by the Art of Noise – showing the ZTT love way back when. The B side of Tears For Fears’ ‘Mothers Talk’ single was a track called ‘Empire Building’ which always sounded like they were trying to do an Art of Noise thing to me, I remember the credits stated that the A side was produced by Chris Hughes and that the B side was not produced. My mix is noisy and quite scrappy, not helped by crappy tape compression as this was recorded over a promo tape I had at the time (which I’ll get to later).

JG Thirlwell aka Foetus in all his guises has to be present in any 80s mix and the opener from his classic album, Nail starts a less frantic section before segueing into the outro of the original Pet Shop Boys ‘Opportunities’ 12”. From here we drift into an extended track from Andrew Poppy’s second ZTT LP, Alphabed (A Mystery Dance) and then a bit more Foetus from the Sink compilation. No one is going to argue with Japan in the credibility stakes and the largely instrumental ‘Life Without Buildings’ from the B side of ‘The Art of Parties’ single sounds like something out of a lost Shogun soundtrack. This reminded me of Coldcut’s mixer – as this session was recorded in their Ahead Of Our Time studio in Clink St., not KISS FM – I think it was a Gemini, black with white decals and orange details. It had an inbuilt sampler on the right side where you could take clips of audio on the fly by punching a big round button at an in and out point. You could then loop that or use it as a one-shot which you could stab away at to your heart’s content, even pitching it up and down. You can hear a bit of this in the Japan track as I took a clip of David Sylvan saying, ‘in my building’ and then played over the top of the track afterwards, it’s quite quiet but it’s there. But I digress, the next two tracks were actually contemporary and not 80’s nostalgia – Michael Brook’s ‘Albo Gator’ had been out the year before on 4AD and Max Tundra’s debut on Warp sounds like an even more crazed Squarepusher and apparently samples one of Andrew Poppy’s other ZTT tracks for the choral vocals, which is a nice touch.

Now, the subject of the tape – ‘EN. T. ERPRATAESHUN’ it says and I have a vague memory of this being a promo tape for a Scottish band called NT who were around at the time. They had a sound somewhere between trip hop and soulful vocal funk back when it wasn’t hip to try and sound like the Meters. They were signed to RCA and put out three singles between 1995-1999 which didn’t quite blow up and the album that everyone expected never materialised aside from a promo CD under the title ‘To The Surface’. I always wondered what it sounded like and why it never got released, occasionally looking for it on Discogs but it’s never been sold. Then last week I was in a local record shop (the excellent Soul Proprietors in Brixton), perusing the cassette racks, and there was a promo tape of the album, under the title State Of Play despite having the same track list as the promo CD. The cover is obviously a colour laser copy with the box tabs crudely punched through the back and inside is the same make of cassette as the ‘EN. T. ERPRATAESHUN’ tape, simply labelled ’N.T.’. At last! £3 later it was mine and I can finally hear what could have been nearly 25 years later.
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Was it worth the wait? Well, the singles still hold up, ‘Responsibilities’ the opening track and debut single is a soulful funk banger that sounds like it was birthed from the same 70s mould as Bill Withers but has subtle 90s samples and production touches. ‘To The Surface’ reminds me a bit of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, except with a vocal hitched along for the ride. ‘Distances By Air’, also from the debut single, still stands up, and could happily sit alongside Air circa Moon Safari or some of Jimi Tenor’s flute-led instrumental jazz – pure smokers music. Following directly after is a Cheech & Chong spoken word intro mentioning acid-trips and uptempo hammond strut ‘State of Time’ definitely has ‘single’ written all over it with swirling dub effects and horns – a lost classic.

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‘If U Don’t’ only came out as a promo 12” but slows the tempo with ruff drums, organ and wah wah guitar, well placed on the track list after the uptempo title track. I won’t go through the whole album but the sound is extremely tripped out in places, lots of echo, swooping tape delay, a sonic soup and very trip hop in lots of ways, which sometimes sits at odds with the soulful vocal although that’s what also alleviates it from similar music of the time. I think the problem with this record is that it was out of time, maybe five years too early, and people were looking elsewhere at the time, to the future rather than the past. This has a retro feel all over it and had it debuted in the late 90s or early 00s when the funk 45 boom happened then maybe it would have fitted like a glove. We’ll never know but I wouldn’t put it past someone to dig this up and release it as a lost 90s soul oddity somewhere down the line. I’m just a bit gutted that I taped over the ‘EN. T. ERPRATAESHUN’ tape as it’s nowhere to be found on Discogs or anywhere else.
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Track list:
The The – Infected (Energy Mix)
Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Hack Attack (Dub)
Steroid Maximus – Life In The Greenhouse Effect
Pop Will Eat Itself – The Incredible PWEI Vs Dirty Harry
Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Suicide
Propaganda – (The Ninth Life Of…) Dr Mabuse
Propaganda – Dr Mabuse (13th Life Mix)
Propaganda – (The Ninth Life Of…) Dr Mabuse
Art of Noise – Beatbox Diversion 1
Tears For Fears – Empire Building
Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel – Theme From Pigdom Come
Pet Shop Boys – Opportunities (Original Dance Mix)
Andrew Poppy – Goodbye Mr G
Foetus Eruptus – Lilith
Japan – Life Without Buildings
Michael Brook – Albo Gator
Max Tundra – Children At Play

Welcome To The Pleasuredome original art up for auction

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After owning Lo Cole‘s original paintings for Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome for 20 years it’s time to pass them on to another Frankie fan. They’re going up for auction via Omega Auctions on July 4th – you can view the lot here.
These are the original cover, inside and back cover paintings Lo made for the album and I’ve requested the three paintings be kept together and sold as a set. An interview I made with Lo and the story of the artwork is here on my Art of ZTT site. With the release of ‘Relax’ approaching its 40th anniversary this autumn and the 40th of the LP next year, it’s time to pass these on. Possibly the ultimate Frankie collectable.

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Mixcloud Select 125: Openmind on Solid Steel 15/07/1994

Opti stuff
It’s been a packed week… Saturday was Jonny Trunk‘s Groovy Record Fayre at the Mildmay Club (see more of that here) and a great time was had. Nursing a hangover and then a cold through the week I managed to catch the end of Stephen CoatesBone Music book launch at the Horse Hospital and see the extraordinary Rain Time exhibition at the same time, ending up in the pub with the authors and making more connections that will unravel over time. There’s been more press to do for my Wheels of Light book, published by Four Corners Books, some of which is hitting the shelves this week in the form of Moonbuilding issue 2 and the latest Shindig! magazine. A podcast for the Bureau of Lost Culture should debut this Sunday (Nov 5th) about the book and light show culture in general (if we finish it in time). In between I managed to design a zoetrope for an Australian TV show, finish the artwork for an anniversary Ninja Tune release which will be announced soon and see Michael Rother live at the Clapham Grand last night.

Rother, Weller, Morris

I was slightly non-plussed by a lot of it, the highlight being a storming Harmonia track early in the set. New Order’s Stephen Morris and the right honourable Paul Weller were guests for the encore and Stephen looked like he was having trouble approximating Klaus Dinger‘s motorik beat. Weller seemed to either be having trouble with his guitar or looking to Rother for cues whilst the latter was head down, deep in his immaculate guitar playing, only looking up in the final bar to signal that this was the end. My judgement may have been clouded by the cold currently consuming my head though. The postman has just delivered an odd package of vintage light show wheel ephemera from my friend John at Funky Parrot (see above). Since publishing the book all sorts of people have been coming out of the woodwork with related facts and pieces connected with the light show world. If you’re such a person or know someone in that field, please get in touch, there’s still more work to do in that area.
MS125 Tape 2
On to this week’s show…
A really old one here, from an original show with PC and I on the decks and Jon More on the mic. I’ve snipped PC’s part out and sent it to him so here are the two of mine joined at around the 25 min mark. The first section makes me want to up my game, there are so many bits and pieces weaving in and out of the mix in places it’s a nightmare to track mark them (yes I try and track mark all my uploads in Mixcloud so that you can find out what’s playing more easily – you did know that, right?). This is still so early that I’m referred to as Kevin from Openmind but the Strictly Kev moniker wasn’t far round the corner and I’m still in chill out mode for the most part.

Kicking off with two Solid Steel jingles we’re into a short Mika Vainio track from his debut album ‘Metri’ on Sahko with those gorgeous pure high frequency notes before drifting into a Woodentops B side. Rolo McGinty intones, bathed in much reverb for the Late Night version of ‘You Make Me Feel’. I swear there’s a bit of Cocteau’s creeping into the mix before Beautyon’s mesmeric ‘To Swing Pil’ enters with a ton of extra electronic sounds of whose origins I’ve no clue. ‘Moist Moss’ is the choir-like piece that originates from Mark Van-Hoen’s Weathered Well album under his Locust moniker, why isn’t he remembered more in the IDM halls of fame? The recall is patchy on the next one and Shazam is no help when things are this layered up. There might be some Air Liquide in there, or something from the Reflective label, it’s so hard to tell and this was nearly 30 years ago. This must have been done on multiple CDs and vinyl at the KISS FM studio as well as Coldcut adding occasional jingles.

An uncharacteristic electronic beat track from Scanner’s Mass Observation release enters before a gorgeous Andrew Poppy track from his second album for ZTT, Alphabed (A Mystery Dance). I found Andrew through my love of ZTT back in the 80s and when ambient and chill out came around his music seemed perfect to slip in (the stuff that wasn’t based around Reich’s minimalism that is). I played ‘Goodbye Mr G.’ to my mum once and it seemed to intensely annoy her as she had no handle on its structure or when it began or ended. I know Andrew a little now which is very weird and he’s still making music, releasing an album, ‘Jelly’ recently.

An old faithful, ‘Plight’ from David Sylvian and Holger Czkay’s ‘Plight & Premonition’, slides in and was a staple of my ambient sets for years. It’s a dark but beautiful piece of world building with found sound and snatches of instruments and radio interference that serves as a bridge or overlay to anything. Path were one of the first bands I ever designed a label or sleeve for and their debut single, ‘Pleasant’ rounds out the mix. There is an odd edit right near the end that slices us into a snatch of Sheila Chandra with Jon reading out something about a fund-raising event but I’m not sure what happened there as it came from a batch of digitisations I made years ago.

The second half of the mix is mostly based on the entirety of The Irresistible Force’s 20 minute ’Mountain High (live)’ track, the final side of his debut LP, Flying High. Woven into this ambient masterpiece are a quick blast of ‘Bhaja Mana Hure’ from the Radha Krsna Temple and a couple of beat tracks including Up, Bustle & Out’s ‘Nightwalk’ and La Funk Mob’s ‘Motor Bass Gets Phunked Up’ which slips and slides in and out of time for a few moments here and there. It sounds like I’m constantly chasing it in the mix. Slivers of Tony ‘Moody Boys’ Thorpe’s Voyager track ‘Arrival’ rise and fall as La Funk Mob take their exit – this was a CD only track, 20 minutes long, beatless, twinkling ambience, also never far away when making ambient mixes back in the day.

Mixmaster Morris’s track takes a left turn before the 38 minute mark and either my vinyl was knackered or the one he took the sample from was as there’s crackling all over it. Into this section creep no less than indie pop darlings then turned experimental mavericks, James. Post-‘Sit Down’ they were indulged by their record company and ended up making a couple of albums with Eno, one called ‘Laid’ with an offshoot album of less poppy tracks called ‘Wah Wah’. Out of the sessions from the latter came an amazing 33 minute 12” of Sabres of Paradise mixes called ‘Jam J’ where Weatherall, Kooner and Burns dubbed them to infinity and back again in one of their then epic reconstructions. This huge, loping fuzz bass-ed monster slouches into the mix in half time before taking centre stage, only to be ousted at the very end by the final moments of Mountain High.
Phew, bit of a heavy trip that one.

Tracklist:
Coldcut jingle intro
Mika Vainio – Sisaan
The Woodentops – You Make Me Feel (Late Night version)
Beautyon – To Swing Pil
Locust – Moist Moss
Unknown – Gated ambience
Scanner – Mass Observation
Andrew Poppy – Goodbye Mr. G
David Sylvian & Holger Czukay – Plight (The Spiralling of Winter Ghosts)
Path – Pleasant
Sheila Chandra – unknown
Coldcut Russian jingle
The Radha Krsna Temple – Bhaja Mana Hure
The Irresistible Force – Mountain High (live)
Up, Bustle & Out – Nightwalk
La Funk Mob – Motor Bass Gets Phunked Up
Voyager – Arrival
James vs Sabres of Paradise – Jam J (Phase 1: Arena Dub)

John Peel Bonhams auction highlights

John Peel at home
Today sees the auction of items from John Peel‘s amazing collection at Bonhams in Knightsbridge. You can view 200 items from the auction online here from the incredible, often historical, contents. Whilst there are letters, lyrics, acetates, clothing and promos by heavyweights like Bowie, Lennon & Ono, Bolan and Factory Records, those don’t interest me as much as these items below. The notes and photos below come from the Bonhams catalogue entries.
JP Gandalf's Garden illustration
THE PERFUMED GARDEN: THE ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY KEN HAYES CREATED FOR JOHN PEEL’S ARTICLE IN THE MAGAZINE ‘GANDALF’S GARDEN’, 1967,
Gouache on artboard, hand-painted by Ken Hayes (Graphics Dept) as an illustration to accompany an article by John Peel in Issue No.1 of the sub-culture magazine ‘Gandalf’s Garden’. The centrepiece of the artwork reading John Peel all at sea in the galaxy with the names of bands such as The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Captain Beefheart, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd and Donovan among others in the design around it, signed and dated ‘67 by the artist in the bottom right corner, the back of the board with a handwritten football score Chelsea 1 – Liverpool 2, 14 1/2in x 24 1/2in (37cm x 62cm)
*Sold for £4,462.50

JP GG spread-low_res-scale-2_00x-gigapixel

‘Gandalf’s Garden’ was a publication focusing on a ‘mystical community’ which flourished at the end of the 1960s as part of the London hippie-underground movement. The magazine emerged in 1968 and ran for 6 issues. This artwork can be seen on Page 8 of Issue No.1 alongside John Peel’s article ‘A Dawn Walk In The Mind Of The Musical Gardener’, published 1st May 1968.
JP Pink Floyd poster
PINK FLOYD/JOHN PEEL: AN IMPORTANT AND RARE ‘EVOLUTIONS’ SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY CONCERT POSTER, Friday 26th January 1968,
Printed on metallic paper, for a concert featuring performances by Pink Floyd, John Peel, Incredible String Band, Jimmy Cliff and the Shakedown Sound, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Chicken Shack, Nelson’s Column, held at the Old Refectory, University of Southampton, England, 20in x 30in (51cm x 76cm)
The title of this event is eerily apposite, the date being that on which Pink Floyd effectively sacked Syd Barrett. His increasingly drug-related erratic and difficult behaviour through 1967 and the band’s evolving musical direction led them to seek another guitar player.
At the end of that year they brought in one of Syd’s friends, David Gilmour, and the band played a handful of gigs as a five-piece in January 1968. In his book, Echoes: The Complete History Of Pink Floyd, Glenn Povey writes: “Syd Barrett was clearly never going to come back to the real world, and his role within Pink Floyd was all but over. One solution the band thought of was to use him as an off-stage songwriter in the same way that the Beach Boys retained Brian Wilson. But almost at once they realised that this was an impossibility.” Travelling to Southampton for this gig, the band simply decided not to pick Syd up en route.
As MC/DJ for the evening, this poster was kept as a souvenir by John Peel. It is thought this is the first example of the poster ever to appear at auction and it may possibly be a unique survivor of the small number that would have been put up around the University campus to publicise the concert.
*SOLD for £8,925
JP Hapshash poster
PSYCHEDELIA: A HAPSHASH & THE COLOURED COAT-STYLE POSTER, 1960s,
Printed on gold coloured card, with typical Hapshash-style castle and sky motif and twisting prose about a grain of sand, origin unknown, 20in x 30in (51cm x 76cm)
Hapshash and the Coloured Coat was an influential British graphic design and avant-garde musical partnership in the late 1960s, consisting of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, who produced popular psychedelic posters. Though this poster has no artist or publishing credit, it bears several stylistic similarities to other well-known Hapshash posters.
*Sold for £637.50
JP Oz trail vest
OZ: AN OBSCENITY TRIAL VEST TOP, 1971,
A fawn cotton vest top printed with brown and pink slogan ‘Oz Obscenity Trial Old Bailey London 1971’, labelled size 34.
Issue 28, May 1970 (the School Kids Issue), which included a very adult Rupert Bear cartoon strip, led to obscenity charges being brought against the three editors. Peel appeared in court as a defence witness for Neville and co-editors at the trial, held at the Old Bailey in 1971. John Lennon was also one of the high profile supporters of the magazine and released the single “God Save Oz” in order to help raise funds for the magazine’s defence. The three were found guilty, but their convictions were overturned following appeal, resulting in an embarrassing defeat for the Establishment.
*(Bonhams neglect to mention that the image is by Robert Crumb)
*Sold for £828.75
JP Frankie flyer 1982
JOHN PEEL: A NORTH CHESHIRE COLLEGE STUDENT’S UNION CHRISTMAS BALL POSTER, 17th December 1982,
Printed on paper, for the John Peel Roadshow at which Peel invited Frankie Goes To Hollywood to do a session that included an early version of ‘Two Tribes’, at North Cheshire College in Warrington, 20in x 29in (51cm x 73cm)
Soon after this show, the group was asked to record a video for their hit ‘Relax’ which was shown by Channel 4 on ‘The Tube’ in 1983. The growing popularity of the group convinced Grammy Award-winning producer Trevor Horn to sign them to his newly formed ZZT [*ZTT actually] Records. The band later performed the song on Top of The Pops before the song was banned from the BBC in 1984.
8Sold for £280.50

Mixcloud Select 65: The Openmind Collective debut on Coldcut Solid Steel 11/07/1993

MS65 tape

28 years ago last week I was heading back into London from my Dad’s 50th birthday party to the Holloway Road to meet Matt Black at KISS FM. This was the first time I ever appeared on Solid Steel, alongside old DJ partner Mario Aguera as part of the Openmind collective. Mixed totally live on air on 3 decks and a CD player (the old rack mounted ones) with a few Coldcut jingles being thrown in off of 8 track-style carts by Matt (Jon wasn’t in the studio for this session).

I’ll never forget it, the nervous countdown to 1am in the quiet studio, both of us shitting ourselves as we were going to be live on the radio for the first time and it was on Solid Steel! The news ending and Matt triggered the intro jingle, and we were off with the luxury of 3 turntables layer up the mix with. It was a seminal moment in my DJ career and I’m eternally grateful to Matt for inviting us on and giving us a chance as it was like getting a foot in the door or the first rung of the ladder. If I’d never done another Solid Steel again I’d have been happy but of course he asked us back again and again.

Looking at the track list I’m pleased that it all still stands up and a few long-term staples were in there; Kraftwerk, Aphex, ZTT, Jungle Brothers and The Irresistible Force. The mix is mostly tight, the odd stumble here and there but no disasters – not bad for a first go live on 3 decks although there was way too much George Carlin in the mix.

Mario took over after  the Barbarella track, we shared a house at the time and pooled our records when playing out as I was only just out of college and he had a full-time job so could afford to buy more new records than me. Along with Chantal Passamonte (now Mira Calix) and David Vallade, a fellow graphic designer who has done covers for Clear, Reflective, Worm Interface, Ninja Tune and many more, we did the Telepathic Fish chill out parties. One day I’ll get a little site together with all the mixes, photos, magazines and flyers I have stored up from those years…

Thanks to Steve Norgate many years ago for the superior audio and track listing as the quality is superior to my own D90 cassette and I doubt a DAT recording of this exists.

Track list:
Sequential – The Mission (Live From the Outer Zone
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome to The Pleasure Dome 12″ intro (on 33rpm)
Sexy Selector – Original Rockers
St Etienne – Your Head My Voice (Voix Revirement by Aphex Twin)
Jungle Brothers – Ultimatum Jungle Beats + unknown African chanting
LS Diesel & Launch DAT – Rougher Than A Lion
Psychic Warriors of Gaia – Maenad (The Valley) + Hear This! spoken word
Kraftwerk – Home Computer
Seefeel – Minky Starshine
Nightmares On Wax – Nights Interlude + George Carlin – God
No-Man – Heaven Taste
21st Century Aura – Disorientation
DJ Spike – Outer Land (part one)
Grace Jones – The Crossing (Ohh The Action…)
Kraftwerk – Morgenspaziergang
Dreamfish – School Of Fish
Barbarella – Barbarella (Irresistible Force Mix) + George Carlin – Nursery Rhymes

Mixcloud Select 10: Openmind – Daydreaming at Night (Float 1 side B) 1993

10 Openmind - Daydreaming At Night tape

Track notes:
Side B of a mixtape created for a Floatation Centre in Brixton called Aquatonics who wanted a mix of continuous ambient music and sounds to play to their customers that would aid their floatation trips. Recorded live on two turntables and a basic CD player with no pitch control direct to this cassette in the house I shared with fellow Openmind associates David Vallade, Mario Aguera and Chantal Passamonte (later Mira Calix). The title was coined by David and was also used as a track title on Chantal’s debut album for Warp.

This week I’ve dug out one of the original flyers used to advertise this in the Ambient Soho record shop, this was an incredibly early computer design by yours truly, probably one of the first. I think this was done on Mario’s computer at his work as we didn’t yet have one at the flat. He was a computer game programmer at that point (working on a game for Queen (the band) I seem to remember) and later worked with Hex creating visuals and animation for a game they were working on. Float A5 flyer frontThe music selection is a pretty good representation of what we were playing at the Telepathic Fish parties at the time: The Orb (of course), Future Sound of London, Dreamfish (Mixmaster Morris & Pete Namlook), Sven Vath and a few side steps like ambient sections from ZTT and 4AD releases. We used to play bits of This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Grace Jones and there’s even a bit of U2 in there (!) There’s also a fair bit of stuff that I just cannot work out in amongst the layers so if anyone spots anything I’ve missed then please comment.

There is one particular moment that makes me cringe on this side – at the end of an Orb mix of whale noises I’m playing over the ‘Return’ mix of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’, suddenly a fairground Wurlitzer strikes up the opening notes of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’. I wasn’t paying attention whilst mixing with three decks and this caught me off guard, quickly being faded out before it could launch into full flow. It may have ruined a few floats… I used to have two copies of the Frankie tune and the intro to this mix is a lovely ambient piece before going into the full song, I would crossfade them together three of four times to extend the intro, sometimes at different speeds or pitches.

Track list:
The Orb – Back Side of the Moon
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Well…
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Warriors of the Wasteland (Return)
Grace Jones – The Crossing (Ohh The Action…)
Sven Vath – Caravan of Emotions
U2 – Mysterious Ways (Apollo 440 Magic Hour Remix)
Brian Eno – Lantern Marsh
System 7 – ?
The Orb – O.O.B.E.
This Mortal Coil – Filigree & Shadow
Kraftwerk – Europe Endless
Dreamfish – School of Fish
This Mortal Coil – Firebrothers
Future Sound of London – Papa New Guinea
Sven Vath – Caravan of EmotionsFloat A5 flyer back

Record Store Day 2019

RSD 19 AG flyer front web
I was going to post about Record Store Day releases last week when the list was announced but wanted to wait for the announcement above as well. For once I’m heading to North London, after spending years down South or in the West End… to Audio Gold, those fine purveyors of vintage audio equipment, hi-fi components and records, old and new. My good friend Robin from Hexstatic has worked there for many years and has been trying to get Jonny Trunk and I up there for nearly as long.

Jonny will be promoting his RSD release on Trunk, the official reissue of Basil Kirchin‘s ‘World’s Within Worlds’, by playing original reels from Basil’s archive via one of the shop’s lovely machines no doubt. I’ll be joined by fellow flexi finder Shane Quentin who, along with Jonny and I, has contributed to the forthcoming book, ‘Wobbly Sounds’ which is all about British flexi discs. Shane’s collection of the disposable discs is enough to make any collector envious and between us we pulled out some sweet examples of the different uses they had from household product advertising to pop music promotion, event invites to educational aids, and yes, porn.

The book is published by those lovely people at Four Corners Books and forms part of their Irregulars series of Great British oddities, I don’t think I’m allowed to show you the cover yet though as it’s not online. Hopefully copies will be back from the printers and available at Audio Gold for April 13th. We’ll be playing some of our collections in the shop and I’m even going to hide some freebies in the racks for people to find…

Now – to my RSD ones to watch list – if your pockets are deep enough of course:

808 State – Four States of 808 (ZTT) 4×12″ box set

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Limited edition 4 x 12″ box set exploring four very different sides of 808 State; Hacienda-inspired acid house classics, Thunderdome-inspired full-frontal aural assaults, renowned collaborations, and downtempo sonic baths. Featuring 27 tracks across four discs, including rare and previously unreleased mixes, hidden tracks, brand new artwork and liner notes. Includes three previously unreleased tracks and three previously unreleased on vinyl. The entire set is remastered from the original master tapes.

Art of Noise – Daft As A Brush! (ZTT) 4×12″ box set

AON

Limited edition 4 x 12″ box set and a vinyl companion piece to the renowned 1986 CD compilation, Daft. Hear a fresh take on three game-changing records – ‘Beat Box’, ‘Close (to the Edit)’ and ‘ Moments in Love’ – while a fourth disc finally unleashes Trevor Horn and Paul Morley‘s mythical post-AoN project, Art and ACT. Featuring 25 tracks across four discs, including hidden tracks, brand new artwork and liner notes. 20 tracks previously unreleased on vinyl with the entire set remastered from the original master tapes.

Basil Kirchin – Worlds Within Worlds (Trunk) LP

Basil

Worlds Within Worlds (Part I and II) is one of the most important improvised jazz-based recordings of all time. Released in 1971 it sold just a handful of copies, but has become a keystone in the development of experimental and ambient sounds – originals now fetch £1000+. This pressing features a new gatefold sleeve (Kirchin hated the original sleeve), with images of Kirchin, his original field recording tapes and notes by WWW fan Thurston Moore. There are just 1500 being pressed with 250 on gold vinyl, which will be mixed randomly in with the 1250 black versions. There will be no way of telling which colour is which as all LPs will be sealed. The LP will not be repressed.

Bob Dorough – Multiplication Rock (Original Soundtrack Recording) (Jackpot) LP

Multi Rock

LP Colored Vinyl (Red/Blue Swirl on Multiplication Rock). 1st ever reissue, from the original master tapes. 1500 total worldwide. Original ABC 1973 TV soundtrack, part of the Schoolhouse Rock! Series. Jazz Bop Vocalist Bob Dorough (1923-2018) composed “Multiplication Rock” as a way for children to remember multiplicaton tables. Colored Vinyl LP from The Original Master Tapes with original Tape Box artwork. includes ‘Three Is A Magic Number’, as sampled by De La Soul.

Deadly Avenger – Your God Is Too Small (Burning Witches) LP

DA 3d

More sonic electro infused speaker decimation from Deadly Avenger in a brand new follow up to 2018′ s ‘I Am Godzilla You Are Japan’.Your God Is Too Small’ picks up the DA Godzilla story from the very begining in a prequel to IAGYAJ. Includes 3D artwork and glasses, Insert, and download card. UK Exclusive variant. Artwork by Luke Insect.

Desmond Briscoe, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop – The Stone Tape (Silva Screen Records) 10″

Stone Tape

10″ EP on Green Vinyl Long awaited BBC 1972 soundtrack, previously unreleased. Numbered Edition.

DJ Pierre presents / Various Artists – ACID 88 volume 3 (Afro Acid) 2xLP

Acid

A double LP of 1 Black + 1 White vinyl of 12 killer acid trax selected by legendary pioneer DJ Pierre featuring Mark Archer, A Guy Called Gerald, K Alexi, Lauren Flax, Type 303, Hiroko Yamamura & many more.

Future Sound of London, The – Yage 2019

Yage

In 1996 iconic group The Future Sound of London released the UK Top 40 chart album ‘Dead Cities’, from which came a track ‘Yage’. Such has been the interest in this masterpiece of electronica over the years that the guys have been back into the studio to revisit it. Here, on this limited edition, individually numbered LP press exclusively for 2019′ s Record Store Day comes the results. ‘Yage 2019’ takes the core of the original and rebuilds it. All together there are eleven tracks reconstructions and interpretations, woven together (as FSOL do) into a 42 minute dreamscape journey across the 2 sides of vinyl. Only 1000 copies of this release will be pressed on vinyl.

Herbie Hancock – Dedication (Get On Down) LP

Herbie

Vinyl has never been officially issued outside of Japan. 3000 made worldwide. ‘Dedication’ is a unique Herbie Hancock outing in more ways than one. This is a solo Hancock release, all sounds heard on this recording are Hancock at the keyboards, be it an acoustic piano, a Fender Rhodes or a synth. The project was recorded live in Tokyo in July of 1974 and never saw release outside of Japan until well into the 21st century. For Record Store Day 2019 Get On Down presents the first ever US vinyl release of this important piece of Hancock’ s artistic legacy.

Worth it for ‘Nobu’ alone, no poster though!?

Propaganda – The Eight Testaments of Propaganda (ZTT) 4×12″ box set

Prop

This limited edition 4 x 12″ box set dives deep into the hits and mythology of Propaganda‘ s highly influential ZTT years. Take a fresh look at their two biggest singles – ‘Duel’ and ‘Dr. Mabuse’ – and their two most beloved live/album tracks, ‘Dream Within A Dream’ and ‘Frozen Faces’ . Featuring 24 tracks across four discs, including rare and previously unreleased mixes, brand new artwork and liner notes. Includes two tracks previously unreleased, and 13 tracks previously unreleased on vinyl. The entire set is remastered from the original master tapes.

Wendy Carlos /Rachel Elkind – Kubrick (Silva Screen) 7″

Kubrick

7″ Die Cut Sleeve/ Printed Inner Sleeve Transparent Orange Vinyl Double A Side: The Shining/ A Clockwork Orange For both these iconic films, Stanley Kubrick chose to work with the extraordinary Wendy Carlos, who wrote (or realised, as both are based on classical pieces) the main themes to both movies. The 7″ AA Side, March from A Clockwork Orange (1971), is an arrangement of Beethoven‘ s rousing Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (fourth movement) and is the first recorded song using a vocoder. Almost ten years later, Carlos was to work with Kubrick again on The Shining (1980). The Shining – Main Theme on the 7″ A side takes as its starting point the Dies Irae from Hector Berlioz‘ s Requiem (Op5), appropriately taken to new levels of darkness by Carlos and Rachel Elkind‘ s electronic treatment.

Art Of Noise, live at the British Library


Last Friday I was thrilled to be asked to play before Dudley / Jeczalik / Langan aka The Art of Noise at the British Library in London. I put together a set consisting entirely of music they had written, remixed, reworked or had a hand in – careful not to play any obvious tracks that they would be playing as they rebooted their In Visible Silence album plus some of their biggest hits. I recorded my mix and you can hear it above, complete with exclusive edits made specially for the show and a rare appearance from AON fan Kenneth WIlliams at one point.
Witness the group below at the soundcheck performing ‘Moments In Love’.

AON soundcheck
Highlights were thundering versions of ‘Beatbox’, ‘Close (To The Edit)’, ‘Legs’ and ‘Peter Gunn’, a beautiful ‘Moments In Love’ (with blink and you’ll miss it ‘In The Army Now’ interjections) and lots of story-telling in between. Many friends and familiar faces from ZTT fandom were present and I had the pleasure of chatting to Anne Dudley‘s husband before the show about her early library recordings for Amphonic (some of which are soon to be reissued by Buried Treasure). JJ Jeczalik strolled up and introduced himself before my set and, during an airing of Frankie Goes To Hollywood‘s ‘Pleasurefix’ (a fan favourite remix of the epic album cut by Gary Langan), I turned around to see Langan himself watching and listening only a meter away with keen interest. “Hi, I’m Gary”, he said, leaning over to shake my hand. :)

Crowd behind leftCrowd behind stage Crowd above front
The whole evening was a fan fest with signed prints, records and T shirts on sale, people watching from the stairwell’s and balconies and an incredible Bowers and Wilkins sound system that made everything shine. I chatted to ex-ZTT artist Andrew Poppy after the main set who regaled me with tales of rescuing his artwork from a skip outside the label one day! Big thanks for the ‘Where’s DJ Food?’ crowd photos above by Peter Williams and shots of me by the stairwell below by Mark Nicholson. Another one for the CV and highlights of 2018.

DJ Food 2DJ Food 1