The Gonzo Daily: The Noise Of Art: Trevor Horn On ZTT's 30th Birthday

Friday 7 March 2014

The Noise Of Art: Trevor Horn On ZTT's 30th Birthday

Pop music needs institutions, that much is clear. Creative spontaneity and an anarchist ethic will only get you so far – sooner or later, if you want music to have longevity and work as social intervention, you need to create an institutional framework, an organisational structure that will provide a setting for genuine artistic freedom and intellectual development to flourish.

Right now, in our atomised, post-everything pop scene, the lack of a collective countercultural architecture is blindingly apparent. So it is timely that the catalogue of Zang Tuum Tumb Records (ZTT) – a pop institution if ever there was one – is being repackaged and re-released this month in the form of a series of well-designed, copiously sleeve-noted editions to mark the label’s 30th anniversary.

The brainchild of producer/musician Trevor Horn, businesswoman Jill Sinclair, and music-journalist enfant terrible Paul Morley, ZTT was named after a 1914 sound poem by the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, and became the vanguard of the so-called New Pop movement of the early 1980s. With a conceptual grounding in the avant-garde substrata of the twentieth century, ZTT cut against the reactionary mood of the time with a series of brilliant pop Gesamtkunstwerks – Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 'Relax', Propaganda’s A Secret Wish, Art of Noise’s Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Noise? – all of which juxtaposed future-shock design with playful sloganeering and a production aesthetic that still sounds strange and modernistic over thirty years later.

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