ZTT Records

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ZTT
Zang Tumb Tuum
ZTT Records (logo).png
ZTT Records logo
Parent company UMC (Universal Music catalogue)
Founded1983 (1983)
Founder Jill Sinclair
Trevor Horn
Paul Morley
Distributor(s) Universal Music Operations
GenreVarious
Country of origin United Kingdom
Location London
Official website ZTT.com

ZTT Records is a British record label founded in 1983 by the record producer Trevor Horn, the businesswoman Jill Sinclair and the NME journalist Paul Morley. [1] They released music by acts including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones, the Art of Noise and Seal.

Contents

In December 2017, Universal Music Group (UMG) acquired ZTT Records, along with Stiff Records. [2] The ZTT and Stiff back catalogues were licensed to BMG Rights Management under Union Square Music until 2022, when Universal relaunched the label.

History

ZTT is an initialism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb , which described "zang tumb tumb" as the sound of a machine gun. [3] It is believed that they likely got the idea for the name via John McGeoch, who produced the Swedish pop-funk band Zzzang Tumb's eponymous 1983 album around the same time as the label was founded. [4]

The majority of the creative team[ clarification needed ] at ZTT had first assembled when Horn produced the album The Lexicon of Love for the British pop band ABC. A precursor to ZTT was the short-lived Perfect Recordings label, spun off from the newly founded Perfect Songs publishing subsidiary of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair's company. Perfect Recordings only released the Buggles' Adventures in Modern Recording , along with the singles derived from it.

In 1983, Horn, Sinclair and Morley founded ZTT Records. [1] [5] Sinclair was ZTT's managing director, while Paul Morley concentrated on marketing. [3] In the same year, Sinclair and Horn acquired Basing Street Studios from Island Records in exchange for distributing the ZTT label. [6]

ZTT's first signing was Frankie Goes to Hollywood (FGTH), [1] whose hits "Relax" and "Two Tribes" were among the best-selling singles of the decade. [7] It was the label's second single, Relax, that became the label's first number one in January 1984. [7] Relax stayed in the UK Singles Chart for a full year, and ZTT was well and truly established. During the 1980s, Grace Jones and Art of Noise [1] were other ZTT acts to chart. [7] ZTT Records also helped define the structure and formats of the UK pop music scene; as part of their marketing efforts to prolong the life of a single release, ZTT issued multiple 12" remixes which charted at positions in their own right as a separate 12" single. [1] ZTT Records also licensed or produced t-shirts with graphic messages related to its artists' singles (eg. Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed), [8] which themselves became 1980s icons. [1] ZTT were unafraid to invert the business of pop and turn it into entertainment. [1]

In 1984, the Horn-Sinclair family businesses were reorganised as SPZ Group, which then consisted of Sarm West Studios, Perfect Songs, and ZTT Records. [9] From the beginning, the majority of ZTT releases were published by Perfect Songs, and recorded at Sarm West Studios. The latter part of the decade was eclipsed by a bitter legal battle between ZTT and Holly Johnson, who fought his way out of the strict, long recording agreement. [7] Similarly, other ZTT artists, such as Art of Noise and Propaganda, were disenchanted and left the label. Propaganda's case was settled out of court; Johnson won his outright. [7]

By the late 1980s, ZTT began to focus on the emerging dance music scene. Manchester trance group 808 State [1] would reach the top 10 with Pacific State , and three other singles and one album during the early 1990s. [7] Seal [1] was the next major ZTT act to emerge in the 1990s, and the label also achieved hits with MC Tunes and Shades of Rhythm. [3]

ZTT Records have produced forty-five Top 40 hits in the United Kingdom, fifteen of which were Top 10 hits. [1]

In May 2022, UMG released the new album by Propaganda vocalists Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag on the reactivated ZTT Label. Credited to xPropaganda, the album was recorded with producer Stephen Lipson, titled The Heart Is Strange and received a generally positive reception. [10] [11] [12]

Music videos and cover art

ZTT Records in London (1986) Ztt2.jpg
ZTT Records in London (1986)

ZTT Records pioneered music video and cover art as forms of high art in their own right. Paul Morley commissioned videos from then-unknown directors, who would go on to become acclaimed in their field, such as Anton Corbijn, Godley & Creme, Zbigniew Rybczyński and Andy Morahan.

Morley also commissioned early ZTT sleeve design and photography to pioneers of the medium such as Malcolm Garrett, Anton Corbijn, Mark Farrow and Jean-Paul Goude.

The label's work in the visual field was profiled by Tony Enoch in Design Week, who positioned ZTT as "from a time when a record label meant something – a happening, a sense of belonging. Labels defined people's youth. Think Apple, Virgin, Beggar's Banquet, ZTT, and Stiff: small, independent British labels appearing to be able to do anything they wanted, reinventing the rules." [13]

In 2008, journalist Ian Peel curated a first exhibition of ZTT sleeve art for galleries in London and Tokyo, [14] and in 2013, he curated the visual archives of ZTT and Sarm West Studios before the studios were demolished. In 2009, Peel compiled a DVD of the labels' most acclaimed videos, entitled 'The Television is Watching You', which received a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 15 Certificate. [15]

Notable acts on the ZTT label

1980s1990s2000s2010s2020s

† as one-time UK distributor for Tommy Boy Records

Action Series

As part of ZTT internal cataloguing of releases, they maintained two series; the Action Series, and the Incidental Series. The Action Series was issued mainly to singles and albums by a majority of the labels artists. However to confuse matters, the series also contains a booklet and a concert.

The Action series paused in 1988, [17] and was restarted by record label manager Ian Peel in 2012.

Cat.
No.
ArtistSong
AS1 Frankie Goes to Hollywood Relax
AS2 Propaganda Dr. Mabuse
AS3Frankie Goes to Hollywood Two Tribes/War
AS4Frankie Goes to Hollywood Welcome to the Pleasuredome (album)
AS5Frankie Goes to Hollywood The Power of Love
AS6Frankie Goes to HollywoodAnd Suddenly There Came A Bang! (booklet)
AS7Frankie Goes to Hollywood Welcome to the Pleasuredome (single)
AS8Propaganda Duel
AS9 Roy Orbison Wild Hearts
AS10VariousThe Value Of Entertainment (concert)
AS11 Art of Noise Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?
AS12Propaganda p:Machinery
AS13Propaganda A Secret Wish
AS14VariousThe Shape of the Universe, Original Soundtrack
AS15 Glenn Gregory & Claudia Brucken When Your Heart Runs Out of Time
AS16 Grace Jones Slave to the Rhythm (A Biography)
AS17 Andrew Poppy The Beating of Wings
AS18VariousZang Tuum Tumb Sampled
AS19 Anne Pigalle Everything Could Be So Perfect...
AS20Propaganda Wishful Thinking
AS21Propagandap:Machinery (Reactivated)
AS22Frankie Goes to Hollywood Rage Hard
AS23Frankie Goes to Hollywood Liverpool
AS24 Das Psycho Rangers Starve God There's Choice
AS25Frankie Goes to Hollywood Warriors of the Wasteland
AS26Frankie Goes to Hollywood Watching the Wildlife
AS27Andrew PoppyAlphabed (A Mystery Dance)
AS28 ACT Snobbery and Decay

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frankie Goes to Hollywood</span> British pop band

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Relax (song)</span> 1983 single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

"Relax" is the debut single by English synth-pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, released in the United Kingdom by ZTT Records in 1983.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trevor Horn</span> British record producer and musician

Trevor Charles Horn is an English record producer and musician. His influence on pop and electronic music in the 1980s was such that he has been called "the man who invented the eighties".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art of Noise</span> British avant-garde synth-pop group

Art of Noise were a British avant-garde synth-pop group formed in early 1983 by engineer/producer Gary Langan and programmer J. J. Jeczalik, along with keyboardist/arranger Anne Dudley, producer Trevor Horn, and music journalist Paul Morley. The group had international Top 20 hits with its interpretations of "Kiss", featuring Tom Jones, and the instrumental "Peter Gunn", which won a 1986 Grammy Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Morley</span> British music journalist

Paul Robert Morley is a British music journalist. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1977 to 1983, and has since written for a wide range of publications and written his own books. He was a co-founder of the record label ZTT Records and was a member of the synthpop group Art of Noise. He has also been a band manager, promoter, and television presenter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Propaganda (band)</span> German synthpop group

Propaganda is a German synth-pop band formed in Düsseldorf in 1982. They signed a recording contract with ZTT Records as early as 1983 and released their first single "Dr Mabuse" in 1984. Followed by their debut studio album, the critically acclaimed A Secret Wish, in 1985. Two of the album's singles, "Dr. Mabuse" and "Duel", were UK Top 30 hits. A second studio album, 1234 (1990), was recorded with a markedly different line-up and released by Virgin Records to less success. There have been several partial reformations of the group in the 21st century, with the original vocalists currently active as xPropaganda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Brücken</span> German singer and songwriter

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarm Studios</span> Recording studio in London, England

Sarm Studios is an independent recording studio in London. Originally founded in east London in 1973, the studio's original location was renamed Sarm East Studios in 1982 when Jill Sinclair and Trevor Horn purchased Basing Street Studios from Island Records and renamed it Sarm West Studios. Sarm Studios original locations were eventually succeeded by the Sarm Music Village complex.

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Andrew John Richards is a British pianist, composer, music producer and keyboardist.

Jill Sinclair was a British businesswoman and record company director who founded ZTT Records. She has been called one of the "most successful people in the British music business".

Ian Peel is a British music journalist. He is most well known as founder of the magazines Classic Pop and Long Live Vinyl and as a writer with special interests in Eighties pop music, ZTT Records, 12" remixes and Paul McCartney.

"The Nine Lives of Dr. Mabuse" is the debut single by German new wave/synth-pop band Propaganda. The song was produced by Trevor Horn and was released on his label, ZTT in 1984. It appears on the debut album A Secret Wish. It was a moderate chart hit in the UK and Switzerland, peaking at numbers 27 and 14, respectively. In Germany, the song reached the top 10, peaking at No. 7.

References

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  2. "Universal Music acquires iconic British indie labels Stiff". Billboard . Archived from the original on 12 May 2018. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 "The influence of ZTT Records". BBC.co.uk. United Kingdom: BBC News . Retrieved 25 December 2015.
  4. Kristina Adolfsson (June 1990). "Latte Kronlund" (in Swedish). Slitz.
  5. "Universal inks deal with ZTT Records". ZTT.com. ZTT Records. Archived from the original on 2 September 2016. Retrieved 24 December 2016.
  6. "Our history". SarmMusicVillage.com. Archived from the original on 25 August 2017. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Colin Larkin, ed. (2003). The Virgin Encyclopedia of Eighties Music (Third ed.). Virgin Books. p. 513. ISBN   1-85227-969-9.
  8. "FGTH Home Page". Frankie-say.net. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  9. Rayner, Gordon (25 March 2014). "Record company boss Jill Sinclair, wife of Trevor Horn, dies eight years after shooting accident". The Daily Telegraph . UK. Retrieved 25 December 2015.
  10. "Propaganda / The Heart Is Strange. New album available on SDE-exclusive blu-ray audio". SuperDeluxeEdition.com. 15 February 2022. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  11. "Claudia Brücken, Susanne Freytag and Steve Lipson announce xPropaganda album". Loudersound.com. 15 February 2022.
  12. "Review: xPropaganda - The Heart Is Strange - Classic Pop Magazine". Classicpopmag.com. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  13. Tony Enoch (13 February 2009). "ZTT in Design Week". ZTT.com. Retrieved 10 July 2017.
  14. "The art of ZTT Records". ArtVinyl.com. 13 October 2008. Retrieved 10 July 2017.
  15. "Album: Zang Tumb Tuum: The ZTT Box Set". Relayer35.com. 28 October 2008. Retrieved 10 July 2017.
  16. "Spill News: Xpropaganda New Album 'The Heart is Strange' Coming May 20 Via ZTT Records". The Spill Magazine. 17 February 2022.
  17. "BBC – h2g2 – ZTT Records 1983-1988". BBC.co.uk. BBC . Retrieved 19 August 2007.