Noise And Girls Come Out To Play / A Compact Introduction To Propaganda

A Zang Tuum Tumb compact compilation containing noise-shots from the records A Secret Wish, Wishful Thinking, Duel, Do Well, P:Machinery, the Nine Lives of Dr Mabuse and Propaganda's studio sessions during the years spent taping at Sarm Studios, 1983 to 1986.... In other words: The best of the highly influential Propaganda on ZTT; classics and rarities from a band once described as 'Abba from hell', although they are much more interesting than that rather glib tag implies. They were a Düsseldorf band, and with hindsight you can see them as the halfway point between the city's most famous sons, Kraftwerk, and the common European language of techno-pop that flourished in Ralf and Florian's wake. Ralf Dörper, a bank employee, music writer and member of Düsseldorf industrial-electronic band Die Krupps, founded Propaganda with part-time DJ Andreas Thein and jeweller-goldsmith Susanne Freytag. None was a musician in the conventional sense but they made a demo version of Discipline by Throbbing Gristle which found its way to NME writer Paul Morley (then in the process of setting up ZTT with Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair),who signed them. Horn discovered he had a great facility with Propaganda's mixture of beautiful and sinister, but by 1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood were consuming all of his time. It was therefore decided that Propaganda (now expanded to include Michael Mertens and Claudia Brücken) would be produced by Horn's engineer Steve Lipson and with Lipson at the controls A Secret Wish became perhaps ZTT's best-realised album and one that has grown in stature ever since. 'I loved that album,' says Horn. 'And a lot of other people loved it too. ' Quincy Jones called Horn, wanting to license A Secret Wish for America. Horn kept him on the phone for an hour talking about Jones's work with Frank Sinatra. And if you listen to Michael Jackson around that time, Horn says, He started to sound a lot like Propaganda. A lot of industrial sounds...