ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

Claudia Brücken

The sleek lines a chrome flourishes of CLAUDIA BRUCKEN’s immaculate, shiny avant-disco-industrial-techno-pop extravaganza, “Love, And A Million Other Things”, rise like shimmering relics from the good old days when stars were special people put there for the express purpose of turning the monstrous, ugly carbuncle known as reality into a multi-dimensional architectural paradise.

The beauty of “Love, And A Million Other Things”, apart from the controlled ice maiden singing, the impeccable playing and state-of-art production, is the decidedly unfrugal attention to detail paid y Claudia and collaborator Paul Morley to every aspect of the project.

“We were always very attentive to details, from our first record with Propaganda, through to our Act stuff,” reminisces Claudia. “It reflects our love of pop music — it’s something that’s in us. We still care about every product we put out, from the single sleeves to the videos to the tee-shirts and overall packaging and promotion… Everything’s part of the whole, and we’re there every step of the way.

From the radical MOR of “Moment Of Joy” to the SAW-’n’-to-smithereens chart attack pop tack of “Love: In Another World”, to the magisterial grandeur of the current single, “Kiss Like Ether”, Claudia Brücken superlative debut LP makes the kind of noise mass audiences love.

By rights, Claudia should become impossibly rich and famous on the basis of this record.

“I think I should as well,” she laughs. “People tell me I’m obscure, but I can’t quite understand that — there’s much more obscure things than me. I don’t want to sound pompous, but I think something like ‘Ether’ stands out a mile today, it has its own glory. And people will hopefully start to see that, although there’s something rather different going on there, it can work in a commercial sense as well. If they’re prepared to make a commitment…”

Paul Lester