ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

Based in Germany, they moved freely around Europe and were rarely in the same place at the same time. The interview always seemed within reach, yet somehow failed to materialise. Then the trail went cold. The British management were no longer handling the band; ZTT were at war with them. A Secret Wish had become Propaganda’s epitaph as well as their finest hour.

Five years on, the face of pop music has changed out of all recognition. The heavy electronic beat that Propaganda had experimented with and the technology they explored have become common currency. The line between musicians and producers (never a very clear one in electronic music) has all but disappeared. Propaganda appear to have pioneered much that has become accepted since their disappearance. Yet few, if any, of the current crop of single buyers would recognise the name of the band that helped pioneer the current phase of pop. But suddenly and unexpectedly the name is current again.

’Heaven Give Me Words’ announces the return of Propaganda — not just to the ‘90s music scene but also to the charts. True to previous form it is a deviation from what might have been expected. But what should you expect of a band who specialise in the unexpected? Still very much in evidence are the sounds and sequences that characterised A Secret Wish — particularly on the B-side of ‘Heaven’ in a track called ‘Count Zero’ (stolen from William Gibson?), where the rhythm and sounds are strongly reminiscent of Peter Gabriel. Following ‘Heaven Give Me Words’ is and album entitled 1 2 3 4. Here too you’ll find evidence of Propaganda’s dark past; ‘Your Wildlife’, for example, plays up the intimidating use of rhythm — Mertens is a classically-trained percussionist.

Only one of the current lineup remains from that of ‘85, three new musicians bringing the outfit up to strength. Gone are ZTT — replaced by a new deal with Virgin — and gone is the Horn/Lipson production partnership — replaced by that of Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes (famed for their work with Tears For Fears).

The new names are drummer Brian McGee, bassist Derek Forbes (both ex-Simple Minds), and American singer Betsi Miller. The one original member is Michael Mertens. He is eager to talk, at last, to MT, an in his quiet German accent he begins to describe the sequence of events that has led up to 1990. The story begins in ‘85 when Forbes left Simple Minds.

“We did 12 showcases as part of a ZTT presentation, and we needed a drummer and a bass player. Derek left Simple Minds and our manager asked him if he was interested in joining us a guest musician. Later on, for a tour, we were looking for a drummer and Derek suggested Brian McGee because he’d worked with Brian previously in Simple Minds. Derek has been around Propaganda for around five years now — not as a face to be recognised as a member of the lineup, but he even played on ‘P-Machinery’.”

Of the Simple Minds connection Merten says, “The issue was never that Derek and Brian had been together in Simple Minds, the issue was that Derek ‘s a good bass player and Brian’s a good drummer”.

Betsi Miller’s family left Idaho for Germany when she was 12. Had they remained in America a photographer friend of Suzanne Freytag’s would not have seen her gigging at a nightclub and passed her phone number on to the band.

“I was working at this place in Munich when I got a phone call from Suzanne Freytag”, she recalls. “Suzanne asked me if I wanted to come and audition. They sent me a tape of ‘Duel’, ‘The Murder of Love’ and ‘P-Machinery’ off the first LP. It was just a playback without vocals so they obviously wanted me to sing over it, and after I listened to Claudia’s voice, I was thinking ‘I don’t know if this is right — not because I can’t do it, but because I feel limited’. Continue »

Some of the vocal melodies are so simple and I was used to singing a little more exotically, a little more free. So I thought I could either go in there and sing it as close to the album as possible, or I can go in there and show them what I’m capable of — and that’s what I did.”

“It was sheer luck that we met up”, comments Mertens. “Suzanne met her first and came back to the band and said ‘well, I hope she can sing’ because she felt she would be right.”

“Right” she was, and she moved from Munich to Düsseldorf “in about 48 hours”.

“When Claudia left the band — early ‘86 — we were injuncted by ZTT for 14 months”, says Mertens. “Obviously we wanted to look for another singer. I went back to Germany and did work for a television company, and during that period we were thinking we wanted a German singer — not so much for ideological reasons, but because we looked at ourselves as a German band. We tried out a lot of good singers, but the problem we encountered was personality. Sometimes you know as soon as somebody walks through the door that it’s not going to be right — she can sing as beautifully as she likes. It’s a very difficult thing. It was unpleasant experience but there was no way around it. We had a lot of personality problems with our old singer and we wanted to make sure things were right this time.”

The first problem facing the new Propaganda is A Secret Wish. Now widely regarded as a milestone, producing a worthy follow-up would not be and easy task.

“People like to look at us as a kind of icon: Propaganda 1984/85", agrees Mertens. “But I don’t want to be forced to repeat what we’ve already done, that would be boring. I’d rather leave it like it is and do what we’re doing now.

“Obviously people have now heard the first single and that isn’t from the dangerous side. We’ve chosen that track because we think it’s a good song. For us there’s no obligation to fulfil anybody’s expectation of what Propaganda is. When ‘Dr Mabuse’ came out it didn’t fit with anything. The next record that came out was ‘Duel’ and that was against everybody’s expectations, because they thought it was going to be crash… bang — more of the same thing. ‘Duel’ was a very lightweight pop song. We like having the freedom to do that. Within the context of this album ‘Heaven Give Me Words’ is a good song to start off with.”

That the song is well written, well executed and is being well received is in no doubt, But does this mean divorcing themselves from the achievements of the earlier lineup?

“I don’t disregard the old Propaganda at all”, counters Mertens. “Obviously if you look at the band in 1990 it’s a completely different lineup. I’m the last remaining member from the old days. But all those changes took place very gradually over four-and-a-half years. You could ask why do we still call it Propaganda? But Ralf Dörper and Suzanne Freytag are still around us even if they’re not part of the lineup.

“When we did the first album it was a hobby for us — Ralf had his job in the bank, I had my job in the orchestra — but in 1987 we decided that it had to be for real and whoever wanted to come along for the ride was in. That’s where Ralf and Suzanne decided to stick to their day jobs.”

“We could have made this record so much like the last one”, comments Miller. “We go offered a direct-to-disk system for practically nothing. We could have made it so electronically and technically over the top. But why? Why do that? Propaganda is no longer this conceptual thing, it’s a real band now. And there still is a very dark side to Propaganda, you can hear that on the LP.

The new lineup means new working methods. Continue »

When all the members of the band were living in Düsseldorf, things were easier for them, now they’re spread between Germany and Scotland — although Mertens and Miller are currently living in London. Consequently the early stages of writing involved passing cassettes from one musician to another.

“Michael would write something in his living room” explains Miller. “Then he’d call Derek in Scotland and he’d go to Düsseldorf and they’d sit down and work out the structure and put that down on tape. On the tape there’d be just the basic rhythm track: drum machine, keyboards and some bass. I’d pick up the tape, go home with it and work out the vocal melodies on my own. Then I’d go over and sing it to them and, with Derek’s help, we’d work out the vocal melody. I think that this will all change in the future. What we all need is to go out and do a live tour, because we’ve never done anything live before. After you’ve really jammed out together I think there’s a kind of confidence you gain that changes the way you work. I’m looking forward to that.”

From the demos the songs were taken into Ian Stanley’s private studio and pre-production work commenced.

“Ian has a small studio at his place in Bath”, say Mertens. “He has a lot of gear there, a big desk, the Fairlight, a DX1 — so before we went into the studio we were doing as much as we could outside. What we did was put a lot of stuff in Ian’s Series III Fairlight. Then we sync’d it all up via SMPTE.

“Once we decided we were ready, we went into the studio and started to lay down the backing tracks, make samples of drum and sections of drums — we let Brian play along and then we took sections of his playing and sync’d them up to the track, That was much easier than it was in ‘84/’85, although we did it on ‘Dream Within A Dream’ — that’s a drum loop on there. It was played by Ian Moseley, a lovely bit of drumming. At that point I realised how good it is to have the perfection of all the sequences and let the human element translate it into something much, much better. I really think that’s a great way of making music.”

Miller picks up the story: “We spent about a year-and-a-half actual recording time in the studio. We’d go in and record and then we’d go and do some more writing because we’d find out what we had wasn’t sufficient or wasn’t great enough to put on tape.”

If the writing was disjointed — and some of the ideas and sequences date back to shortly after A Secret Wish the recording was equally disjointed.

“We started at The Wool Hall out in Bath”, Miller recounts. “We were there for three months and then we had a break for two or three months, then we came back to London and worked at Abbey Road. Then we spent a bit of time at Marcus before going back to The Wool Hall to finish it. We mixed it at Olympic and Metropolis.”

It’s an impressive itinerary, but what of their gear? Have 1985’s PPGs been replaced by their 1990 counterparts? Exactly what did Mertens use in the recording of 1 2 3 4?

“What weren’t we using?” comes the reply. “My setup consists of the PPG system, a Super Jupiter, Oberheim Xpander — Ian has got a Matrix 12 which in connection was fantastic. I love all the analogue stuff very much. Later on in the recording I got a MIDIMoog. It was expensive but I really wanted it — especially for the live work we plan to do.

“I’ve got a D550 and the Yamaha TX rack. Sampling-wise most of the stuff was either Fairlight Series III or Chris’ Synclavier. Some samples we did on the Lexicon 480, which for bass drums is fantastic. I think it’s the best quality machine around except for the Synclavier. That’s not the point though, it was never our aim to use the newest thing. If that is your premise you’ve missed the point. You can have lots of new sounds that are all crap, you know. Continue »

If you’re going to use a synthesiser you have to work hard and spend a lot of time. If you are pleased too quickly, it won’t last. It’s like a fashion accessory. Two years ago everyone was using the D50, you could here it everywhere.

“Technology is still la big part of Propaganda. If you listen to the album there are tracks which are heavily electronic…”

“… but there’s a human element in it too”, concludes Miller.

And what of the past — what was behind the sounds that amazed and confused in the mid-‘80s?

“In 1984, when we did ‘Dr Mabuse’, we had a Fairlight Series II” reveals Mertens. “But everything was all pre-SMPTE then. We had a code on tap and every time we had to start the tape from the beginning and hope that it would catch up. There were always these moments: everything has been programmed, everybody’s brain was gone, we’d be hoping that this was the take, and the tape wouldn’t pick up. Those were the days. Then MIDI came along and made life much more easy for us.

“Next I bought a PPG 2.3 system with a Waveterm which I still use. It’s still eight-bit sampling, I never upgraded it to the Waveterm B because I really like the sound of that machine. I didn’t buy another sampler for quite some time. It’s very good for some things but these days if you have an S1000 you can put anything in there — you can put down almost a whole track with it and it doesn’t lack dynamics. But this isn’t the case with the PPG at all. If you do that it sounds terrible.

“Then I got into sequencers and started using an Atari and C-Lab Notator software — although, most of the time I don’t use the note display. The way we recorded was that there was a lot of stuff in Notator, there were still a few sequences in the old PPG, which we used an SRC synchroniser for. When we first went into the studio Ian Stanley was suggesting that we should both learn a new sequencer. He was suggesting that we use Opcode Vision on the Macintosh. But I said ‘no, Notator’s so fast and so reliable’. And we had this argument — he was advocating the Macintosh and, as far as I was concerned, the Atari was good enough. I wouldn’t take it on stage, but in the studio environment it’s fine.”

While Notator won the day in the studio, Mertens is less confident about the Atari’s reliability for the gigs the band have in the pipeline.

“The Atari would be my favourite system to use, but I’m not sure how it would behave on a tour. A lot of people have recommended the Macintosh to me but the Yamaha C1 might be interesting. Vision looks good though, so I might prefer the Macintosh. There aren’t really any hardware sequencers around any more are there — apart from the MC500? I used the MC500 a lot before I had the C-Lab software, but I prefer the C-Lab now.

The fascination with live performance began back in 1985 when Propaganda joined forces with Forbes and McGee for the ZTT showcases.

“That was one of the things that helped us realise that a step towards being a live group was actually what we wanted”, says Mertens. “When Brian hits a drum on stage he hits it very hard, and it’s a very earthy feeling. I think that’s a good connection with all the electronic stuff going on around him.

“The problem we had in 1985 was that we would have wanted to put the soft of production we had in the studio onto the stage. And that would have been vastly expensive. There was no way we could have afforded to tour with a Synclavier, so there was no other way to recreate the production we’d done that to use tapes. And that’s something we don’t want to do again. I’m quite nervous about it actually.”

The timing of the tour is still as uncertain as the equipment that will make it possible. Continue »