An interview with Paul Morley
I interviewed the journalist Paul Morley in November 2008, to coincide with the release of The ZTT Box Set. This is a full transcript of that interview.
People spend their money on Nintendo Wii and iPhones now. Please could you explain what a record label like ZTT used to be?
“Something like Nintendo. That, in a way is a record label. Apple is a record label. But once upon a time, in the vinyl era, there used to be people passionately committed to the idea of … yeah, that’s slightly wrong too. I think I had a dream about this because I was reading about how Hollywood is worried about narrative disappearing because everyone’s just twittering and texting; everything’s breaking up. So I was thinking about it probably too much, now I’ll try and think about it in a simple manner.
"I guess record labels were like little shops, and we were shopkeepers and we used to sell our own wares, of which we were very excited about.”
Pop music is made by Girls Aloud and Scouting For Girls. Could you explain what Frankie Goes To Hollywood was?
“Well, Frankie Goes To Hollywood was a pop group like they are. Pop groups and pop music hasn’t changed. A great pop song is three or four minutes of sensation transmitted through melody, harmony and rhythm, however much it’s technologically adjusted. I don’t think there’s been much change there. That’s why, as much as there seems to be a superficial move into the future, we’re still swirling round our nostalgia really.
“I was looking at Friday night’s Children In Need and I think there were 10 to 15 pop groups on there, all of whom have teenage fans, and every single one was effectively a parody of a pastiche or an homage to the past. So in that sense a pop song is a pop song is a pop song, however it's transmitted to its audience.”
None of these pop groups feature scenes of gay orgies or presidents fighting, as Frankie’s videos did.
“Well no. Once upon a time there was an attempt to wonder what the future would be like with pop music. Now bizarrely, with pop music people are wondering what the past was like. That’s been the big change. Because back in my day (as we now must call it) we were very much anticipating the glorious future, probably making the mistake of not realising that it would very much consist of mobile phones and computer games. We wanted a space-age future but we didn’t anticipate that it would be that, and within it music would still sound the same. And look the same.
“Thinking about it, a quarter of a century ago, when we did ZTT, thinking of the twenty first century and hopefully imagining it would be shiny and silver and space-age and fabulously futuristic - and to an extent there’s an element of that with what people can do with their little gadgets - but we wouldn’t have anticipated that the clothing that people wore and the music that they played was not that dissimilar from the kind of music and clothing of the 70s and 80s.”
The gap between the 60s and the 80s felt immense. It’s the same time gap between the 80s and now, so why does it feel like part of the same era?
“Because everything’s slowing up. They’ve discovered what cool and hip is, so everybody can do it now. There was a mad race from the black & white-ness of the war; a mad race from being an adult into this new world of youth culture. That’s succeeded and now people of my age are still involved in youth culture. So the need and desire to move forward has stopped a little bit. And people can now have their pop music literally on tap.
“In my day, a record label was giving you music in a certain way, you’d have to go and get it. Now you just turn on a tap and you’ve got pop music coming into your lives. That’s the big difference.”
Could you explain why the records you released on ZTT were covered in things you’d written?
“They were like websites before websites. I often think of them as acoustic websites. I had this idea of, wouldn’t it be great if you had something on the outside of the sleeve and you touched it and zinged inside to the label, then you touched that and you zinged inside to the music. The sleeve to the 12” of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was a primitive idea of what a website would become.”
At the very least it gave you something to read on the bus home.
“Yes. Full of images, full of words, full of music. It just didn’t move as quickly as it does now, because it was on a flat surface. But that was basically the idea, just this mix of sound and ideas and images.”
The groups on ZTT very much leant themselves to such an approach. What could you write on the sleeve of a Scouting For Girls record?
“Well, I’m not gonna be sentimental or nostalgic - it’s just a fact of life, but the romance of pop music has sort of gone. Once upon a time there were just a few groups of one style, now there are many, many, many of one style. More people have found a way in.
“In the late 70s/early 80s there was still a hint that if you were in a pop group, your parents would be appalled. Now pop music is a sensible career choice. Being famous is now what once upon a time being a doctor or a lawyer was. So you have that wonderful thing where the guy from Scouting For Girls tells his boss at the Carphone Warehouse that he’s going off to be in a pop group and the manager says, ‘Can you still work on Sundays?’
“Because it’s not deemed now as being this amazingly outrageous commitment to ideas, it’s simply a good job. It’s become its own kind of conservatism. The idea that you’d put ideological messages and great zealous outpourings on a Scouting For Girls record… Odd as it may seem, it was once quite a radical idea and it was about altering the imagination rather than soothing it.”
Did you like all of the records ZTT released, or did that not matter?
“It did matter and, for a couple of years when I was really involved I did like all of the records we put out. It was only when they started to put out records that I didn’t like that I started to not enjoy it. Certainly the first Art of Noise records, the first Frankie records, Propaganda… I was really loving it.
“But I would’ve sold Frankie very early on to a major label and got rid of that anxiety of how you follow up a wonderful moment in pop. As a writer I knew it was all over, that if you go that high that’s kind of it. Certainly then it was. Now you can sort of maintain a career off one good single. Back then it was moving so fast and you had to keep coming with great records. So as soon as that was over I’d have got rid of them. Then it became for me, as a writer, having a record label became a bit of a burden. You would have to put out records you didn’t enjoy, just to maintain the cashflow.”
Was I the only person who bought the first das Psych-oh! Rangers! single?
“I hope not! I thought we were onto something. They made a really, really great record that never got released called ‘Powerstation’. Unfortunately the band didn’t like it so much because it sounded like a great American record, almost like Bon Jovi! They wanted it to be a lot more fractured.
"Their first stuff was made by Steve Lipson who now does all the Simon Fuller records, and that was a great hint at the future - what a pop record sounds like now. But one of the things about ZTT is they were doing it in the mid-80s.”
We spoke to Anne Pigalle and she claimed ZTT owed her money. Were you all crooks or was there no money to be paid?
“We weren’t crooks, as such. And I was signed to the label like an artist, so I’ve got my own stories about that. But I went in, coming from a tradition of record labels like Factory and Mute, and I thought of ZTT very much as a surreal indie label. But of course Trevor Horn and his wife Jill had come from a very conventional music biz background and for them they’d signed their own little deal with Island so were only getting a certain amount of money and passing on to the artist a certain amount of money. But then they compounded those errors by wanting to sign the publishing and made a lot of old, 1950s management errors that often happen when new labels are signing young people. That goes on today with your Cowells and your Fullers and the way they do their deals; it’s still like the 1950s.
“And in a way that was also part of my embarrassment because I wanted a label that was much freer, where the deals were all 50/50 and it was all very open, and I found myself slightly less in favour of their way of working, which was slightly unsettling for me.”
The debut gig of the Art of Noise consisted of you talking about spanners. Do you sometimes wish you’d not been quite so insufferably arch?
“There is a bit of both. To give myself a small amount of credit, I was flung into that when, the day before the gig, the actual Art of Noise pulled out. And obviously we had to have some replacement and that basically consisted of me doing situation comedy with no comedy at all! But then Factory had things like this, you attempt all sorts of things and are wildly ambitious and have good intentions and then it goes horribly wrong. The problem with that concert is that people thought Frankie would be playing, and they weren’t. And trying to do a variety show with not much money and bands pulling out… But I think if you’d got in for free and seen it you’d have been pleased! Some people quite fondly remember it. It was certainly something. It was an idea to put something on in the West End that wasn’t the usual thing. I suppose that was very much anticipating the horrible world that we have now where everything’s controlled by your Cameron Thingamabobs and your Lloyd Webbers. It was an early attempt to say, ‘Watch out for this otherwise there’ll be musicals about Queen and Rod Stewart on in the West End’. It was the best of intentions, it just didn’t quite come off.”
Do you agree that the opening car-starting noise on the Art of Noise’s ‘Close To The Edit’ is as revolutionary a pop moment as Little Richard screaming “A-wop-bop-aloo-bop”?
“Yes I do, and largely underestimated. I think one of the thrilling things about ‘Close To The Edit’ is it bloody made the Top Ten! I did a radio show the other day and before I went on they were playing Keane, and ‘Close To the Edit’ sounded like the most remarkable, contemporary, futuristic sound you’ve ever heard, compared to that. And it was 25 years old.
“At the time in ’84 it actually got into the Top Ten and it was filled with unbelievably surprising sounds, and it didn’t have a vocal and was like a surreal collage. I thought that was a remarkable, really underestimated achievement. And at the time we were fighting all sorts of problems, making videos that we weren’t in and, this will really confuse your readers, back in those days if you didn’t have the group in the video then television companies had rules that meant they couldn’t show the video. We made great videos that didn’t even get shown because the Musicians Union had some ridiculous rule about insisting the musicians who played the instruments be in the video. We couldn’t explain that, in a funny sort of way it was a machine that made the music so we’ve simply represented a machine.”
Which was the better 12” single: New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ or Frankie’s ‘Relax’?
“Ha ha. I’ll have to be disloyal and still say it was ‘Blue Monday’. That also had one of those moments that was so shocking it still sounds contemporary. You can imagine what it sound like in the early 80s. You did feel like you were hearing the future coming back at you.”
With ZTT’s records we would often buy the cassette single, 7”, 7” picture disc, 12” picture disc, and all the remixes. Were we being gullible fools, were we not supposed to buy them all?
“No, no, no. You were supposed to buy them all because they were all pieces of magic and they all created a story. One part was just one chapter. You weren’t a gullible fool. I went out of my way to make sure that everything was different, that it was a different part of the story, that the mixes were different. So that if you went out and bought seven versions of ‘Two Tribes’, it would always come in a different sleeve and would always be a different mix. For me it was remembering how I bought records in the 70s, the excitement of always coming across something that was new, and that somebody had put some thought into it overcame the idea that it was this cynical view that it was manipulating gullible audiences. I knew that was there and that was what I was fighting with it, to be constantly different and constantly worth the money and worth the wait and fill people’s lives with this absolute magic.
“It’s another way of describing a record label in that it was music but they were also these fabulous objects. I bought ‘Of Montreal’ the other day and it folds out into this little box, so I think people still realise that the value of music isn’t just that you hear it but that you hold it and feel it and have it in your lives. I get the feeling that’s not actually gonna die. I mean, it will be in the margins and it will be like this weird hobby that people have, like going into their shed. But I think there will still be that element of holding something rather than just hearing it coming through your phone.”
What’s the greatest chair you ever sat in?
“I’ve got a couple of Phillipe Starck chairs in my kitchen that I still enjoy sitting in. I once sat in the lounge of Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, in 1982 and looking at his record collection which was made up of thousands and thousands of wonderful albums and noticing that none of them had actually been opened, they were all still sealed. And he had this wonderful, battered old leather chair that I wondered if Bob Dylan had sat in. I decided that he had so therefore was sitting in a chair that Bob Dylan had sat in. I enjoyed that.”
It figures they were still sealed as I always got the feeling that Albert Grossman didn’t like music.
“Ha, ha. You’re absolutely right. I was salivating because they weren’t opened. But he bought me a hat.”
What’s the best way to deal with a shouting tramp?
“My technique, and I have had that a few times, is simply to shout back louder and more violently. That tends to diminish their outlet, they shrivel up and revert to the shy person they really are. I always do that.”
What’s your favourite item of clothing?
“I’m making a programme about this very thing, at the moment. The last thing I wore for this was when I interviewed Phil Oakey and I thought I should dress up for the occasion. So I wore this shirt that in the collar area requires about an hour’s getting ready. It’s brand new but it has the hint of the new romance about it. It ended up making me look like a demented pirate, which I quite liked but he didn’t even notice. I think he thought it was how I’d normally dress.”
It’s good to judge a shirt by how long it takes you to put on.
“Well it makes you aware of the complexity of clothing. So I’ll choose this shirt. People who tune into this TV programme can see me wear it.”
What do you wish people would stop doing?
“Stop being stupid. I particularly feel this after watching X Factor but obviously that would take me about ten thousand words to explain why.”
The comedian Adam Bloom describes it as, “A load of wankers telling a load of wankers that they’re wankers”.
“It’s almost got a zen like poignancy, that.”
Described ZTT in 5 syllables.
“It was amazing.”
Thank you, Paul Morley.
People spend their money on Nintendo Wii and iPhones now. Please could you explain what a record label like ZTT used to be?
“Something like Nintendo. That, in a way is a record label. Apple is a record label. But once upon a time, in the vinyl era, there used to be people passionately committed to the idea of … yeah, that’s slightly wrong too. I think I had a dream about this because I was reading about how Hollywood is worried about narrative disappearing because everyone’s just twittering and texting; everything’s breaking up. So I was thinking about it probably too much, now I’ll try and think about it in a simple manner.
"I guess record labels were like little shops, and we were shopkeepers and we used to sell our own wares, of which we were very excited about.”
Pop music is made by Girls Aloud and Scouting For Girls. Could you explain what Frankie Goes To Hollywood was?
“Well, Frankie Goes To Hollywood was a pop group like they are. Pop groups and pop music hasn’t changed. A great pop song is three or four minutes of sensation transmitted through melody, harmony and rhythm, however much it’s technologically adjusted. I don’t think there’s been much change there. That’s why, as much as there seems to be a superficial move into the future, we’re still swirling round our nostalgia really.
“I was looking at Friday night’s Children In Need and I think there were 10 to 15 pop groups on there, all of whom have teenage fans, and every single one was effectively a parody of a pastiche or an homage to the past. So in that sense a pop song is a pop song is a pop song, however it's transmitted to its audience.”
None of these pop groups feature scenes of gay orgies or presidents fighting, as Frankie’s videos did.
“Well no. Once upon a time there was an attempt to wonder what the future would be like with pop music. Now bizarrely, with pop music people are wondering what the past was like. That’s been the big change. Because back in my day (as we now must call it) we were very much anticipating the glorious future, probably making the mistake of not realising that it would very much consist of mobile phones and computer games. We wanted a space-age future but we didn’t anticipate that it would be that, and within it music would still sound the same. And look the same.
“Thinking about it, a quarter of a century ago, when we did ZTT, thinking of the twenty first century and hopefully imagining it would be shiny and silver and space-age and fabulously futuristic - and to an extent there’s an element of that with what people can do with their little gadgets - but we wouldn’t have anticipated that the clothing that people wore and the music that they played was not that dissimilar from the kind of music and clothing of the 70s and 80s.”
The gap between the 60s and the 80s felt immense. It’s the same time gap between the 80s and now, so why does it feel like part of the same era?
“Because everything’s slowing up. They’ve discovered what cool and hip is, so everybody can do it now. There was a mad race from the black & white-ness of the war; a mad race from being an adult into this new world of youth culture. That’s succeeded and now people of my age are still involved in youth culture. So the need and desire to move forward has stopped a little bit. And people can now have their pop music literally on tap.
“In my day, a record label was giving you music in a certain way, you’d have to go and get it. Now you just turn on a tap and you’ve got pop music coming into your lives. That’s the big difference.”
Could you explain why the records you released on ZTT were covered in things you’d written?
“They were like websites before websites. I often think of them as acoustic websites. I had this idea of, wouldn’t it be great if you had something on the outside of the sleeve and you touched it and zinged inside to the label, then you touched that and you zinged inside to the music. The sleeve to the 12” of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was a primitive idea of what a website would become.”
At the very least it gave you something to read on the bus home.
“Yes. Full of images, full of words, full of music. It just didn’t move as quickly as it does now, because it was on a flat surface. But that was basically the idea, just this mix of sound and ideas and images.”
The groups on ZTT very much leant themselves to such an approach. What could you write on the sleeve of a Scouting For Girls record?
“Well, I’m not gonna be sentimental or nostalgic - it’s just a fact of life, but the romance of pop music has sort of gone. Once upon a time there were just a few groups of one style, now there are many, many, many of one style. More people have found a way in.
“In the late 70s/early 80s there was still a hint that if you were in a pop group, your parents would be appalled. Now pop music is a sensible career choice. Being famous is now what once upon a time being a doctor or a lawyer was. So you have that wonderful thing where the guy from Scouting For Girls tells his boss at the Carphone Warehouse that he’s going off to be in a pop group and the manager says, ‘Can you still work on Sundays?’
“Because it’s not deemed now as being this amazingly outrageous commitment to ideas, it’s simply a good job. It’s become its own kind of conservatism. The idea that you’d put ideological messages and great zealous outpourings on a Scouting For Girls record… Odd as it may seem, it was once quite a radical idea and it was about altering the imagination rather than soothing it.”
Did you like all of the records ZTT released, or did that not matter?
“It did matter and, for a couple of years when I was really involved I did like all of the records we put out. It was only when they started to put out records that I didn’t like that I started to not enjoy it. Certainly the first Art of Noise records, the first Frankie records, Propaganda… I was really loving it.
“But I would’ve sold Frankie very early on to a major label and got rid of that anxiety of how you follow up a wonderful moment in pop. As a writer I knew it was all over, that if you go that high that’s kind of it. Certainly then it was. Now you can sort of maintain a career off one good single. Back then it was moving so fast and you had to keep coming with great records. So as soon as that was over I’d have got rid of them. Then it became for me, as a writer, having a record label became a bit of a burden. You would have to put out records you didn’t enjoy, just to maintain the cashflow.”
Was I the only person who bought the first das Psych-oh! Rangers! single?
“I hope not! I thought we were onto something. They made a really, really great record that never got released called ‘Powerstation’. Unfortunately the band didn’t like it so much because it sounded like a great American record, almost like Bon Jovi! They wanted it to be a lot more fractured.
"Their first stuff was made by Steve Lipson who now does all the Simon Fuller records, and that was a great hint at the future - what a pop record sounds like now. But one of the things about ZTT is they were doing it in the mid-80s.”
We spoke to Anne Pigalle and she claimed ZTT owed her money. Were you all crooks or was there no money to be paid?
“We weren’t crooks, as such. And I was signed to the label like an artist, so I’ve got my own stories about that. But I went in, coming from a tradition of record labels like Factory and Mute, and I thought of ZTT very much as a surreal indie label. But of course Trevor Horn and his wife Jill had come from a very conventional music biz background and for them they’d signed their own little deal with Island so were only getting a certain amount of money and passing on to the artist a certain amount of money. But then they compounded those errors by wanting to sign the publishing and made a lot of old, 1950s management errors that often happen when new labels are signing young people. That goes on today with your Cowells and your Fullers and the way they do their deals; it’s still like the 1950s.
“And in a way that was also part of my embarrassment because I wanted a label that was much freer, where the deals were all 50/50 and it was all very open, and I found myself slightly less in favour of their way of working, which was slightly unsettling for me.”
The debut gig of the Art of Noise consisted of you talking about spanners. Do you sometimes wish you’d not been quite so insufferably arch?
“There is a bit of both. To give myself a small amount of credit, I was flung into that when, the day before the gig, the actual Art of Noise pulled out. And obviously we had to have some replacement and that basically consisted of me doing situation comedy with no comedy at all! But then Factory had things like this, you attempt all sorts of things and are wildly ambitious and have good intentions and then it goes horribly wrong. The problem with that concert is that people thought Frankie would be playing, and they weren’t. And trying to do a variety show with not much money and bands pulling out… But I think if you’d got in for free and seen it you’d have been pleased! Some people quite fondly remember it. It was certainly something. It was an idea to put something on in the West End that wasn’t the usual thing. I suppose that was very much anticipating the horrible world that we have now where everything’s controlled by your Cameron Thingamabobs and your Lloyd Webbers. It was an early attempt to say, ‘Watch out for this otherwise there’ll be musicals about Queen and Rod Stewart on in the West End’. It was the best of intentions, it just didn’t quite come off.”
Do you agree that the opening car-starting noise on the Art of Noise’s ‘Close To The Edit’ is as revolutionary a pop moment as Little Richard screaming “A-wop-bop-aloo-bop”?
“Yes I do, and largely underestimated. I think one of the thrilling things about ‘Close To The Edit’ is it bloody made the Top Ten! I did a radio show the other day and before I went on they were playing Keane, and ‘Close To the Edit’ sounded like the most remarkable, contemporary, futuristic sound you’ve ever heard, compared to that. And it was 25 years old.
“At the time in ’84 it actually got into the Top Ten and it was filled with unbelievably surprising sounds, and it didn’t have a vocal and was like a surreal collage. I thought that was a remarkable, really underestimated achievement. And at the time we were fighting all sorts of problems, making videos that we weren’t in and, this will really confuse your readers, back in those days if you didn’t have the group in the video then television companies had rules that meant they couldn’t show the video. We made great videos that didn’t even get shown because the Musicians Union had some ridiculous rule about insisting the musicians who played the instruments be in the video. We couldn’t explain that, in a funny sort of way it was a machine that made the music so we’ve simply represented a machine.”
Which was the better 12” single: New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ or Frankie’s ‘Relax’?
“Ha ha. I’ll have to be disloyal and still say it was ‘Blue Monday’. That also had one of those moments that was so shocking it still sounds contemporary. You can imagine what it sound like in the early 80s. You did feel like you were hearing the future coming back at you.”
With ZTT’s records we would often buy the cassette single, 7”, 7” picture disc, 12” picture disc, and all the remixes. Were we being gullible fools, were we not supposed to buy them all?
“No, no, no. You were supposed to buy them all because they were all pieces of magic and they all created a story. One part was just one chapter. You weren’t a gullible fool. I went out of my way to make sure that everything was different, that it was a different part of the story, that the mixes were different. So that if you went out and bought seven versions of ‘Two Tribes’, it would always come in a different sleeve and would always be a different mix. For me it was remembering how I bought records in the 70s, the excitement of always coming across something that was new, and that somebody had put some thought into it overcame the idea that it was this cynical view that it was manipulating gullible audiences. I knew that was there and that was what I was fighting with it, to be constantly different and constantly worth the money and worth the wait and fill people’s lives with this absolute magic.
“It’s another way of describing a record label in that it was music but they were also these fabulous objects. I bought ‘Of Montreal’ the other day and it folds out into this little box, so I think people still realise that the value of music isn’t just that you hear it but that you hold it and feel it and have it in your lives. I get the feeling that’s not actually gonna die. I mean, it will be in the margins and it will be like this weird hobby that people have, like going into their shed. But I think there will still be that element of holding something rather than just hearing it coming through your phone.”
What’s the greatest chair you ever sat in?
“I’ve got a couple of Phillipe Starck chairs in my kitchen that I still enjoy sitting in. I once sat in the lounge of Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, in 1982 and looking at his record collection which was made up of thousands and thousands of wonderful albums and noticing that none of them had actually been opened, they were all still sealed. And he had this wonderful, battered old leather chair that I wondered if Bob Dylan had sat in. I decided that he had so therefore was sitting in a chair that Bob Dylan had sat in. I enjoyed that.”
It figures they were still sealed as I always got the feeling that Albert Grossman didn’t like music.
“Ha, ha. You’re absolutely right. I was salivating because they weren’t opened. But he bought me a hat.”
What’s the best way to deal with a shouting tramp?
“My technique, and I have had that a few times, is simply to shout back louder and more violently. That tends to diminish their outlet, they shrivel up and revert to the shy person they really are. I always do that.”
What’s your favourite item of clothing?
“I’m making a programme about this very thing, at the moment. The last thing I wore for this was when I interviewed Phil Oakey and I thought I should dress up for the occasion. So I wore this shirt that in the collar area requires about an hour’s getting ready. It’s brand new but it has the hint of the new romance about it. It ended up making me look like a demented pirate, which I quite liked but he didn’t even notice. I think he thought it was how I’d normally dress.”
It’s good to judge a shirt by how long it takes you to put on.
“Well it makes you aware of the complexity of clothing. So I’ll choose this shirt. People who tune into this TV programme can see me wear it.”
What do you wish people would stop doing?
“Stop being stupid. I particularly feel this after watching X Factor but obviously that would take me about ten thousand words to explain why.”
The comedian Adam Bloom describes it as, “A load of wankers telling a load of wankers that they’re wankers”.
“It’s almost got a zen like poignancy, that.”
Described ZTT in 5 syllables.
“It was amazing.”
Thank you, Paul Morley.