The roots of Art Of Noise lie in Malcolm McLaren's 1982
single Buffalo Gals, and the Duck Rock album that followed
it. McLaren foresaw the rise of hip-hop and recruited
producer Trevor Horn to record his musical vision. At this
point Horn was working with the aid of a close group of
collaborators: Anne Dudley - pianist and orchestral
arranger, JJ Jeczalik who was a dab hand with the emerging
Fairlight technology, and engineer Gary Langan. The team
produced for McLaren a high-tech pastiche of the most
fashionable black music styles of the time. The experiments
of Dudley, Jeczalik and Langan on this project led to the
formation of Art Of Noise.
Art Of Noise were unleashed on an unsuspecting public in
1983, with the debut EP Into Battle With Art Of Noise. The
groups' identities would have remained a complete mystery
if the record hadn't credited Dudley, Horn, Jeczalik,
Langan and Morley as their composers. Paul Morley
contributed ideas and delivered the bands non-image to the
press and media: their early appearances on TV were
dominated by anonymous figures in masks, their videos
featured pianos being bisected with chainsaws, their
publicity photos were lovingly shot pictures of spanners
('because a spanner is intrinsically more interesting than
the lead singer of Tears For Fears', Morley later
explained).
In 1984, the Close (To The Edit) single crashed into the UK
top forty. 1985s Moments In Love failed to make the UK top
fifty (by one place) but anticipated an entire genre
– chillout. Their ZTT material was ransacked for
years on end, culminating in the use of a sample from Close
(To The Edit) as a key element of the Prodigy's
Firestarter. The air of mystery surrounding the band meant
that they could, in a famous mixup, receive an American
magazine's award for best black act of the year - not bad
going for five middle-aged, middle-class, white English
people...
1985 saw Dudley, Langan and Jeczalik depart for China
Records, taking the name with them. It was the beginning of
the Art Of Noise as a band. Or, as Morley put it in the
delightfully snotty sleevenotes to Daft, a compilation of
their ZTT recordings: "(they) have now decided that they
are competent enough to pursue a conventional rock career,
and that this is what they prefer - the settled patterns of
a rock schedule, its unsubtle, manufactured sincerity."
The 'new' Art Of Noise had many pop hits – mostly as
collaborators, with the likes of Duane Eddy (Peter Gunn,
1986); fictional TV presenter Max Headroom (Paranoimia,
also 1986); Tom Jones (a cover of Prince’s Kiss,
1988) and Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens (Yebo, 1989).
Disbanding in 1990, the trio went their separate ways, with
Dudley in particular achieving incredible success. A Brit
award for her work on the Phil Collins vehicle, Buster was
followed by an Academy Award for her score for The Full
Monty. Jeczalik made the studio his home, mixing and
remixing artists as diverse as Stephen Duffy and
Shakin’ Stevens, and Langan (who had left the group
after In Visible Silence) produced the likes of ABC,
Spandau Ballet and Ronan Keating.
In 1999 Horn, Dudley and Morley reformed Art Of Noise with
the addition of Lol Crème. The result of this collaboration
was The Seduction Of Claude Debussy, an album created
around the work of the titular French modernist classical
composer, built on hip-hop beats and drum and bass, with
vocal contributions from actor John Hurt and rap pioneer
Rakim. It owed nothing to anything the Art Of Noise had
ever done before, except some of Anne Dudley's orchestral
experiments on the later albums. 'We don't sound like the
other Art of Noise,' Morley said, 'but we're influenced by
them.'
