ZTT is an
initialism
of
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
's sound poem
Zang Tumb Tumb
, which described "zang tumb tumb" as the sound of a
machine gun
.
[3]
It is believed that they likely got the idea for the name via
John McGeoch
, who produced the Swedish pop-funk band
Zzzang Tumb
's eponymous 1983 album around the same time as the label was founded.
[4]
The majority of the creative team
[
clarification needed
]
at ZTT had first assembled when Horn produced the album
The Lexicon of Love
for the British
pop
band
ABC
. A precursor to ZTT was the short-lived Perfect Recordings label, spun off from the newly founded Perfect Songs publishing subsidiary of
Trevor Horn
and
Jill Sinclair
's company. Perfect Recordings only released
the Buggles
'
Adventures in Modern Recording
, along with the singles derived from it.
In 1983, Horn, Sinclair and Morley founded ZTT Records.
[1]
[5]
Sinclair was ZTT's managing director, while
Paul Morley
concentrated on marketing.
[3]
In the same year, Sinclair and Horn acquired
Basing Street Studios
from
Island Records
in exchange for distributing the ZTT label.
[6]
ZTT's first signing was
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
(FGTH),
[1]
whose hits "
Relax
" and "
Two Tribes
" were among the best-selling singles of the decade.
[7]
It was the label's second single,
Relax
, that became the label's first number one in January 1984.
[7]
Relax stayed in the
UK Singles Chart
for a full year, and ZTT was well and truly established. During the 1980s,
Grace Jones
and
Art of Noise
[1]
were other ZTT acts to chart.
[7]
ZTT Records also helped define the structure and formats of the UK pop music scene; as part of their marketing efforts to prolong the life of a single release, ZTT issued multiple 12" remixes which charted at positions in their own right as a separate 12" single.
[1]
ZTT Records also licensed or produced t-shirts with graphic messages related to its artists' singles (eg. Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed),
[8]
which themselves became 1980s icons.
[1]
ZTT were unafraid to invert the business of pop and turn it into entertainment.
[1]
In 1984, the Horn-Sinclair family businesses were reorganised as SPZ Group, which then consisted of
Sarm West Studios
,
Perfect Songs
, and ZTT Records.
[9]
From the beginning, the majority of ZTT releases were published by Perfect Songs, and recorded at
Sarm West Studios
. The latter part of the decade was eclipsed by a bitter legal battle between ZTT and
Holly Johnson
, who fought his way out of the strict, long recording agreement.
[7]
Similarly, other ZTT artists, such as
Art of Noise
and
Propaganda
, were disenchanted and left the label. Propaganda's case was settled out of court; Johnson won his outright.
[7]
By the late 1980s, ZTT began to focus on the emerging
dance music
scene.
Manchester
trance group
808 State
[1]
would reach the top?10 with
Pacific State
, and three other singles and one album during the early 1990s.
[7]
Seal
[1]
was the next major ZTT act to emerge in the 1990s, and the label also achieved hits with MC Tunes and Shades of Rhythm.
[3]
ZTT Records have produced forty-five
Top 40 hits in the United Kingdom
, fifteen of which were Top 10
hits
.
[1]
In May 2022, UMG released the new album by Propaganda vocalists Claudia Brucken and Susanne Freytag on the reactivated ZTT Label. Credited to xPropaganda, the album was recorded with producer Stephen Lipson, titled
The Heart Is Strange
and received a generally positive reception.
[10]
[11]
[12]
Music videos and cover art
edit
ZTT Records pioneered
music video
and
cover art
as forms of high art in their own right.
Paul Morley
commissioned videos from then-unknown directors, who would go on to become acclaimed in their field, such as
Anton Corbijn
,
Godley & Creme
,
Zbigniew Rybczy?ski
and
Andy Morahan
.
Morley also commissioned early ZTT sleeve design and photography to pioneers of the medium such as
Malcolm Garrett
,
Anton Corbijn
,
Mark Farrow
and
Jean-Paul Goude
.
The label's work in the visual field was profiled by Tony Enoch in Design Week, who positioned ZTT as "from a time when a record label meant something ? a happening, a sense of belonging. Labels defined people's youth. Think Apple, Virgin, Beggar's Banquet, ZTT, and Stiff: small, independent British labels appearing to be able to do anything they wanted, reinventing the rules."
[13]
In
2008
, journalist
Ian Peel
curated a first exhibition of ZTT sleeve art for galleries in
London
and
Tokyo
,
[14]
and in
2013
, he curated the visual archives of ZTT and
Sarm West Studios
before the studios were demolished. In
2009
, Peel compiled a
DVD
of the labels' most acclaimed videos, entitled 'The Television is Watching You', which received a
British Board of Film Classification
(BBFC) 15 Certificate.
[15]
Notable acts on the ZTT label
edit
As part of ZTT internal cataloguing of releases, they maintained two series; the Action Series, and the Incidental Series. The Action Series was issued mainly to singles and albums by a majority of the labels artists. However to confuse matters, the series also contains a booklet and a concert.
The Action series paused in 1988,
[17]
and was restarted by
record label
manager
Ian Peel
in
2012
.