Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Propaganda

Things started happening quickly for the Dusseldorf-based art-synth collective Propaganda following a relocation to England in 1983. At the time of the move, the year-old group was made up of keyboardist Ralf Dörper, programmer Andreas Thin, percussionist Michael Mertens and vocalists Suzanne Freytag and Claudia Brücken.

Signed to producer Trevor Horn's Zang Tumb Tuum (ZTT) Records (the home of such similarly, wonderfully bloody-minded "pop-art" projects as Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and The Art of Noise), it seemed that Propaganda had found an ideal home as their somewhat theatrical and very-European sounding mix of icy synthpop sensibilites and stone-faced classical pretense was a perfect fit with Horn's detailed, expansive production style and ZTT's provacative, sometimes-obtuse image marketing department.

The band's debut ZTT single, 1984's "Dr. Mabuse," did a workmanlike job of priming the pump for future success: cracking the U.K. Top 30 and generating quite a bit of demand for the band's first album. However, this level of anticipation would be severely tested as Propaganda were forced to wait nearly a full year to release their follow-up single ("Duel"), and had their album kept on ice as well, the reason being that ZTT had their hands full promoting Frankie Goes To Hollywood's debut album Welcome To The Pleasuredome on a worldwide scale.

By the time Propaganda's debut album (A Secret Wish) was released in June of 1985, Thein had already departed the lineup, fed up with ZTT's timetable. From the looks of the album credits, it doesn't looks like he was missed too much as the list of guest contributors to the record is almost a news story in itself: Steve Howe (!?), David Sylvian, Ian Mosley, Glenn Gregory and Stewart Copeland are listed, along with extensive production guidance from Horn (and featuring typically bleak photography by longtime U2 confidante Anton Corbijn).

While the chart singles from the album were striking on their own right, it was the remarkably cinematic piece that opened A Secret Wish that had me from hello. A reflective masterpiece, “Dream Within A Dream" is a nine-minute classical/pop hybrid that layers the words of Edgar Allan Poe over a sprawling, hypnotic musical bed that owes more in structure to opera than anything troubling the UK Top 40 in mid-1985. With Freytag providing a Nico-esque reading of the lyric, the music around her steadily builds up from a lone trumpet to a stormy, chaotic midsection and then leaves us floating off in a calm, gorgeous reverie ... a synthpop take on Pink Floyd's "Echoes," if you will.

Capitalizing on the album's momentum, Propaganda briefly toured the UK in the fall of 1985, but after that, everything went pear-shaped in a hurry. Perhaps the most catastrophic development was the departure of Brücken for an eventual solo career. As the outspoken, moody central figure in the group's interviews and videos, Brücken's loss was possibly a mortal blow on its own, though group tensions with the record company concerning the release of a poor-selling (though highly-rated) remix album called Wishful Thinking may have been exacerbated by the singer being "married into" ZTT (specifically, art director Paul Morley).

It wasn't much later that Propaganda quietly disintegrated: the victims of an interminably-lengthy legal battle with ZTT's legal department (the usual "artistic/business differences" kind of story). Following the cessation of label hostilities in 1988, a new version of the band emerged with Mertens as the only original member. Joined by Derek Forbes and Brian McGee (both ex-Simple Minds and both originally employed for the band’s 1985 tour), and American vocalist Betsi Miller, the Mertens-led incarnation of Propaganda released 1234 through Virgin Records in 1990 to very muted response. Since that time, only a rarities compilation called Outside World has surfaced from the depths. A much awaited all-new followup release to 1234, originally slated to appear in 2000, has never materialized.