While ZTT Records was busy with their assault on the singles charts with FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, PROPAGANDA and THE ART OF NOISE, the label held a secret weapon in post-minimalist composer Andrew Poppy.
Poppy’s musical trajectories shifted after discovering the radical soundscapes of Bartók, Debussy, Cage, Feldman, Riley, Glass, Reich, and musique concrète. Following studies at Kingsway’s College and Goldsmiths, alongside a formative summer school session under John Cage, Poppy honed his avant-garde instincts within THE LOST JOCKEY ensemble before securing a deal with ZTT.
Unleashed in 1985, his debut solo album ‘The Beating Of Wings’ has hit its 4 decade milestone proving that contemporary classical and electronic pop aesthetics remain surprisingly compatible bedfellows. Where later follow-up ‘Alphabed’ brought early Akai samplers and vocal turns from Annette Peacock into the mix and prior to lending orchestrations to ERASURE and NITZER EBB, ‘The Beating Of Wings’ positioned Andrew Poppy as ZTT’s ultimate high-concept iconoclast.
Paul Morley himself later observed that “ZTT needed Poppy as much as it needed Frankie”, crafting a bridge for fans of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and KRAFTWERK. As Steven Wilson noted on the podcast ‘The Album Years’, Poppy was “ahead of his time… fitting right in with the Max Richters and Nils Frahms of today.”
Composed, produced and performed alongside bespoke ensembles, the album’s sonic architecture welds acoustic orchestration to electric piano, bass, electric guitar, drum machines and the Fairlight CMI to build an infectious, hypnotic pulse. This post-minimalist avant-pop driven by hypnotic rhythms, synth textures, and grand classical arrangements has been freshly remastered by Stephan Mathieu while the CD is now housed in a deluxe two-panel gatefold sleeve featuring a 24-page booklet with brand-new liner notes written by Andrew Poppy.
Who better to talk to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the 40th anniversary edition of ‘The Beating Of Wings’ than the man himself, Andrew Poppy…
Photo by AJ Barratt
What was your own musical training journey?
I think what I do comes out of both a classical world and pop, rock and dance music. Jazz is in there somewhere too. My relationship with the conservatoire-based things is quite soft and chaotic but also fundamental. The classical tradition is obsessed with training and schooling. I’m not very good with that, even when I try. So I’m always both engaging and disengaging. There’s another way of doing things, trial and error, doing something, seeing what happens, listening and copying.
I did have piano lessons on and off from the time I was about 9 or 10; 6 months here, 6 months there. I was interested in the piano and music but didn’t really understand what the lessons were about. You do scales and very simple pieces of classical music like Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ piece. I stumbled through that early on. But looking back I couldn’t make sense of it. My early piano teachers never played it for me. I might have understood it intuitively if they had. My musical world was singing simple hymns in church and listening to pop music on the radio.
Perhaps I was too young. I must have learned some basic principles of notation and some dexterity at the keyboard. But it didn’t really connect with me until I started messing around trying to make my own things. A school friend said I could join his band if I bought a bass guitar. So I did. This is 1968-9. That experience sent me back to the piano and I found a piano teacher who had been a big band leader. He smoked a cigar through the lessons and encouraged me to play Bartok. Which is very scrunchy and rhythmic music, which I loved.
At secondary modern, schools education ends at 16. I was cued up to work in a factory. Apprenticed to a soldering iron. So it was a couple of years before I discovered the various FE college programmes where there were opportunities to explore music and literature and theatre. A whole world I didn’t know existed. But these programmes are only one part of it. The people you meet and the things that happen in the margins are often the real drivers of a creative education.
The real break though was a couple of teachers at Kingsway College in London where I did a music course. Dika Rančigaj, a Slovenian pianist was my piano teacher for two years. My first hair-raising experience was in the first week. She told me I was going to turn pages for her at her lunch time concert that day. She was playing a two-piano piece by Debussy: ‘En blanc et Noir’. So I’m sitting very close, watching her hands, trying to follow the score over her shoulder, hoping I’d catch her nod. My head’s almost inside the grand piano with a lid up. Wow.
In the lessons she was very hot on technical stuff but it wasn’t dry. It was physical, a lot about touch, the position of the hand and fingers and weight of the arm. It was no longer about just playing the notes.
Kingsway was also where I met composer / pianist Dave Smith who introduced me to an enormous amount of experimental contemporary music much of it by young living composers like Philip Glass. He was writing his own piano music and performing it, sometimes in art galleries. So it was about absorbing the things that are happening. The first conversation I had with him was about Stockhausen. I said I was fan and he gave me a book. Dave and Dika. I met them in the same week. It changed my life.
The things that you teach yourself are more connected to your physical and social world. So I doodled around on the piano with a direct physical connection to the sound of the instrument. Without knowing or really thinking or understanding what I’m doing. It’s the way I learned to play guitar and bass. I just picked them up and started to explore. Friends tell you how to make chords or how to play a bass line and you listen to records and pick it up. Much later a few classical guitar lessons were useful. When I played bass in a school band, I always played with a pick. Now I usually play with fingers. Cut out the plastic middle man.
It’s the same in electronic music. I know now that Stockhausen’s music comes out of an intellectual procedure known as serialism. But if you hear ‘Kurzwellen’, his piece which uses 4 radio receivers, it’s a collage, however he arrived at the building of the moves. As a teenager I’m hearing the changes of texture and the shear audacity of it. “Oh yeah, I can do that”. And I did. Kind of. Made a tape piece when I was 15 using a domestic Grundig ¼ inch reel-to-reel machine with a sound-on-sound facility.
Education is also about paths you choose as well as those that are chosen for you. Once I’d left school I was choosing to try and gain access to something. I had a sense that there was more over the horizon than what was being mapped for me. If you can choose then some kind of ambition is speaking in that choice. If you don’t choose, someone else’s ambition is in play. When I was at school I had an idea I might be an artist of some kind. Although I didn’t know what it was. I just scribbled poems. I made a tape piece, tried to write a song, made a little piano piece.
I don’t think creativity is discipline specific. Many artists move through different disciplines. They might be successful at something, but there are other things which all contribute. The painter Paul Klee was a violinist. It’s a cliché to mention the UK art school system in the 50s and 60s and its part in producing successful British pop music. And many of the keyboard players studied classical music. Last word on this. I’m loving the last two Kim Gordon records. She’s a painter and a very interesting writer too.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
Who were your inspirations in the classical and pop world?
So many people and the list gets added to every year. If I think about it in terms of performance it’s a different list from thinking about ‘inspirations’ or ‘composition’. But it blurs.
For the piano the inspiration at the very beginning, in the 60-70s, was the playing of Nicky Hopkins, Leon Russell and Thelonious Monk. The piano music of Beethoven, Bartok and Debussy. Electric piano and keyboards, Ray Manzarek, Stevie Wonder, Joe Zawinul. For the bass guitar it was Jack Bruce of CREAM. For electronics and the studio inspiration it was Stockhausen, Hendrix and THE BEATLES. And I haven’t even touched on the voice or composition. Whatever that is!
In terms of producer / arrangers, the hit list would be George Martin, Brian Wilson, Quincy Jones. The first single I ever bought was ‘River Deep Mountain High’ with that fantastic ecstatic vocal by Tina Turner. But it’s staged by Phil Spector and arranger Jack Nitzsche. Of course, there are less flamboyant producers like Tom Dowd who did classic 60s Aretha Franklin. In the 60s I loved orchestral pop; in the 80s I discovered Mahler’s song cycles and then everything kind of started to cohabitate.
Composition gets confused with record production early on for me. It’s a confusion that’s there in THE BEATLES and Stockhausen. But in terms of the traditional idea of notated composition, of pitches and rhythms, acoustic textures and forms, then Debussy, Cage, Feldman, Riley, Glass and Reich would be important inspirations. All that music is notated and that’s the crux of it somehow.
There were a number of strands going on for me moving into the 80s. I was starting to make, to write, notated piano pieces and ensemble pieces at Goldsmiths in the late 1970s.
I organised a performance of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’. Persuaded ten musicians to come and play. It’s a notated piece but not in the usual way. It’s a one-page piece that often goes on for 50 minutes. Everyone reads from the same page. It’s built from 53 short modules. You repeat them and move though the sequence at your own pace but mindful of the group context. It’s foundational, for me and lots of other people, including Glass and Reich. At some point fellow student Jeremy Peyton Jones and I organized a concert of ensemble pieces in which I played an amplified solo piano version of Philip Glass’s ‘Music in Fifths’. And then we started making concerts just of our own music.
I’ve made a playlist of inspirations or at least things that turned me on from between the age 15 to 26. You can read it on the False Walls label website blog.
Photo by AJ Barratt
What attracted you to signing to ZTT Records as opposed to a classical label?
In 1980, alongside making notated pieces, I set up a home studio with a TEAC 4-track, a mixer I built from a kit, and a space echo delay. Then quickly moved onto an 8 track and Soundcraft mixer. I was making soundtracks for contemporary dance and theatre and just making things because I could; quite abstract collage-type pieces sometimes, as well as some vocal-based pieces. I bought a drum machine when they started to appear, and a Pro-One mono synth. There was an Emu sampling keyboard that I hired to use on a dance theatre piece called ‘Mid-Day Sun’ that played at the ICA theatre in London. That was my first experience of sampling.
I can’t remember where I heard about the Fairlight music computer. When it came out in the early 80s, it wasn’t affordable; it cost more than buying a car. But Blue Weaver (famous musician in the 70s) had one of the first in the UK. I booked him to do some programming for another theatre score. We spent a couple of days together programming what I’d sketched out in notation. It was a fantastic education into both the practicalities and the concepts of sampling and programming.
A little while later I heard ‘Into Battle With The Art of Noise’ in the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street. I bought the record and it immediately connected. I knew how it was done. Also, the reference to Futurism in the name of the band, or what I thought was a band, was loaded with associations of the machine age. We were moving into a new machine age of the electronic programming computer. So I thought their record label might get what I was doing. It was a very casual thing. But looking back it was the most appropriate. I was sending tapes to lots of labels because I wanted to make records as an artist. Some of them showed interest but didn’t offer me anything. I’m glad they didn’t because ZTT was so right in many ways.
To answer the second part of the question, it depends what you mean by classical label. I did approach Bob Hurwitz at Nonesuch Records. If they’d said yes, it would have taken me in a slightly different direction. They eventually had Laurie Anderson. Three of the pieces on the ‘Wings’ record were fully notated and had performances. ‘Cadenza’ had many performances between 1980 and 1983. So those pieces might have sat well in a Nonesuch or an ECM Records catalogue. It would have worked. But, I’ve got lots of their records and it’s a similar aesthetic. The image of all the music is of a live acoustic performance. It’s careful not to appear artificial. I was interested in a more constructed, produced approach, where the recording process itself is very present and direct. It’s more of a pop aesthetic; it’s an electronic music aesthetic. It’s like Andy Warhol screen print portraits. They could be paintings, but they’re photographs of a recognisable face and they’re paintings at the same time.
Photo by AJ Barratt
Was there a concept or storyline to ‘The Beating Of Wings’?
I think a theme emerges, once you get two people or animals in the same room they start to speak to each other. Or rather the listener imagines what they’re saying. I don’t think it’s necessary to know. That is almost the theme: I don’t think it’s necessary to know.
But to put it another way, the theme that emerges is something about authority and control breaking down and moving towards instability. It’s summed up by the verse from ‘Listening In’, which I never sang, but which was printed on the inner sleeve of the original vinyl.
“Don’t worry, they said, ALL’S WELL. My Doctor says ALL’S WELL in
the world of new music and my lawyer says ALL’S WELL; ALL’S WELL in the world of youth culture and my government says ALL’S WELL; ALL’S WELL in the world of scientific discovery and my father says ALL’S WELL; ALL’S WELL in the world of decision making and my lover says ALL’S WELL; ALL’S WELL in the world of experimental psychology and my preacher says all sorts of crazy things.”
—extract from unrevised AP ‘post first past the—’ 1984
In this stanza, a whole bunch of narrators are identified through their seats of knowledge and authority. My doctor, my lawyer, my government, my father, my lover, my priest. And then what they say suggests that this knowledge is unstable.
All the pieces work with repetition, each in a different way and in a very controlled way. But gradually they move from a cool sense of a formal pattern-making towards something hot, edgy and maybe a bit out of control. It’s never really out of control but each piece has a sense that it could be round the corner. The process of moving out from a starting point is different in each piece. Again, to come back to the Warhol screen print portraits, some are bright, some are direct, some are sparkly and some are chaotic; even if they are the same face over and over, like the Joseph Beuys collection. So with ‘The Beating of Wings’ the listener has to decide if the four pieces are four different faces or are they the same face with different colours and textures.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
‘The Object Is A Hungry Wolf’ was a fairly ambitious opening that combined orchestrations and Fairlight, what was going through your mind and driving you both musically and culturally?
Thanks. Yes, I think it is ambitious in hindsight. When I made it, I just made it. It’s a modular machine. It kind of grew itself.
It holds together lots of different textures and ways of doing things. In some ways it’s very simple. A single musical pattern in 12/8 is all there is. But the way it gets projected into different gestures, different colours and musical spaces it becomes something else. It’s pattern-based rather than melody- and harmony-based. Although these emerge in different ways.
I like the vocal presence that kicks in right at the beginning. The vocal at the beginning of Wolf is articulated as: “Do, do, do da – da, do do do do do, da-da”. For me it’s connected to that pop so-called ‘non-lexical vocables’. THE CRYSTALS’ “Da doo ron ron, Da doo ron ron”, there’s a fizz to the opening. The repeated alternation of the vowels and consonants articulate a rhythmic idea. In ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, the opening up-beat down-beat sets a tempo. ‘Ron ron ron sets up an off-beat sequence that is buoyant and exciting. The voice as a drum. But the voice sets up a tension with the drum in ‘Da Do Ron Ron’. In ‘Wolf’, this vocal pattern is forever reforming itself.
The recording process was ambitious for all the tracks on the album because they were all different ways of doing it. For ‘Wolf’ I wanted to use the Fairlight as spine and record the acoustic instruments in overdubs. I started by working with Fairlight programmer Steve Rance. It was quite straightforward to plan it out as I’d had the Blue Weaver experience. We sat together with the score, which I described and he programmed it.
Then on the live sessions I worked with sound engineer Stuart Bruce on each instrumental strand separately. The strings were one session, then the woodwind individually. Rory Allam, who plays the prominent bass clarinet part, was an important contribution. Then with the voices Elise Lorrain and Mary Philips, we worked on the feel. Getting an intimacy, groove and energy. It’s not just about getting the notes right. It’s more like film making. It can seem artificial. But you can create a different type of focus and intensity, rather than recording everyone in the room after a short rehearsal. Each sound and performance has a life that is different from moment to moment. It allows for great flexibility of balance in the mix. Sometimes it’s the way to go. I played all the pianos, and the electric organ part.
By contrast, ‘Cadenza’ and ‘32 Frames’ are single takes with everyone in the room. For ‘32 Frames’ we had a short rehearsal a few days before. There was lots that was great about the recording session but some important moments were blurred. That’s why there are overdub credits. A few weeks later we made the overdubs. They are the same parts but making sure important details can be heard and feel right in the context.
The Fairlight extends the drum box. Its programming is more open ended. It’s not limited to two bars of 4/4. What happens in ‘Wolf’ is that the machine’s idea of the pulse drives it through. Even though the music chops and changes direction and it’s even got a slow movement in the middle and two different tempos in the last part. It’s locked into a machine groove. The human performance is always pulling it out of shape and that tension is ecstatic if you get it right.
You’re good friends with Claudia Brücken but how aware were you made that a small section of ‘‘The Object Is A Hungry Wolf’ would be sampled for the intro of the first ACT single ‘Snobbery & Decay’?
I did not know that. Brilliant. Thanks Claudia xx
Photo by AJ Barratt
‘32 Frames For Orchestra’ might be one of your best known pieces and even got the ‘Drummed Up’ treatment for release as a 12 inch single, how was the “pop” marketing approach for you?
I love the ‘I Feel Love’ disco experience and those James Brown dance grooves. The TALKING HEADS’ rhythm section or Sly and Robbie on Grace Jones’ ‘Nightclubbing’. And then there’s the dance feel of KRAFTWERK’s ‘Pocket Calculator’ and ‘Autobahn’. The machine and the dance move towards each other.
You could hear ‘Drummed Up’ as a kind of love letter to disco or house. It wasn’t a marketing idea. I really wanted to do it and thought it would bring out some of the dance floor implications of the piece. It should be fun.
‘The Impossible Net’ on the B-side of the ‘32 Frames For Orchestra’ single was an Fairlight-assisted “industrial” version of the A-side, did you see the remix culture that ZTT were very much part of as being a development on the “variations on a theme” aspect of classical music?
Yes, for sure. That’s exactly the idea. ‘32 Frames’ is a set of 8 variations each with 32 bars. ‘Drummed Up’ is a very straightforward version of the piece with a drum machine.
The concert piece and the album piece are ‘32 Frames’. Once you start to move it somewhere other, ideas suggest themselves. It somehow wanted to be a more extended dub-based cut up piece. Which is what happens in ‘The Impossible Net’. It got cut in half. Then the first half slows down. Introduce a dub suggestion of the instrumentation and then build a new middle with the Fairlight, using all the same notes and patterns but electronic sounds. Then, transitioning back to the original tempo for the last part. Because the sample-based machine can increase the tempo without changing the pitch. Of course, now you can do all this in two seconds with the swipe of a screen.
Opening up the middle allowed for adding a kind of piano cadenza type coda for the orchestra to think about. ‘The Impossible Net’ is a whole new piece really.
Your own voice featured in ‘Listening In’ and it was very percussive with a LinnDrum being brought in as well alongside the samples, how did that come together, especially with not using live percussionists?
Yes. I’m glad that vocal performance is there because it suggests what comes later. Particularly on the 2nd album for ZTT: ‘Alphabed’. But also what happened in my recent albums like ‘JELLY’. The speaking and singing on ‘JELLY’ picks up that thread. There’s a 3.50 version of ‘Listening In’ called ‘Listening In remodelled’. It was on the B side to the 7 inch vinyl of ‘The Amusement’.
The original demo for ‘Listening In’ was made around April or May 1981. It used an Akai 4-track tape recorder, voice, Wurlitzer electric piano, Pro-One mono synth, guitar, bass guitar, Doctor Rhythm drum machine and Roland space echo delay. It started with a simple drum pattern, sent through the delay. I improvised with the delay feedback to make a dub groove which then was recorded. Then the track was built, first a hand-muted bass guitar rhythm played with pick that sat inside the drum track. Then all the other melodic patterns were added, and the vocal.
For the ZTT recording in 1985, the demo was scored out with the drum machine and tape delay rationalised into a melodic pattern. Then Stuart and I recorded lots of percussion sounds individually to make a library of samples. Each sample was then triggered from an AMS delay which could be used as a simple sampler. Each sound was then recorded separately onto the multi-track using a drum programme to create a melodic shape of sampled drums. It seems an absurdly convoluted way of doing things now. There were also a number of metal samples triggered in the same way.
The only Linn sound is the bass drum I think. The bass part is a DX7 keyboard. Wurlitzer electric piano added the melodic parts, with Bruce Nockles’ live trumpet giving a breath and sustain to the percussive keyboard sound. Jack Hues’ electric guitar overdub replicated the guitar part that had been transcribed from the demo.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
You stripped it down to pianos for ‘Cadenza’ and you left a lot of space and silence? What fascinated you about minimalism?
It was the first of the four pieces to be written, in 1980. The silence is only at the opening with the three arpeggios, which cover the whole keyboard played with the so-called sustain pedal held down. Each arpeggio moves to a loud chord whose decay hangs in the room. The piece comes out of that decaying sound of the piano. Each time it happens the ear follows the dynamic contour from loud chord to nothing. Hopefully. The gesture is inviting the ear to listen in. The main body of the piece is about staying in the moment of that opening gesture. To make it continuous. It’s almost a drone piece.
It’s the directness of so-called minimalism that I like, and the physicality of repetition.
How do you look back on ‘The Beating Of Wings’ four decades on?
In some ways the remastered anniversary edition has been a revelation. I’ve heard it as more complete. Previously, I was more self-conscious about the album’s diversity. But times have changed with the remastering, Stephan Mathieu has somehow made it flow through the whole 48 minutes. I like that. In 1985 it was mastered for vinyl. Back then side A and side B were two different moments. Just turning the disc over is a big event. It’s like an interval in the movies. We don’t do that now. Interesting last year that the Oscar-winning ‘The Brutalist’ builds an interval into the whole film experience, with a still image and its own musical score. It makes the ritual of seeing it in the cinema into something special. CJ Mitchell at the False Walls label, designer David Caines and I, wanted to do something similar with the design for the anniversary edition. Making is meta with a small ‘m’. So you get a version of the original vinyl centre labels on the CD sleeve. It should be fun.
Is the legend true that Trevor Horn actually wanted you to be more like Isao Tomita?
Ha ha ha! I wouldn’t put it like that. I remember it was our first proper conversation just before I started working on ‘The Object is a Hungry Wolf’. It was already fully scored for voices, ensemble and keyboards. We were sharing thoughts. He talked about the Tomita synth versions of Debussy music. Which I knew. It’s a kind of response to Wendy Carlos’ ‘Switched on Bach’.
Interesting that Trevor developed that idea with Anne Dudley and THE ART OF NOISE years later. But the year before going to ZTT, I’d made a piece using the Fairlight and wanted to use that alongside the acoustic instruments. He was into it.
Was ‘The Beating Of Wings’ ahead of the game in the sphere of modern classical music, what with the short-lived Factory Classical label that came in 1989, the late William Orbit in the clubs with the Ferry Corsten remix of ‘Adagio For Strings’ and all those “classical meets pop” concerts that spring up a lot today?
It’s not for me to say.
Photo by John Hollingsworth
Would you say ‘The Beating Of Wings’ opened doors for you after its release, do you remember the ZTT period with fondness?
This is probably a “no” and a “yes” answer. Yes, remembering fondly for sure. I felt like I’d achieved a lot, learnt a lot and been part of an intense creative hub. I’ve kept in touch with some of the Sarm ZTT people I worked closely with back then. The recording engineers were all brilliant to work with: Stuart Bruce, Bob Kraushaar and Dave Meegan, who recently mixed ‘JELLY’. Also Paul Morley, Karen Goodman and Claudia Brücken. And I’ve seen Trevor Horn a few times. When I saw him at the SARM closing down party he said “I still play ‘The Amusement’”.
In 1988, I tried to get another deal and would like to have toured the nine-piece band I had for ‘The Value of Entertainment’ concerts. But it wasn’t possible. Over the decades the music seems to have resonated more and more. Younger people get it and as the Internet started to kick in 25 years ago, I became aware that people all over Europe and America love those two early albums.
In the early 90s I continued to write, perform and produce records. The first album I made after ZTT was called ‘Recordings’. And was recorded straight to stereo at Abbey Road. A kind of detox. But, as I already mentioned, I had an 8 track studio set up at home since about ‘82 and after ‘Wings’ was finished, Steve Lipson suggested I buy an Akai sampler and a computer as the Fairlight was so expensive to hire. So I got into that and ran it alongside my 8 track until well into the present century. Then the computer finally took over completely with Protools. Still have the Atari 8 track ½ inch machine but it hasn’t been on for 25 years.
Photo by Jack Symes
What is next for you?
‘The Beating of Wings’ anniversary album has already had some very positive reviews. It’s primarily an instrumental album and what I’ve been doing recently is vocal music. There is quite a bit of instrumental music that’s not been released, so maybe there’s another ‘Ark Hive’ disc. There’s also a collection of 30 or so piano pieces from the last 40 years called ‘Fruits & Shavings’. I’m going to publish those scores. So anyone who’s interested can play them.
The last couple of decades has focused on vocal music that I could perform myself. I’ve always written vocal music for other people, from songs to choral pieces. It was a leap in the dark to start doing some work on my voice so that I could record and perform things. Going back to ‘Listening In’ on ‘Wings’, the ambition was there. It put down a marker. The ‘Alphabed’ album which followed ‘Wings’ is full of voices but not my own.
The new project has pianos, synths, bass guitar, and continues to work with an alternation of speaking and singing that happens on ‘Hoarse Songs’, ‘Shiny Floor Shiny Ceiling’ and’ …and the Shuffle of Things’. The last project ‘JELLY’ had such a positive response live and I’m keen to get back to performing with a new project. At the moment it’s called ‘BOUNCE, the melancholy of the.’
ELECRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its deepest thanks to Andrew Poppy
Additional thanks to CJ Mitchell at False Walls
The 40th anniversary edition of ‘The Beating Of Wings’ is reissued by False Walls as a CD and download on 2nd October 2026, available from https://andrewpoppy.bandcamp.com/album/the-beating-of-wings-40th-anniversary-edition
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063715171165
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Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
29th September 2026
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appeared on ‘Partysnäks’, the soundtrack to ‘Die Tanzbeinsammler’.
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was recorded for the film ‘Insignificance’ and produced by Midge Ure under the pseudonym of Otto Flake Junior.
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was very much dominated by Gabriel’s dancefloor instincts. But all was not well within. “The MD from Island suddenly left and all the people who worked on my album left as well” she remembered, “A new guy came in and already I could sense what would happen, so Pascal and I decided to get really experimental”.
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with CHROME SEDUCTION was a frantic club number that also saw a reunion with former partner-in-crime Susanne Freytag. The project of Magnus Fiennes, brother of actors Joseph and Ralph, it was independently released by Mother Alpha Delta.
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featuring a duet with FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD’s Paul Rutherford A beautifully crafted synthesized tribute to David Bowie & Pat Metheny, it had been intended for a film soundtrack but shelved.
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, a co-write with Martin Gore which also featured the guitar of DEPECHE MODE’s main songwriter. It was the stand-out song on ONETWO’s debut EP ‘Item’.
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was the alluring highlight of three songs recorded.
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was the first song to emerge from Brücken’s reinterpretations project with producer 
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from scratch for OMD. “Paul had the idea of asking Claudia to do the vocal in the middle eight” remembered McCluskey before thinking “y’know, could you ask Claudia to do it in German as well?”... the result was electronic magic.
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very much reflected her personal mindset following the end of her relationship with Paul Humphreys.
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