(First published in Issue 117 of Electronic Sound magazine, September 2024)
(Photo by Thomas Ecke)
WISHFUL THINKING
It’s over four decades since Düsseldorf synth wizard Ralf Dörper recruited classical percussionist Michael Mertens to join his new experimental synth band, Propaganda. 1985 album A Secret Wish remains a shimmering, dark-hearted classic, but – forty years on – the reunited duo are looking to the future, with a new incarnation of the band that made their names
Words: Bob Fischer
“I think we’ve become closer friends than ever before,” says Michael Mertens with a warm smile. “We were always friendly with each other – we had an incredible time making A Secret Wish with Claudia and Susanne and it was wonderful. But although Ralf lives in Düsseldorf and I live in Düsseldorf, there were years when we hardly made contact. But then, during the process of making this record, there was so much interaction. And nowadays, we meet once a week and have coffee.”
“We went our separate ways,” nods Ralf Dörper. “Michael was making commercial music for soundtracks and advertising, and I’m still in an industrial band that tours. So there’s always good stuff that I can tell Michael about – Spinal Tap is a reality!
“We’ve all had our wild times in different areas, but now we’re more settled we can concentrate on the work without the ego stepping into it. In a band, when you’re pretty young, fame and money and other stuff is coming in, and suddenly the work is not as important as your own ego. Luckily, after a few decades, you overcome that.”
They both chuckle knowingly. They first met in late 1982 (or possibly early 1983, neither are quite sure) when Michael, then a percussionist with the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, placed a classified advert to sell his Fricke MFB Drumbox in a local magazine, Der Überblick. Ralf – then, as now, keyboard player with synth-punk outfit Die Krupps – answered, and the rest is slightly convoluted history. Ralf had already formed a new musical project, Propaganda, with artist Andreas Thein and singer Susanne Freytag. Susanne drafted in fellow singer Claudia Brücken, and Michael was recruited following that chance encounter in the inky back pages.
Within months, they were signed to Trevor Horn’s nascent ZTT label and had decamped to London. 1984 single ‘Dr Mabuse’ – inspired by the moustache-twirling villain of Fritz Lang’s silent movie – was a UK chart hit. But Thein swiftly departed, and follow-up single ‘Duel’ and debut album A Secret Wish were delayed until 1985. There were disputes over contracts and tensions within the band. It was another five years before second album 1234 was released, by which time only Michael Mertens remained of the line-up originally signed to ZTT. Attempted reunions in the ensuing decades have proved short-lived, but – 41 years after they first met – the duo are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in Michael’s house (“So I can elbow him out of the way,” laughs Michael) discussing a new incarnation of the band that first brought them together as disparate twentysomethings.
The new album, the simply-titled Propaganda, is a shimmering encapsulation of the duo’s unique brand of electronic oddness, a sumptuously-produced collection of danceable, dystopian pop. The project was initiated, they explain, when they collaborated on a remix of one-time ZTT label-mate Holly Johnson’s 2015 single, ‘Dancing With No Fear’.
“We recorded something new for the remix for Holly, so that was the starting point that kicked the whole thing off,” recalls Ralf. “But at that time we didn’t really have an agenda – we just wanted to see how the songs evolved, and in the end they changed a lot.
“Some of these songs were written years ago, so they’re not a reflection of the now. But maybe they were a vision of the now.”
It is, occasionally, a pretty bleak vision. Düsseldorf vocalist Thunder Bae sings throughout, bringing edgy Millennial angst to an album that combines dark sensuality with Orwellian foreboding. So while songs like of ‘Purveyor Of Pleasure’ are – unsurprisingly – a trifle saucy, the likes of ‘Distant’ and ‘Tipping Point’ paint a sombre picture of social isolation and environmental collapse.
“A track like ‘Tipping Point’ has a duality,” says Michael. “We all know there’s an ecological disaster looming and we have to be very aware of that and try to change our lives. But on the other hand, we want to run around with our iPhones and that costs a lot of energy! That’s the contradiction of the world we live in, and that’s why it’s quite a jolly song – you try to formulate that contradiction within the music.”
Meanwhile, the playfully titled ‘Love:Craft’ continues a fine Propaganda tradition, the weaving of early 20th century horror fiction into shiny synth anthems. “There is a thing on the doorstep / A shadow out of time / Crawling all around you / Leaving trails of grime”. Come on, hands up, which of you read The Call of Cthulhu as an impressionable teenager?
“That was me!” grins Ralf. “On A Secret Wish we quoted Edgar Allan Poe, and I thought ‘OK, let’s make it a bit darker and harder – and that’s HP Lovecraft’. Musically, we wanted a sort of ghostly atmosphere to give the people who don’t know him a hint. I’m not sure he’s too popular any more.
“I was reading stuff like that pretty early, when I was around 13 or 14. And I like songs that reference books or movies. In [1985 single] ‘p:Machinery’ there’s a line about ‘joyless lanes’, referring to an old German silent black and white movie, Die Freudlose Gasse. I like to hint sometimes at lost or hidden culture.”
Speaking of which, the album’s closer is an affecting curveball. Sung in the original German, ‘Wenn Ich Mir Was Wuenschen Duerfte’ is a heart-rending torch song once recorded by Marlene Dietrich.
“If you translate the title, it’s ‘If I Had A Wish’,” says Ralf. “And that’s us referring in a way to A Secret Wish.”
“I didn’t know the song, but when Ralf played it to me, it really hit me,” adds Michael. “I love that song, and I’m very proud of the version we did. And Thunder Bae really did a good job. I love the lyrics, they’re very fitting for the world we live in today. It starts out with ‘They didn’t ask us when we didn’t have a face / Whether we wanted to live or not’. We’ve just been thrown into this world’.”
“It’s not pop,” smiles Ralf.
The fortieth anniversary of their debut single feels, I suggest, like a nice handle on which to hang their return. They are both adamant the timing is purely coincidental (“I wish we were that efficient,” insists Michael) but both are happy to discuss that occasionally turbulent rush of mid-1980s success. Can the conflict and competition they have alluded to sometimes provide fuel for the creative process, I wonder? Both men, however, are shaking their heads.
“It’s distracting, and it slows everything down,” says Michael. “It’s very hard to make music when you have friction. You have to have a peaceful environment to be properly creative.”
Was the main problem, I suggest, essentially that ZTT simply became too big too quickly? The label was basically a cottage industry that suddenly, in the shape of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, had the biggest and most controversial band in the country on their roster. ‘Relax’ sold two million copies in the UK alone.
“Yes!” exclaim both Michael and Ralf, in perfect unison.
“The structure of the company was much too small,” explains Ralf. “What I find very strange: in England, there are so many books about the history of labels. About Mute, about 4AD, about Some Bizarre and about Creation. But so far nobody has written about ZTT, and the story is amazing. You could look in detail at every band, at Anne Pigalle and the Art of Noise people. And the business part, the artwork, how it was all interlinked, how it became very, very big then failed totally! It was like the rise and fall of an empire.”
So how did they feel about Frankie, I wonder? The success enjoyed by Holly and the gang was, after all, the main reason for that year-long hiatus in Propaganda’s early pop career.
“We got on great,” says Michael. “I was living in the Columbia Hotel in Hyde Park, and I remember one day Mark – the bass player from Frankie – knocked on my door and said ‘Michael, listen to this!’ And he played me the cassette of ‘Two Tribes’ and it sounded amazing. They were great guys”.
Trevor Horn himself was earmarked to be Propaganda’s bespoke producer, but the demands on his time soon made the job impossible.
“There was so much confusion,” says Ralf. “We had to more or less fight for our space in the studio. On the back sleeve of ‘Dr Mabuse’, there was a small announcement: ‘The next single will be “Duel”.’ But at that time, ‘Duel’ didn’t exist! Trevor started to work on it, but he didn’t get to grips with it, and then he wanted to give it to someone outside. From what we heard, they nearly tried to give us away to Stock, Aitken and Waterman.”
Yes, it’s true. Propaganda may have been ice-cold synth wizards with a penchant for German expressionist cinema, but they were also a whisker away from becoming label-mates of Big Fun and The Reynolds Girls. ZTT engineer Steve Lipson ultimately stepped up to the production plate, but – never ones to be outdone – SAW did eventually get their hands on ‘Duel’. Four years later, they produced a cover version for the 1988 debut album of notorious tabloid “wild child” Mandy Smith.
“We would have preferred Kylie,” shrugs Ralf.
Let’s talk about Thunder Bae. She’s a towering presence on the new album, and her adoption into the Propaganda fold was the result of another chance encounter – she was working with a fellow producer in the building where Michael once kept a studio for his TV soundtrack work.
“We were thinking ‘What can we do with the vocals?’” admits Ralf. “We had the idea of international guest singers, but it’s difficult – there’s always management involved, and schedules and timing. So we thought maybe we could do it in a way that was less high profile and possibly more locally based, with a pool of different voices. Thunder Bae was in that pool, but we realised over time that her voice would fit perfectly on all the songs. There’s a lot of creativity and talent in Düsseldorf and we really wanted to use it.”
“She’s totally into it, she loves it,” adds Michael. “She once said ‘I want to sit down with you and Ralf and watch you guys write your lyrics and music’.”
“She’d be sitting around for weeks,” deadpans Ralf.
Does Thunder’s presence, however, now mean the working relationship with Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag is effectively over? Some of the songs on the album, the duo reveal, were written as part of an ultimately fruitless 2012 attempt to reunite the line-up that recorded A Secret Wish. But in 2022, Brücken and Freytag – working again with Steve Lipson – released their own album, The Heart Is Strange, under the name xPropaganda.
“They do their thing and we do ours, really,” says Michael. “I went to see Susanne last year, just on a personal level. We were both in Berlin. I said ‘Look, so many people from our time are already gone. I’ve lost friends from Düsseldorf and we don’t know what’s going to happen. Let’s meet and have coffee’. So it was very friendly. But that was before the decision was made that we would come out with our record under our name, Propaganda. They might feel differently about meeting now and being friendly – but I don’t know that. I haven’t spoken to them since.
“Claudia left in 1986 and Susanne in 1987 or ‘88, and since then the band has always been in transition. We had a totally different set-up a couple of years later, and now we have a different set up again.”
“I wouldn’t even call it a band,” says Ralf. “I always try to say it’s a project.”
They both seem genially relaxed about the situation. It’s been genuinely heartwarming, I tell them, to see them so clearly enjoying the extended time they are now spending in each other’s company. And I’m always interested in those “sliding doors” moments, the tiny turning points that change alter the directions of our lives irrevocably. If, four decades ago, Ralf hadn’t spotted that classified advert and phoned Michael in search of a second-hand rhythm box, how different do they think their respective lives would have been?
“I would have stayed with the Symphony Orchestra,” says Michael. “Playing opera three or four times a week. And I would have been retired by now! It was a very unlikely meeting, we were from entirely different scenes.”
“Without Michael, ‘Dr Mabuse’ would not have existed in the way it did,” ponders Ralf. “The original idea when I started Propaganda in the summer of 1982 was to have a sound similar to Die Krupps, but with a female voice. So without the possibilities provided by Michael giving it more harmonies and more atmosphere, ‘Dr Mabuse’ wouldn’t have worked. It would have been a one-off release, then back home, and I might not have continued with music.”
“It was,” smiles Michael wistfully as we begin to say our goodbyes, “a defining moment.”
Propaganda is out now on Bureau B…
https://shop.tapeterecords.com/en/propaganda-propaganda-4123
Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/
Support the Haunted Generation website with a Ko-fi donation… thanks!
https://ko-fi.com/hauntedgen
The Haunted Generation 