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, J.J. 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 The Art Of Noise.
They were unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1983, with the debut EP "Into Battle With Art Of Noise". The group's 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. 1985's "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 Prodigy, The'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 (on "Peter Gunn", 1986); fictional TV presenter Max Headroom (on "Paranoimia", also 1986); Tom Jones (on a cover of Prince’s Kiss, 1988) and Mahlathini And The Mahotella Queens (on "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 The Art Of Noise with the addition of Lol Creme. 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.'