Propaganda - Cyber-pop expressionism

The best way to understand the work of Propaganda is to take a close look at the cover of their compilation Noise And Girls Come Out To Play: three of the group's four members are immortalized there in the statuesque yet glossy beauty of a new, soulless humanity - aloof, pale, motionless, perfect. Yet to the side of the image, the eye of singer Claudia Brücken opens wide, seeming almost to issue a warning not to be seduced by that lifeless world, not to cross the threshold. In fact, it's a shot cropped on the right-hand side, but even analysing the full image (taken by photographer Anton Corbijn) reveals something interesting: Brücken, the only animated figure in the group, wears a dazed look and a mocking, ironic "Mona Lisa" smile. How should we read that look and that smile? Is there really something unsettling beneath it, or is it just humorous pop pretence? What we can say for certain is that that black-rimmed, wide-open eye is a direct derivative of expressionist aesthetics.

The cue we've offered isn't random: just as with Bowie (the most Teutonic of British musicians, with the Berlin trilogy he called "my DNA") and Madonna (the most Teutonic of American musicians, just think of her early-80s debut alongside Otto Von Wernherr and later "Confessions On A Dancefloor"), the visual image with which Propaganda presented themselves was not incidental to the music, but an integral and inseparable part of it. This shot, like others similar to it, was taken by photographer Anton Corbijn, who was not by chance commissioned to create an image for every song the group recorded for their first album, underlining the parallel development of the musical and visual planes. And the icy Bowie of "Station To Station" (far more than the toy robots of Kraftwerk) stands as the forerunner of Propaganda's silent, enigmatic aesthetic.

Propaganda (Claudia Brücken, Ralph Dörper, Susanne Freytag, Michael Mertens, in the original line-up – Andreas Thein, who passed away in 2013 after a long battle with cancer, was among the founders but left the band after the first single, "Dr. Mabuse") have had a strange destiny. Born in Germany, conceived for the English audience, they found success above all in Italy. Grandchildren of Kraftwerk, though more through a shared cultural heritage than direct lineage, and through the ideal role of intermediary played by Giorgio Moroder: "The children of Fritz Lang and Giorgio Moroder", as NME dubbed them. Born within Ztt, the label of one of the symbol-producers of British electro-pop, Trevor Horn (The Buggles, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Art Of Noise, Seal), hailed by the music press (Melody Maker called them a likely candidate for the perfect post-punk band), they never achieved the commercial success they deserved, not least because their troubled internal history initially led to the release of just one album. They still managed to make a name for themselves with a handful of hit singles, above all (paradoxically?) in Mediterranean Italy, and to win the admiration of illustrious peers.

As far as content goes, Propaganda remain a band worth paying attention to even today, as latecomer offspring and among the last heirs of Mitteleuropa's culture of decadence. A perfect embodiment, one might say, of the "crisis of the crisis".

Fully rooted in the atmospheres of German avant-garde music, they can quite obviously be linked to Kraftwerk: through their origin (both bands hail from Düsseldorf, Germany), the synthetic, electronic nature of their music, their fascination with industrial technology, and their heralding of an age of sub-human prototypes. And the direct inspiration drawn from Fritz Lang, fundamental to Propaganda, had already been foreshadowed in Kraftwerk's "Metropolis" by 1978's "Die Mensch-Machine" (an album whose title would in turn be echoed in Propaganda's hit "p:Machinery").

At the same time, Propaganda differed from their more celebrated forebears in several respects. First of all, their message took on overtly darker tones than Kraftwerk's. Musically, they also adopted a symphonic approach and an epic impact that moved away from the lean, freeze-dried sounds of the 1970s band. Propaganda drew on expressionist culture, both cinematic and musical, even more explicitly than Kraftwerk had done. The latter were certainly unrepeatable, extraordinary innovators, but Propaganda were marked by far greater musical versatility. On one hand they had a much more pronounced classical-symphonic bent; on the other, they absorbed the influence of their musical contemporaries (Moroder, Quincy Jones).

Kraftwerk's "Metropolis" is bleak, but it's a bleakness that seems to describe an already completed process, in which nothing more can happen beneath the blanket of inanimate stillness established by technological progress (it's essentially a sci-fi, aseptic rereading of the dramatic realism of Bowie–Eno's "Warsaw"). Propaganda's technological world, as depicted in "p:Machinery", instead takes on apocalyptic overtones in an emphatically grandiose manner: the track's magnificent melody and its shower of glittering keyboards herald future events with devastating consequences. And it's precisely this that one senses first and foremost in "p:Machinery": a relish for catastrophe. The kind of suspended catastrophe one expects to sweep over the masses at any moment, as in some "Metropolis"-style epic.

Brücken's enigmatic voice contributed significantly to creating this sense of unease and mystery, lending the band's work an air of elusive unattainability. Her vocal delivery, with a power and fullness worthy of an opera singer, recalls in its ambiguous, unfathomable register that of Nico: the comparison is a conscious one, so much so that Brücken did in fact try her hand at a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" (the track now appears on the aforementioned compilation Noise And Girls Come Out To Play). And if Brücken's contribution to the band's unmistakable air of mystery came through as the "singing voice", Freytag's equivalent contribution came through as the "spoken voice". These two complementary and perfectly converging elements remain one of Propaganda's most distinctive trademarks.

The first and "only" album

Propaganda released their debut album, A Secret Wish, in 1985. Today, though, it's best heard in the beautiful deluxe edition issued in 2010, which lets us better understand, in hindsight, its original meaning (but it's also worth pairing it with the compilation Noise And Girls Come Out To Play, to which we'll keep referring as its ideal completion). This deluxe edition is split into two parts: "The Dark Religions Depart…" and "… And Sweet Science Reigns". Rather than prophesying a happy age of reason replacing the supposed superstitions of the past, these titles sound more like the typical promises of media "propaganda". Brücken herself, at the time, sometimes appeared in the guise of a "dark priestess": a look largely derived from Madonna's in "Like A Virgin", but with a mock-monastic quality absent from the original of the time, and whose darker connotations instead recalled Madonna's in "Burning Up" (today we might even say that, by pushing Ciccone's sensual image on several fronts toward self-ironic grotesque—unable to compete on the same plane of allure—Brücken was something of a forerunner of Lady Gaga; though this is also a revival of the theatrical grotesque imagery drawn from German cabaret, the same source that Marilyn Manson would later draw on musically and stylistically for his caricatured portrait of the contemporary age on "The Golden Age Of Grotesque").

Although in Italy the band's biggest hit was the single "Duel", a synth-pop track that's musically sunny and catchy (even if its lyrics aren't quite as reassuring, not to mention the even more unsettling video, caught between glamour and the grotesque), this track immediately reveals its dark counterpart in "Jewel", its noise-oriented, post-punk reworking. They are "two sides of the music, light and shadow, the sublime pop A-side ('Duel') and 'Jewel', its evil twin": so reads Andrew Harrison's liner notes for the reissue of A Secret Wish, with which we largely agree.

But the shadowy side of Propaganda that Harrison refers to comes, as we've said, from the past. Despite an academic "intelligentsia" that has never wanted to recognise pop-rock as an art form worthy of consideration, postwar German "Volksmusik" gathered up themes and forms typical of pre-war Mitteleuropean culture (visual art, literature, philosophy, music and cinema). Propaganda are perhaps the clearest emblem of this. One need only listen to the over ten-minute extended version of their hit "Dr. Mabuse", where chaotic string orchestrations of expressionist lineage ("Shostakovich's demonic cyclone", as Harrison calls it) rise out of the background, layering over stark, pounding, violent drum percussion. This track, included on A Secret Wish (deluxe edition), finds its counterpart in "Das Testament des Mabuse" on Noise And Girls Come Out To Play. On that latter compilation, the revival of expressionist orchestration also resurfaces on "Strength To Dream". But it reaches its apotheosis on the track "(The Ninth Life Of) Dr. Mabuse", where the jagged disorder of such orchestrations translates perfectly into the systematic deformation of electronic sounds carried out digitally (anticipating the opening of Radiohead's "Spinning Plates"). All of this underlines just how far from accidental Propaganda's reliance on that "high-art" stylistic source from the turn of the century really was. Expressionism warps forms, distorts sounds, and what was once performed by hand by string players in a philharmonic orchestra is now carried out by computer in the recording studio—yet the artistic message remains the same. And once you consider that Mertens originally worked as a percussionist in the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, it all makes sense.

In that same extended version of "Dr. Mabuse", however, one cannot overlook, as far as the long closing instrumental coda is concerned, the influence of Quincy Jones's "Thriller". Yet on that track, Michael Jackson offers us a contrived darkness, straight out of a Disneyland haunted house, suited to an underage audience; Propaganda's darkness, by contrast, seems more sincere and far more deeply rooted in a vast cultural world. It's no accident that the track "Dr. Mabuse" takes its name from a literary character brought to the screen by Fritz Lang, a leading figure of expressionist cinema (a director Austrian by birth and German by artistic formation). Lang's Dr. Mabuse is a criminal endowed with hypnotic powers that let him bend people to his will, just as Brücken's eye, staring out at us from the cover of Noise And Girls Come Out To Play, has the magnetic power to draw in the viewer's gaze. However unsettling and disorienting, expressionist aesthetics remain, by their very nature as aesthetics, bewitching.

And many obsessions of pre-war German and Mitteleuropean culture, already depicted in Lang's filmography, resurface in Propaganda's work: the tyranny of machines, the expressionist warping of perception, a taste for decadence, the creation of a humanity of golems, the dictatorial or oligarchic manipulation of the masses.

Analysing the various tracks on A Secret Wish keeps leading us back to constant comparisons with Kraftwerk. The animated mannequins they describe in "Schaufensterpuppen" (and when, before the German contribution to the genre, had rock music ever featured lyrics like that?) become the post-human puppets moved by strings pulled from above in the video for "p:Machinery".

The gleaming exterior of the model in "Das Model" transforms into the frozen gleam of the faces in "Frozen Faces", a decidedly ambiguous track. The musical introduction to the over ten-minute version of "(Echo Of) Frozen Faces" is overwhelming, with those beautiful, sharp, elegant saxophones suddenly given over to their own convulsive contortions: having already taken their turn through classical and electronic music, Propaganda's study of sonic distortion thus leads them to tackle another genre where distortion is often a stylistic signature—jazz. Freytag's detached spoken voice offers us a disconcerting suggestion: don't worry about the bloodstains on the drums or the ongoing "disaster", but rather take an optimistic break and dance. The musical backing thus turns into a kind of "Caribbean-electronic samba", in the hope (probably a mocking one, given the light, ironic tone of Brücken's vocal delivery) that the "frozen faces" might melt away…

And what of the mirage-like life reflected in the hall of mirrors of Kraftwerk's "Spiegelsaal"? Well, this first becomes the virtual reality installed by machines that have themselves become programmers in "p:Machinery" (and with this, Propaganda, starting out from Lang's "Metropolis", already anticipate the nightmare of the future "Matrix", which would come several years later). On the other hand, it becomes the "dream within a dream" of "Dream Within A Dream": "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream", the lyrics read—actually a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. But Kraftwerk's own mirrors aren't far off either, since, as Andrew Harrison tells us, "Propaganda were a band of ideas, and those ideas became a magnificent, self-referential hall of mirrors, inside which one might just end up getting lost".

Musically, "Dream Within A Dream" is a highly successful attempt to make the chill of synthesizers coexist with the warmth of brass, in the manner mastered by Bowie's Berlin period ("Subterraneans" from "Low"). The end result is a track of magnificent, suggestive atmospheres, deeply hypnotic and dreamlike, to which Freytag's spoken-word vocals also contribute (how much inspiration might Lele Marchitelli have drawn from this for his unjustly overlooked score for "Sono Pazzo Di Iris Blond"?).

The apocalyptic atmospheres and themes of "p:Machinery" also bring to mind the ambiguous portrait of industrial society drawn by Ernst Jünger in the 1930s, suspended between dismay and fascination in equal, opposing measure (and more broadly, it would perhaps make sense to ask how much the entire kraut-rock movement, starting with the other name by which it's known, kosmische musik, has in common with the cultural and philosophical movements labeled "cosmic" that emerged in Germany at the start of the twentieth century; the fact, too, perhaps coincidental, perhaps not, that Propaganda's record label was called "Zang Tumb Tumb" throws us back once again to the start of the century, to our own Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, aesthete of war, and so once more to Jünger, and his theorizing of the relationship between technological progress and the art of warfare).

Worth noting too is the nightmarish interlude of "Thought Part I", with its disorienting expressionist flashes lit up in the dark by atonally struck keyboards, as well as the version of "Sorry For Laughing", once again stretched past the ten-minute mark. Its long instrumental introduction amplifies the unsettling gothic-horror atmospheres already present, albeit with less impact, in the more compact version found on the original edition of the album. It's a reworking of a track by Josef K, the post-punk band who took their name from a character in Kafka (it's the whole "gothic" cultural imagination that resurfaces here, both Mitteleuropean and "exported", spanning Lang, Poe and Kafka). Propaganda's interpretation retains the dark flavour of the original track, which was already very good in its own right, but transforms it radically in style, profoundly altering its original punk nature to turn it into a thoroughly electronic track in keeping with the rest of the album.

It's quite likely that in shaping their "dark" style, Propaganda were also driven by a good dose of irony (the lifeless mannequins in the "p:Machinery" video do, after all, stick their tongues out at the audience...). That suits anyone who, deep down, wants to make "Volksmusik". But this brings us back to the opening question: is what we're seeing real or fake? Perhaps the best answer to that question comes from photographer Anton Corbijn, commenting on his involvement with the Propaganda project: "Enigmatically glamorous, art yet still pop, mysterious yet proper in the face of the gaze, and rich with an intense personal style. At a time when the world was exploding in the slick colour of MTV, and everyone was going mad for its multicoloured superficiality, we stood in the shadows, and even Trevor Horn was drawn into them, where, I think, he was perhaps even more remarkable as a producer."

It should be noted, however, that making "Volksmusik" ("people's music" in the Kraftwerk sense) carries no diminishing connotation at all within the cultural context we're examining: the recovery of the "mythic" origins of the Volk and of folklore has been an important leitmotif of German culture at least since Romanticism. And postwar Germany set out, with an openly stated aim, to give the world both the people's music and the people's car. It's a "Volk" that thus shifts from national to global, united worldwide by music and machines. On the other hand, the political "propaganda" surrounding the worldwide union of the "Volk" (the proletarians), theorized in Germany itself in the previous century, had a boomerang effect, resulting in the creation of a dictatorship of foreign extraction established in the eastern part of the country. That regime had in turn risen from the ashes of an earlier dictatorship that had dragged Germany into disgrace and catastrophe. When the band released A Secret Wish in 1985, the Berlin Wall was still standing. Propaganda thus reflect the geographic and cultural landscape they were part of (perhaps with a touch of that superstitious irony the German people must have developed to bear the lightness of everyday existence within such a heavy historical and political situation). Music, machines, propaganda: the circle closes.

So what became of this little epic? At the time, Propaganda boasted three European hit singles ("Dr. Mabuse" no. 7 in Germany, "Duel" no. 2 in Italy as well as Top 5 in the Netherlands, and "p:Machinery" no. 5 in Italy as well as Top 10 in France). Their album reached the Top 20 not only in Italy but also in Britain (no small feat for a non-Anglo-Saxon group). Not bad at all, considering all of this was achieved with a single album (and it does seem their Teutonic charisma held particular appeal for the Mediterranean Italian audience). Even so, the results were probably below expectations. Perhaps this is why Propaganda broke up almost immediately, clashing with ZTT itself over the termination of their contract, before moving on to solo projects or forming new bands.

Underlining the fact that the 1985 version of A Secret Wish still didn't capture everything Propaganda meant to express, it's worth remembering that the band released a remix album that same year, Wishful Thinking. And that was only the first chapter in an ongoing series of releases expanding and completing the material from their "one and only" work, thanks to which we can today better assess its true significance.

The troubled follow-up

Only five years after the release of A Secret Wish, Propaganda produced a second album, 1234, but did so with an entirely new lineup. Mertens alone had survived the diaspora, and in particular Brücken was replaced by a new female voice, Betsi Miller. Although the band was by then essentially dead in all but name, the collaborations they entered into from that point on had something almost pharaonic about them. For starters, the new album was produced by Ian Stanley and Chris Hughes (the former was one of the two "hidden" members of Tears For Fears at the time of "Songs From The Big Chair", and the latter was the heavyweight producer behind that fine record). What's more, two songs on the new album ("Heaven Give Me Words" and "Your Wildlife") were co-written with Howard Jones, who at the time of Propaganda's first album was one of the standard-bearers of British synth-pop. The new lineup also saw the arrival of Derek Forbes and Brian McGee from the early Simple Minds. And finally, believe it or not, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd turned up on guitar on "Only One Word". These prestigious collaborations, like others to follow, underline the esteem and admiration Propaganda had managed to earn among their peers, on the strength of just one previous album with unremarkable sales and despite the band's collapse immediately afterward.

With all these collaborations, the new album should have amounted to something particularly significant. Instead, the result marked a drastic drop in quality: 1234 is in fact an empty record, as glossy as a fashion photo in a glossy magazine. To play on words, one could say that of the old Propaganda's darkness, only the shadow remains here (without the "old" ever being replaced by anything of worth). An attempt to revive the atmospheres of early Propaganda does crop up here and there, mostly when Freytag reappears as a guest, as on "Vicious Circle" and above all on "Ministry Of Fear", easily the best track. For the rest, the album turns out to be downright grating in its mediocrity. And Miller's studied, formal voice, which has nothing in common with the expressiveness of Brücken's, certainly makes the result feel even more superficial. And yet (or perhaps precisely because of this) the track "Wound My Heart", certainly nothing remarkable, managed to reach no. 1 on a sales chart — in Argentina, to be precise.

What followed the release of 1234 was the breakup of even this new lineup. The band would try once more to rise from its own ashes, and eight years later Mertens, Brücken and Freytag attempted a new reunion. But the torment of their story knows no bounds, and although the group had managed at the time to record new tracks, none of that material would ever be officially released. Not even the presence of another standout guest on guitar, Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, would help. The recorded tracks were made available online, and two of them, "Cloud 9" and "Anonymous", were re-recorded and then released by Brücken as part of a parallel project, Onetwo, launched together with Paul Humphreys of OMD (yet another name added to the pantheon of collaborations).

Something a little more (relatively) substantial came in 2005, when Mertens and Freytag released a vinyl record with a rather telling title: Valley Of Machine Gods.

A few more brief, occasional reunions followed, tied to events and concerts, but nothing substantial. Then again, as Claudia Brücken once said: "We couldn't make a new A Secret Wish, and we shouldn't even try. That work was part of an unrepeatable moment." It belongs, as Harrison puts it, to "those last moments when pop could still be about mystery rather than explanation."

Then, in January 2018, came the announcement of a London date, following a new reissue of A Secret Wish, offered this time on 180g vinyl (complete with booklet and poster) or in a lavish CD edition with a rigid digipak and a rich 32-page booklet containing interviews, photos, notes on the musicians, information on the recording sessions and reflections on the artistic legacy handed down to later generations. Yet another acknowledgment for an album that remains a timeless miracle precisely because it was conceived to exist outside of time. The fact that it keeps periodically coming back into vogue is proof of the quality of the work done back then: eight months in the studio to produce a project destined to remain thoroughly relevant for decades, never once feeling dated — a feat that very few in the world have had the ability and the foresight to pull off.

In November 2025, for the fortieth anniversary of "A Secret Wish", ZTT released a massive 6-CD box set, along with its digital counterpart, titled A Secret Sense Of Rhythm, A Secret Sense Of Sin, alongside a vinyl reissue of a new version of the original album mixed by David Kosten. The box set contains dozens of extended versions, outtakes, remixes, demos, and above all a double version of the original album. The first is the analogue one ("Analogue Sequence"), warmer, more physical, pulsing: edited and mixed with less compression, in keeping with how an album was built for vinyl and cassette back in the 1980s. The second is the digital soul ("Digital Variations"), colder, sharper, more cerebral, more detailed, a complete reconstruction of the album, again carried out by Stephen Lipson, using digital equipment. It shouldn't be categorized as a simple remix, but rather as an alternative edit of the album, and, if you will, something closer to the remixes of the ZTT/Fairlight CMI school.

Heard this way, the album doesn't sound in the least like a record from the '80s, and that judgement makes any further qualifier redundant. Its influence has been slow-burning, subterranean, yet steadily growing, to the point where it's now regarded as one of the most important manifestations of European electronic pop. This box set isn't nostalgia: it's a critical tool. Finding two parallel versions of the album today means witnessing the exact moment pop music turned into the art of sonic editing.

A Secret Wish emerges from this work more alive, more coherent, more visionary than ever. That's the paradox of Propaganda: their only true album is still the future of many others.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia (“A Secret Wish” 2018 reissue), Cristiano Orlando (“A Secret Sense Of Rhythm, A Secret Sense Of Sin”, 2025)

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