Pick the most unlikely collaboration you can think of. Go on. I'll wait. Got it? Wrong. This is it. Well, of course it's not: I'm sure there are others as outlandish, and the aim of this section from the beginning has, after all, been to find teamups between artistes who would generally never be expected to be seen working with one another, in some cases where the one would not even know the other existed, let alone be willing to collaborate with them. And we've had some good ones: David Bowie and Pat Metheny. Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page, our very first outing. Then there was Cave and Kylie, Eminem and Elton... the list goes on.
But this one is a bit special. Famed as one of the progenitors of the real “new” or “futuristic” music of the early nineties, one of the first bands to ever appear onstage with computers, making Kraftwerk look like Led Zeppelin, the Art of Noise were a whole new proposition in music. Using tons of samples, Fairlights and sequencers, and creating what a lot of musical purists (myself included, at the time) snorted was “not real music at all”, they made a name for themselves as the ultimate avant-garde band of the eighties, defying musical convention and boldly going where (nearly) no musician had gone before.
So of course, it was only a matter of time before they hooked up with Tom Jones, wasn't it?
Kiss --- The Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones
A legend in music, Tom was approaching his forty-eighth birthday when he teamed up with the young futurists. The song was a Prince one, which had done very well for the diminutive purple one, but when AoN and TJ got together, they made it even more successful, smashing the top ten with the biggest hit single for either act in three years. Utilising their trademark sampling technique, the boys slipped in snippets from their other hits, “Close to the edit” and “Peter Gunn”, as well as “Dragnet”, giving the song new life and direction. The song had been a staple of Jones's stage show for some time, but this was a totally different animal.
It's possibly debatable that had Jones released the song on his own he would have had a hit anyway, but the addition of the Art of Noise and their updated treatment of the song really made it something “the kids” were happy to buy, and they wouldn't feel like they were supporting some old fogey's retirement fund, cos, you know, he's just the guy singin', in't e? It's
really an Art of Noise song, and those guys are cool!
Well, they were. This seems to have been their last commercial hurrah, as their next album failed to chart and they more or less faded away after that. Tom Jones? You remember “Sex bomb”, dont'cha? That was as we entered the new millennium, and as recently as 2009 he had a number one hit single again. So who exactly is the old fogey again?