The Art of Noise’s central figure was keyboardist and arranger Anne Dudley. A star student at the Royal College of Music (after the Art of Noise dissolved, she became a film scorer, winning an Oscar for The Full Monty), Dudley became a session keyboardist. Her ideas about pop, and her knowledge of orchestration, made her a key musical collaborator with Trevor Horn, the producer who revolutionized pop production in the early eighties. In fact, Horn was a Prince-like studio autocrat — he famously remade the entire track of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” entirely by himself: the version that went to number one.
Horn founded the label ZTT, and the Art of Noise was its digital Booker T. & the MG’s: Horn, Dudley, J.J. Jeczalik, and Gary Langan. The name had come from an Italian futurist manifesto. Their first album, Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?, in 1984, yielded the dance hits “Close (To the Edit)” and “Moments in Love.” “We had no idea that what we were doing would be remotely commercially successful,” Dudley later said. “I think we thought it was in the vein of the avant-garde classical composers, like John Cage and Stockhausen. But then the boys would keep putting these hip-hop beats on it.”
Dudley, Jeczalik, and Langan went their own way after that, signing to the Chrysalis-affiliated label China. After two albums there, it was time for a best-of, with a new single exclusive to the album. The Art of Noise had already collaborated with Duane Eddy; now they reached out to Tom Jones.
The Welsh crooner had spent the eighties courting the country market, but when his manager Gordon Mills died in 1986, his son, Mark Woodward, began managing him. In 1987, Jones issued a concept album, Matador, which would become a stage musical four years later, yielding a British hit with “A Boy from Nowhere.” When the Art of Noise called for help with their 1988 “Kiss,” it completed his career turnaround. “I’m always listening to new things,” Jones told The Face. “I watch [the BBC chart show] Top of the Pops, and I do that because I like it, not because I feel I have to. I want to do new things; I don’t want to just repeat myself.”
According to Dudley, “On our instrumentals we put drums up front throughout and everything else changes around them. So we decided Tom’s vocal would be the drums, in effect. Verse one does have the big drum sound you’d expect from us alongside the vocal, but on verse two it becomes tiny, goes down into mono, like a little rhythm box. Although Tom’s still out front, suddenly the track’s opened right up, there’s all the room you want to stick in things like the piano and brass stabs. For the middle section, the drums come back big again, huge sound. Then verse three has a Latin-American rhythm, cha-cha. The whole thing is really cheeky, but the continuity is there in Tom’s vocal — we’re completely faithful to it.”
Read more: Age of Chance, the Art of Noise, Sir Tom Jones, and the strange afterlife of Prince’s “Kiss”
