Kirsty MacColl

ZTT Records is a record label founded in 1983 by NME journalist Paul Morley, record producer Trevor Horn, and businesswoman Jill Sinclair. The label's name was also printed as "Zang Tumb Tuum" and "Zang Tuum Tumb" on various releases. ZTT is an initialism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's sound poem... "Zang Tumb Tumb". The word "Tuuuum" is also featured on the cover of the original publication of the poem in book form. The majority of the creative team at ZTT had first assembled when Horn produced the acclaimed album The Lexicon of Love for British pop band ABC. A precursor to ZTT was the short-lived Perfect label, spun off from the newly founded Perfect Songs publishing subsidiary of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair's company. Perfect Recordings only released the Buggles' Adventures in Modern Recording and the singles derived from it. ZTT enjoyed considerable success in the 1980s with the composer Andrew Poppy, bands such as Propaganda, Art of Noise, and the chart-topping Frankie Goes to Hollywood. In 1987 and 1989 respectively, Propaganda and Frankie Goes to Hollywood frontman Holly Johnson went to court to be released from their contracts.
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Stiff Records is a record label created in London in 1976, by entrepreneurs Dave Robinson and Andrew Jakeman , and active until 1985. It was reactivated in 2007. Established at the outset of the punk rock boom, Stiff Records signed pub rock acts and marketed them as punk and New Wave, including... Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Plummet Airlines, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury. The label's marketing and advertising was often provocative and witty. Stiff billed itself as "The World's Most Flexible Record Label". Other slogans were "We came. We saw. We left", "If It Ain't Stiff, It Ain't Worth a Fuck", and "When You Kill Time, You Murder Success" . On the label of Stiff's sampler compilation Heroes & Cowards was printed: "In '78 everyone born in '45 will be 33-1/3". A very early Stiff sampler album, A Bunch of Stiff Records, introduced the slogan, "If they're dead, we'll sign them" and "Undertakers to the Industry".
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I.R.S. Records is a record label, launched in the United States in 1979 by Miles Copeland III along with Jay Boberg and Carl Grasso. Miles was also the manager of Wishbone Ash, The Police, and later, Sting, as well as other bands. I.R.S. was the sister label of Copeland's Illegal Records . I.R.S.... releases were distributed by A&M Records until 1985, by MCA Records until 1990, and finally by EMI until the label folded in 1996. In 2011, EMI revived the label; currently, the label has Chiddy Bang and Foxy Shazam on its roster. In 1985, Copeland brokered a deal to switch the label's distributor to MCA Records. Under the agreement, A&M continued to release the label's pre-1985 catalog, much of which still can be found under the A&M banner. In 1990, the band Green Day included a letter from then-I.R.S. college radio rep Lori Blumenthal in one of their last cassette releases for Lookout Records. The letter expressed IRS' interest in signing the band to the label. A reply letter from Lookout, also included in the cassette artwork, deemed I.R.S. a "cheesy" and "washed up" record label, and they expressed their loyalty to Lookout! Records.
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Pop music is a genre of popular music which originated in its modern form in the 1950s, deriving from rock and roll. The terms popular music and pop... music are often used interchangeably, even though the former is a description of music which is popular , whilst the latter is a specific genre containing qualities of mass appeal. As a genre, pop music is very eclectic, often borrowing elements from other styles including urban, dance, rock, Latin and country; nonetheless, there are core elements which define pop. Such include generally short-to-medium length songs, written in a basic format , as well as the common employment of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and catchy hooks. So-called "pure pop" music, such as power pop, features all these elements, utilising electric guitars, drums and bass for instrumentation; in the case of such music, the main goal is usually that of being pleasurable to listen to, rather than having much artistic depth.
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Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy... and southeastern American folk music. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjoes, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles such as violins, and harmonicas. The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres. In 2009 Country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and second most popular in the morning commute. Immigrants to the Maritime Provinces and Southern Appalachian Mountains of North America brought the music and instruments of the Old World along with them for nearly 300 years.
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Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has... its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music with a 4/4 beat utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
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