ZTT Records

 ( British Record Labels ) 

The majority of the creative team at ZTT had first assembled when Horn produced the album The Lexicon of Love for the British Pop music band ABC. A precursor to ZTT was the short-lived Perfect Recordings 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, along with the singles derived from it.

In 1983, Horn, Sinclair and Paul Morley founded ZTT Records. Sinclair was ZTT's managing director, while Morley concentrated on marketing. In the same year, Sinclair and Horn acquired Basing Street Studios from Island Records in exchange for distributing the ZTT label.

ZTT's first signing was Frankie Goes to Hollywood, whose hits "Relax" and "Two Tribes" were among the best-selling singles of the decade. "Relax" became the label's first number one single in January 1984, and stayed on the UK Singles Chart for a full year. During the 1980s, Grace Jones and Art of Noise were other ZTT acts to chart. ZTT also helped define the structure and formats of the UK pop music scene; as part of their marketing efforts to prolong the life of a single release, ZTT issued multiple 12" remixes which charted at positions in their own right as a separate 12" single. ZTT also licensed or produced T-shirts with graphic messages related to its artists' singles (eg. Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed), which themselves became 1980s icons.

In 1984, the Horn-Sinclair family businesses were reorganised as SPZ Group, which then consisted of Sarm West Studios, Perfect Songs, and ZTT Records. From the beginning, the majority of ZTT releases were published by Perfect Songs, and recorded at Sarm West Studios. The latter part of the decade was eclipsed by a bitter legal battle between ZTT and Holly Johnson, who fought his way out of the strict, long recording agreement.

By the late 1980s, ZTT began to focus on the emerging dance music scene. Manchester trance group 808 State would reach the top 10 with Pacific State, and three other singles and one album during the early 1990s. Seal was the next major ZTT act to emerge in the 1990s, and the label also achieved hits with MC Tunes and Shades of Rhythm.

ZTT Records have produced forty-five Top 40 hits in the United Kingdom, fifteen of which were Top 10 Hit record.

In May 2022, UMG released a new album by Propaganda vocalists Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag on the reactivated ZTT label. Credited to xPropaganda, The Heart Is Strange was recorded with producer Stephen Lipson, and received a generally positive reception.

The label's work in the visual field was profiled by Tony Enoch in Design Week, who positioned ZTT as "from a time when a record label meant something – a happening, a sense of belonging. Labels defined people's youth. Think Apple, Virgin, Beggar's Banquet, ZTT, and Stiff: small, independent British labels appearing to be able to do anything they wanted, reinventing the rules."

In 2008, journalist Ian Peel curated a first exhibition of ZTT sleeve art for galleries in London and Tokyo, and in 2013, he curated the visual archives of ZTT and Sarm West Studios before the studios were demolished. In 2009, Peel compiled a DVD of the labels' most acclaimed videos, entitled The Television Is Watching You, which received a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 15 Certificate.

The Action Series paused in 1988, and was restarted by record label manager Ian Peel in 2012.

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