Artist · chart history · #245 in alternative artist polls
Art of Noise
Band London United Kingdom Active 1983–2000
Art of Noise formed in 1983 in London, United Kingdom and was active until 2000. Art of Noise has 51 chart appearances on 34 radio countdowns from 11 stations on RockLists, spanning 1984–2024. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Peter Gunn”, which appears on 17 lists with a best position of #80. The station that charted Art of Noise most often is Fred (XM 44) (XM Satellite Radio (national)), with 11 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1986.
Art of Noise came out of London in 1983 with no faces, no frontman and a sound that made the rest of the synth-pop pack look like they were still tuning up. The lineup read like the credits on the back of a sleeve, because that is what it was: engineer and producer Gary Langan, programmer J. J. Jeczalik, keyboard player and arranger Anne Dudley, producer Trevor Horn and, stirring the theory pot, music journalist Paul Morley. They sold themselves as a non-group, an art project with the people deliberately smudged out of the picture.
What they actually made was mostly instrumental: melodic collages stitched together on the digital sampler, a machine that was brand new, and they wielded it like a scalpel and a sledgehammer at once. The Into Battle With the Art of Noise EP gave the world the stuttering Beat Box and the drifting, gorgeous Moments In Love, and the first album, (Who's Afraid of) The Art of Noise?, carried the clattering Close (to the Edit).
Horn and Morley were gone by 1985, but Dudley, Jeczalik and Langan kept the machines humming, and the trio's twanging, sample-blasted take on Peter Gunn won a Grammy in 1986. A cover of Kiss with Tom Jones hollering over the top became an international hit too, and In No Sense? Nonsense! added a Dragnet of their own. Langan left in 1987, and Dudley and Jeczalik ran out the decade before calling it a day. Horn, Morley and Dudley regrouped with Lol Creme in 1998 for one last run that ended in 2000.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Art of Noise on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peter Gunn | 17 | #80 | – | 1986 | |
| 2 | Close (to the Edit) | 13 | #49 | – | 1984 | |
| 3 | Moments In Love | 6 | #59 | – | – | |
| 4 | Paranoimia | 3 | #72 | – | 1986 | |
| 5 | Kiss | 1 | #223 | – | – | |
| 6 | Dragnet '88 | 2 | #1224 | – | – | |
| 7 | Legs | 3 | #90 | – | 1986 | |
| 8 | Dragnet | 1 | #70 | – | 1987 | |
| 9 | Beat Box | 3 | #480 | – | – | |
| 10 | Paranoima | 1 | #2012 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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