There never had been anything quite like Book of Love, and there hasn't been since, either. Four art school students who found in the Mid-80s downtown scene of New York City a calling to take up the synthesizer and make something magical. It was unheard of at the time, an American synth-pop group, just as it was unheard of to make music for dance clubs about tragic artists or to make music that understood that the dancefloor was like a playground for adults.
They had a great run of Club Chart hits, always selling well enough to remain in the public eye. During their seven-year run, they released four albums, an exquisite array of singles, and opened for Depeche Mode on two of their tours. Exposure in the movies helped (see The Silence of The Lambs or American Psycho), as did a willingness to combine pulsating beats with a liberating sense of whimsy.
In the end, Book of Love went their separate ways. But there's a happy ending to the story, one that found a remix of "Boy," from their first album, topping the club charts in 2001 and introducing a whole new audience to their work. Even better, though, comes the remastering of their entire catalog with bonus tracks (including several of their trend-setting remixes, never before available digitally) and the news that there's a tiny reunion of sorts in the near future.
Principal songwriter/producer Ted Ottaviano talked with dancemusic.about.com recently about the wild and expansive story of Book of Love.
DJ Ron Slomowicz: You had an amazing moment in 1987, when "Modigliani" ended up
both in an episode of Miami Vice and in the John Hughes film Planes,
trains and Automobiles. What was it like to have a song that covered
that much cultural ground?
Ted Ottaviano: I was really thrilled about it because what they both
ended up using was something called the "Requiem Mass", which is a mix
that actually ended up getting included on the CD version of the first
album. But you have to realize that the CD version of our first album
didn't come out until the album had been out about two or three years.
So basically that mix, the "Requiem Mass", was only available on a
twelve-inch piece of vinyl. And it has no beats to it, it's just
purely atmospheric. And I, at that point, had to fight to have that
put on the twelve-inch because I was told that there was no point in
putting a mix on a twelve-inch that people wouldn't dance to. But I
knew Book of Love was different than most other dance acts and that
our audience would appreciate something like that. So I fought to
have it on the twelve-inch, and it ended up coming out and, because of
that mix, that was the juggernaut that kind us in Planes, trains and
Automobiles and on Miami Vice.
So it really sort of proved to the band that we had to sort of stand by kind of our instincts and kind of the way that we think or audience hears our music. In terms of the film and that TV exposure, that Miami Vice episode I remember was AIDS-related so there was something kind of nice about the fact that it kind of dealt with an issue that I knew our audience was sensitive to. I didn't really have that much of an opinion on where or how it was used, but the fact that it was used was very exciting to me.
RS: Very cool. The design component of the Book of Love sleeves,
albums, and 12"s, you all seemed to be very involved with the artwork.
How did you approach that artwork?
Ted Ottaviano: It's funny that you say that, because I was thinking
recently about how the artwork has become almost like incidental now.
We live in a world of audio files and we don't even have places to see
physical products. But the fact that we came from art school, we felt
like we had a responsibility and a duty to make sure that the artwork
was ongoing and that it fit with the music and fit with who we were.
So we usually had a very, very instrumental role in it and sometimes
that meant us just making sure that we oversaw and hired the right
people to do it, but that also sometimes meant doing it ourselves.
As our career went on and we became less focused on the band ourselves, we became less focused on the artwork as well, but those first three albums, we were all over it in terms of the artwork and the twelve-inches and everybody had a shot to actually create content for each one of the albums, which was kind of nice.
RS: As a group you were always very vocal about LGBT issues, from
"Boy," on the first album, all the way to its chart-topping remix
fifteen years later. Along the way you even became the first group to
address safe sex in a pop song ("Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls," on
Lullaby) and then served up those gloriously filthy Mood II Swing "Boy Pop" remixes in the early 90s. Did you ever explicitly decide to be
socially and sexually conscious, or did that just come naturally from
the music that you were making at the time?
Ted Ottaviano: It was kind of trendy back then.
I felt like we were a filter for everything that was around us, and there were certain issues that were really clearly important to us. At that point in the AIDS crisis in the late 80s, so many people in our world were just dropping off, and it was a gay issue and a downtown artists' issue, so we felt like doing what we could on that level. But I don't really know if we ever really, really felt that we specifically had a cause that we felt like we were there to of put across. I never really felt our fan base had anything to do with sexual orientation, I always felt that we were basically the group that, if you were that loner in high school, you know what I mean, because of the fact that you were gay or the fact that you had a weird nose or whatever it was, we were your band. It was about feeling a little bit like disenfranchised, and gay people understand that, I mean it's built into every floorboard that we walk on.
RS: Now as you and Susan are from Philadelphia, what did you make
of Philly's The Dead Milkmen's shout out to you in "Instant Club Hit?"
Ted Ottaviano: Was that the one that was like where they start doing
a litany of slagging off groups?
RS: Yes. "You'll Dance to Anything."
Ted Ottaviano: Yes. I loved it. I mean, it's like It's just, you know.
