Jean-Jacques Burnel eat your heart out! Zeus B Held is the real European Man. As a musician and a producer he's been in and out and round about bands who have had hits just about everywhere from Germany to France, Italy and Austria and other places you couldn't afford to see on holiday and wouldn't want to anyway cos the food's dodgy.

I'll be surprised if you've heard about most of the foreign stuff to which Herr Held has turned his hand. I certainly hadn't before we met. And even now I'm not sure I believe names like Birth Control, Locomotive, Wolf Man, Gina X, The Rockets, Lillidrop, Der Krupps, The Visitors and others. The thought of German Reggae with French lyrics — sort of Rasta Alsace — or an electroItalian boogie version of Canned Heat's On The Road Again fill me with a sense of grim foreboding.

But there's no denying the success which made Zeus Held's bank manager smile as he pointed him in the direction of London, England in 1982. Where electronic Rock pioneers like Fashion's Dee Harris and John Foxx were already beckoning. And, as we all know, the streets and the studios are paved in gold.

Or shag pile carpet if you're talking about Utopia which is the place the German gentleman and myself met up late one weary afternoon in March. In the three years he's been working in Britain, Zeus B Held has produced a good clutch of albums and singles, the most notable and successful being Fashion's Fabrique LP and Dead Or Alive's That's The Way I Like It from the Sophisticated Boom Boom collection on CBS Epic. When we spoke, Held was at the tail end of a busy schedule which had involved finishing off album and single projects with Ellery Bop, This Island Earth and Ian Dury's old sidekick Chas Jankel, as well as adding the required overdubs to some Dead Or Alive tracks up for 12" remix. So, after I've cracked the obligatory joke about Held Chords, the German keyboards player, we should cut the cackle and get down to some serious conversation. After all, this is a man up to his eyes in serious business. Zeus, the floor is yours.

"I find everything is far more professional over here than it is back in Germany," he says in a heavy accent which still cannot disguise a laudable command of the English language. "Even on the business side of things there is a certain sense of creativity, I think. People are worrying and thinking much more about the end of the job than they do at home. Certainly in Germany there are some good guys who work non-stop. But their attitude is much more..."

Held's shrug speaks for itself. And out loud I doubt whether the same could possibly be said of German studios. Bearing in mind all we've ever been told in the Audi adverts about their national pride in precision engineering and their attention to detail...

"You have to remember that in Germany if people do something they do it to extremes. It can be very bad. But as far as studio technology goes, you're right. We have some great studios and some of the best engineers in the world. But there comes a point when you're making a record where you need to be fresh, flexible and Funky. That's when you run into problems. As a producer or a musician in a band you might want to put something really weird down and you don't really know what will happen and what it'll sound like. In Germany the engineer might very well turn round to you and say 'Look, I studied five years Physics at the Tonmeister school in Nuremburg. Don't tell me to do that! It just won't work because it's going to be out-of-phase, and afterwards it will have a sub-sonic tone which will give you terrible trouble at the cut.' I say, 'Forget it. Just do it.'

"Those kinds of arguments you just don't have working in England because there's been a more natural development between the music business and the studio business. People go into the studio here to be creative and so there is a bigger chance for the technofreaks to make money developing more toys for the studio. Just look at Solid State and AMS. Great stuff. But in Germany they're more conventional."

Maybe you already sense a paradox in the wind. Zeus B Held, after all, has built his reputation as an arranger and a synthesizer programmer, in the most modern and hippest dance idiom this side of the Atlantic. A man you'd expect to be in cahoots with his engineers. But it's worth remembering that he cut his own engineering and production teeth in a damp Cologne cellar eight track with Germany's Class of '78 New Wave hopefuls knocking out entire albums in a weekend for obscure German independents. Before that, 10 years in one of the country's top Progressive bands, Birth Control, had seen him on the other side of the glass in some very different, very up-market places.

"Birth Control were a Berlin band and we did six albums in the time I was in them. The band was very big in Germany, but they never really broke internationally. I used to do a lot of session work too and I played a lot with Can. They had their own studio in an old cinema, which was really interesting by the way. It was all in one big room. There were no false walls, the desk was in the middle of the room. They'd put screens round the drums and the piano and sometimes you had to work on headphones. It was a very stimulating atmosphere. I did some sessions there with Holger Czukay playing bass at about the time he was making his Movies album. In fact I remember taking cassettes of that album to Midem one year to see if we could get him a deal. But it was ahead of its time because he did what David Byrne did on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, only he did it first. You know, taking bits from the radio and cutting it up with the music. Nobody could handle it then."

But back to that cellar, which soon turned 16 track, presenting Held with the ideal opportunity to hone his skills with the echo sends and the patchbay. A number of regional European hits soon followed — including that dreaded Eurodisco version of On The Road Again — as Zeus B Held developed the knack of injecting just the right amount of chilled magic into the warm and reassuring moods which pulls your average European to his feet. He finally hit a creative peak with a girl called Gina X and an album called Performance. Reminiscent in atmosphere, if not much more, to David Cunningham's Flying Lizards project, Performance was well-received in Britain and a single, No Grey Dark Man reached Number 60 in the UK charts. It also reached the ears of Fashion's Dee Harris, who remembered it a couple of years later when his own band had forsaken the independent aegis of Miles Copeland's Step Forward/Illegal axis and signed to Arista. Held was asked to produce the resultant Fabrique album — and when it was finally released in 1982, there he was, rocketted into the Top 10, touching the pulse of the great British unwashed with the dance single Street Player. As great an achievement surely as the Eye Talk with which he managed to keep a now Harris-less Fashion afloat on CBS almost two years later. Did those chart positions over here fulfil any of Held's ambitions?

Happened

"No. Not really. I never planned to have success in England and to come here. It just happened."

I had asked why it was that the bulk of records released in Continental Europe sound to be little more than sequenced electronic soma to the point where FR David represents a very real aesthetic. Held nodded in agreement.

"It all has to do with what you hear on the radio. What you hear on the radio traditionally. In France and Germany it's much more a progressive middle of the road music in their own language. So it's not particularly Bluesy. It comes from a more chanson point of view. So the whole phrasing is different and the chords change differently. We only got the Blues and Rock 'n' Roll filtered through Britain while you have had it all the time. And Rock is based on the English language too. So in Europe they have much more to rely on the melody and the sound. That's why bands like Talk Talk are so big in Europe, because they have their finger on the trigger for melodies. And as an instrumentalist anyway I always care much more about the melodies and the sounds than I care about lyrics."

So you sit there adding a twist to the tale and fizz to the formula, eh? I laughed but suddenly the leather-suited Held got serious again. 'He came over All German' as Deevoy might say.

"There you have to bring in the word Culture. Still, in France and Germany Rock music is considered an 'Art Form'. You get: the Theatre; Films; Novels; Rock and so on. Like categories. So the uncommercial bands get very serious about their art because they never think about trying to please anybody but themselves. They do it for a small circle. It's quite healthy sometimes but at other times you listen and you say 'Do we really need this?' Combine that with the sort of things you'd hear on the radio and I think you hit a right balance. It's good to take an element of those weirder things and put it in the middle of a straightforward Pop song. It makes it come alive."

Zeus certainly did that for Pete Burns' Dead or Alive. After almost 10 despairing years shaping up as the next Screaming Lord Sutch; moaning that his image had been raped by both Adam Ant and Boy George, Liverpool Lime Street's wildest tribal gender bender suddenly saw an opening in the Hi Energy gay club scene and went for it. With a vengeance. That's The Way I Like It, the old KC and the Sunshine Band stomper, was the first hit and Held produced it. Since then the Burns Boys have moved to the Hazel Dean/Gary Glitter team of Stock and Aitken. And with them Dead Or Alive hauled You Spin Me Round to Number One earlier this year after a gruelling four months on release. Theoretically, of course, Zeus B Held could have produced that record too. But it didn't appear to worry him one way or the other.

"Dead Or Alive had a very fixed idea of what they wanted to do. They want this market they've got. That's why they feel so strong. And I accept that. We had a good co-operation. But I think Pete Burns has the voice to move into other areas. Not opera perhaps, but with a patch of other sounds behind him. I heard the demo and it was perfect. The voice blows through the speakers. I liked the aggression and maybe I should have made the album more Poppy. But we all felt happy with it. And ultimately I'm only the producer with a clear task: to try and give the band and the artist the sound and shape and colour that he will really go for. Not to sell him a suit he won't feel comfortable with".