Track Listing

1. Dream within a dream
2. The murder of love
3. Jewel
4. Duel
5. Frozen faces
6. P-machinery
7. Sorry for laughing
8. Dr. mabuse
9. The chase
10. Strength to dream

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7341 in Music
• Released on: 2000-02-06
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

My reflection of the 80's
If you listened to Annie Nightingale on a Sunday night you would have heard Dr Mabuse regularly. So I bought the 12 inch. When the Album was released I bought it. ZTT were one of the music labels that were just 80's cool. And if you watched Channel 4 American Football Jewell covered the plays of the week.

20 odd years later this is an album I still play. Some feels a bit dated........(wait, the good bit is coming soon) especially D Mabuse, and the weakest tracks are Murder of Love and Sorry For Laughing, but it's not too embarrasing to play to your teenage daughters.

So if you are 50, or 40, or 30, or teens give this one a whirl

There are some real jewels in it.

ZZT masterpiece
ZZT Records had great success in the 1980,s with Frankie Goes To Hollywood but after journalist Paul Morley had signed the group to Trevor Horns label it was Dusseldorf band Propaganda who made the finest album ever to be released on it. A Secret Wish released in July 1985 does,nt quite encapsulate Morley's vision of the band as a twisted version of Abba but their stentorian fusion of synth-pop , electronic funk and neo-classical futurism sounded thrillingly contemporary ( It has also dated very well) and had tunes that would crack a titanium walnut.
The band had already released the single "Dr Mabuse" (Named after a character in a Fritx Lang movie) which had reached no 27 in the U.K. charts before the release of the album and while its inky black rhythmic arrangement and juddering keyboards gave a delicious portent of what the album would be like , only a true psychic could have envisaged some of the delights A Secret Wish would unfurl.
The follow up single the magnificent "Duel" took the band into pop territory though it retained the trademark plump bass lines and dynamic stabbing keyboards. Lyrically "Duel" was an altogether darker beast with its chorus about "You start bleeding , i start screaming". The lyrics were down to "conceptualist" Ralf Dorper who operated strictly behind the scenes , never touring or appearing live with the rest of the group.
Final single "P Machinery" is in truth one of the albums weaker tracks , though that's weaker in a comparative sense. Certainly when you put it up against "Sorry For Laughing" or "Murder Of Love" where the keyboards attain a real cinematic gleam it palls slightly. Opening track "Dream Within A Dream", "Jewel" and the closing "The Last Word/ The Strength To Dream" are more extended instrumental work outs that occasionally approach ambient( "The Last Word " is an instrumental remix of "Dr Mabuse") with their appropriately reverie like tones and textures. There are spoken passages ( "The Strength To Dream" ,s opening line is from the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Dream Within A Dream") but unusually for spoken passages they never skirt the edges of the ridiculous.
A Secret Wish is not only a hugely enjoyable album but surreptitiously an influential one as well. It,s in many ways a perspicacious progenitor for the dance music that would become so popular in the late 80,s / early 90,s. Certainly i can hear their influence on bands like Underworld, The Disco Evangelists, Fluke and Leftfield. The band continue on in various forms till this day , even appearing together on German TV in 2007 performing an edited version of "Dr Mabuse". As i alluded earlier it still sounded like the future now. Looks like that wish came true.

An all time classic
One of my favourite albums, but unfortunately the CD version contains remixes of some of the songs that were on the original cassette version, and the cassette versions are better, so you might want to look around for the cassette as well.
When you compare the brilliance of this to the rubbish that's in the charts nowadays, it's like chalk and cheese.
Buy this album if you like anything from the 80s, preferably the cassette version...