Website tag: Z

Zac F

Born as Zacharias Fotiou, Zac F began his mixing career at late 80’s moving through disco and funk to house and hip-hop in famous clubs in Athens and Santorini. At the same time being a musician, soon drove him to music production and remixing.
2005 started his collaboration with Planetworks, making tracks for a lot of best selling compilations such as La Suite, Sunset & Sunrise, Remix, Enigma Wet and Seduction. On La Suite 3 the track ‘Lover’s Come’ appeared, which was based on Kim Wilde’s Cambodia.
In 2007 he released his debut album A Night at the Port. It was followed by A Night at the Port II (2011) and The Sound of Everything.
Zac F made remixes for Eartha Kitt, Claude Challe, 18 Summers Later, Dreamers Inc and many others.


Zaadnoordijk, Roel

Roel Zaadnoordijk was born in 1955 and grew up in Leiden (Netherlands). He started playing the organ at 14 years old. He experimented with tape recorders to record sounds of falling trash cans and flutes made of beer bottles. His parents didn’t want him to start a career in music, so he didn’t get a formal education at the conservatory. But his passion for music remained, and soon he was recording tunes for companies and radio stations.

Using the synthesizer, he created dozens of CD’s with cover versions of popular songs, using the aliases Richard Romance Synthesizer Section, Gino Marinello Orchestra and Raoul. His instrumental versions of Kids in America and Cambodia appeared on various CD’s.

These days he is the owner of DailyChannelTV.com.


Zig & Zag

Zig and Zag are two puppets, who made their television début on Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ)’s TV show The Den. Apparently extraterrestrials from the Planet Zog, Zig and Zag visited Ireland, decided to stay and were adopted by Ian Dempsey (and later re-adopted by Ray D’Arcy). They brought an alien dog called Zuppy with them.

Zig was beige with red “zogabongs” (pom-poms) and Zag was purple with green spots and yellow zogabongs and dreadlocks. Zag was portrayed as a lecherous lady-killer, whereas Zig was portrayed as a weak-willed childish simpleton, constantly giggling at rude jokes, and frequently unaware of what was going on around him. Their image was boosted by highly successful comic books and their number 1 selling parody song albums. Their biggest musical success was the single “Them girls”, which made the charts in a few European countries.

After having worked on The Den for a number of years, Zig and Zag worked concurrently on The Big Breakfast, then eventually left The Den to work on the show exclusively. On this, they acted as interviewers and were less restrained with their language and actions. It was also on The Big Breakfast where they had regular chats with Kim Wilde. This started in the summer of 1993 when Kim visited the programme to do promotion for If I Can’t Have You, then during her weeklong presentation residence they were colleagues. Kim kept visiting the programme until 1996. While Kim was on Tommy, Zig & Zag did a one-off TV special entitled ‘Zig & Zag’s Dirty Deeds’, in which Kim also appeared briefly.

After a revamp of The Big Breakfast, they were dropped and produced a small number of episodes of an even more risqué show for ITV before returning to Ireland to present a music quiz called 2Phat with Ray D’Arcy, their “father” from their later years on The Den.

The last series of 2Phat ended in 2001, and the brothers returned to The Big Breakfast during its last month of production in 2002 in an unsuccessful attempt to save the programme from being axed.

Ciaran Morrison and Mick O’Hara, who provided the voices for Zig and Zag respectively], have gone on to produce a TV series for Channel 4 in 2004, The Bronx Bunny Show, and regularly appear on RTÉ Two in their current incarnations of Podge and Rodge.


Zieger, Petra

Born 25 March 1959 in Erfurt (Germany). She started performing in 1976 with a big band in Erfurt. She met her partner Peter Taudte, who was drummer in this band. When he became drummer with the rock band Phonoclecs, Zieger was engaged as their singer. She had her first TV performance in 1981 with a cover version of Chequered Love. It was released on a compilation album called ‘Some Broken Hearts Never Mend’, and subsequently on a four track EP, both released by the state-run record company Amiga in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Aside from ‘Chequered Love’, Petra has always sung in German, which makes this recording a rare find, even for Petra Zieger fans.

In 1984, Petra moved to Berlin and started a career of her own. Petra Zieger & Band released albums in the GDR, but when Germany was reunited in 1989, she also started releasing singles. The first single, ‘Das Eis Taut’ (‘The Ice Melts’) was a big success partly because the lyric was about the tearing down of the Berlin wall. In 2006, Petra started her own record label P2P music. The 2007 album ‘Nimm Mich’ became the first independently released album for Petra, and also her most successful one so far.

Petra Zieger finally met Kim Wilde on 2 July 2011 when both of them performed live in Landsberg (Germany).