Erasure returns to their roots
Synth-pop pioneers Erasure celebrate a quarter of a century together this year with the release of the triumphant new album Tomorrow’s World.
The record sees the duo — studio boffin Vince Clarke and flamboyant frontman Andy Bell — hand production duties to British electro-pop wunderkind Frankmusik, who was born only six months before the 1986 release of Erasure’s debut album.
“There were a few people suggested for the producing duties, some of them quite big names, but Frank was championed by the fans of Erasure, and he was my instinctive choice,” Bell told the Star Observer from Orlando, Florida, where he and Clarke were midway through an American tour.
“He loves ’80s music. We’d already written about 25 tracks, but Frank really manipulated them and turned them into something else entirely.”
Indeed, the high-octane sound of album highlights like the swirling house track Fill Us With Fire and the anthemic lead single When I Start To (Break It All Down) suggest Frankmusik brought the pair back to their ’80s club roots.
“Definitely. My heart’s in minimal electronic club music, and I think my last solo record [2010’s Non-Stop] was very much in that vein. It was really a stepping stone towards doing more of a club record with Erasure, thanks to Frank.”
It remains to be seen whether the revilatised sound will return them to the levels of success experienced in their glory days — Erasure landed an incredible five number one UK albums in a row from 1988 to 1994. Bell said that, at 47, he was comfortable leaving his chart-topping days in the past.
“It’s all so competitive now in the UK, and so dependent on being on TV — if you’re not on it, it’s not going to happen, really. We just kind of do our own thing,” he said.
“We had our run from the late ’80s until the mid-’90s. At the time we didn’t even think about it, because we were so young and so busy. It was only once it slowed down we appreciated it all.
“Besides, Vince and I have always been down-to-earth and independent in spirit. We’ve never really had any huge marketing machine behind us, which keeps it more real — it’s just us, doing the hard slog.”
And has been for 25 years — their happy union made all the more remarkable given the duo formed from the ashes of Clarke’s short-lived stints in Depeche Mode and Yazoo.
Bell talks about his working relationship with his musical partner (who is straight and has been happily married since 2004) as though it were a marriage.
“When we met, Vince was really ready to settle down with another person, another songwriter. Those teams don’t come along very often, and I think because I was such a fan of Vince’s, I just really wanted to learn from him.
“Also, our first album [1986’s Wonderland] didn’t do so well, so we really had to work for it. I think that bonded us together as Erasure. Vince was very ambitious, and I desperately wanted to be a pop singer.”
It’s a job he’s excelled at, becoming something of a gay icon in the process thanks to his unapologetically open, playful attitude to his own sexuality. Who could forget the sight of Bell and Clarke, dragged up like Frida and Agnetha in the videos to accompany their camp-as-tits 1991 ABBA covers EP, Abba-esque?
“We were very lucky when Erasure started — [being gay] was a very hip thing at the time, thanks to Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But it seems like not much has changed. People seem to come out and then disappear. The whole music business is so corporate, and there are so many gay artists where it’s still kept hush-hush. To be honest, I just get fed up with it.
“Who knows, maybe in 20 years time when we have a gay president everything will all come out like WikiLeaks!”
Bell ‘came out’ all over again in 2004 when he publicly announced that he was HIV-positive and had been since 1998. He acknowledged that, even in 2011, revealing one’s HIV status still posed something of a risk for a celebrity.
“It is quite taboo, but I can understand as it’s such a personal thing. It’s up to each person. For a lot of people, it is a really private issue,” he said.
“But lots of my friends are positive and I just wanted it to be out in the open. I didn’t want to feel like anyone had any dirt on me. Maybe that’s not the right reason to come out about it, but I just hate that feeling of anyone having something on me.
“It was a very freeing thing for me to do.”
INFO: Tomorrow’s World (EMI) out September 30.
