Who approached you concerning work on the new album?
"It was one of those coincidental things. I've got an agent called Steven Budd who was contacted by Mute Records. He looks after different producers and he was ringing up for another act at Mute. Erasure just happened to be in the office at the time. They'd been looking for a producer for ages."
"Various people had been approached and for various reasons it had not worked out and somebody mentioned that I was a producer. They weren't even aware that I produced records, which is quite strange as I've been quite well known as a producer for a while. And as it turns out, I think Vince is a bit of a fan of the original Human League, and so it sort of appealed to him".
"I think it appealed to him, getting back to basics, as it were, working with somebody who started off with synthesizers, with the same background, and I was very flattered to hear that "Being Boiled" was one of the most influential singles he had bought. I just thought, 'This is a marriage made in heaven", because usually you have to work with people who you've really not got much in common with and it's just on a professional level, but myself and Vince, from a musical point of view, are very similar, and Andy's just a sweetheart!
"So anyway, we had a meeting. They'd been up all night, which was funny. I thought, 'I'm going to get on well with these people!' It was a strange meeting because Daniel was there, and I'd never met him before, which is astonishing because myself and Daniel, it transpires, started off our careers as synthesists within 3 months of each other, with the Human League and the Normal, so we're very similar to each other in a lot of respects. I'm amazed that I've never met him before, considering his office is literally 1/4 mile from here (his flat) and also Virgin (the record company who released the Human League, BEF & Heaven 17) is very close by. You just don't bump into people, I suppose."
"That's how we met and I couldn't believe it was all so straight forward, because obviously it's a very important gig to get and I would have probably done it if they'd have not paid me anything (don't tell them that!) because it's such an honour to be working with them."
And it's important for them to get the right producer as well.
"Yes, of course. Vince works on a very intuitive level. He has to feel comfortable with the people he's working with. There are a lot of producers around who are very egotistical. I acknowledge that I've got as many weaknesses as anybody else, but I think if you approach something with the right spirit, you end up with something that's got a bit of heart about it."
At what point does the producer get involved?
"Right from the word 'Go'! It's not a matter of selecting musicians, because Vince does it all, and Andy writes all the vocal melodies and vocal arrangements. I helped him with the vocal arrangements and I helped Vince selecting sounds. We discuss the arrangements of the tracks, so the structure of the tracks is as much me as Vince, but I mean, Vince is a very good songwriter. He knows what he's doing, and it's a pleasure to work with him. It's not like producing some band who've never been produced before - he knows his way round exactly.
"We've worked with several engineers on the album. We started off with a guy called Andy Houston, who's a young engineer friend of mine, who I thought it'd be good to give a break to, and he did the first stage in Amsterdam, in Vince's studio, which was basically some rough backing tracks.
"Then we went to Dublin for what was supposed to be 3 weeks, but turned out to be five, I think, with another engineer called Al Stone, who's another contact of mine, a very good engineer, who unfortunately had to go and do something else in the middle of the album. Then, as luck would have it, we got Phil Legg in, who's worked with Erasure previously on "Crackers International" and earlier than that, and who I did the Terence Trent D'Arby album with ("The Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby"), so there's an automatic connection. We love him to death, he's great."
"Phil's done the rest of the album, he's mixing the album with us now. He's a vital part of it, really, he's not just a 'knob twiddler', he's like a right-hand man. If you're ever stuck for ideas, he comes up with ideas, because he does production himself, and arrangement. He's trained himself up to Level 7 on the Piano. He's taking his exam in the middle of the mixing actually!"
Where was the album recorded?
"In Amsterdam first, then we did some more vocals in the Church studios in Crouch End, then yet more vocals in Vince's studio in Chertsey, where we did all the backing tracks from scratch after all the vocals were recorded. We started at the beginning of September, so the whole thing will be 6 months."
Is that about average?
"No, not for me. Normally it would be four, but you've got to get Andy out of bed in the morning!
"The idea on this album, which is completely different from any of the other Erasure albums, is that we wanted to do all the vocal arrangements first, and then do the proper backing tracks afterwards. It's very interesting. I've never done an album like that."
Whose decision was that?
"That was between Vince & Andy. I think they'd always felt that Andy's always been put on the tracks previously as almost like an afterthought, when the track's already finished as a piece of music and then Andy just fits in where he can. Whereas what we wanted to do on this album was to actually build the tracks around Andy's voice, which isatotally different approach, and I think it's paid off, coz he sounds great. Comparing it with previous Erasure albums, I think his voice sounds fantastic. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I?"
If somewhere in the making of a track, you realise it could be a single, is it treated in a different way from an album track?
"I personally don't. The only thing it affects is the length, but Vince & Andy tend to write very short pop songs anyway. That's what they do for a living. They're not really into grandiose epics. "To be honest, we've got a couple of epics on this album, probably more epic than anything they've ever done. One of them features the St Patrick's choir in Dublin. This was just an idea I had one day, because I'd read about it in a Dublin guide book."
"St Patrick's is a huge cathedral and every day at 5.45 the 40 piece boys choir sing for 20 minutes. The church is almost empty, because it's a Protestant church in the middle of Dublin, which is predominantly Catholic. The choirmaster, when I rang him up, said, 'Oh yes, sometimes there's nobody there, but we still do it'. Usually there's about 10 people there or something, and it holds 500. So I thought, what an amazing thing! And it just struck me that one of the tracks, which is going to be called "So The Story Goes", sounded like a hymn. And you know that Andy used to be a choir boy at one time. The chords lent itself to it, it's just like a hymn, so I thought, what a great idea, getting the choir on it! I mean, you don't want it to sound like St Winifred's School Choir or something, but provided it's done in a serious manner, not tongue-in-cheek, I think it could work, and it did!
"Apart from the length (but most of them are single length anyway) myself & Vince & Andy are all very fond of pop music. It's not like a difficult thing for us to make pop music, I mean, in other words, we all try to cram as many hooks & what-have-you into the three and half minutes. We like that discipline, so it's not a difficult thing. It's not like, 'Oh God, we've got a bunch of album tracks, what on earth are we going to do for a single?'! I mean, I really honestly think that probably 7 out of the 10 songs we've done could be singles!"
With the "Chorus" album, Erasure made definite ground rules to make it sound different from previous albums, ie no drum machines, no MIDI etc. Was there anything you definitely wanted or didn't want in this album?
"There are no drum machines and no samples of any description on this album at all. It's all from Vince's analogue machines or Andy's voice. Andy does all the backing vocals apart from the two tracks with the choir on."
So it's similar equipment to the previous album and the last tour really?
"Yeah, except that for the first time ever, Vince has actually got all his equipment working and installed in a purpose built studio, whereas before, he may have had more or less the same amount of equipment, but it wasn't all set up at any onetime. We had such flexibility, it was an amazing thing. This album, in theory, shouldn't sound like anyone else. There can't be anybody else with the combination of instruments that he's got, for a start."
"I mean I think Vince is brilliant, I've never worked with anybody like him. Mozartian! He thinks about music in kind of interweaving monophonic lines, like those little things that classical composers do. Maybe in a more simplistic way. perhaps, but it's still a major talent to be able to do that with melody. It's not to be underestimated."
And it's particularly appropriate to the equipment that he's using.
"Yes, exactly! I mean, the palette is more sophisticated than we had at the time, but it's not dis similar to the kind of thing we did with the Human League early on. It was all monophonic synths. Vince doesn't even like using polyphonic synths really. He doesn't like playing chords or anything, although I managed to persuade him on a couple of songs. He tries to arpeggiate everything.
"I definitely wanted Andy to do all the BVs (backing vocals), coz I think he's got a great voice and I don't think it's ever really been fully exploited. He's got several voices, you know, and one of the things we've exploited this time round is his falsetto, which has been used before, but it's not really been featured. There are 2 or 3 tracks on this album where he's singing in quite a sweet high voice, which I think really suits him. I find it amazing to work with someone with such a voice..."
In your opinion, how does this album rate compared with the others which have gone before it?
"I think somehow it's more varied. It's got more variation within it than some of the previous albums. That's not knocking the previous albums because they're all excellent. I don't like albums that sound the same from start to finish, I get bored, and I don't like putting on albums as wallpaper music. I don't think it's fair on the artist because of all the effort that people put into them. I like to listen to things, and I appreciate the details that people put into things, you know."
"This album, I feel, has probably had more musical work done on it than just about any of the previous albums. I mean, there's more 'content', if you know what I mean. It went through more stages than probably any of the other albums, so it's a richer cake, if you like, but hopefully not losing the beauty of their simplicity as well. There's more detail on it, little things coming in here and there. I think it will reward anybody over a period of time. It's not built just as the latest Erasure album, it's meant to be listened to and not sound out of date in five years' time."
You can go back to it in 5 years and hear things maybe you didn't hear before.
"Yes, that's the idea. That's what we're aiming for. And the thing is, because Erasure are a fantastic pop group, there's a tendency to think they bring an album out every 18 months, and they have two or three hit singles from quite a nice album, and then you wait for the next one. But I just don't do albums on that basis, I just never have done. I like to think that people are still listening to the early Human League albums and the early Heaven 17 albums, and you know, maybe even the Terence Trent O'Arby album doesn't age as much as people think."
"I mean we had a Heaven 17 mini-revival last Christmas with "Temptation", and people were saying, 'God, this sounds great!' and people were still going out and buying the records. That's always been a big thing for me: I like albums that you can come back to year after year. Obviously, Erasure are going to move on to different things, but I think this should be a definitive statement of what they're about now. Whether we've achieved it or not, only time will tell..."
Do you have a particular favourite track?
"Um well, four of them haven't been mixed yet, so it's tricky to telt how they're going to turn out. But of the ones we've done so far, I liked "Blues Away", which is quite soul-y, which is my 'bag' as well as the electronic bag. There's something unique about it. The single ("Always") I really like. Good isn't it?! Great vocal arrangements, Andy sounds really powerful. I think his voice really stands up well to that examination. It's so melodic, it's just one of those classic singles. But I mean, whichever the second single is going to be, it's going to be an amazing second single, I tell you! I mean, if people thought they were losing it from the point of view of the fast thing, the track that we start mixing today, which is going to be called "Run To The Sun", is just absolutely incredible! It has that high energy feel, with beautiful melodies. It sounds like Donna Summer or Sparks stuff that Giorgio Moroder produced in the late 70s early 80s but super 90s high tech. I can't really describe it any better than that. It's almost like an "I Feel Love" or something in that vein, which I think really suits Andy's voice particularly. That's more than likely going to be the second single.
"I just mixed the one with the choir yesterday, and that sounds astonishing! I don't think Erasure's sounded like that ever, because we've got this weird thing where I told the choir that I wanted them to go wandering off into a different key at the end. It sounded sort of unearthly - we've got the track fading down at the end and the choir carry on, and it's just heading off into the heavens. It's just an amazing, amazing ending, and it's all recorded with the natural reverb of the church as well. It just sounds like nothing else you've ever heard, well, nothing that I've ever heard. If that doesn't shock people, nothing will!"
What were V & A like to work with?
"They're the best people I've ever worked with. My favourite people I've ever worked with, ever! I'll miss them when we've finished, I really will. "I think Vince and Andy are capable of expanding what they do from here. I think that now that Vince is settled in Chertsey, they're going to go onto do some amazing things, I really do.
"I just think that they're amazing human beings... Considering how much success they've had, Vince is as down to earth a person as you're likely to meet, well, Andy is as well..."
And he's as head in the clouds as he's always was!
"Yes, head in the clouds, feet on the ground! I sometimes think that money doesn't mean anything to him, I really do, he's such a spiritual person. Whereas Vince is really earthy, I mean I'm sure he is spiritual in there, but he hides it well. You know what I mean, he's really practical.
"They are the perfect yin & yang combination. They are opposites, but perfectly complimentary, like the two ends of a magnet."
Thanks to Jonathans Grant and Russell for their lists of questions to put to Martyn Ware.