ONE DAY
In an effort to get him into the swing of recording again, Daniel Miller had suggested to Vince that he should go back into the studio and record a single in April 1985. The plan was that the single would be a complete one-off, whether successful or not, and so Vince could work without any of the pressures and commitments that had soured his previous projects. "The main reason I wanted to do this single was 'cos I'd done nothing for so long and I was starting to get bored." No 1, 7/85
After auditioning Andy, Vince returned to the studio on the 11th April to record the two tracks needed for the single with Flood. "We already had the backing track recorded, and we were working with this reggae singer. He was a really nice bloke, but was too used to singing in a certain style and found it hard to change. His sense of rhythm was different, it was a good sense of rhythm but it wasn't a reggae song and so it sounded funny. Flood, the producer, had worked with Bourgie Bourgie, so immediately, well, after we'd tried everyone else, we just phoned Paul up." Vince, No 1 7/85, RM 6/85
Paul Ouinn agreed to collaborate on the single, having left the band Bourgie Bourgie midway through recording their first album and about to commence a solo career. "[Paul] : was really easy going. When he came in at the recording, he was really quiet and you had to listen carefully to what he was saying. Never raises his voice." RM 6/85
On the first day of recording (24th April), Vince watched from the mixing room as Paul went into the recording booth carrying what looked like a large, black medicine bag. "He opened it in the recording booth. We couldn't see anything but we could hear the sound of a bottle juggling around. The bag turned out to be full of bottles of wine, he must have had a whole crate in there, and what must have been hundreds of cigarettes. In between takes all you could hear was 'glug glug, puff puff'. It was really funny." RM 6/85, SH 4/85
After spending a grand total of three days together, Vince and Paul had finished the single and filmed a promotional video. The song received considerable airplay and promotion, and for a while it looked as if it would continue Vince's run of success.
"I don't know why they thought of me, but I thought I might as well try it, if only for the free studio time. At first I thought the song was a bit too low-key, but the more I hear it, the better it sounds. It seemed to suit my melancholic crooning quite well... This is the first time I've never had a record played on the radio during the day!" Paul Quinn, No 1 7/85, NME 6/85
Although the single ONE DAY eventually stalled at number 99 in the charts, Vince had enjoyed the experience, which had essentially been a dry-run of the approach he hoped to take with Andy Bell a few weeks later. "One of the best things about working with [Paul] was the fact that he doesn't write himself. People who are writers themselves want to do their own stuff. That's fair enough, but it makes it hard for us if I have already written the song... I discovered that having a laugh and enjoying what you're doing is more important than anything else. We had a great time in the studio. When I'm bored I start slicing the wart on my hand with a razor -you don't feel a thing, it's really weird - But it doesn't happen very often." NME 6/85, MM 4/85 His confidence and enthusiasm restored, Vince relaxed by taking a brief hang-gliding holiday.
By the time ONE DAY was released, work was already well under way on Erasure's first single. "I was hoping the single [One Day] would be a flop, because I thought if it takes off Vince might change his mind and take Paul Ouinn on full time, because I was only on a retainer. I hadn't signed anything and so they could have easily got rid of me." Andy, Radio 1 12/92
Even if the song hadn't flopped, Andy's fears were completely without foundation. "No, I must have failed the audition because somebody else got the job!" Paul Quinn, RM 6/85
Note: Vince and Andy met for the second time on April 25th, when Andy paid an unexpected visit to the studio during the sessions for ONE DAY. "I went down to the studio where they were recording, because Vince had said to pop in any time. I think Vince was really freaked. It was my birthday as well and I was feeling really insecure and I said, 'Oh, it's my birthday', and he didn't know what to do. Did he give me a present? No. Did he sing 'Happy Birthday'? No. We had some pizza." SH 12/86
In the months before the auditions, Vince had also renewed his interest in Reset Records, re-launching the label in a deal with Spartan records. The first release under the new deal was 'TV Glare' by a Depeche Mode-esque North London band Vince had discovered called Absolute, followed by 'Calling All Destroyers' by Robert Marlow (with an embryonic Oh L' Amour style arrangement), a single by Eric Radcliffe's solo project, Hardware, and Reset Records' eighth and final single, 'Can't You See' by Absolute. "I just don't know how producers do it. - People are all for you one minute, and then they're as finicky as hell. It's even worse when you're working with a major label. They're so finicky about every little thing it just isn't true. That part of my life is shelved - permanently!" Vince, IM & RW 4/86
By the time the last single was released Vince was devoting most of his energies towards Erasure and Eric Radcliffe was moving on to produce his own 'funk' band, and so it was decided that the label should be permanently folded. Eric Radcliffe continues to manage Blackwing studios to this day.
At the time it was also reported that Vince had produced a single for 'photographers turned pop stars' (and ONE DAY collaborators) Jamie Morgan and Cameron McVey, although this ultimately never saw release. Seemingly bursting with enthusiasm, Vince also signed up with Jeff Wayne's advertising jingles agency, composing the music for ads for Boots, Volkswagen, Johnson Cotton Buds and smoke detectors, amongst others (whilst in V8Z00 and The Assembly, Vince had occasionally 'moonlighted' for beer money by doing a few jingles for Capital Radio and the theme tunes for The Other Side Of The Tracks, Get Set For Summer, Loose Talk, Trax Trix and Data Run). The adverts would be something to fall back on if the new band didn't work out. "Someone approached me from an agency, I said 'yeah', it sounded like a laugh, and I did maybe four or five a year. It's ideal for me, it really suits me. You get 30 seconds to pack in all your punches." RM 3/88
SO THE STORY GOES
Fresh from their respective holidays, Vince and Andy reconvened at Trident Studios on May 2nd to commence work on two Vince-penned tracks; WHO NEEDS LOVE LIKE THAT (reworking the backing track from the auditions) and PUSH ME SHOVE ME. "The idea originally was that Andy would work for me. I'd write the songs and he'd sing them. We've ended up as more of a partnership than we set out to be. At first, we hardly said a word to each other, I didn't want to get involved, because I didn't know Andy, and I wasn't going to say, yeah, let's do six albums." Vince, Rage 9/91, AP 9/88
Euphoric after passing the audition, Andy had been convinced he would become an overnight success. "I was really cocky and confident. I'd never had a deal before and when I joined Vince I kind of felt it was like a free meal ticket, and I think for a while I sort of abused it. I was quite lazy for a while you know, not turning up and stuff and sort of living the good life, because I'd got what I'd always dreamed of." Radio 1 12/92
"Andy is permanently jet-lagged. He's got his hours all muddled up. It's really bad, like an illness - terrible." Vince, RM 11/85 Once the recording was under way, Andy quickly discovered that he couldn't just breeze into sessions late and hung-over and expect the end results to be polished perfection. "Maybe the commitment was there as much as Vince would have liked. I think I didn't realise my responsibility, how much it really was." Andy, Radio 1 12/92
"I think it was more a case of not knowing what he had to do, and what was involved. I mean, everybody comes into the music business expects that once you've got a single deal that's it." Vince, Radio 1 12/92
The recording process turned out to be more arduous and time-consuming than Andy had initially expected, but it afforded them both an opportunity to get to know each other. "Once we started working together in the studio it was a bit daunting. I had really respected Alf and being in the same set up was really nerve-wracking. I did feel as if I was under Vince's shadow. I was frightened to say things at first, I didn't feel it was place to do so. It was Vince's thing and I was just the singer... I felt I really had to prove myself. From reading his interviews I'd heard that he was difficult to work with and stuff like that. But that was all totally unfounded, and I found that he's a really nice bloke to work with - not difficult at all... To an extent we were just messing about, but like new friends, we had to go through business of getting to know each other. Vince was like a closed clam when we met and my ambition then was just to... penetrate him. I was intrigued, and I just thought 'I really want to get to know this guy and everything'. I do have quite peculiar taste." Underground 7/87, Q 1/90, Details 11/89, Radio 1 12/92
"I think right from the start we've always know how each other feel, we were quite personal and we would tell each others things, you know, about our emotions or how we felt about other people. It was a way of breaking down each other's shyness. At that time {Andy] was so quiet. When we first met, he never said anything, ever." Vince, Radio 1 12/92, Hot Press 11/85
Their first single completed, Vince and Andy had to decide on what to call their new band. They asked their friends, relatives and colleagues in the music industry to put forward possible names, and drew up a lengthy list of all the suggestions. Together, they then went through the list, crossing off any name that either of them didn't like, until eventually only the name Erasure was left.
Other rejected suggestions had included the none-too imaginative 'Vince and Andy', 'Yazoo 2' and what would become the name of their first album, Wonderland. "The name doesn't really mean anything, but it could mean rubbing out. We did a recording once for Radio 1 and Erasure was written on the box, and when we get there the following week somebody had wiped the tape, so we had to do the whole thing again." Andy, Going Live 86
Later on, Vince and Andy would attempt to find an explanation behind a name chosen mainly out of convenience. "People have read meanings into it afterwards. If there was a meaning to it, it was subconscious, but at the time we were really stuck. The name was just plucked out of the air." Andy, RM 3188 "It's because we play rubber rock! When we were thinking of the name, we didn't want people to think of Erazer, as in 'Erazerhead' [an inexplicable cult movie directed by David Lynch], so we put an 's' instead of a 'z'. And that makes it Eraser, which is rubber. What you could say is that's wiping out everything in the past." Vince, RM 3/88
Vince in particular latched onto this latter explanation, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the disappointments of his tenures in his previous three bands. The 'rubber rock' was a dig at the endless accusations that synthesizer music was in some way less authentic than someone brooding over a guitar or piano - Vince had always made a virtue of his music's artificiality. The name Erasure had connotations of both artificiality and modernity, sounding direct and unambiguous, possibly alluding to part of the recording process, and being one - letter short of a palindrome it lent itself naturally to logos and graphics. It echoed the name of another synth duo, the Eurythmics, and the name of one of the warring nations in George Orwell's bleakly futuristic '1984', Eurasia. The name also contained an element of nihilism, like in Andy's previous band, Void - Erasure meaning, in effect, 'that which has been obliterated'.
Although Vince had already prepared several songs for Erasure, he was sufficiently impressed with Andy to begin taking his suggestions on board, and the next batch of songs to be recorded were a more collaborative effort. "To begin with, I was just hired as the singer and I kept wanting to put my two penny worth of ideas in but I just thought 'now now dear, don't go rushing in and spoil it before it's started.' I didn't want to be too intrusive and put loads of ideas forward in case he thought I was a big-head. Then when I finally did, Vince was very encouraging and now we write the songs together." Andy, SH 12/86, MM 3/87
They both brought different elements to the song writing partnership, Vince bringing his strict, structural outlook on song writing, and Andy bringing a more freewheeling approach to melody and lyrical content. "He brought in chaos where once there was order, which is great. I think my song writing and begun to go around in circles and I was stuck on lyrical clich˙s. I don't have a very big vocabulary you see, and I think that's because I come from Essex and we're men of few words, whereas Andy's got a better vocabulary than me, so there's always interesting lyrics coming into the songs. He brings me a melody or a lyrical idea, and I have to put it in some kind of order, which I'm quite good at." Vince, No 1 7/85, Radio 19/94 Almost every Vince song from around this time contrived to include locked doors or pictures on walls somewhere within the lyrics.
Andy also found that in collaboration they produced songs far superior than anything they could come with on their own. "Vince has taught me a lot of discipline. He's taught me that it's important to have a beginning, a middle and an end with a song. Some of the songs I've made up before have been like rambling poems. I'd be walking down the street, I'd get a rhythm in my head and just fit nonsense words around the rhythm." RM 3/87, MM 12/85
The procedure for writing the early songs would be the method they would use for all of their following albums. "Most of WONDERLAND was written in the studio with me and Andy sat around a piano. I don't like using electronic keyboards because they're not physical enough. I like the idea of a piano because you can bang it. I only occasionally start with a sequence - mostly I'll play some chords and Andy'll try to sing a tune over them. We record that onto a Walkman, and then we go into the studio and start constructing the parts for the song. The words come last... I like a good tune with a good chorus. I started off doing folk music and playing guitar and it's all derived from that. I only knew three chords to start with, and so that was all I could write with. Folk music is very simplistic but very effective all the same, and I think I've captured that. Our songs are now more simple than they were with Yazoo. We then decide of the style of song once we've got the melody, and then we usually work out a bass line and the drums around that. Then we start overdubbing sounds and experimenting, just layering things on and taking them out if they don't work. We also spend a long time working out the vocal harmonies." Vince, E & MM 8/86, NME 6/86
The lyrics for the album were mostly along traditional 'you broke my heart and now I'm blue' lines, though perhaps with a more assertive and self-reliant attitude than most pop songs. "It was sort of like, we'd write a love song, and it would always be like 'Oh, what line can we pull out next?' It would always be sort of hurtful lines or something like that. 'They split up forever' and stuff like that... You don't have to make the songs personal to make them good -it's quite easy to pretend. We've got fickle lyrics, quite throwaway really, but people read deeper meanings into them anyway." Andy, AP 9/88, Underground 7/87, RM 5/86
"I don't think I've got anything that important to say. I mean, at the moment we're not writing political songs -although there might come a time when we do. Besides, people don't take you seriously anyway, so what's the point? When we first started recording Andy and I didn't know each other very well - I just wanted to record his voice - and we didn't know what each other's views were, so consequently I don't think the album had anything to say." Vince, RM 11/85, RM 3/87
The next three songs to be recorded were MM HEART... SO BLUE, CRY SO EASY and LOVE IS A LOSER on the 17th May (although much of the intervening time would have been spent in the studio writing, recording and rehearsing). Vince had already written the tune for LOVE IS A LOSER several months before Erasure was formed, but Andy collaborated on the finished lyrics, making it their first co-written song to be recorded. "Sometimes Vince might be a bit stick-in-the-mud about the lyrics. I thought, 'Let's write a song about VD', and I started making up all these verses. Then Vince and me thought, 'oh no, you can't do that' so we rewrote it between us..." NME 6/86
MY HEART... SO BLUE would be the only ballad on an otherwise upbeat album, marking the difference from the much more low-key Yazoo. It has been commented that the track is not totally dissimilar from SONG FOR, a song Vince wrote at around the same time for the b-side of ONE DAY - if anything, an illustration about Vince's point about his song writing becoming 'stuck in a rut'. "When I met Vince last year, he had a lot of material already written. Some of the stuff we did over and over again, and still had to remix it, but some songs worked out straight away." Andy, Making Music 5/86
MY HEART... So BLUE is also a good example of how Andy was inadvertently mimicking Alison Moyet's vocal style, most noticeably on lines like 'Our eyes are open when it suits us to see'. This would lead to endless unfavourable comparisons being drawn, with it being obligatory for Alf to be mentioned in every review and interview for the next couple of years. Whenever a lazy journalist wanted to knock Erasure they'd inevitably and relentlessly repeat up this one, trivial point. "It's just my technique. I love female singers -I listen to them a lot and I learn from them -and. I think my mid-range is very similar to Alf's, but then we go off into different areas. People were saying that I didn't have any style of my own, and that I was imitating her... Obviously I've listened to a lot of Yazoo -how you rehearse when you're a singer is by listening to other people's records and then singing along to them, and I always sang along to Yazoo records and because I really admired Alison's voice. I thought she was very good, technically, and I just learnt where her breathing space were and the nuances of her voice. It wasn't something that I did consciously. Now they're calling it the 'dreaded comparison', but I don't mind being compared as long as I'm not considered a cheap imitation... I find it quite touching, that people have been comparing us." Andy, E & MM 8/86, RM 11/85, Radio 1 2/92
Vince was less flattered by the comparison. "I'm getting sick of the Yazoo thing all the time. I'm fed up with subject being brought up. Yazoo was a long time ago, and it's shame that people don't look at things apart from the past. If people want to slag off what we're doing now then that's fair enough, but to compare our stuff with Yazoo is unfair. I'd sooner they'd say that what we do is crap and they're not interested... When you're recording and you're originating something you're not thinking about anything in the past. You're just concentrating on what you're doing at the time and what you find inspirational. You don't think 'Oh, we can't do that because it might sound like something else?' You just do it because it sounds good. I never noticed Andy's similarity to Alf's voice until about a month ago -that's the honest truth... He has said himself that he did in a way try to sound like her -he was never a really experienced singer, and when you're not experienced, you do try to sound like someone else. But I wasn't really conscious of it at the time... I don't care really. I don't care what people say. It's not a deliberate thing, and I don't think it's something we have to defend." Vince, MM 10/85, IM3/89
"I was a bit wary of my voice being weak. People are always saying, 'He sounds like Alf', and stuff like that. I think she's got a really good, gutsy voice, but my voice box is not made that way at all. It's more warbly. So I thought, how can we bolster it up... by double tracking the voices. But it the end it drowned rather than strengthened it." Andy, Making Music 5/86
On the 7th June Erasure finished SAY WHAT (with the studio staff 'The Stomp Crew' joining in on the choruses) and MARCH ON DOWN THE LINE (originally entitled 'New Way'). From this session onwards every song Erasure recorded would either be a joint Clarke/Bell composition or a cover version. "This is the first time I've been in a proper band. Really, the first time I worked together with somebody on everything. It's not like I just write the music and Andy writes all the lyrics. There's a sort of mutual reassurance we both need that we both give each other. Something you think of you'd never dream of doing on your own. It's important to have somebody else to help you along with them... As far as I'm concerned this is my first band ever! Yazoo was more an experiment which just went on..." Vince, Sire Press Release, IM & RW 4/86
These tracks were followed on the 1st July by REUNION, DON'T SAY NO and OH L' AMOUR. Andy's main contribution to OH L' AMOUR were the words to the chorus (and therefore the title). "I thought I'd have ago at writing the new 'Chanson D'Amour'... OH L'AMOUR is gay humour; it's what screaming queens would say if they split up. It came from the film 'The Women', which is an old black and white film with just women in it and it was directed by a woman in the 1930's or 1940's. It's about very camp, bitchy, high society games and any time they wanted a divorce they'd get on the train to Reno. There's one woman who's on the train every single journey, and her quote is, 'Oh, l'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour!'" RM 5/86, Gay Life 6/86
With the completion of SENSELESS and HEAVENLY ACTION (then called 'Angel') on the 23rd of August, the album was effectively finished. Note: The track PISTOL would be recorded much later, on the 9th January 1986. "With PISTOL originally I wanted to write a song about meeting pretty policemen in toilets, but that was too blatant. So I changed it." NME 6/86
The album had taken 4 months, somewhat longer than had been expected, and as much of that time had been spent working in the studios at Trident, Powerplant, Blackwing and Livingstone, the album had run considerably over budget. But it was worth it. Vince and Andy were both extremely pleased with the finished album and were convinced that they had an unsinkable hit on their hands. To Vince, it was the best album he'd ever done. It was entitled WONDERLAND to reflect its theme of childhood naivety, the idea being reflected in the sleeve of the album (a boy scout rescuing a ballerina from some goblins) and its accompanying singles (angels, toy soldiers and storybook trains). The plan was to release and promote WHO NEEDS LOVE LIKE THAT as the first single, and to follow the wave of its success with a second single, SAY WHAT, the album and a high-profile national tour in November. "We were expecting a top 40 single. I was really hoping when WHO NEEDS LOVE LIKE THAT was released that that would be it, like a passport to success. I thought it'd be really easy." Andy, RM 5/86