CLARKE: When I decided to leave, it wasn’t for another music band or to form Yaz—I just decided to leave.* We were just young, and things happened quite quickly for us, and there were a lot of egos flying around. I was just fed up. In retrospect, I’m really glad [I left]. No regrets at all, because I’ve worked with some really brilliant artists.
I did a single, [the Assembly’s] “Never Never,” with Feargal Sharkey. I was thinking that since I’d had the personality clashes with Alison I would move on with working with different singers instead [of being in a permanent group]. Then I met Andy. We had auditions. He came alone, and he was there for about 20 minutes and sang two songs I had written: “Who Needs Love Like That” and “My Heart So Blue.” We had been through 39 or 40 singers by that time. They were really good, but the moment he opened his mouth and started singing, we knew it.
We had discussions about making dance-type music. He took me to a lot of clubs—the first time I had ever been to a gay club. These gay clubs were playing high-energy music. We were into the idea of making music like that so we could perform it live. But it wasn’t really until the second album [1987’s Circus] that we became friends, because then we started writing songs together. You can’t write a song with somebody you don’t trust. And we went through a lot together. We played some really shitty clubs, traveled in some shitty vans, we had a car crash once. We really were a band.
* DANIEL MILLER: Creatively, could they have done more together? Yes. But the band started to change almost as soon as I started working with them. Vince was a restless soul. You could see that during the making of Speak & Spell. Vince was the leader: He was the songwriter, he organized the band, he was the one getting the gigs, he pretty much made all the records. Obviously Dave sang and Martin did some melody lines, but Vince led, he produced. I was credited as co-producer, but most of the big ideas came from Vince. I think the other members of the group were very happy for that to continue. I don’t know for how long they would have been happy, but there was more to do if they wanted to do it. But Vince decided he didn’t want to be in the band anymore. The touring, he felt there were limitations—there were lots of different reasons and those reasons were very fixed in his mind, so I don’t think there could have been another Depeche Mode album from those four people.
[Regarding reuniting with Gore for Ssss,] I’ve never really been interested in techno. I didn’t know anything about it. But after I did a remix for Plastikman, I started to get interested in the genre. I did two or three tracks and got a bit bored, so I emailed Martin. That email that I sent him was the first I ever sent him. So we started exchanging files: I’d send him a written track, he’d send me a bass part….We did that over the course of a year. We didn’t even talk at all until the very end, when we had a conference call with Daniel. Just before it was released, I went to L.A. to do some promotion. I had spoken more words to Martin in that meeting than I had when I was in Depeche Mode! Martin’s really shy.
I love making music. It’s the best job in the world. When you start making something from nothing, it’s just an incredible feeling. Even now, with Erasure, it’s always about the next record, the next song you’re gonna write. I never stop.
“ONLY YOU”
he rich pageant of pop has no shortage of slight, sinister, Machiavellian male figures who made their millions ruthlessly manipulating the talents and emotions of the powerhouse women in their lives. Phil Spector had Ronnie, Sonny had Cher, Ike had Tina—the list is long and grim. But Vince Clarke was no master puppeteer and Alison Moyet far from his docile discovery. No romantic feelings fueled their relationship. Of the many duos littering the new wave landscape, Yaz (short for “Yazoo,” a name already taken by an American rock band that filed suit and were never heard from again) were the most like complete strangers who had accidentally wandered into each other’s personal space. And yet Moyet’s malleable vocals—as impressive when they were angelic and intimate as when she was unleashing her trademark bellow of bluesy rage—caused blood to pump furiously through Clarke’s airy, catchy compositions. Though he’d started his career with Depeche Mode and would go on to form Erasure—another duo, with a singer with whom he’d feel a far stronger connection—Clarke’s best coupling was his brief, two-album (mis)matchup with Moyet.
JB: Like Clarke, I was the male half of a boy-girl pop duo at the start of the eighties. Like Yaz, my group (April Showers—Google us!) demoed a song that was swiftly snapped up and released by a label. We, too, had insurmountable communication problems and couldn’t cope with instant success … and the way it completely evaded us. And like Moyet and Clarke, my ex-bandmate, Beatrice Colin, and I are now good friends and comfortable enough to indulge in the occasional bout of “You were the bigger asshole” / ”No, you were the bigger asshole!” without tears being shed. (Let’s hope my current boy-girl duo—in which I’m clearly the bigger asshole—manages a similarly happy ending.) So I don’t find it particularly surprising that Yaz didn’t endure past two albums, but the amount of leeway they allowed each other is kind of amazing. Pre-and post-Yaz, Clarke was all hyper-caffeinated pop, all the time. While in the environs of Yaz, he was amenable to Moyet’s goth fantasies and her penchant for moody balladeering. But Clarke’s “Only You” is their song for all seasons.
LM: When I went to Clarke’s Brooklyn brown-stone for our interview, I didn’t know what to expect. Although he set the agendas for his various groups, Clarke has always seemed to avoid the spotlight, both on stage and in the press. His manager warned he’d be shy, but as Clarke followed close behind me while we descended the two flights to his sub-basement, I wondered if I was being led into the lair of a synth-pop serial killer. Even more disconcerting, Clarke refers to his studio as…the Cabin. (I’ve watched enough horror films to know that girls don’t come back from places called the Cabin.) As I passed the snaking tangles of wires hanging from the walls, my mind started to race: strangulation at worse, electrocution at best? Finally, we arrived, and there they were: the cold, inert bodies of his keyboard collection. The man loves his machines—maybe more than he likes people? Which is why it’s so reassuring that he’s capable of writing such a plaintive little lullaby like “Only You.”
VINCE CLARKE: When I left Depeche Mode, I wrote “Only You.” It’s like a folk record with synths. The actual implement was a guitar; I transposed the riff into synth notes. It was a very simple arrangement. For the lyrics, I just formed words on a piece of paper. I was just hoping that Daniel [Miller, Mute Records founder] would like it.
ALISON MOYET: “Only You” has a nursery rhyme simplicity and a lack of pretension. You don’t need to be a great singer to sing it; you don’t need to be a great instrumentalist to play it. It’s a universal, everyman song.
CLARKE: I kind of knew Alison. I’d seen her perform locally. She was in a punk band with my best friend, and she’d been in a couple of blues bands. I knew that she could sing with a huge amount of emotion, and “Only You” was supposed to be a ballad, so I asked her to demo it on a four-track tape recorder.
MOYET: I never intended to be in a band with Vince. I was hanging around on Canvey Island [in Essex, England] with the Dr. Feelgood lot doing the pub-rock thing, which seemed like a more natural progression for me to go from punk than New Romantic. I never aspired to be a pop star or to have a mainstream hit. I never listened to pop music. Basildon was a new town with no culture, and we had no money. Punk was an ethos that we could relate to because it didn’t matter if you had money, education, or social standing. It belonged to us. I bought into that, but there was a time when I realized for a lot of people it was all about fashion and clothes. A lot of my friends who would have been wearing dishcloths the same as I was were then spending a lot of money when the New Romantics came out, and I felt quite betrayed by that. My ambition was to be part of the London pub circuit. When you say that now, it makes you think of some kind of nasty, gnarly old singer, but in the seventies, the pub-rock scene was really interesting. You had Elv
is Costello, Ian Dury, and the Stranglers. I wanted to headline the places they played. So a part of me was thinking, I’ll never hear the end of it if I go and sing with this pretty boy. But I had no money, no tape recorder, no way of making a demo, so I thought, Okay, I’ll use this as a demo.
CLARKE: I took the demo to Daniel. He seemed completely not interested. I thought I was going to have to go back to working in factories. Fortunately, there were four associates from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden [in the Mute offices] at the time. They got to hear the song and really liked it. That made Daniel pay attention.
“A part of me was thinking, I’ll never hear the end of it if I go and sing with this pretty boy. But I had no money, no tape recorder, no way of making a demo, so I thought, Okay, I’ll use this as a demo.”
MOYET: Vince called and said, “The record company thinks we should record an album together,” and two months later I was a pop star.
CLARKE: Alison and I weren’t a real band. We barely knew each other. We wanted to use Black Studios, but Fad Gadget was recording their second album. [Frank “Fad Gadget” Tovey] would be in there from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., so Alison and I would go in around six in the morning and record from 6 to 10 a.m. That was quite stressful because we had to commute to London.
MOYET: The first thing Vince said to me was, “You got any songs?” He’d written “Only You,” and we were going to release that as a single. He wrote “Don’t Go” for the B-side, and that was obviously too good for a B-side, so we wrote “Situation” together, which ended up being flipped over [released as the A-side] in America. From that point, the songwriting was completely equitable. I wrote half of the material in Yaz. But Vince is a famous songwriter, so the assumption was that I was the voice and he was the creator. It wasn’t the case, but you get tired of trying to explain. You just have to look at the difference between Yaz and Erasure to see what my input in the band was compared to what Andy [Bell’s] influence is. I am very aware that the assumption is the female voice is the mouthpiece of the male creator. I was talking about “Nobody’s Diary” to someone the other day, and he said, “You really interpreted that song well.” I said, “No, I wrote that song when I was 16.” Even with all the credits on the album sleeve, even now when it’s on Google for anyone to see, the assumption is always that the vocalist is not the creative influence.
CLARKE: We fell out pretty fast. We just didn’t know what to say to each other. We never went out for a drink—not one drink. We were quite different. We weren’t in the same school. We didn’t have anything in common. She was a bit younger than me. Alison was incredibly lacking in self-confidence. I think she felt a bit put out because I knew my way around the studio by then. I knew the record company. I don’t think she felt like a part of the camp. I’m sure that was something she went through, that she was in “the boys club.” We did the first record and a tour in the U.K., and by the end, we had pretty much fallen out, so the second album was really thrown together. We weren’t even in the studio together.
MOYET: We always worked separately. He would play me a song on the guitar, and I would sing it in the way I chose to sing it. I would play him a song on the guitar, and he would arrange it in the way he chose to arrange it. I didn’t mess with him, and he didn’t mess with me. We were very different in the sense that I come from a French peasant family who have no problem expressing themselves loudly, and he was very reserved and English and was more of a passive-aggressive to my aggressive. And then we were famous, and I was getting a lot of attention. When Yaz started, there was a lot [of talk] that I was the great singer and Vince was the lightweight. Obviously, that [perception’s] changed. Singers, schmingers—there’s plenty of them about, and Vince is recognized as the great, consistent musical talent that he is.
The big shock was going from being a bit of a black sheep, the sort of person that people around town avoided, to being really famous. I was always remarkable, and obviously I don’t mean that like, “Aren’t I wonderful?” I mean it like people have always had something to say about me. You noticed me in a room, for good or bad. It was hard to get that sort of universal attention, to be recognized everywhere within a matter of weeks.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by Duos 1. “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys 2. “Since Yesterday,” Strawberry Switchblade 3. “Club Country,” The Associates 4. “White Horse,” Laid Back 5. “Dream Baby Dream,” Suicide
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Following the dissolution of Yaz, Moyet launched a solo career in the U.K. with 1984’s hugely successful Alf. She seemed geared for international success but instead chose a more idiosyncratic career path, recording what and when she wanted. In 2008 Moyet reunited with Clarke for a live Yaz album and tour. In 2013, after several grueling years of disinterest from British record labels that only wanted to work with her if she recorded cover versions or played the nostalgia card on reality TV, she released the critically acclaimed album The Minutes, her highest U.K.-charting album in 25 years. Almost as much attention was paid to her weight loss, which saw her dwindle from an English size 22 to a 10. Meanwhile, Clarke started another duo, Erasure, which to date has sold 25 million albums—spawning the 1988 U.S. hits “Chains of Love” and “A Little Respect”—and continues to record and tour.
CLARKE: Alison sent me an email saying, “Do you want to do this reunion thing to celebrate 25 years since the Yazoo releases?” I said, “No, not really.” I was really busy at the time. Then the next year Andy said he’d like to take a break and maybe do a solo record. So I thought I could do the Yazoo thing, maybe do a few dates. The next thing you know, management is piling on all these shows.
MOYET: When we did the reunion, I was much calmer and more easy to get along with, and he was much more open and lighter. Consequently, we found that we had quite a lot in common in terms of our sense of humor, and we had a lovely, lovely time.
CLARKE: It wasn’t until we did the reunion tour that we really got to know each other. We didn’t do so much reminiscing as we talked about our kids. She has three, I have one, so she had a bit of advice for me.
MOYET: Looking back to the eighties, there was so much more room for diversity. A freak was more celebrated than it is now. There was less sexism, bizarrely, in the creative arena. Women could present themselves in a male light but not like the way they have to do it now. The way it’s done now, it’s almost like playing an aggressive sexuality and imagining that gives women parity, when truly all they’re doing is playing to a sexual fantasy and they are no more esteemed and stronger—they’re just being sex toys. Back then, women could employ a male aggressiveness that was far more about feminism and their independence. That had actually been achieved by the women’s movement, which seems to have been lost in later years. Women seem to have given up. Young women seem to be giving it away. Once upon a time, our attractive girl pop stars were Bananarama, who presented themselves with light independent spirits, but you never felt they were whoring themselves. There are times now when I feel like it’s shocking when you see someone with their clothes on. It’s shocking when someone’s not offering you their arse to imagine yourself penetrating as they sing.
“KIDS IN AMERICA”
t the end of the fifties, when the British attempted to get to grips with the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon, the singer Marty Wilde was at the forefront of the homegrown movement. At the start of the seventies, when the British were enamored with all things Osmond, Wilde’s son Ricky was launched as a domestic equivalent to Donny. When the eighties commenced and there were few solo female pop singers, Wilde’s daughter Kim took her place in the family business. Signed by pop mogul and grumpy seventies-TV talent-show judge Mickie Most—everything you like or loathe about Simon Cowell originated with him—Kim Wilde saw instant success with her debut single, “Kids in America.” More than a decade’s worth of hits predominantly written by her father and brother followed, but her success was on a song-by-song basis: Five years elapsed between “Kids”
entering the U.S. charts and her version of “You Keep Me Hanging On” climbing to number one. She didn’t have a die-hard following, she didn’t have a signature sound, but as far as new wave women are concerned, Kim Wilde was one of the first and lasted the longest.
JB: Kim Wilde was a sullen, pouting British Bardot with a thin, inexpressive voice and a back catalog that is criminally easy to underestimate. “Kids in America” was as much a rarity upon its release as it is today: a crunchingly simple, super-poppy, three-minute single that sounds on first hearing like you’ve known it all your life. The Ramones could have done that song, Katy Perry could have done that song—but neither could have done it better than Kim Wilde did. And not just because she did it with an English accent. It was the way she sounded like she was just a little too cool, like she was doing the listener a favor. And she was! Especially in the final bridge, when she gave voice to the deathless couplet “New York to East California / There’s a new wave comin’ I warn you.” The first line is geographically baffling, while the second accurately predicted the turn that American music was about to take.
LM: “Kids in America” is the 1982 version of “Smells like Teen Spirit” and “We Are Young”: an adolescent anthem that encapsulated what it was like to be coming of age at a certain time. However, while Kurt Cobain pinpointed the apathy of Generation X, and Fun.’s “Let’s set the night on fire” chorus is a sarcastic call-to-arms for overachieving millennials, Wilde’s message was earnest and innocent: “Everybody live for the music-go-round.” We didn’t know about irony back then; we didn’t have detachment or distance. We were all about fun (without the period). These days, Ferris Bueller wouldn’t be cutting school; he’d be trying to raise seed money for his hot new app.
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