W L INTERVIEW
WIRRAL LIFE TALK TO ERASURE
Erasure have been performing to fans for the 35 years . They have written more than 200 songs and have sold over 28 million albums worldwide . Back with their new album Neon , and tickets now on sale for Manchester later this year , Wirral Life had a catch up with the songwriters ’ thoughts on how it came about .
Tell us a bit about your new album The Neon .
Andy : I love the word , I think one thing that looks really beautiful is when you go on holiday somewhere and you ' re in the old town and they have old stone roads and ancient stone walls , they might have a neon sign , this mix of antiquity and modern day-ism .
Vince : We never really have a concept particularly when we start making a record because we don ’ t know what ' s going to happen . You know , Andy and I get together to write the songs , every two years pretty much , so a lot of the time we spend is catching up and gossiping and then we sit down , play some music or , in this case , I prepared some tracks for the record and then we start working out what the tunes might be . The lyrics , they nearly always come later .
Did you want to remind listeners of those classic Erasure hallmarks with this album ?
Vince : Basically , you sit in the studio , you muck about a bit and you go , that ’ s not bad , have a cup of tea and then you muck about some more .
Andy : I just felt like I wanted it to have some kind of originality , you know , of like those bands that I ' m fans of , like Eurythmics and stuff like that .
Does one of you do the lyrics and the other the music or is there more overlap there than we might imagine ?
Vince : There ' s a little bit of overlap but it ’ s mostly , you know , Andy takes care of the lyrics and I take care of the music arrangements . I mean , I ' m not that interested in recording vocals and Andy ’ s not interested in watching me mess about on the keyboard , you know , so it works out really nicely .
Your attention to melody runs throughout the Erasure catalogue . Do you both have a strong sense of melody ?
Andy : When I was in school , I used to love singing the hymns in a school assembly . Even if it was a new hymn , you could kind of guess where the note was going to go to . What we ' ve tried to do is not go to the obvious place . I mean , you ' re going on a journey but don ’ t have the ending where everybody thinks it ’ s going to be .
Vince : I think the best songs are those that are melodic , but at the same time have , as Andy said , some kind of twist , you go , oh , I wasn ’ t expecting that . It might be a chord change , or it might be a melody change or a change to the lyric and you go , oh , I wasn ’ t expecting that and that ’ s the thing that keeps me listening to that record over and over .
Andy : Sometimes I hear things and I realise that it ’ s us ! That ’ s happened before when we ' ve been out in a club or something and he ’ s said , ‘ oh , I love this , who ’ s this ?’ and I ’ ve replied , ‘ it ’ s us , Vince !’
Andy , in terms of lyrics , had you done any song writing prior to meeting Vince ?
Andy : My auntie , she told me that I used to do poems and take them round to her and read them when I was , like , a teenager , so I remember my first song was about Alice In Wonderland which wasn ’ t a very original idea . That really came from rhythm , I had written before with another guy
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