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With a career spanning over 30 years, 17 albums and over 40 singles, it perhaps gets too easy to take synth-pop duo Erasure for granted. Yet take a closer look at the achievements of singer Andy Bell and all-round synth wizard Vince Clarke and you’ll find a band that has survived baggy, grunge, Britpop, the so-called New Rock Revolution and just about every musical movement that has trended over the last three decades.

Crucially, Vince Clarke is a genuine, bona fide musical pioneer. While musical plaudits are more often than not thrown at a variety of plankspankers and warblers in the rock idiom, Clarke’s work with Depeche Mode at the outset of their career which was then followed by the all-too-brief The Assembly and Yazoo has done much bring synthesized music to the fore.

Just stop and consider his legacy – without Vince Clarke it’s hard to imagine much of today’s pop landscape sounding the way that it does now. Even underground dance music owes Vince Clarke a doff of the cap, with many of its original creators taking to the synthesizers and drum machines because of his forward thinking work. Indeed, his 2012 collaboration with former Depeche Mode cohort Martin Gore on the VCMG album emphatically displayed that Clarke’s ability to create dancefloor bangers outside the pop arena was beyond question.

Currently on tour with Erasure as part of Robbie Williams stadium tour, Gigwise caught up with Vince Clarke in Edinburgh to talk about the new album, World Be Gone, synths and Scrabble…

World Be Gone is Erasure’s 17th album. What keeps you motivated after so long?

Vince Clarke: I’m still really enjoying it. I love going into the studio and making an album with Andy; the rest of the stuff is peripheral, really. The initial creation of the record is still always surprising. We’re never quite sure if we can come up with any new ideas but then we get together and some magic happens.

Erasure have never shied away from addressing social and political issue – I’m thinking of songs like ‘Hideaway’ and ‘A Little Respect’ – but the new album feels like a longer and consistent effort of comment. Was this decided at the outset of the writing process or was it something that developed organically?

VC: I think it organically grew. We never really have a concept for an album. We started this time around wanting to make a more atmospheric record, as far as the vibe was concerned. As for the lyrics, we had a few ideas together and then Andy would go away and work on some ideas. Obviously, there’s so much shit going on at the moment that you can’t avoid and Erasure are at a point where we feel comfortable making statements and observations that we might have shied away from in the past.

It’s certainly more contemplative than rabble-rousing, if such a thing can be applied to Erasure. Why?

VC: We decided from the outset to make a more thoughtful album. The last two albums were kind of club records, I guess. Years ago, we released an album called Erasure which had much longer and slower tracks and we were interested in trying something like that again but making the tracks not as long!

So the way that it came about was that I started putting some musical vibes together in my own studio, which I then presented to Andy. He and I then worked together in Miami and London and then New York where we then started to put structure to this stuff.

And it is was really nice this time around because there was no pressure as there usually is to get something finished on time. We also wrote more songs than we needed which is unheard of for us.

After all this time, how do you know when you’ve hit on something that can be turned into a song?

VC: I don’t know; that’s the magic of it. We don’t sit around trying to make a record for other people and trying second-guess what they might like; you have to make a record for yourself, really. If either of us comes up with an idea that the other doesn’t like then that idea gets dropped immediately. We both have to like it and make sure that an idea is going in the right direction with the right feel and it’ll then get recorded. We’ve always operated like that.

As evidenced by material recorded by The Assembly (‘Never Never’), Yazoo (‘Midnight’) and ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ on the new Erasure album, there’s always been a blues/gospel feel in the music that you’ve made, and I’ve always found that an interesting juxtaposition with your electronic delivery. Have you ever been a fan of the blues or is this an unconscious result?

VC: I think it’s an unconscious result because I don’t know anything about the blues. I never really understood it. When I worked with Alison [Moyet, Yazoo], she really introduced me to that whole world but even then I didn’t really understand it because I couldn’t notate it. I’m a really logical person and up to that point, I knew that [musically the note] E works with C and it definitely works with G but when it came to half tones and semi-tones I was lost I was drowning in a sea of blues!

But obviously Andy has an incredibly soulful voice and having worked with him and Alison I can really appreciate the beauty of that and that kind of contrast. What I learned from that is that the obvious things aren’t necessarily the best things. And vice-versa. The voice against straightforward music often gives that song a twist. I wouldn’t be able to write a thesis about how it works but I’ve come to learn it.

What lessons did you learn from making the criminally under-rated VCMG with Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, and did any of that influence the way you work now? Are any planning any more collaborations with Martin Gore?

VC: Working with Martin was really interesting. He has the same interests that I do in as much as we’re both synth nerds. He’s really interested in sound styling and sound architecture and that’s great because VCMG wasn’t about songs; it was about feel and vibe. It was like a sound sculpture and in that world you can kind of do what you like, so long as you keep to the beat!

But whenever I work with someone else there’s always something that comes out of it. I didn’t enjoy collaborating when I was younger. Well, I refused to do it, really, because I was arrogant then and thought I knew everything. I’ve come to learn that that’s not actually the truth.

Will we make another record? Martin says he’ll make another one with me in 20 years.

Where are you most comfortable – the studio or the stage?

VC: Definitely the studio. I feel very, very, very nervous being on stage. The studio in my house is like a big toyshop, really, and I’m surrounded by gadgets; it’s a boy’s delight down there. What I get to do every day is muck around and what a fantastic job that is!

Nerd question: do you still use your old synths like the Sequential Circuits Pro One and the Roland SH-101?

VC: That’s all I use. I went through a phase of using soft synths and plug-ins for a while. The way that we work now is that I’ll generate the stuff at the beginning with soft synths and I then convert everything into analogue using my original Pro One and now, obviously, there’s all the Eurorack stuff which is incredible. That’s a whole other world of nerdiness; it’s next level!

Have any of the synth manufactures ever offered to make a Vince Clarke Signature Model?

VC: I’m very fortunate because I have a lot of synths in my studio from a variety of manufacturers and they all sound slightly different, so I get the choice of equipment to get a particular sound. I wouldn’t like there to be a Vince Clarke Signature Sound because the great thing about these old, analogue synthesizers is that their not predictable. You’ll know how a Moog sounds but the rest of my stuff is very loose and very unpredictable. In any case, if there was a Vince Clarke Signature Model then it’d have to be a massive synth; it’d need at least 17 filters on it!

Was there any one single song or band that made you want to explore what synths had to offer?

VC: It was probably Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark. Their first single was ‘Electricity’ and the b-side of that was a track called ‘Almost’ and the reason that I liked it was because I thought, I could play that! They, along with some other bands at the time, were using sounds that had never been heard before, and suddenly I realised that I didn’t need a guitar or a Marshall stack. You could be creative with a tiny, monophonic synthesizer.

It was almost like folk music because it was almost like someone playing an acoustic guitar and singing a song except it was three or four monophonic synths and a drum machine and it still sounded powerful and incredibly emotional, too.

You were part of that wave of bands that came in the wake of Kraftwerk in the 80s and your impact on popular music has been huge. Looking back over your career, what are you proudest of?

VC: Well, it’s still a cliché but we’re still trying to work on the perfect song. And that’s yet to come. A good pop song, for me, is something that has an emotional twist in it. And that could be in the lyrics or the chord change but it’s something that will take you somewhere completely different. Getting that exactly right is an art.

I’m very proud of ‘A Little Respect’, especially because it was a gluing moment for myself and Andy. I didn’t quite agree with him and he didn’t quite agree with me but it all came together in the end and we came up with something together that was quite good.

And also ‘Oh L’Amour’ which was on the first Erasure album. That was the first time Andy contributed to the song writing and what he brought to the track was magic and then suddenly we were a band. It wasn’t just me being ex-Depeche and all that shit, we were together in our own right.

Why has Erasure lasted so long?

VC: I really like Andy; he’s a nice bloke. We have very similar views with regard to politics and everything else. Also, there are no egos in the band. If either of us presents an idea that the other doesn’t like then we just bin it; no one fights for their corner.

What was the last thing that you learned?

VC: I’m a bit of a Scrabble fan and I finally learned how to spell ‘guerro’. And until recently I didn’t know that I hadn’t been spelling ‘synthesizer’ correctly. My autocorrect on Word kept telling that I'd been spelling it incorrectly.

Erasure 2018 tour UK tour dates are as follows. Tickets are available here

FEBRUARY

02 - Dundee, Caird Hall
03 - Edinburgh, Usher Hall
04 - Newcastle, City Hall
06 - Liverpool, Philharmonic
07 - Hull, City Hall
08 - Manchester, O2 Apollo
10 - Cambridge, Corn Exchange
11 - Birmingham, O2 Academy
12 - Nottingham, Royal Concert Hall
14 - Ipswich, Regent
15 - Southampton, O2 Guildhall
16 - Cardiff, St David’s Hall
18 - Aylesbury, Friars Waterside Theatre
19 - Brighton, Dome
20 - Guildford, G Live
22 - Norwich, UEA
23 - London, Eventim Apollo

More about: Depeche ModeErasure