This interview was broadcast September '94 on Radio1 and some of you
may recognise it from the I Say I Say I Say promo interview CD. But there's
lots of extra bits that aren't on the CD, so it should be quite interesting for
everybody!. Mark Goodier ( MG) cuts in occasionally with a question, but
mostly the programme was made to be continuous talking.
Oh yes, and I missed the first 10 minutes of this as well!. Sorry!.
Andy: I can't imagine anything else before I met Vince. I mean this is kind of
the first foray into the music industry and it kind of swollows up your whole
memory. And I can't remember anything else before, I mean, I know that I
did things, part time work and stuff, as did Vince, but he had a history
before me, I can't think of anything else, it just fills up my whole body.
Vince: We don't really work that hard though, I don't want to give the wrong
impression. I think as we've made more and more albums, we've got into this
really good way of working. We click really easily. We know exactly where we
both stand in regards to the writing and the making of the music and it just
all sort of clicks into place really, everytime we make a new album.
MG: Do you ever think back to the days before Erasure?
Vince: No because it's too far away,.. that is a long time ago, I don't
think about that at all.
Andy: When I think about Vince Clarke and being a Yazoo fan, and when I
listen to the albums and even see Vince in videos and stuff, it's a totally
different person, in another group, in another world and this Erasure has
nothing to do with it. But if I hadn't have had Vince, if circumstances had
been different, I think I would've gone mad by now. I think I'm much more
easily persuaded and soft soaped by people.
Vince: Well, we've both been very lucky in having the right record company
to work with, I mean, we've been on the same record company all the time.
They're not really such a music biz type organization, so we don't really
get a lot of bulls**t, particularly, I don't think, so we're lucky in that
respect and you soon learn not to take any notice of that crap you know.
MG: What jobs did you do before you had a record deal with Mute?
Vince: I've done all sorts really, I worked alot in the factories, packing.
I started off in a yoghurt factory. Postman.. I used to work for the Dole
office, British Rail. I did some driving once, driving a lorry..well, a
small lorry, y'know..I quite liked that..
(Andy laughing)
Andy: A mini one..
Vince: A mini lorry yeah, for a tenner. I think I'd have been a Taxi driver
if I hadn't have done music. It puts me off a bit to say too much like Rock
n' Roll kind of, ..that sort of stuff. I think it puts music in a bad light, and it's
not the point of making music at all. So I tend to shy away from all that.
Andy: People ask whether your life has changed out of all recognition, but
it's like, out of recognition of what?, because your life goes on, it just
changes gradually, so there's never any huge step between one thing and the
next. And I think the whole Rock and Roll thing is so old fashioned and a
complete myth because they're all complete..rich kind of like property
speculators, selling all this kind of angst and teenage revolution to people
and it's completly false. The things I did before, it was very brief, was
very similar to Vince, just making sandwiches and doing bar work and selling
shoes. But, I always knew I was gonna do this anyway.. so that made me happy
while I was working before. It's something that .er.., that's what caused
it. Just by the notion that that's what you were gonna do, that's why it
happened. There's a few people though, that are very close dear friends and
that's all I want. I don't try to stay close to people, because that's just
a natural thing, you can't force something that's not gonna happen
naturally.
Vince: I'm the same as Andy really, I've got a few friends from a long
time,y'know, and people I've got to know also through the music business,
but people that I've known for a long time now that I really respect. I
think we're quite supportive of each other. In and out of music. Definitely.
Andy: I think a lot of people kind of like ignore you because they're not
interested in you at all, they're interested in the trimmings and everything
else that goes with it. And that's what's kind of disappointing when you
meet people. I mean, I always take people on board straight away, and really
enjoy talking to them and then just with one word or one sentence, you'll
draw a blank and you think 'Well, what have we been talking about for the
past hour?'.
Vince: You know, those people, you just can drop, or they lose interest in
you.
Andy: I think it's.., that's the thing that the music industry perpetuates
anyway, it's that kind of like, the success thing and the glamour and
trimmings and stuff, it's like the jealousy thing needs to be there for
people to buy records, kind of. It's like, are we just having a folk hour
( not sure what he's saying there, I think it's folk hour - J) here or something
y'know. It's a complete myth and a complete farce and complete bulls**t the
whole thing.
Andy: It's always really fascinating with each album that we do, we always
approach the vocals and the music almost as two different entities, and with
this new album we decided to take the vocals first with a basic track and
then work the track around it, and I think it worked out really well. But
you never really appreciate the other person's work until it's all finished
and then you can sit down and listen to it objectively, as you can be, and
it amazes me, just listening to the nuances and the trills that Vince puts
in and there's always something extra that you hear on every listen.
Vince: I can't really remember writing songs on my own, you know. It seems
like it's always been this way, we've always written songs together.
Andy writes the lyrics now, so I don't have to worry about that
anymore and I can just worry about funny sounds, off keyboards.
Vince: Well I think up to the point when I met Andy my song writing had
started going round in circles a little bit you know, I don't have a very
big vocabulary you see and I think that's because I come from Essex and we
say we are men of few words I suppose!, and Andy's got a better vocabulary
than me, so there's always interesting lyrics coming into the songs.
Andy: I'm waiting for Vince's instrumental!
Vince: I'm glad there's only two of us in the group, I don't think a third
member would be of any use to us.
Andy: When we're writing songs it's almost like a game that we play with
each other and it's like being Edward Lear and writing nonsense poems and
kind of chucking them backwards and forwards to see who can come up with the
most kind of off the wall notion.
Vince: It's not like a situation where we argue about it , I think it's more
of a case of we try and impress each other with what we've done on our own,
or surprise the other person.
Andy: I think the thing we disagree on usually is packaging and what you're
gonna wear for videos and things like that and Vince is usually right, I
mean... (both laugh), in hindsight. It's always in hindsight. I think
anybody else is always gonna be regarded as an outsider now anyway.
Andy: If we're song writing we use a piano or a guitar, which Vince plays,
and strum cord sequences, until we hit on a cord sequence that we think's
really interesting. And then I'll just sing along and keep singing over and
over and wait 'til we come on a melody we both like. And once we've got that
piece sorted out, we start on another cord sequence and then another melody
and then kind of like piece them all together and not necessarily in that
order.
Vince: We don't find it very difficult to write melody's and I think if we
had difficulty in remembering them ourselves then they wouldn't work. We
just seem to come out with simple tunes, excellent pal!!. (Vince starts
laughing ).
Andy: No, no I think the songs aren't simple. I think that they give the
effect that they're simple, but if you actually listen to the melody's and
how they go... I think the thing with our stuff is they're always surprising,
y'know, there'll be a melody so far and then that melody will stop and the
note will be up here or something or down there and then another melody will
start, but it gives the illusion that the whole thing just kind of flows
together.
Vince: I think when we write we've always got tunes and stuff in our heads
from what we've heard and those ideas are bound to come into the song
writing, we don't suddenly decide we want to write in a certain style or
make music in a certain style.
Andy: I think song writing for us is a bit like a whisk drive, y'know, we
decide we're gonna get together and have a game of cards and some drinks,
and then see how many we can come up with.
Vince: When we were recording this album, I mean, as Andy said, we recorded
the vocals first, then we did the music, then a bit more vocals. I think
that when we record, we tend to over record, do too much, and then kind of
sift through it at the end in the mix. But you can always tell, well, I
think we can always tell when the things finished. We've always recorded
just the ten songs and then just stopped. We're very lazy actually, that's
the truth of the matter!.
Andy: We're minimalists!.
Vince: We'd never record say, twelve songs and then pick ten, we'd only
record ten songs that we really like. I mean, we'd write more than ten and
we'd have more than ten ideas (laughs), but we'd only pick the ten ideas
that we think are the winners.
MG: Are you able to keep your personal lives separate while you're working?
Andy: I think when you're recording it becomes your personal life, so
there's not really...no..
Vince: I don't think that, for Andy more, he tends to take it more to heart,
I think, than I do. I mean Andy will take stuff home and mix his home ( it
sounds like he's saying 'mix his home'!? - J) and listen to things over and
again you know, and I don't do that, and I get bored very, very quickly.
And it's nice, during the mixing stage for instance, on this album they were
mixing a track maybe every two days and then I'd just go in every two days,
and it's really nice to hear it fresh like that and not be thinking about it all the
time and it's a nice surprise when you go in and hear the mix.
We'll probably go in the studio again quite soon because of the fact that this
new album has taken us so long, which is unusual for us. Therefore, I think
we've still got loads and loads of ideas in our heads and we wanna work on
those ideas quite soon. And when you've got it sort of buzzing around in your
head you wanna get it out.
Andy: If we thought that a song was good and then somebody criticised it, it
would make us even more adamant of getting it out and accentuating the
points that they didn't like about it.
Andy: I've always been singing, from when I was really small, I used to sing
myself to sleep and so I was always in the choir's and always a big fan of pop
music and still am.
Vince: I used to play a violin when I was at school, for a while. I went to
music school as well for a couple of years. I was totally useless at it
as well. It makes such a screechy sound, you're supposed to put chalk or
whatever it is, resin on the bow to make the string grip the bow hairs. And
I found that if you put vaseline on it, it didn't screech at all!, but it
ruined the violin!. I got in big trouble for that.