JOSH THE WINDOW CLEANER TV

I only wanted to do poems, off the top of my head, and backing vocal sections,” he says. Clarke told him he could do anything he liked. Clarke put it together at the studio at his house in Brooklyn during the lockdowns, and Bell wrote and recorded the vocals later. It’s a layered, and often gorgeous, selection of digital tracks, largely made up of manipulated songs from their previous album, The Neon (which gave them their first Top 10 album since the 90s), and created as a sort of companion piece. The new Erasure album, Day-Glo (Based on a True Story), is not a return to those poppy hits but an experimental album, akin to 1995’s Erasure, which all but blew up their mainstream appeal. “I just think, wow, that’s a hell of a lot of work we’ve done. He seems to agree when I imply they have been dismissed as being a bit frothy and lightweight (even if their songs have tackled everything from a post-industrial Britain, to lost love affairs and homophobia), but he doesn’t seem bitter about it. “When I think about songs like Chorus, and Ship of Fools and Breathe, we do have standout songs,” says Bell. But their biggest hits – among them Sometimes, Stop! and Blue Savannah – stand up.

JOSH THE WINDOW CLEANER TV

Blame the daytime TV appearances perhaps, combined with a burgeoning laddish Britpop era that couldn’t handle Bell’s sequins and camp. Despite Clarke’s history as the synth-pop pioneer who had already had hits with Depeche Mode and Yazoo, at some point in the 90s, Erasure became rather uncool and never really recovered. Bell and Vince Clarke wrote brilliant, enduring pop songs – so catchy, I realise, that I’ve had A Little Respect going round in my head for most of my life, ever since the fateful afternoon I taped it off the Radio 1 chart show sometime in late 1988. In the end, it’s the songs that count.”Īnd what songs they are.

It makes you realise your life isn’t measured by how many people know you and stuff like that. And then, says Bell, “that all changes, the media changes, and they don’t want you any more. Bell, Erasure’s vocalist, means they were big and mainstream enough to get on daytime television. I n the late 80s and early 90s, when the electropop band Erasure were, says Andy Bell, “kind of the darlings for a while”, they reached what he calls “saturation TV”.

Josh the window cleaner