Erasure
| Erasure | |
|---|---|
 Erasure (2011) |
|
| General information | |
| Genre (s) | Synth pop |
| founding | 1985 |
| Website | www.erasureinfo.com |
| Current occupation | |
| Andy Bell | |
| Vince Clarke | |
Erasure ( English for 'erasure', 'erasure', 'erasure') is a British synth-pop duo consisting of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell . To date, Erasure has sold over 25 million albums and had 40 hit singles.
Band history
History and foundation of Erasure
Vince Clarke is a synthesizer and sequencer specialist who, as a founding member of Depeche Mode, composed their first hits ( New Life , Just Can't Get Enough ). At the end of 1981, Clarke left Depeche Mode due to musical differences, and then in 1982, for a short successful time, found the Duo Yazoo with Alison Moyet . Yazoo's first hit was the multi-covered Only You , written by Vince Clarke for Depeche Mode. According to Dave Gahan , Vince Clarke played the demo for the band at Blackwing Studios in London. After listening to the piece, Clarke walked outside to a cigarette's length. When he came back in, Gahan revealed that they would not record the piece. After two albums and some successful singles ( Don't Go , Situation , Nobody's Diary ), Yazoo was broken up due to personal differences.
The Assembly project followed in 1983 with sound engineer Eric Radcliffe . In this collaboration, an album with ten different titles and ten different singers should be recorded. However, it only came to the single Never, Never with singer Feargal Sharkey . After another short-lived collaboration in 1985 with singer Paul Quinn (and the single One Day ), Vince Clarke wanted to tackle a longer-term project. He was looking for a singer through an advertisement in Melody Maker magazine . The last of about forty applicants was Andy Bell.
Andy Bell corresponded exactly to Clarke's ideas: Clarke stayed in the background as a rather introverted sound tinkerer, while Bell presented a rather unusual show on stage: glamorous to trashy with a voice that reached into falsetto . In this mixture they still show extraordinary and spectacular live shows for synth-pop musicians. A newspaper report once described the conception of the live show: "What could be regarded as tasteless in any way is gratefully included in the concept." The name of the band comes from the film Razor's Edge with Bill Murray.
Rise to one of the most successful pop duos
The duo released their first single Who Needs Love Like That in 1985 , a small nightclub hit . The first hit was Oh L'amour , also a release from the first album Wonderland (1986). In Europe, the single was particularly successful in Germany and France, in South Africa (2nd place) and Singapore (3rd place) Erasure even made it into the top ten for the first time.
Erasure's first commercial big hit was the fourth single Sometimes , with which they made it to number 2 in the English and German charts in 1986. Victim of Love reached # 1 on the US Dance Charts in 1987 . The second album, The Circus (1987), also produced by Flood , from which these singles were extracted, now sold much better.
The subsequent five albums The Innocents (1988), Wild! (1989), Chorus (1991), Pop! The First 20 Hits (1992) and I Say I Say I Say (1994) all came first in England, so that Erasure were already considered one of the most successful British bands in 1992. The album The Innocents, produced by Stephen Hague, and the compilation Pop! have been awarded triple platinum in England . Monophonic synthesizers were increasingly used for chorus . International hit singles such as Ship of Fools , A Little Respect , Blue Savannah , Chorus , Love to Hate You and Always were extracted from these albums . In addition to her English homeland, Erasure became very popular, especially in Scandinavia and South America. For example, Chorus reached number 1 in Argentina and Love to Hate You and Always were also published in Spanish, Amor Y Odio and Siempre .
The EP Crackers International with the hit Stop! reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in 1988. The ABBA-esque EP , on which they covered the ABBA hits Lay All Your Love on Me , SOS , Take a Chance on Me and Voulez-Vous , reached number 1 in the singles charts in England in 1992 and number 2 in Germany. Erasure started a new ABBA boom.
The “Wild!” Tour in 1989/90 turned into a ten-month long worldwide success, ending with the “Milton Keynes Bowl” concert on September 1, 1990, in front of over 60,000 visitors and more than two million listeners to the live broadcast of the BBC radio station 1 . The highlight of the tours so far, however, was the "Phantasmagorical Entertainment" show in 1992 with many costume changes, dancers and different sets, in which Andy Bell took to the stage in a swan, among other things. It was also a great success and all concerts were sold out.
Crisis and comeback
After the very popular album I Say I Say I Say (1994) produced by Martyn Ware , they released several albums that were commercially less or less successful. The album Erasure (1995) led away from the radio-compatible 3-minute up-tempo numbers to ballads with playful ambient sounds and sprawling instrumental passages. The single In My Arms from the album Cowboy reached number 2 on the US Dance Charts in 1997. The next album, Loveboat , produced by Flood for the first time and featuring acoustic guitars and hip-hop beats, was not even distributed in North America in 2000 .
From 1999 to 2001, all Erasure singles from 1986 to 1992 including remixes and B-sides were gradually released on four box sets. However, the first four box sets are no longer available. In 2001 the US television series Scrubs "honored" the erasure hit A Little Respect in the third episode of the first season ( My Best Friend's Mistake ) . The piece is picked up again and again, sometimes interpreted by series characters themselves.
In the same year, Wheatus recorded a successful cover version of A Little Respect . With an adaptation of the Peter Gabriel hit Solsbury Hill , Erasure made it back into the playlist of radio and music channels in 2003 , which in turn brought higher sales figures. The single, the subsequent album Other People's Songs (only with cover versions) and the concerts that followed were more popular than in a long time. In 2003 Erasure finally brought out hits with their best-of album ! The Very Best Of Erasure brings their old and new hits back into the minds of listeners, with 100,000 copies sold in Great Britain alone (for which there was a gold record ). A DVD with all of the duo's music videos shows an overview of the hit catalog by Clarke and Bell.
With the single Breathe from the next album Nightbird , Erasure reached number 1 in the US dance charts and number 4 in the UK charts again in 2005 and were able to build on their past successes. Even music critics were able to warm up to this record again after Erasure had mostly reaped malice from them for a few years. On the extensive tour accompanying the album, every concert was recorded and offered for sale on CD around half an hour after the concert had ended . So the fans had a live album of their “own” concert. A DVD of the show in Cologne is also available.
On March 31, 2006, the acoustic album Union Street was released together with the single Boy in Germany. No new tracks have been recorded for this album, rather album titles from the years 1987 to 2000 that have not been released as singles have been selected. These were rearranged in a studio in New York with musicians Steve Walsh and Jill Walsh . On their tour in April 2006, two sold-out concerts could be seen in Hamburg and Berlin .
In May 2007, the album Light at the End of the World , the first single from it, I Could Fall in Love with You , which reached number 7 on the US Dance Charts, was released on March 30, 2007. In the summer of 2007, Erasure got together with Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry participated in the True Colors Concert Tour for the benefit of the Human Rights Campaign . In late summer and autumn 2007 a European tour took place, which also took the band back to Germany.
On February 20, 2009, based on the 1992 album Pop! The First 20 Hits , the new compilation Total Pop! The First 40 Hits , a double CD collection of the first 40 singles.
In August 2009, a series of remixes that were previously mostly only available to DJs under the name Erasure Club was released on a compilation CD called Erasure Club .
In 2009 the album The Innocents celebrates its 21 year anniversary. On this occasion, the CD The Innocents 21st Anniversary Edition has been available since October 26, 2009, with the material being digitally revised. As a forerunner of the anniversary CD, the Phantom Bride EP was released with new remixes of Phantom Bride and other songs.
Andy and Vince had been in New York since early October 2009, working on material for a new album. On September 30, 2011, the fourteenth studio album Tomorrow's World was released , produced by Frankmusik and announced with the new single When I Start To (Break It All Down) . The album reached number 29 in the English charts, number 35 in Germany and number 61 in the USA. The single Be with You reached number 7 on the US Dance Charts. In 2011 Erasure went on a world tour and played in Russia for the first time. In addition, after 1997 they played five concerts in Brazil and two concerts in Argentina.
Latest publications
On November 11, 2013, the Christmas album Snow Globe was released , which contains both covers of classic Christmas carols and new own compositions. As singles were Gaudete and Make It Wonderful decoupled. On September 22nd, 2014, Erasure released another long player: The Violet Flame . The album was recorded in New York and London, with Richard Philips aka Richard X from Britain acting as the producer . In 2015, another compilation, Always - The Very Best of Erasure , was released, which reached number 9 in the UK charts, followed the following year by From Moscow to Mars , a career-spanning box set to mark the 30th anniversary of Erasure.
In November 2016 it was announced that Erasure would be opening act for Robbie Williams' "The Heavy Entertainment Show" tour in 2017 . In May 2017 the album World Be Gone was released , with the first single Love You to the Sky , which was released as a single-track download in March. The album came in at number 6 in the UK charts. Analog synthesizers were still used most of the time, while logic and soft synths were used on the tour . As announced, the album World Beyond was released in March 2018 , a new recording of World Be Gone in a post-classical guise. It was recorded in just ten days by Andy Bell and seven musicians from the Brussels-based "Echo Collectives". In March 2018, Erasure entered the Billboard Classical Albums and Classical Crossover Albums charts for the first time .
On August 21, 2020, the new album The Neon was released, from which the single Hey Now (Think I Got a Feeling) released in June comes.
Discography
Studio albums
- 1986: Wonderland
- 1987: The Circus
- 1988: The Innocents
- 1989: Wild!
- 1991: Chorus
- 1994: I Say I Say I Say
- 1995: Erasure
- 1997: Cowboy
- 2000: Loveboat
- 2003: Other People's Songs
- 2005: Nightbird
- 2006: Union Street
- 2007: Light at the End of the World
- 2011: Tomorrow's World
- 2013: Snow Globe
- 2014: The Violet Flame
- 2017: World Be Gone
- 2018: World Beyond
- 2020: The Neon
Awards
- 1989: in the "British Group" category
- 1993: in the category "Idea of the Year" (ABBA Esque)
- 1994: for Always
Web links
- Official website (English)
- Erasure at laut.de
- Video interview: Erasure on Bonedo.de
References
- ↑ Erasure - World Be Gone (Mute). (No longer available online.) May 10, 2017, archived from the original on 20171222 ; accessed on August 6, 2020 (English).
- ↑ vinceclarkemusic.com ( Memento of the original from May 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ depechemode.de
- ^ The Assembly "Never Never" (1983). BR.de, November 9, 2007, archived from the original on March 4, 2013 ; Retrieved May 28, 2013 .
- ↑ Charts. The highest chart positions of Erasure's albums and singles. ( Memento of December 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at: erasureinfo.com
- ↑ abbeyroadlive.sandbag.uk.com ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ August 2009 News. ( Memento of August 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at: erasureinfo.com
- ↑ a b erasureinfo.com
- ↑ RSH Gold Award 1993
