Erasure

Current Erasure Releases

Light At The End Of The World (Album)
( CD , Ltd Ed CD With Bonus Songs & Digital Download )

Leave it to Erasure to hole up in a cottage abutting the woods of Mid-Coast Maine, surrounded by ocean, forest and mountains to produce one of the most computer-based, modern albums of their career. In a setting perhaps better suited to the creation of last year's critically-acclaimed acoustic Union Street project, Vince Clarke, Andy Bell and producer Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, Wire, Clinic, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) spent six weeks last autumn recording the songs that comprise the new CD Light At The End Of The World .

The most recent release in an incredibly fertile and prolific period, Light At The End Of World proves Erasure's creative vitality, musical influence and cultural relevance is just nearing its peak more than twenty years and twenty million albums into their historic collaboration.

The writing process for Light At The End Of The World was disciplined, beginning over the internet, with Clarke and Bell exchanging ideas via email, in two separate Maine songwriting sessions last summer and ending with Bell writing and revising in the studio as the tracks were assembled daily by Clarke and Jones.

Much had changed in their personal lives. Clarke was now married with an infant son and living in Maine while Bell had been navigating his way through the heart-wrenching break-up of a relationship of nearly two decades. Nevertheless, the songwriting process that had brought them more than thirty Top 40 singles and eleven Top 20 albums, including five Number 1s, remained the same.

"Doing all our albums, me and Andy get together in a room with an analogue micro-cassette tape recorder," he says. "We have no melodic ideas, nothing, when we go in that room, which is the most amazing thing about it. I'll play guitar or piano - a selection of chords I think sound interesting. And Andy will sing a melody over the collection of chords. We'll do this for four chords, or eight bars. Then we'll have a melodic idea with a chord change, another short section, then the next collection of chords. There will be four or five parts like this that we record onto the tape recorder. Then we'll listen back and choose the bits we like for the chorus, say, and piece it together." Vince Clarke

"This album is to show people that our pop isn't finished. It's saying we can still do it, we can still write great songs," he adds, trying to pinpoint Erasure's appeal. "We're a bizarre mixture - people don't get it a lot of the time. We're quite British and working class - working people love a good tune in a pub - but we're also quite eccentric. We're the UK version of Sparks: the Gilbert & George of electronic pop. And we don't play the game." Andy Bell

I Could Fall In Love With You (Single)
( CD , 7" Vinyl Picture Disc & Digital Download )

"This is one of the few songs that existed in part before the Maine hotel room writing sessions. Before we started this album, I was really keen for it not to be mid-tempo - I'm having a mid-tempo crisis! Our albums seem to have got slower and slower, so I started searching for classic funk or disco basslines, put some ideas together with chord changes and basslines underneath, and emailed them to Andy for him to sing over the top. The song, like this album, is quite 'up' and uptempo because we're both in good spaces right now." Vince Clarke

Sunday Girl (Single)
( CD , 7" Vinyl Picture Disc & Digital Download )

"This one flowed out very naturally in that hotel room in Maine. We would only write in the afternoon because I've got a new baby [Oscar] and so had to get back home each night. The chord changes and melody seemed to work really well." Vince Clarke

"It's a Bacharach-type song with a big chorus. It's quite old-fashioned, like Neil Sedaka's Calendar Girl." Andy Bell

Storm Chaser (EP)
( CD , 7" Vinyl Picture Disc & Digital Download )

"We originally recorded Early Bird during the 'Light...' album sessions in Maine last Fall. We were considering some special way to use it apart from the CD and when we agreed to co-headline the True Colors tour, we just thought it might make an interesting duet between Cyndi and us. She put down the vocals in New York and sent the track back to us. We were quite happy with the result and quite happy to have gotten to know her and perform with her on the road this summer." Andy Bell