POLITICAL TUNES, EDGE
Erasure goes bold with political themes
Most people think of Erasure as a dance band. And most people's thinking is correct: The British duo has made a 30-plus-year career out of irrepressible pop songs perfect for clubs from Boston to Berlin to Buenos Aires. But the team of singer Andy Bell and synthesizer wizard Vince Clarke has also spent time making slyly political music. (For Bell, “A Little Respect” has always been a gay pride anthem.)
With album No. 17, last year's “World Be Gone,” they ditched sly for overt.
“When we started writing, we didn't have a concept, but all this weird (expletive) was going on in the world,” Clarke said from his Brooklyn studio ahead of the duo's Tuesday performance at House of
Blues. “What was happen- ing in America, what was happening with Brexit, I could have never known or believed that it could happen. It is really turbulent times we are in.”
And so the pair looked squarely at the trouble.
“Lousy Sum Of Nothing” addressed the global refugee crisis. “Oh What a World” calls out people for political apathy. “Still It's Not Over” revisits the fight to get governments to take on the AIDS epidemic. Clarke said he wants the lyrics — the messages — to shine, so he worked hard to keep the music and production simple to not overpower the words. The “music light, vocals heavy approach,” as Clarke calls it, echoes some of the band's early work in which Bell's voice dominated the records. (It's nice to hear 54-year-old Bell still has those powerhouse pipes.)
“I tried to make almost cinematic music, and that gave Andy loads and loads of room to add backing vocals and harmonies and counter melodies,” Clarke said. “He even worked with a guy who helped Freddie Mercury. That's cool, isn't it?”
Because the album deals with so many topical themes, more tracks than usual made it into the set list. While Erasure will perform their global hits, they feel delivering their new material is important.
“The new album set the scene for the tour,” Clarke said. “Obviously we are doing stuff from our back catalog, but we wanted to put this record on stage.”
Clarke and Bell spend the most time together on tour so that's when they begin to toss ideas for material back and forth. The pair has just started on the process, but one of the ideas is for the next release to be a “high-energy or disco” record. But that depends on the songs they write and the world those songs reflect.
“I'm a natural optimist,” Clarke said. “So while many terrible things have happened in my lifetime, I've seen the end of apartheid in South Africa. I've seen the IRA giving up their arms. We were touring in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, and I thought, `Never in my lifetime would I see this.' So while we are in a downturn, I believe that things will get better.”
And we'll need some killer dance tracks for when that happens.