Andy Bell: 'It's amazing what you can do when you have these aspirations in your heart'
Best known as the singer in synth pop duo Erasure, Andy Bell has been steadily amassing quite a solo catalogue over the past 20 years. Alongside his more esoteric adventures as ‘polysexual’ character Torsten – a collaboration with playwright Barney Ashton-Bullock – the 61-year-old is about to release Ten Crowns, his third album under his own name.
Talking to The Yorkshire Post via video, the Peterborough-born vocalist says all these extra-curricular activities allow him to try out different approaches to the music he makes with Vince Clarke in Erasure.
“I think it’s just a really healthy thing to do,” he says. “Vince and I have a great working relationship and personal relationship and when we go off and do different things it gives you some news. Because we’re so much in each other’s pockets, it’s nice to have a life outside of Erasure as well.”
With Erasure temporarily paused following the tragic loss of Clarke’s wife Tracy Hurley Martin to cancer, Bell decided to dedicate some time to shaping a batch of songs that he’d been working on over a number of years with the producer Dave Audé into a full-blown album. “It just seemed to happen quite naturally, really,” he says.
Bell first met the American producer – a Grammy Award winner who has worked with the likes of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Madonna and Beyoncé – in 2010 via Bel’s soon-to-be husband, the US DJ Stephen Moss. Four years later the pair collaborated on the club hit Aftermath (Here We Go).
“Dave’s from Utah and (Erasure) are for some reason really popular there, and in Texas as well – you read about these places that apparently very conservative but there’s always a flip side to that,” Bell says. “Stephen had a few clubs in Tampa, Florida and I did a PA there in one of his clubs and he mentioned this guy Dave Audé and said he’d love to do some work with me, so we met up kind of blindly at his house in LA. His children were two or three years old and they’d come in and knock on the window to try and get into the studio and I felt bad for them, but much like Vince, Dave is a workaholic.”
The pair became firm friends and continued writing together after Aude relocated to Tennessee. “We’ve written half of (the album) in Nashville,” Bell says. “It’s been over ten years or so off and on but we finished it over the past couple of years.” They create in the traditional way, in a room together, he adds. “Dave’s a remix DJ as well, so he’s mixing a track by day for people like Meghan Trainor and Nicole Scherzinger and he’s always got loads of spare material lying around. He might play something to me and say, ‘Do you like this?’ and I’ll start singing along on the mic, just building a melody and then start attaching words to it pretty much in the same way as I do with Vince.
“It’s more instantaneous with Dave because his studio’s right there in his house and his wife puts up with me staying there.”
The album counterbalances serious subject matter with uplifting melodies. Its central theme is about picking oneself up, dusting oneself down and making the most of life, Bell says, explaining it’s been a feature of his life ever since his youthful rebellion against his church upbringing because it meant little to him as a young gay man.
“Recording in Nashville, you could feel the presence of all the churches, but I don’t like the way it’s being used now as a weapon against gay and transgender people and I think that’s reflected in the music,” he says. “We’re not hurting anybody on purpose. I just think how can you use Jesus’ name in the name of hate and then you say ‘amen’ at the end, which means for everybody. I feel like a spiritual person and I just think, why are we being attacked?”
The presence of Blondie singer Debbie Harry in the song Heart’s A Liar is, says Bell, a “dream come true”. He adds: “Of all the people in the whole of pop, she’s my number one, and it’s almost surreal and I love having her there because I feel that she’s been a mentor. I’ve met her a few times and she’s always been very sweet, very coquettish and teasing, and I just think she’s so cool. She showed me a way how to be in the industry...it’s amazing having a track with her, I can’t quite believe it until it comes out.”
Bell is less sure, however, that he will follow Harry’s example and continue performing until he’s 80 years old. “I’m kind of walking the line because I was 60 last year,” he says. “We don’t have to work – I don’t want that to sound arrogant or anything – but it’s kind of like what else would you do with yourself? I have grown vegetables before (he and Moss own a small farm in Spain) but not like a full-time thing. Music is like a call for me, you’re always going to want to do it in some aspect, so I don’t know if I can retire but at the same time you are aware of your mortality and being able to move around the stage (after two hip replacements).”
Forty years on from meeting Vince Clarke after responding to an advert that the former Depeche Mode and Yazoo songwriter placed in Melody Maker, Bell is full of gratitude for where their group Erasure has taken them, with total albums sales exceeding 28 million and tours all over the world.
“As a kid being completely obsessed with music, I had the record player in the bottom of my wardrobe with the speakers in it to make it sound bigger, and I spent my whole time dreaming of possibly making music,” he remembers. “I didn’t even realise that I was a singer when I was young and I don’t think I would’ve believed if somebody had told me when I was listening to Parallel Lines ‘you’ll be singing a song with that lady one day’. And I met Vince Clarke, who was my hero as well, and I think it’s amazing what you can do and what things can happen when you have these aspirations in your heart. I’m very, very lucky because not everybody gets the chance, but no, I can’t believe where I am.”
He and Clarke compliment each other as people, he feels. “Vince is a really true character and what you see if what you get with him,” Bell says. “In the beginning I used to feel like he was faking his modesty, but he isn’t. He is really shy and gets really embarrassed, that’s why I love nerds. He likes being by himself as well and he’s in it purely for creating the music and for the art of the music. I just think we’re really well suited, I think I chose well with that man because I could have been easily misguided by something else. He’s pretty much kept me on the straight and narrow, Vince has.”
Discussions over a follow-up to Erasure’s 2022 album The Neon have begun, but it’s only at the ideas stage, Bell reveals. “I saw Vince in Brooklyn before he moved and also in his new place, and we’re planning to see each other again by the end of this year. We’ll just see what happens,” he says.
In the meantime, he is looking forward to his solo tour, which begins in York. “You can never underestimate how much work it is just to release an album these days and my poor Stephen, he’s had a baptism of fire because I don’t think he really realised the amount of work that goes into these things, and neither did I until I’ve seen him pretty much every day sending non-stop emails and making phone calls, and here we are signing 5,000 CD booklets and getting ready for the tour,” he says. “It’s like a wave that comes up and hits you in the face. The album comes out and you go, what just happened?”
Andy Bell plays ay York Barbican on May 1. Ten Crowns is out on May 2. https://www.andybell.com/