ERASURE – ABBA-Esque EP

A lot of acts survive on having a bit of mystery, and Erasure fitted into this. Their first hits followed on from the Mode / Assembly / Yazoo / continuum, all different in their way but clearly made by the same person.

In some ways it was more of a surprise that Erasure continued together for as long as they have, seeing as how Vince left (or broke up) his other units.

Anyway, this one made them break overground, they were now in the same bracket as Abba, they achieved a pre-sold public who would continue to buy their records in slowly diminishing numbers without adding new takers.

At some point they stopped being ‘classic’ pop radio certs, maybe because Radio moved on as much as Erasure ‘matured’.

Oh, and it’s difficult to recall the video for this without accidentally including French and Saunders in it.

My main issue with this version is that it isn’t in the right key, so Andy Bell sounds thoroughly constricted.

Tom, I see your ELO and raise you a Hot Chocolate. Erasure were almost permanently in the Top 10 in the mid/late 80s but are generally remembered for a couple of songs – Sometimes and A Little Respect – while things like Victim Of Love and Ship Of Fools, more than decent, super-catchy, are in the same lost boat (ship?) as HC’s Put Your Love In Me and Love Is Life.

RD Cook’s early (1982) warning shot aside, the critical and cultural reappraisal of Abba did not begin in earnest until the early nineties. In the intervening decade since their split they had continued to be regarded with slight suspicion, and the general consensus, from a music press which still couldn’t find it in itself to forget 1976, was one of a somewhat embarrassing MoR hand-me-down looked at with only the remotest corner of the farthest eye. Erasure’s original intention had been to record a full album of Abba covers, but in the end they boiled it down to a four-track E.P. featuring industrious interpretations of “Lay All Your Love On Me,” “Voulez-Vous,” “Mamma Mia” and the lead track “Take A Chance On Me.” The project, with the associated diligent period and dress recreations in its videos, and the unavoidable side-effect of camp, was unexpectedly successful, and an important floodgate towards the parent group’s rehabilitation. It came in the wake of the Abba Gold compilation, which is likely to continue selling forever; “Dancing Queen” was reissued and returned to the top 20; the tribute acts thrived, especially Australia’s Bjorn Again, who later in 1992 repaid the compliment by releasing an E.P. entitled Erasure-ish, featuring four of their songs redone in the Abba style, and outsold virtually every other group who played at the Town and Country Club that year. You are right to feel a shiver.

No doubt there was an element of the nascent and wretched guilty pleasures phenomenon in all of this, which was still missing the point of Abba somewhat. And it has to be said that Erasure’s readings, though clearly heartfelt, are aesthetically scarcely one rung on the ladder up from KWS. The duo can best be described as the Hollies of their era; solid, reliable hitmakers, rarely innovative but always craftworthy, with the occasional flash of true inspiration (“Blue Savannah,” “A Little Respect,” “Chorus,” “Stop!,” the latter their best and most euphoric hit) peeking through the general electro-studium. As proven by the show we caught at Hammersmith Odeon in mid-1991, they were capable of superior entertainment, but this didn’t always translate to their recordings. They were among the most consistent hitmakers of the 1986-92 period covered on their Pop!: The First Twenty Hits compilation (as doomed a title as Abba’s The Singles: The First Ten Years); again, as with the Hollies, scarcely out of the top ten but hardly ever at number one.

Their “Take A Chance On Me” suffers on three distinct levels; firstly, because the song was conceived for female voices, Andy Bell can’t attain the high ranges of Agnetha or Frida, or would come across as ridiculous if he’d tried, so sings it in mid-register. Unfortunately this means the song being stripped of its theatrical peaks and bows – he can’t recreate the aghast exasperation of “some say that I waste my time,” nor lends the song sufficient depth to lend the “I’m gonna get ya/I ain’t gonna let ya” couplet the carnally conspiratorial whisper it needs. Secondly, in an effort to simplify the song to accommodate Vince Clarke’s usual, bustling electrothrob, its many subtleties are steamrollered over; for instance, the crucial question mark harmonic two-step ascension which follows the “It’s magic!” in the original bridge is ignored entirely, thereby turning the track into a rather blustering blunderbuss of a cover. Thirdly, although guest rapper MC Kinky was ideal for “E”-Zee Posse’s thundering 1990 hit “Everything Starts With An ‘E’,” her chortles about Special K and machine guns are in this context crass and thoroughly unwanted. One ignores the holding back in Abba’s music at one’s peril.

Aside from the aforementioned ‘Always’, their biggest hit in the USA and a long-running (though sadly seldom played now) hit over here, yes, totally killed their career.

Another good comparison (though a much lesser pop act) is Geri Halliwell’s cover of It’s Raining Men. Conversely her biggest hit, but also (particularly in the wake of the equally crass ‘Bag It Up’) made sure she was strictly gay interest only from then on.

I’ve heard compelling arguments that Kylie Minogue would have suffered a similar fate if she’d released the ace but extremely OTT ‘Your Disco Needs You’ from Light Years.

Of the four tracks I thought their ‘SOS’ was best (and I can hear an Erasure rendition of ‘The Visitors’ all too well in my head). Not a patch on their singles from even the previous year (I like ‘Chorus’ and ‘Love To Hate You’ a lot) but they deserved a chart-topper having scored seven top 4 hits by this point.

I view Vince and Andy’s homage as a parallel to Carter/Carnavon’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. ABBA had been largely forgotten/passed over/disregarded by the tastemakers, but of course, ABBA were as close to the personification of Pop, as King Tut was the perceived personification of Amun Ra. So we have a kind of Hall Of Mirrors effect going on here, where the source of light is obscured or just around the corner. If I had never heard an ABBA record before, this would have fuelled my curiosity to explore further.

The songs are resistant to parody, but ABBA themselves…?
Thankfully, Vince and Andy plus Bjorn Again have no curse to haunt them.

I think this is probably around the time when I realised that ABBA were a) disco b) AMAZING. My only prior experience of them was a mouldy tape with Fernando and The Winner Takes It All on one side and a top 40 from 1987 on the other that lived in the car glovebox. I thought they were OLD and RUBBISH and on a par with Dire Straits in terms of boringness. Scratchy, sepia and dirt-encrusted, like the cardboard inlay of that tape which had been left out in the sun too long. Obviously I’d heard Waterloo and Dancing Queen by that point, but surely they were by a completely different band who were FUN and COLOURFUL? That ABBA lived on the TELLY, not on a crusty tape. Shortly after this I inherited my very own tape deck and speakers for the first time and realised that all these dualistic conundrums could be solved by continually rewinding All Songs Ever and copying down the lyrics on pink notepaper.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Depeche had a *very* Abba-ish track, Photograph of you on their first post-Clarke album (it breaks down to Mamma Mia piano at the end).

And U2 covered dancing queen all through 1992, most notably in June in Stockholm with Bjorn and Benny on stage with them.

Anyhow, I agree with Tom’s review, except that I’d be a little more negative about Erasure generally (Andy Bell’s voice just has no character as far as I’m concerned and that then seems to expose the limits of Clarke’s musical imagination) and about these tracks in particular (only the Voulez-vous sounds at all good to me). I suspect that this this e.p. would have been much less of a hit if Gold had come out four months before it rather than four months after:
4

If I remember rightly, radio and TV (including TOTP) got sick of Take A Chance once the laughs had dried up, about halfway through the EP’s chart run, and instead started playing Lay All Your Love On Me (complete with naff-looking forest-set Snow White/Little Red Riding Hood video)?

I have distinct memories of quite a lot of props for Abba from various people in the New Pop/New Romantic era and IIRC Phil Oakey was always biggin them up and that respect never really died away in the around 10 years until this* and the more ironic take on them.

Personally I found the post-early 90s ironic/camp interest in Abba as annoying as one of those terrible Channel 4 Saturday night countdowns of various things (a personal bugbear of mine) which often seem to mine the same vein.

*Not the actual Erasure recordings as its obvious they actually appreciate the songs for what they are ie great pop songs and not as part of something that’s most important function is to spark feeble ‘jokes’ about 70s fashion.

By the way, many thanks to P^nk S for the big up @15. The whole Retro thing is something I feel I need to investigate further. I bought Simon Reynolds’ book, but alas have not had time to read it yet. Also, I’d like a differnt perspective on this subject. Are there any other recommendations out there?

I had no knowledge of Erasure’s chart stats post-ABBA-Esque, so the curse did strike in a way. Bjorn Again, however seem to have gone from strength to strength in the nicheWorld the have created for themselves. I would recommend seeing them live if you get the chance.

It’s interesting that some of the smartest and most creative figures of eighties pop – Oakey, Horn, McKenzie/Rankine, McCulloch, Costello, Tennant/Lowe were the ones who stayed true to Abba when they were unfashionable. It seems right to mention that I was pleasently surprised by Blancmanges cover of The Day Before You Came (for me the finest of all Abba songs) when I first heard it about 3 years ago as it turned out to be (almost) as moving and enigmatic as the original, I say almost because the Blancmange singer didn’t quite have the lonely yearning in his voice that Aghneta had.
Vince Clarke hinted at being another Abba loyalist with that piano interlude on A Little Respect but Abba-esque just seemed like a bemusing diversion. Also like the majority of 1992s number ones it seemed to outstay its welcome a bit.
I’m in two minds about Erasure too. I was sitting in a pub a few weeks ago where their greatest hits were being played and each one sounded just fine. This is a group who wrote the glorious Oh L’amour after all, and that was one of their flops. The strange thing is if someone were to ask me was I an Erasure fan I wouldn’t instanly say yes. Why is that? In the current relativist climate we’re all suppossed to be ever so comfortable in our tastes and yet still I find there are some artists who it just feels odd to admit to liking.

@19 My recollection is, conversely, that “Lay All Your Love On Me” was the track that got all the initial attention and airplay (I had the sense it was being promoted because it was a lesser known Abba track than the others on the EP – back in those final days when Abba were still a bit associated with dusty 1970s naffness), and that “Take A Chance On Me” (and its inappropriate rap, and emotion strained beyond Vince Clarke’s capacities) only really got attention later on – possibly with the video being released later, too. I wonder if this recollection is correct, or if my mind is playing tricks on me…

Not sure I quite agree that this EP killed Erasure’s career: I think it’s just that their relatively limited (if deep) pool of songwriting/performing talent more or less dried up.

“Pop!” is a fine album, it’s true – some wonderful, often quite understated, singles – “Breathe of Life”, “Am I Right?” stand out for me, as well as the more obvious gems of “Ship of Fools”, “Sometimes”, “O L’Amour” (although it must be said that the pale nodders towards Abba that were Dollar did a better job of it – perhaps Erasure should have got a female lead singer to increase their range) or “The Circus”.

Because essentially they ploughed a narrow seam: they were great at expressing vulnerability, loneliness, and occasionally (as on “Drama!” a kind of lopsidedness and awkwardness) – and perhaps the level of commercial success they had for a few years (in a way, quite strangely: as they weren’t really a conventional pop/chart band, despite superficial appearances on the contrary) made excessive demands on them, that lesser known colleagues at Mute Records remained untouched by.

And so they ended up, post-Abbaesque, with some quite dull stuff, before temporarily being reduced, a la Beautiful South, into doing cover versions that didn’t suit their style at all.

The real problem was that Andy Bell’s voice – despite the odd flight of fancy – had a relatively limited emotional, as well as technical, range, while, secondarily, the stiltedness of Clarke’s keyboarding – which had worked so well, when organized on a strictly formal pattern, as in Yazoo’s “Only You”, or Erasure’s “The Circus” – became increasingly restrictive (as is readily apparent on the Abbasesque EP); there was only so far they can go. And after they lost that path it appeared there was no way back. Although, with sunset falling on SAW and the re-ascendancy of guitar-led pop that had been gaining ground from 1989, and really soared forth from 1991, something culturally had changed, leaving Erasure behind. So the fault was not entirely theirs.

All that said, this isn’t a bad or even mediocre set of performances.

@22 I think that point about Erasure and their presentation of “gayness” is quite astute. The comparison that Wichita makes early on in the thread with Hot Chocolate (albeit for different reasons) I think also has something to it, in as much as Hot Chocolate perhaps suffered, at least in terms of perceived credibility, for not quite fitting into the contemporary British expectations of what constituted “black music” stereotype, Erasure were often dowdy, grey rainy day at a run-down seaside town, not sparkly and spangly and shiny. Neither group quite fitted in with contemporary prejudices or categorisations, and perhaps suffered, at least at the time, for it.

On my CD copy of the EP “Lay All Your Love On Me” is the lead track, and I believe the vinyl is the same way. But it’s “Take A Chance On Me” that’s collected on Pop! so I can’t be sure.

I like Erasure. I say this only actually owning Pop! (I got it from a charity shop for £1, and in fact that was only because I always feel guilty exiting a charity shop without buying anything). But it’s wormed its way into my heart (the fact I spent an evening with only it for company as I pulled an all-nighter on some Physics probably helps) and it’s clear Erasure were capable of magic – “Sometimes”, of course, “Oh L’amour”, “Victim of Love”, “Ship of Fools”, “A Little Respect”, the exclamation-pointed triumph of the immediate and obvious “Stop!” followed by the wonky “Drama!” (which gave, of all people, The Jesus & Mary Chain their highest chart appearance), “Love to Hate You” (that couplet about “I like to read a murder mystery/I like to know the killer isn’t me”)… and “Take A Chance On Me”. Most of its sheen is probably that of the original tune (conversely I don’t like Erasure’s “Lay All Your Love On Me” much chiefly because I don’t like ABBA’s all that much), but it’s bouncy enough. I veer more to punctum’s side on the rap than Tom’s (an act of mischievous tampering that in this case destroys more than it creates, mainly because everything grinds to a halt before it begins).

Amusingly enough despite the agreement upthread that they were a great singles act it’s Then Play Long that has to deal with them five times (though it’s nice to see Lena will get to grips with two of their finer numbers).

Oh, one last thing: the only #1 single for Mute, I believe.

What are Erasure’s total sales in the UK versus the Pet Shop Boys’?

Things like Oh L’amour and Sometimes are OK I suppose, but, honestly, the first thought that occurs to me in both cases is ‘Would be measurably, perhaps 50% better if Moyet was singing it’. That is, now I think about it, it isn’t just that Bell’s voice strikes me as somewhat anonymous, it’s that the character it does have inclines towards and seems to invite comparison with Moyet’s. Compare with Glenn Gregory from Heaven 17: his voice is slightly anonymous/generic, but he never sounded like an approximation to Oakey so at least Heaven 17’s stuff got to stand on its own merits, didn’t come pre-shadowed/pre-refuted as Erasure’s largely does for me. Is my sort of reaction unfair? Possibly, but it’s not as though Clarke’s changed things up musically to help avert or forestall the problem. Bernie Sumner would have have always just been a poor man’s Ian Curtis (and New Order probably wouldn’t have amounted to much) if they hadn’t evolved their sound away from the original Joy Division template. But by 1983 NO were already playing plenty of songs that you really couldn’t even imagine Curtis as we’d known him singing – the break was accomplished. Clarke didn’t do anything like that, and he’s paid a price for it. Erasure are, in my view, essentially, ineliminably a minor group.

#29, don’t get the J&MC reference.

I think that Rick Astley one had worn out it’s welcome pretty quickly, also Nat King cole had his single re-released to cash in (successfully), whereas Matt Bianco’s b-side got a lot of club play.

Either I’m listening to something else, or totally missing something important that everybody else is hearing and I’m not (or vice versa).
Andy Bell’s voice, to me at least is one of the more distinctive voices that emerged from the 80s. There is the hint of a wobble on tracks like Sometimes and Stop! which I hear quite clearly as “well that’s Bell’s trademark, innit?”. Someone upthread said “constricted”, but I don’t get that sense at all. He’s not on the verge of sobbing like, say Kevin Rowland but there is in my mind some element of emotion in there; that sense of affrontery which precedes the sobs, the cusp of losing it, even on Erasure’s more joyful outings it’s evident to my ears at least.

Re:35, aren’t they supposed to have sung the backing vocals on it?

#41 Ah, now that rings a (and e) bell.

More like September 1997, I surmise. It was all very sad.

TOTPWatch: Erasure twice performed ‘Take A Chance On Me’ on Top of the Pops;

4 June 1992. Also in the studio that week were; Take That, Lionel Ritchie, Utah Saints and KWS. Tony Dortie & Claudia Simon were the hosts.

9 July 1992. Also in the studio that week were; Smart E’s, Dina Carroll, Joe Cocker, Urban Hype and Bryan Adams. Femi Oke & Adrian Rose were the hosts.

They also performed ‘Voulez-Vous’ on the edition transmitted on 13 June 1992. Also in the studio that week were; Incognito, The Wedding Present, Manic Street Preachers and Cyndi Lauper. Adrian Rose & Femi Oke were the hosts.

@11 and @12: And the original victims of the curse were, of course, Abba themselves: Bjorn and Benny the pharaohs sacrificing their marriages to the gods of music, money and fame.