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I’ve put it through a translator-
Andy Bell: the irony that almost cost him his career, life with HIV and the new Erasure album
The duo that he formed in the 80s with Vince Clarke seems to be experiencing a new golden age, after those beginnings where they accumulated hits like Oh'l Amour”, “Stop!” or “Blue Savannah”; Following 2020's hit The Neon, the duo deliver a new album: Day-Glo (Based on a True Story)
It may seem contradictory, but deep down it makes a lot of sense. Known for his histrionic figure on stage, in private Andy Bell is a shy and reclusive person. The singer of Erasure traced a strange parable with fame: he met public exposure in the mid-80s, and learned from the beginning that the same machinery that one day godlike, the next day destroys and ridicules. Over the years, along with his partner Vince Clarke, Bell turned Erasure into an unbeatable pop tank that not only has a past to back it up, but also reached one of its best versions three and a half decades after its founding.
Born in Dogsthorpe, a small English town of less than ten thousand inhabitants, Bell is the oldest of six children, the first son of a factory worker and a mother who began working as a cleaning staff in a school and ended up taking care of the only sex city shops. The maternal liberal gaze (especially in contrast to the paternal conservative rigor) paved the way for the future singer to be able to whitewash his homosexuality in front of his family when he was 17 years old. Although years later he recognized that his hometown was not particularly hostile, it was small enough that he soon grew bored. Thus, Bell and a friend rented an apartment in London to try their luck in the big city.
Installed in the English capital, Bell got some jobs while forming his first band, The Void. Although the group was not successful, he was convinced of his future as a singer, and that was how he responded to an anonymous advertisement for a vocal audition published in Melody Maker magazine, in 1985. The one who called was Vince Clarke, whom Andy admired. most notably for his work on early Depeche Mode records and later as part of the duo Yazoo. Bell was guaranteed the position and that same day Erasure was born, although he assured that he took his time in naturalizing working side by side with one of his musical heroes. "I was very shy in the studio, I couldn't even talk to him because I couldn't believe I was there," specified the vocalist.
With Wonderland, their first album, Erasure fully entered the world of synth-pop, and did so with a bang. Bell's fear of the talent of his creative partner faded when the single "Sometimes" from his second album, The Circus, became a hit. The diffusion of the theme brought in addition a notorious public exposure, which Bell had to surf as best he could along with his shyness, and shortly after he began a relationship with Paul Hickey, the band's manager, a bond that faltered in 1990 when Hickey was diagnosed with HIV but, in Bell's words, remained "platonic" until his death in 2012.
Change of decade and paradigm
With the change of the decade, Bell also had to deal with a greater onslaught: what in the eighties was validated as modern and current, in the nineties it was thrashed as frivolous and naive. Hymns such as "Oh'l Amour", "Stop!" or “Blue Savannah” were quickly forgotten, and songs like “Breathe” or “Chorus” didn't even have a chance to break through in a historical period that went from grunge to boy bands and from there to nu metal. And not having an immediate need to please became the creative fuel for one of the greatest artistic risks: in 1991, Bell provided his voice for the record adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Peter Hammill. Four years later, Erasure released their self-titled album, and what were once three-minute pop gems were now sleepy, ambient pieces twice as long.
The following years saw the duo stay alive with albums that served little more than to justify going on tour, and that's how in 2005 Bell decided to launch a solo career. A year earlier, he made public that he had been HIV positive since 1998. At the time of making the announcement, he threw an irony that a large part of the public took for granted: that he had decided to get infected on purpose. “I said it angry, it had already happened to Paul. I didn't go out to grab it on purpose. I wanted to say something shocking, but it was just stupid, "he would admit in dialogue with The Guardian, in the middle of this year.
After trying all possible formats to save a creative shortage (cover albums, Christmas carol albums), in 2017 Erasure released World Be Gone, an album that returned them to success for the first time in many years. Soon after, the duo reformulated the songs in acoustic and orchestral format on the World Beyond album and found that their repertoire effectively stood on its own. In 2020, his return to the big leagues materialized with The Neon, an album that reached fourth place in sales in its first week on the charts, which meant his first foray into the Top 10 since 1994. The album was supposed to bring the band to Argentina in 2021, but the pandemic had other plans.
To mitigate the lockdown, Clarke took The Neon's tracks and tampered with them enough to break them down and reassemble new songs. The end result is Day-Glo (Based on a True Story), which hit the rinks last Friday, a sound collage to which Bell added new lyrics at his Miami home. "Many of the songs contain poems, and I think Vince thought they were a bit harsh, especially because I don't really know what they're talking about," he acknowledged at the time of its release, a phrase that well sums up the work policy of his last thirty and five years.
