Yazoo Are Back - Unfriendly As Ever
Posted on: Saturday, 7 June 2008, 00:00 CDT
T hey were never friends. She was a stroppy Essex 20-year-old with a rich, gutsy voice who lived round the corner from his studio. He was an experimental young keyboard wizard who had briefly tasted success with Depeche Mode and wanted to tread his own path.
But together Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke created a capsule of unique chart-busting electronic pop music that has endured in spite of a partnership that disintegrated as quickly as it had materialised.
Wind forward a quarter of a century and the unlikely partnership known as Yazoo are back in action to complete what they see as unfinished business. Their tour is touching parts of the UK they have never explored before - including the Westcountry - to play songs which have barely been exposed to live audiences.
Theirs is still boundary-breaking music, melding cutting-edge electronica with pop songs celebrating the devastation of love at its most beautiful and destructive.
After phenomenal success with their debut, Upstairs At Eric's - which spawned the simple but unforgettable ballad, Only You - the duo's 18-month working relationship ended before their second album, You and Me Both, was released.
"I knew Depeche Mode because we all grew up in Basildon and two of them were in my class at school, but I knew Vince the least," Alison explains. "When he left the band he just asked me to come and sing on some demos he was recording - we never even had a drink together.
"By the time we'd finished the first album I was a pop star and we were already falling out."
Alison, the tall, tomboy wild child with a compulsion to cut her own hair when drunk, who describes her young self as "a dark, aggressive, defensive scrapper", went on to great acclaim as a glamorous solo artist and, more recently, an actor.
Several years were spent in a well of depression and agoraphobia, creatively gagged by her record label of the time.
"Age has brought me peace in my heart," she says. "All my work brings me joy and I love a challenge."
Vince set up a new and highly successful partnership in Erasure, but the legacy of Yazoo's sonic style lives on. There is still no friendship between the pair - even rehearsals have been done independently, with Vince preparing backing tracks for Alison to sing along to as she gazes out of her Hertfordshire window at flocks of crows.
"I listen to the albums and he sends me the recordings. I had a pianist come round and sort out the keys for me because my voice has dropped over the years," explains Alison, who has a son, Joe, aged 22, and two younger daughters.
On stage as Yazoo it will just be the two of them, a bunch of computer equipment and maybe a guitar for probably the first and last time.
"It's the salmon cycle of the creative process: you write, you record, you perform. Performing songs for the first time feels like coming back to end what we started."
It promises to be an unmissable experience for band and fans.
Yazoo perform at Plymouth Pavilions on Monday, June 16. Box office: 0845 146 1460
(c) 2008 Western Morning News, The Plymouth (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Western Morning News, The Plymouth (UK)
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