Erasure – Pop! The First 20 Hits
Greatest hits album, 1992
The best songs write themselves. For me, I would say ‘Oh L’amour’, ‘Sometimes’, ‘Victim Of Love’, ‘Ship Of Fools’, ‘Chorus’, ‘Love To Hate You’ just sprang out of nowhere, which I love. Every time we tried to write a hit, it’s failed. For instance, because we went off the road with Erasure the album we consciously made a decision to do ultra-pop on Cowboy, and it didn’t gel with me. If you’re writing it on purpose, it’s not going to work. I think it’s just fascinating to have a whole series of songs that did really well, got played on the radio, and we built up a fanbase over this period. At the same time, because it was capped with the ABBA-esque EP, we got slammed because all of a sudden we were drowned in ABBA. We got dismissed as songwriters, people said ‘oh that was their only Number One’. It took away from our own pleasure of our own songs in some ways.
‘Too Darn Hot’
From AIDS charity compilation Red Hot + Blue, 1990
Along with one of Seymour Stein’s assistants, Diamanda Galás was one of the organisers of the whole thing. Erasure was the first band that said yes to the project and because they got one band on board they got the B-52s, and then Sinéad [O’Connor], and then even later, George Michael. I felt very proud of that. I wasn’t positive then either, I only found out I was positive in 1998, but as Diamanda said, artists were afraid of appearing on an AIDS benefit album. I went into Mute one day, and Diamanda had a photograph on her desk. I said to her ‘Wow, who’s that handsome guy?’ She said, ‘that’s my brother, he passed away of AIDS’. I painted her a picture on Photoshop and met her in New York. They told me she was in the gay bookstore on Christopher Street, so we had to park the limo – we’d never go in limos, honestly – by the shop, and then get go and get Diamanda. I gave her the painting and she couldn’t believe that I’d done it. She’s quite shocking – she told me that she had a gun in her handbag. She said, like, ‘those motherfuckers, they’re not gonna get me – nobody’s gonna get me’. I love the way that she’s still angry and very eloquent with her activism and the things she cares about. We all know what’s going on every day on this earth, and nobody says a word. You’re not allowed to say a word. And she does.
Electric Blue
Debut solo album, 2005
It had always been a desire to have a solo career. One, because of Debbie Harry, she’s always had her solo side projects, and I love the fact that Alison Moyet and Annie Lennox went on to have their own careers. It’s really hard to be a frontman and go solo – the record company hates it because you supposedly only sell 10% of the band’s records, and fans don’t like it either because it’s like you’re separating yourself from the band. It wasn’t daunting to step out on my own, because I like it, I can do things as well, it’s not because Vince [Clarke] wouldn’t let me do them but I feel like I can just do them more on my own. I got to make the video for ‘Crazy’ with Al & Al, who are amazing digital artists. You should have seen some of the material that I sent them, it was pornographic, and they mixed into the walls and stuff like that. Apart from the song ‘Electric Blue’, which I love, it was great working with Claudia [Brücken, of Propaganda], I think she’s a brilliant writer. I love the song ‘Love Oneself’. We got to play Koko in Camden, which was great, because I wore my rubber outfit and with a mask and gloves. It was a bit more edgy than Erasure, in a way
Non-Stop
Second solo album, 2010
When I look at Non-Stop as a piece of work, it’s not very coherent. I loved working with Pascal Gabriel, and he’d worked with Kylie, but at the same time, I sort of wanted to be cool. You can’t want to be cool. You’re either cool or you’re not, but I love some of the songs and I think there were some amazing remixes on there, especially the Seamus Haji remix of ‘Will You Be There?’ In some ways, it was a bit ahead of its time. I think with Erasure too, it’s always been like that – some of the costumes that I’ve worn have been derided, but then all of a sudden Take That or Harry Styles are wearing it. In some ways, that’s more flattering, because you’re not part of whatever the clique is at the time. ‘Honey If You Love Him (That’s All That Matters)’, the song with Perry Farrell, was bizarre because it came out of nowhere, I didn’t know he was a fan or anything. There was an invite from him saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got this song that I think you would really like’ and I did. I’m so glad that he let me do it and sing with him. I thought he was very brave. We went to his studio in Malibu, I didn’t know many of his songs, only a few, and it’s a bit embarrassing when you’re working with someone and you don’t really know their stuff very well. I just thought what an opportunity not to be missed. We got we got on really well.
Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors tour
Tour of the USA in support of LGBT+ charities, 2007-2008
I was always a fan of Cyndi Lauper, her voice is phenomenal, she’s got this operatic style and range. She organised the True Colours tours for homeless LGBTQ+ people and tried to Obama elected all at the same time. I felt honoured to be asked twice, once on my own, once with Vince. I was onstage with Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, the B-52s, all these people that to me are superstars in America, they’re saying, ‘fucking Andy Bell! Here he is!’ I just go, ‘whoa, hold on a minute’. Then you’ve got the guy from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and Sean Hayes from Will & Grace. You get to meet these people, and they’re fans, and you think, like, ‘oh my gosh, how can they be fans?’ They’re these big stars and I’m always in fan mode, I never put myself on the same level. I don’t know if that saves me or if it’s just self-demeaning. Even here in Mallorca, I’ve been in the bar on New Year’s Eve and there’s Annie Lennox waving, almost saying come over. I didn’t go over because I don’t know what to say. We supported David Bowie twice, and we got a message saying, ‘do you want to meet me? Line up in the corridor’ so Vince said no. We didn’t meet him.
Yazoo – ‘Nobody’s Diary’ remix
2008
I love getting my hands on Vince’s sounds. I always have to have a producer or an engineer because I can’t do anything, so I work with Gareth Jones. I wanted to present ‘Nobody’s Diary’ in a different light, twist it around a bit and make it sort of more dancy, but it was quite dancy in the first place. I love doing remixes for other people – Amanda Lear, Sandra Bernhard, Goldfrapp. I love singing on them, which other people don’t do, just adding like little bits of vocals. Gareth and I would spend three days or more doing a remix. The very first remix I did was for ‘Breath Of Life’, and it ended up being shorter than the single. I was like, ‘oh, that’s probably not how you do a remix’. It took a while to get used to it.
I still think Yazoo’s music is so ground-breaking, it has never been equalled, not by anyone. Erasure, we can’t do that. We were going to call ourselves Yaz Two at one time when we were trying to think of a name, I’m so glad we didn’t, because they’re incomparable. We can’t do Yazoo because they had that dynamic between the two of them. To me, it was so… groovy’s not really the word, but cutting-edge, disco, electro, Detroit – it had all this stuff in there. Alison’s vocals, she just made it ballsy, they all thought she was a Black lesbian. One of my ambitions was to have this Yazoo level but I’ve come to the realization that’s not going to happen because we’re a different thing. I don’t know what Vince did then, I asked him when he wrote ‘Only You’, what was the impetus? What was behind it? What was your feeling? He goes, ‘Oh, nothing’. I said, ‘You can’t tell me that you weren’t feeling anything when you wrote that song!’ He won’t admit to an emotional connection. It’s a very Cancerian trait.
Are you polar opposites in that way?
I don’t think so. I’m quite tough as well. Even though people think I wear my heart on my sleeve it is sort of an illusion and very self-protective. We’re very protective of each other. When we were first in the studio with Wonderland, I couldn’t believe it. I was in the studio with Vince Clarke, I was just staring at him all the time. He might have thought it was a bit weird, but I thought, I’m going to crack your shell, I don’t care how long it takes. I just waited and waited and waited.Eventually still there’s a reservation, but that’s just who he is.
The Fall Of The House of Usher
Peter Hammill’s operatic adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story, 1991
That was a lovely project. I know Mark Almond wanted to do it, and I think he was pissed off when I got it. I didn’t really know Van Der Graaf Generator, but Peter Hammill just asked ‘Would you like to play this part? He’s a really naive character, a really innocent character in the opera.’ I went down to Bath where he had his studio and was literally learning line by line. It was just a great exercise because I don’t read music. Even though the sheet music was there, I followed it almost blindly. Peter put his voice on there so I could hear what the notes were, but I was following them without reading music, I second guessed where the notes were going to go. When I was in school I used to love singing hymns, I learned them off by heart, so I got a sense of how melody works. I used to sing like Les Dawson when he played the piano, really out loud, and then do the last note of a line off key on purpose. People would think I was tone deaf. I’ve never been a snob about voices, there’s nothing wrong with people who can’t sing. There’s a snobbism to it and I think it’s wrong – that’s why pop is fantastic, because you can make anything you want out of it. Peter was very kind, very gentle.
Torsten The Bareback Saint, Torsten The Beautiful Libertine
Series of albums and one-man stage shows about polysexual undead being, Torsten. 2014 – 2016
The Fall Of The House Of Usher was what gave Barney [Ashton-Bullock, playwright] the idea to offer me Torsten. We were on the same table at the Mojo Awards when I was giving an award to Daniel Miller. Me and Barney started talking, and I just liked him straight away, because he’s so odd. He’s a poet, so dedicated to his craft, and so undersung, because the West End is so commercialised now, it’s so tough for avant-garde people. [His work is] like scattering poetry, this sometimes machinegun effect, he chooses words so that they’re doing what they’re describing with their sound. He loves tongue twisters. I loved that I could be this filthy character, who’s totally opposite to who I am in real life. I’m seen as being this airy fairy, gentle clown person, but Torsten is quite bitter and hates that he’s living forever. He’s a vampire that doesn’t want to be one, a reluctant vampire. I love that he’s completely multi-sexual and asexual all at the same time. Doing Torsten is a challenge. I love his words, and sometimes it’s a bit filthy, more than it’s necessary to be, but I like that. I can’t speak words, I can’t remember them, so I have to sing them, I have to have a tune to them, which I’m sure is what happened to Madonna and Evita. Torsten is a great character and I don’t want him to die.
Popstar To Operastar
Reality TV series, 2011
That was so embarrassing. I’ve been asked to do the jungle [I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here] about three times. There’s no way. I don’t want a bug crawling up my nose. If I get bitten by anything, I’m going to die. I’ve been asked to do things like The Yorkshire Auction House and Bake Off 80s Challenge with Curiosity Killed The Cat. That is surreal in itself, you know? I think I was too serious in Popstar To Operastar. I truly believed it was a path to do opera properly. Honestly, I didn’t realize I was that naive. It dawned on me after two or three shows that it was just a TV show. You’d get this pep talk in the dressing room from the opera singer, saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to be fine, it’s going to be amazing’, and then you go on and get slated on the by the panel. I’d think, ‘You cow! How can you do that?’
We were doing an Erasure tour at the same time so I was traveling up and down on the train, exhausted. They gave me The Barber Of Seville to do. I couldn’t remember the words, I was just going ‘blah, blah, blah, blah’, which was like sacrilege for the show, so they said, ‘you’re going off now’. But for me, that was like one of the best moments on TV, going ‘blah, blah, blah, blah’ – I was just so over the whole thing. I didn’t realize how scripted those things are. They say, ‘oh, can you say “this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my life?”’ Boy George said it’s the same in the jungle.
Dave Audé – ‘Aftermath (Here We Go)’
Single, 2014
I love dance music, so it’s really a privilege to be working with someone that’s already there, who already knows how to make it. Dave Audé wants to produce music, he gets frustrated with just doing remixes. He’s co-written with Meghan Trainor before she got famous, and all kinds of other people. He’s been ripped off so many times and I’m so surprised that he’s still untainted by the industry. ‘Aftermath’ was kind of a post-apocalyptic party, a bit like ‘Atomic’, but ‘well, we’re all fucked, so what are we going to do?’
Then we did ‘True Original’, which I love, because of the energy of it. We just carried on. ‘Don’t You Know’ was one of the one of that group of songs, that was rough lyrics on a piece of paper and then sung twice. I went to L.A. three times. We went to Amsterdam one weekend, which was a bit of a failure. We had one song, ‘Last Chance Saloon’, I had this horrible “yeah wooo!” middle, a bit like Slim Whitman or Conway Twitty. Dave and his family moved to Nashville, which is when it started to become Ten Crowns.
Ten Crowns
Third solo album, 2025
I said, ‘oh Dave, look, we’ve got all these songs, let’s just finish them off’. It sounds confident because we were free. We had no label, there was there was no pressure from anywhere. It’s just being free, writing, and then also knowing that Dave’s impressed you have an ego boost, and that affords you to show off a bit or just be confident in your writing. I felt so honoured when Debbie Harry said yes to sing on ‘Heart’s A Liar’. We went out for drinks, and had champagne and vodka. I picked up my glass and the beer mat thing fell right in her lap, almost in her crotch. ‘Well, what are you gonna do? Pick it up then!’ I was shaking as I picked it up and said, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry! She said, ‘Next time, make sure you drop it up a bit higher’. There’s always been this cheeky banter and there’s a mutual admiration there.
When you listen to Non-Stop and Electric Blue and now Ten Crowns, there’s almost no comparison, it’s me learning how to write songs. The learning process goes on forever, and really, I just want to show people what I’m about and what I’m capable of – it’s not just being in Erasure, it’s all kinds of things. I love Erasure. I love Vince. I just want to show people that there’s more than one string on my bow.
Andy Bell’s Ten Crowns is released on 2 May 2025. For more information about the album, and his forthcoming tour dates, go here
