Vince Clarke is at home in New York, where he has lived for more than 20 years, and talking about why, after 40-plus years as a musical collaborator par excellence, he has recorded his first solo album. Unlike most of the music that he made with Depeche Mode, with Alison Moyet in Yazoo and with Feargal Sharkey in The Assembly, and that he still makes with Andy Bell in Erasure, there isn’t an electro-pop banger to be heard on Songs of Silence. In fact, I suggest to the 63-year-old, who is nothing like the aloof tech boffin he has sometimes been portrayed as, it sounds like the work of a solitary person.
“I’m quite happy working on my own, and I found it very soothing and calming to be making this kind of music at that time in my life during various lockdowns throughout the pandemic,” he says. He hadn’t intended to make an album. “I was just making tracks and working with new technology, so it was really for my own benefit. But I love the process of making music probably more than anything else – and being alone in the studio, listening to music for hours on end, well, that’s a solitary process. The only entity that stayed in the studio was the cat – but even he left after an hour or so of listening to the same tones over and over.”
Those tones were part of a challenge Clarke set himself to steer clear of writing traditional songs, “with chorus and verses and big chord changes”. Usually, he says, “a chord change might indicate an adjustment in the arrangement, which in turn might introduce a chorus or something to happen. In this instance, however, I was relying on keeping the interest through the length of the track by introducing textures, rather than going, okay, now here’s a big chorus and then let’s have the backing vocals. I just liked the challenge of doing something different.”
Did he miss not just conjuring up another of the pop songs that have helped Erasure sell almost 30 million records? Clarke admits that the seclusion of the pandemic years – during which he was also caring for his wife, after she was diagnosed with stomach cancer – meant there were no opportunities to spark musical ideas off people in the normal way. “I just needed to make something that was satisfying to me. That said, it was a shock when my record company suggested they would release the music as an album. I would have been happy doing the stuff alone in the studio with the cat, just making calm music for my own sanity.”
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Clarke equates the results with ambient music, even though he had “always thought of that as music with whales singing in the background or the sound of the sea washing up against the beach. That approach has changed a lot over the last few years, and I’ve been exposed to a considerable amount of it. That was also some of the inspiration to make Songs of Silence, because I’m so used to making music and songs in a very traditional way – a good melody, a killer chorus, decent lyrics.
“Within that setting you know where the chorus is, you know where the different bridges can happen, but with the new music it was more listening really, really carefully, and sensing at certain points that something needs to happen, an event or a change of texture. The tracks never started out as 20-minute drones that I had to cut down. They started as three-minute tracks that I then had to extend. Whatever I did was about wanting to make the music still sound interesting enough, but not relying on the usual tricks.”
Songs of Silence brings Clarke into the spotlight with minimum fuss. Usually, he is hunkered over a bank of keyboards that emit deliriously pulsating synth-pop, while Bell belts out the words. Now, he jokes, he has a hefty workload of pop songs, ambient music and remixes for too many other music acts to mention. (The list includes the Irish synth-pop band Tiny Magnetic Pets.)
“I like to be busy – what can I say? – and I very much know I’ve got the best job in the world. I’m 63, but I’m still surrounded by and messing about with toys. It’s something that I love to do, and I get a huge amount of satisfaction from it. I’m just extremely grateful and fortunate there are other people out there that like what I do. Honestly, what I do is a dream job.”
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Does he think much about his legacy as a pop songwriter? He dismisses the question with a quiet laugh and a wave of his hand. What about singing? Before he cofounded Depeche Mode he was in a few bands where he stood in front of a microphone. Given his apparent reluctance to do so since then, we can only guess that he found it an uncomfortable experience.
“I can’t sing,” he says. “I did vocals on a couple of the very early bands I was involved in, from the mid to late 1970s, but I just sounded like… Actually, I don’t know what I sounded like. But then, as people know, I discovered and have worked with some fantastic singers. I never thought to myself that maybe I could do what they do, because you realise you’re working with people who can really do it. That makes you understand that you can’t do it and that maybe you should just stick to the stuff you know and what you’re really good at.”
Vince Clarke’s greatest hits
Depeche Mode
Vince Clarke was a founding member of Depeche Mode in the summer of 1980. (They changed their name from Composition of Sound in September that year.) By November 1981, a month after they released their debut album, Speak and Spell, Clarke left the band.
Yazoo
Soon after leaving Depeche Mode, Clarke linked up with his former Basildon schoolmate Alison Moyet. By early 1982 they had formed Yazoo, releasing their debut single, Only You (a song that Clarke wrote while in Depeche Mode) by April. Within a year, after their albums Upstairs at Eric’s and You and Me Both, the duo split up.
The Assembly
Clarke and the sound engineer Eric Radcliffe then established The Assembly, not so much a band as a songwriting project. The initial aim was to record a series of songs featuring different vocalists, but after one single, Never Never (featuring the former Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey), in 1983, The Assembly disbanded.
Erasure
In early 1985 Clarke placed a “Singer wanted” ad in the UK music paper Melody Maker. One of the applicants was the Yazoo fan Andy Bell, with whom Clarke instantly connected over a mutual love of electronica, disco and pop. From their first batch of singles (including Oh L’amour and Sometimes), Erasure have been a consistent presence in pop charts worldwide and are regarded as one of the best electro-pop bands of the past 40 years.
Songs of Silence, by Vince Clarke, is released on Friday, November 17th, via Mute Records
