Yazoo married synthesizers with soul for the minimalistic dance grooves of their influential inaugural. Vince Clarke and Alison "Alf" Moyet formed the group in Basildon, Essex, England. Clarke had left Depeche Mode over creative differences after their first album and answered an ad that Moyet had placed in 'Melody Maker'. Moyet recalls: "After my previous band The Screamin' Ab Dabs split up I was looking for another bunch of blues musicians to work with. At the same time, I'd been playing in bands that predated Depeche, and Vince was looking for a singer who was quite different to Dave Gahan. He was looking for a singer generally but looking for my number at the same time, so it was real serendipity that he just opened the paper and there was my number. It was like it was meant to be...I had mixed feelings about it. And yet, what excited me about Vince was his attitude. There was always a lot of 'We're going to do this, we're going to do that' talk going on, the hot air-ing of young people who don't have a great future ahead of them. I left school at 16 completely unqualified, I had no prospects, the idea of university wasn't even a consideration, and you met plenty of people that were just getting stoned and drunk and kept saying the same things about what they were going to do. Vince was someone that actually turned what he wanted to do into fact and I found that really interesting...I had no money so I had no way of making a demo, and Vince called me up and said he had a song, would I like to go and demo it for him? I thought that if I did this song with Vince I'd have a demo to illustrate how I sang. He played me 'Only You'. I had a very quick musical memory then and just sang it into his tape recorder. He called me up a week later saying he'd played it to the record company and they thought we should record it. So we recorded it, and when they heard that they said we should make it into a single so tried to find some b-sides. Vince had written 'Don't Go' but that was too good for a b-side so then we wrote 'Situation' together, which actually ended up being released as a single in America. Everything we did at that time just seemed to spark - it just kind of worked. I don't think Vince ever intended to start a band with me, that wasn't what he was looking for. He was still very sore, Depeche were his mates and leaving them was like the break-up of a marriage. I think he was feeling angry and disillusioned and wanted to prove himself as a writer, so we got together without having a future, and it just rollercoastered. Everything that we did appealed, and suddenly we were making an album before we'd even been for a pint together or had a relationship or knew anything about each other's lives. We had this strange studio relationship where he would bring a song to me or I would bring a song to him and he would do what he did without asking me anything and I would do what I did without asking him anything... there was no conversation. I would write a song and, for the most part, he would just arrange it up then I'd sing on it, or he'd sing me a song on the guitar and then I would play with the melody or not, add vocal pieces and sing it the way that I wanted to. There was no talk about whether this was a gentle song or a dance song, I just sang it as I saw fit."
Clarke remembers: "Before I first met Alison...my best friend Robert was in her punk band. I'd seen her perform with them and with an R&B band in local venues. She had a huge voice, and made an impact. When I left Depeche I wasn't sure I'd still have a record deal and was keen to play the label something of my own, so I wrote the song 'Only You' but needed someone to demo it with. Alison happened to be advertising in a local paper so I called her. She sang the song beautifully and made it sound exactly as I'd had it in my head. It all happened very fast and because we hadn't been in a band for years, playing in clubs, it was very much just a working relationship – we never had the chance to bond. We never really knew each other. Not really. We weren't mates or anything. There was tension, yes. I think I was definitely intimidated by Alison. She had a big personality and she was quite vocal, whereas I'm more of a sulker. The fact that we never talked, never socialized together, meant that when problems came up we didn't know how to communicate and sort things out. It seems strange but we really were just working all the time. I loved being in the studio so much that the thought of leaving to go out for a drink seemed like wasting time. I got quite good at using synthesizers, but I was crap at talking. Also, we were only about 21. It led to paranoia."
'Upstairs at Eric's' was named for the home studio of Eric Radcliffe at which it was recorded. The band produced the album with Radcliffe with assistance from Daniel Miller. Radcliffe says: "When I was about fifteen the group I was in was booked into a four-track studio to do some demos, and I got a taste for recording then. I got an Akai reel-to-reel at home and I built a studio in the front room, with multi-core cable running into my bedroom which acted as the control room... it snowballed... eventually I was able to afford a eight-track Teac and it was with that machine that I came up to London and set-up the studio here, which I called Blackwing and it took off in earnest...I count myself fortunate and privileged to have worked with such a talented team. I remember that we had to build a studio in my house (in about ten days) to complete the recording of 'Upstairs at Eric's' because Blackwing Studios London was fully booked. My mother provided us all with her famous 'egg and chips' and also appeared on the record. Wonderful days!...We often combine more than one [device] to create a sound. One particular one that sticks in my memory is the snare-drum sound on Yazoo's 'Don't Go', I did that using the Lexicon 224 and 224x [reverbs] ganged together. We came across that sound entirely by accident, but then again, in the final analysis I think you discover almost everything by accident, just by fiddling around."
The name Yazoo came from some old blues labels; but the band had to change their name to Yaz in the US after a multi-million dollar lawsuit from an American group with the same name. 'Upstairs at Eric's' charted at ninety-two in the US, forty-nine in Canada, fourteen in Germany, eleven in Sweden, nine in New Zealand, and two in the UK. The album went platinum in Britain and inspired electronic dance music for the next decade and beyond.
Moyet says: "People have spoken about me as having been this kind of blues-jazz singer, and that gives it a much more 'honed' air than it really had. It was actually really thrashy: thrashy punk-blues-rock. My style of singing was based more on male singers than on a kind of gentle female singing, and that is what Vince had me doing in Yazoo. Actually, if you'd have heard 'Don't Go' when Vince first played it to me it was a very straight melody much in the way of 'Just Can't Get Enough'. Those turns in the melody in the final version were things that I brought to it from my own sense of playing R&B."
When He got back together with Moyet for a reunion tour in 2008, Clark rediscovered the music: "I haven't actually listened to the Yazoo tracks for 25 years. I never listened to the albums or anything. When I was listening to the multi tracks and preparing for the tour it was quite shocking how simple they were...and how straightforward the tracks were. I think with Yazoo there was a lot of experimentation that we did in the studios...it was just kinda throw everything in the pot and see what comes out...When we did the Yazoo tour we were using machines called 'Fair Lights', which are basically huge, huge computers and each song was held on one 12" floppy disc, and the reason why we had two machines was that whilst one song was playing, it would take that amount of time to load up the second song. And now of course everything is on the laptop, it's moved on thousands of miles."
http://www.yazooinfo.com/
"Don't Go" went to twenty-nine in Italy; twenty-two in New Zealand; six in Australia; five in Sweden; four in Germany and Ireland; three in the UK; two in the Netherlands; and number one in Belgium and on the US dance chart.
"Bad Connection"
"In My Room"
"Only You" hit seventy-two in Germany, sixty-seven in the US, thirty-two in Italy, seven in Australia, five in Ireland, and two in the UK.
"The Other Side Of Love" was originally released as a single after 'Upstairs at Eric's' came out; but it was added to later versions of the album. It went to thirty-five in Germany, twenty-eight in Italy, twenty-five in the Netherlands, thirteen in the UK, eleven in Ireland, and nine in Belgium.
"Situation" hit seventy-three in the US, sixteen in the Netherlands, eight in Belgium, and number one on the US dance chart. It was the b-side of their debut single and replaced "Tuesday" on the US release.
'Upstairs at Eric's'
full album:
All songs written by Vince Clark, except where noted.
Side one
"Don't Go" – 3:08
"Too Pieces" – 3:14
"Bad Connection" – 3:20
"I Before E Except After C" – 4:36
"Midnight" (Alison Moyet) – 4:22
"In My Room" – 3:52
Side two
"Only You" – 3:14
"Goodbye 70's" (Moyet) – 2:35
"Tuesday" – 3:22
"Winter Kills" (Moyet) – 4:06
"Bring Your Love Down (Didn't I)" (Moyet) – 4:40
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