Andy Bell’s long-awaited solo album, Electric Blue, will be released in October 2005. Andy is working with the New York production team Manhattan Clique on the album.
The album tracks include Crazy, the first single; a duet with the excellent Claudia Brücken
(Claudia Brücken was a founding member of Propaganda
Back with Andy, the Crazy single is due in September and will include mixage by one Vincent J. Clarke.
Here I Go Impossible Again entered the UK singles chart at number 25. Not too bad for the third single from the album. I would like to have seen more attention paid to the other track on the single; All This Time Still Falling out of Love was perhaps the most obvious single from the album.
The Australian release of Nightbird has a wee bonus: a great big image file of the album cover. Put the CD is your computer and open up the CD folder; the file is called nightbird.jpg. It would make nice wallpaper for your computer screen.
That picture file is the only thing you’ll see when you put the CD in your computer. The CD has some annoying copy protection to stop you copying the music onto your computer. It only takes about 30 seconds and a Post-it note to defeat the protection and copy the files, but it’s still a pain. Even so, it’s definitely worth the bother to put this excellent album onto your computer or music player.
Andy Bell has posted a List of Music You Should Hear
The EIS is running a competition to remix “Here I Go Impossible Again”. The second UK CD comes with Digimpro remixing software and extra tracks to allow you to remix the song. You can send your remix to be published on the EIS website and voted on by the public. Vince and Andy will pick a winner from the top ten to win an iPod and a stack of Erasure live CDs.
The remix software included on the CD is for Windows only. You can get a free Mac version from the Digimpro website.
The latest album Nightbird is great. A nice, rich sound, lovely production, and many strong songs. But the thing that really struck me is how wordy the song titles are. “Let’s Take One More Rocket to the Moon”, while quite a poetic phrase, doesn’t really hit you in a pop-song kinda way. And “I Bet You’re Mad at Me” just sounds silly, though maybe I just don’t much like the song. Anyway, I was sure Erasure had previously been synonymous with punchy songs with snappy titles, and the new album was a departure.
Of course I realise that it’s possible to over-analyse these things. So that’s exactly what I did.
Erasure FAQ Copyright 1994-2005 Bennett McElwee. All rights reserved. Please ask me before copying any part of it. Thanks!