Erasure – Wild! / Andy Bell – Torsten In Queereteria

Mute / Cherry Red

Thirty years a classic. A record that’s hugely saturated in my childhood — it might be my favourite Erasure album, or it might be the one that I heard most through my sister’s walls in the late 80s. There’s not much I still listen to from when I was a bairn, but Erasure sit in that category right next to Dolly Parton and The Dubliners.

Arguably, I should probably try and convince you that this is a banger. So here’s a sentence that is both objectively true and also entirely squee:

Erasure are better than the Pet Shop Boys.

Wild! is probably their best album-album — as in it might not have “Ship of Fools” or (oh go on then) “A Little Respect” on it, BUT it also does have “Drama” on it. All time favourite Erasure line? “Your shame is nevaaaaar-aaaaa-aaaa-a-a-aaaaaaaaaa-r ending”, which is the best use of melismata-as-sarcasm I can think of.

Why were Depeche Mode good? Because they had Vince Clark. Vince, for my money, is one of the greatest synth-fetish people. So many sounds that could be chintzy but persist as a kind of opulent bath for Andy Bell‘s singing. Oh yeah, let’s talk about Bell’s voice for a bit, because we’ll come back to that when we get to his solo record. So the thing that I probably didn’t notice before with Wild! is how it expands Bell’s range — there’s the upper voice belters (“Blue Savannah”) and the heavily breathed lower voice (“How Many Times”). On his solo record, his not inconsiderable voice gets properly put through its paces — and his vocal coach needs a knighthood (unless they’re not into the monarchy, which I fully support), and it has the effect of illustrating that Bell could sing to fuck already by the time of Wild!

Possibly maybe Bell’s greatest gift is decorous vocals — there’s just an inch of histrionics that eke in through the edges — the deliberately off note in “You Surround Me”, the closing of super drama tastic “Brother And Sister” or the discreet quoting of Blondie in “2000 Miles”. Quite seriously, I think someone who’s actually a musicologist rather than a gobshite with a musicians’ dictionary (hi) should take a proper gander at Clarke’s music — there’s all of these contrapuntal bits he chucks in and at least one verse (“Crown of Thorns”) that’s probably a madrigal.

I’m sorry to do this a bit perfunctorily, but there’s some extras on here that are remixes. They’re mostly alright if you like that sort of thing. It’s very much a time and place in remixing culture (and for that matter, queer music culture) and there’s no spraytan dubstep mixes, but I’m a bit too stuck into the main meal of album which is, let’s get hyperbolic, entirely one of the best pop records of the 80s.

That’s unfair, because if I listen to the remixes without the album beforehand, there’s plenty there that’s definitely creating new spaces in songs (Gareth Jones‘s mix for “You Surround Me”, “91 Steps (6 Pianos Mix)” going all Steve Reich / Penguin Café Orchestra) but, well, possibly there’s another project for someone to put all of Erasure’s best remixes into one place.

tl;dr: several million out of ten from me.

Now this is very much a different proposition. Very rarely are press releases worth reading, let alone quoting. Here though: “Torsten In Queereteria is the third solo album by Andy Bell (Erasure) performing as alter-ego Torsten, a semi-immortal polysexual who is destined to love many, lose many and be haunted by bittersweet memories, due to his unnaturally elongated life.[…] It’s a role Andy first took up at the Edinburgh Fringe theatre festival in 2014 in Torsten The Bareback Saint“.

Honestly, even if the record was pish (it’s very much not) it gets full marks for that.

So there’s a question of what someone who was very, very pop (and, critically, very queer as fuck) does when they reach a “respectable” age? In Bell’s case, he’s put himself in a situation (with poet / playwright Barney Ashton and musician Christopher Frost, he says, reading again from the press release) where he’s really stretching his voice, finding opaque vocal folds to occupy, being hilarious and fabulous and sad and *waves hands at everything* just so brilliant. Words like camp and theatrical and super properly massively fucking queer are important to this record. But it’s also touching and sweet and dark and very well delivered / written / arranged.

And as I seem to be in the business of extended quotes, there’s some achingly hilarious slash bitchy lines here. “Cabaret Awayday”:

Your pubic stubble all mascaraed up / in your diamentine crotcheless panties / that you flash for a reaction soliciting requests for quick hand shandies / and sometimes when a prick is pushed right through the glory hole / you made willing to a small extent and use it as a microphone / oh yes I’ve heard your tragic take on Dame Shirley Bassey / Though you do not have her range / and there’s a blue moon when your punters stay hard / because those cruisers just find you strange.

“Cabaret Awayday” is another good place where there’s plenty of Bell spending a lot of time at the bottom of his range, lending the impression of a conspiratorial drag demiurge.

So the difference between here and Erasure is that Bell’s queerness was always there, but perhaps not front and centre. Here there’s plenty of salacious sauciness, tragic old dears, high camp and, well, I am a child who enjoys hearing people who sing really well saying words like “fuck” and “wanker”. It’s not very Erasure-y, except it’s very good. It’s nothing like as pop, but it’s also something like “being mature” without austerely disappearing up his own arse. Witty Kurt Weill-y numbers (“If I Want To Drink A Little”), libertine-y bleary pissups (“Let’s be sober some other time / when we don’t have such existential pressure on our minds”) and quite the best chorus I’ve heard in yonks in “All the nice guys I rejected in favour of rich flirts / at least I now know good men [dramatic pause] from perverts”.

There’s a thing that’s really frustrating about when some musicians get older. People trying to “do a Cash” and sing credible things. Sting doing Downland with a lutenist. Standards, jazz albums. All of that stuff is often pish. What this is doing for Bell is very definitely not that. I’m actually quite pissed off I didn’t check out his Torsten side-project before, because it’s got oodles of wit, charm, astonishing vocals, lovely arrangements, genuine affection for reprobate queers, and gosh darnit lovely tunes. I’m not sure what people say “that’s showbiz” to theseadays, but they probably should say it in the direction of this record.

-Kev Nickells-