For the debut Depeche Mode album, 1981’s synth-pop masterpiece Speak & Spell, Vince Clarke composed nine of the 11 songs, including the British hit singles “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “New Life.” As lead singer Dave Gahan told Rolling Stone, Clarke almost immediately lost interest in the band and the necessary rounds of photo sessions, music press interviews and tour dates. Clarke quit in November ’81, and the band’s guitarist/keyboardist Martin Gore became main songwriter, leading the group to mega-stardom in one of rock’s most surprising hand-offs.
Clarke almost immediately formed a duo with Geneviève Alison Jane Moyet, another native of the small town of Basildon in the Essex region, who was known as “Alf” during her days fronting various R&B, punk and blues acts, including the Vicars, the Little Roosters and the Screaming Abdabs. In 1982, Moyet told Smash Hits magazine, “I’ve played in millions of different bands on the Southend/South Essex circuit, never breaking out, never getting on to the London circuit. My main love was blues and when I advertised for a ‘ritzy blues band,’ Vince answered.” In fact, he was the only person who responded to her Melody Maker ad.
Moyet considered herself a “traditionalist” who balked at using synthesizers for the blues, and Clarke was not a fan of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker or British groups like Dr. Feelgood that used ’50s and ’60s blues repertoire as their foundation. Somehow, their demo of a Clarke song called “Only You” found a home at the U.K. Mute label, where they found encouragement. (Clarke had offered the tune to Depeche Mode, who passed.) Moyet later described the duo as “an arranged marriage” that moved quickly from preparing a quick song demo to a recording act neither member particularly foresaw. Looking back later, she wrote, “We didn’t do briefs or debriefs. We didn’t play each other our favorite albums. We didn’t ask what the other listened to and neither what we wanted or hoped to make together. It’s like we shared a work top. We each did what we did in our turn and then observed the other.”
Clarke and Moyet decided to name themselves Yazoo, after a small “roots music” American record label, but had to be known as Yaz in North America when a subsequent lawsuit and their U.S. label Sire, making a deal with Mute, dictated the change. An album recorded at Blackwing Studios in London was hastily done, under the supervision of its owner Eric Radcliffe and Mute’s head Daniel Miller, mostly between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m., since Mute act Fad Gadget had most of the time booked. The Upstairs at Eric’s album arrived in U.K. shops in August 1982, after the major chart success of two singles, the glorious ballad “Only You” and the more upbeat floor-filler “Don’t Go.”
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“We just came together and it was a bit of a mish-mash, really,” Clarke said in 2012 in a Quietus interview on the 30th anniversary of the LP’s release. “There was no concept or theme running through the album; we were just messing about in the studio. Part of the charm of that album is a naivete…We’d make one sound and we’d think it was great and just stop there and wouldn’t make any more sounds. It wasn’t like we were continually honing or over-producing songs because everything at the time sounded fresh.”
Moyet’s contralto—her low, resonant, soulful voice often double-tracked—provides a startling contrast to Clarke’s arpeggios, beeps, honks and electronic percussion. While Moyet is credited with “vocals and piano” on the album sleeve, Clarke’s listed as providing only “noises,” and what well-chosen, totally synthetic noises they are. “Only You” is a deep well of yearning, as Moyet establishes with Clarke’s opening lyrics: “Looking from a window above/It’s like a story of love/Can you hear me/Came back only yesterday/I’m moving further away/Want you near me.”
“Don’t Go” starts with a fanfare, a swelling growl, and the crash of snare-drum-like percussion, all generated by Clarke’s synthesizer array, including the ARP 2600, Linn LM-1, RSF Kobol, Roland June-60 and Sequential Circuits Pro One. Sawtooth and pulse waveforms, oscillation, modulation, filters and arpeggiators are all at Clarke’s fingertips, and he makes the music exciting and more than dancefloor-worthy. From the bottom to the top of her range, Moyet uses every exquisite vocal trick—yelps, screams, slides—to drive the track forward.
American copies of Upstairs at Eric’s feature a Francois Kevorkian 12-inch remix of the Moyet-Clarke co-write “Situation” in place of Clarke’s “Tuesday,” adding the British single B-side of “Only You” to the lineup. It’s a brilliant track, nearly six minutes of expanding experimentation that sounds inspired by Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” Moyet roughens up her voice and Clarke makes his “minimal” approach riveting, leaving lots of air around the interesting noises. The echoing Moyet laugh is so infectious it’s been sampled numerous times, including for Los Del Rio’s worldwide smash “Macarena.”
Moyet mostly stays at the bottom of her range for her kiss-off to glam and punk, the short and potent “Goodbye 70’s,” which she wrote when she was a 17-year-old fed-up punk rocker: “I’m glad that we don’t hear you anymore/I’m tired of playing in your fashion war.” Clarke adds some decidedly Morricone-like vocal grunts. Moyet’s solo-written soul raver “Midnight” is another stand-out, with a vocal that soars with echoes of Aretha Franklin and Etta James. The album’s also got two super-poppy gems that could have fit on Speak & Spell, Clarke’s “Bad Connection” and Moyet’s “Bring Your Love (Didn’t I).”
Upstairs at Eric’s is available in the U.K. here and in the U.S. here. Yaz dissolved before their second album, You and Me Both, was even released, and Clarke contrived several excellent one-off projects before settling into his long tenure with singer Andy Bell in the hit-making duo Erasure. Moyet fielded a number of offers, signing to CBS for a million-pound advance, releasing her debut solo set Alf in November 1984, after finally resolving a lawsuit from Sire that claimed her services.
Alf was a huge hit in most of the world (it registered no higher than #45 on the Billboard album chart in America) and was the start of Moyet’s stellar solo career, which has seen her sell over 23 million albums, releasing 10 studio sets and a slew of top 10 hits on the U.K. singles charts, three of which come from Alf.
Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, who’d worked with Bananarama, Spandau Ballet and others before CBS hooked them up with Moyet, co-produced the LP at London’s Odyssey Studios, with Richard Lengyel engineering, and co-wrote all the tunes with Moyet in a frenzied two-week period, except one bespoke song by the legendary Motown/Invictus tunesmith Lamont Dozier, “Invisible.” Tim Goldsmith is the drummer, Swain plays keyboards and synths, and Moyet handles lead and backing vocals with the same confidence she showed in Yaz, but without much of the edginess encouraged by Clarke.
Sonically, the album reflects the mid-’80s reliance on smoothing out contours, favoring stacked keyboards and synth-drums, and finding commercial settings for strong vocalists. Moyet ’84 fits into the world of contemporary hits like Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds,” Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now” and Duran Duran’s “The Reflex.” The “star-making machinery” was on her side, but she kept her integrity.
“Love Resurrection” is a mid-tempo, widescreen R&B tune that has beautifully-arranged background vocals, as does “All Cried Out,” which features a more aggressive voice, with some fancy trills. The lyrics may be more clichéd than her work with Yaz, but Moyet sells the sentiments with panache, and that extraordinary resonant low vocal range she commands: “You took your time to come back this time/The grass has grown under your feet/In your absence I changed my mind/And someone else is sitting in your seat.”
“Invisible,” became Moyet’s highest-charting American single, reaching #31, deserving much better. Her vocal is outstanding, bluesier and grittier than the glamorous, soft-focus video made to promote it. In this song about a love affair going nowhere, some of the words are top-shelf Dozier (“It may be naïve, but I just want to believe/I’m the only one”), which Moyet bites into with raw emotion. “For You Only” recalls Yaz’s “Only You” more than a bit, and didn’t chart when released as the album’s fourth U.K. single in early 1985.
Alf proved that Moyet’s voice could be depended upon, even when her label and producers had their vision firmly set on the commercial pop market. As avant-garde as Vince Clarke might be, he’s shown a definite mercantile knack over the years; from 1986-2007 his tenure helming Erasure yielded 24 consecutive Top 40 entries in the U.K. singles chart. Erasure had plenty more worldwide hits after that, although only three songs, “Chains of Love,” “A Little Respect” and “Always” made it into the American top 20.
A reunion tour of Yaz in 2008 was greeted with riotous enthusiasm by U.S. fans who thought they’d never be able to see them (the duo had played a total of two American shows, at New York’s gay club Paradise Garage, in 1982). Reconnected Live is the 20-track double-CD issued to chronicle the 2008 concerts, which included stops in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.
Alison Moyet’s latest world tour kicked off in February 2025 in Dublin, with North American dates scheduled for later this year. Tickets are available here. Her recordings are available in the U.K. here and in the U.S. here.
Erasure’s Andy Bell is playing dates in 2025 to support his new solo album Ten Crowns, and Clarke issued his first solo set, Songs Of Silence, in 2023, but Erasure hasn’t played live since one January 2024 show in Red Bank, New Jersey. There is no indication they’ve broken up. Hopefully, we haven’t heard the last live performance from Vince Clarke, who will turn 65 years of age on July 3, 2025.
Watch Alison Moyet perform “Invisible” at the Prince’s Trust concert in 1987
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