Station to Station: New-Wave Electric Dreams
Yaz are the ultimate ’80s cult legends: a boy, a girl, a deck of synthesizers, U.K. pop hits, futuristic dance beats, a few 12-inch club classics—and good-bye. They were the quintessential new-wave odd couple: the flamboyant, brassy girl singer and the reclusive synth genius. They made a one-shot perfect album in a genre where nobody gave a toss about perfect albums, the 1982 electro-pop classic Upstairs at Eric’s. According to lore, they couldn’t stand each other and broke up after 18 months. Their mountaintop moment was “Nobody’s Diary,” their final hit, on Top of the Pops in 1983. Alison Moyet torches it up, and Vince Clarke hovers in the background with a wedge haircut and a key-tar around his neck. She’s wailing about tragic love, practically breaking into tears as she lip-synchs; he’s punching buttons. They look ridiculous. They look excellent.
Cult heroes. We all have them, and we worship them more than common sense says we should, because if we didn’t, they’d simply vanish, like the Aztec gods. Vince Clarke has always been my total pop-star cult hero—he epitomized that archetype, the guy who writes perfect songs because he can’t express himself any other way. Notoriously shy, never smiling for the camera or opening his mouth onstage, he used his gadgets to connect to singers with sexier, messier emotional lives. He wrote dysfunctional love songs for three straight dysfunctional pop groups—Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure—until the third turned into a keeper. With Erasure, Vince made his one and only memorable public remark: “It’s the first time I’ve completed a second album with a band and I was still speaking to the other person.”
Yaz inspired devotion—everything about them was playful and mysterious, their songs filled with in-jokes and puzzles. They didn’t give any clues as to how they made such a big loud pop record with just a girl singing and a boy on keyboards. (Alison Moyet was in the credits as “voice and piano”; Vince Clarke was “noises.”) Were they a couple? Straight girl, gay boy? Both gay? Who knew? They put mannequins on the cover, so fans could picture them however we wanted.
They never became famous in America, yet their sound did, fusing new-wave tech effects, disco beats and Europop melody, and their songs became familiar over the next couple of decades to anyone who lived in a dorm, went out dancing or watched a teen movie. Enrique Iglesias had a No. 1 single in 1997 on the Latin charts with their ballad “Only You,” retitled “Solo En Tí”; over the years, it’s been a left-field hit for soft-rocker Rita Coolidge, freestyle queen Jocelyn Enriquez, Czech boy-band Lunetic and Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Makana. Yaz’s zippy beats remain a touchstone for electro kids—LCD Soundsystem name-checked them in their first single, and even a hardcore Yaz cultist has to be stunned by how you can still go to a club and hear “Don’t Go” or “Situation.” How did all this happen?
This summer, Yaz are doing their first live shows in 25 years—a reunion so unexpected, it hadn’t even been rumored on the fan circuit. There were no tearful reconciliations, not even a phone conversation. Clarke and Moyet agreed to the reunion tour in a couple of quick reply-all e-mails to the promoter, with no haggling or bickering. This astonished everybody who’d ever heard of either of them, including, evidently, Clarke himself. “There were bad feelings, yeah,” he admits now. “Alison and I lost touch. I saw her last week for the first time in 15 years, and I just told her, ‘I’m crap on the telephone. I can never think of anything to say.’”
Four years ago, Clarke married his publicist, had a baby and left New York, moving to the outskirts of a tiny village called Damariscotta, Maine. This is quite possibly the least new-wave place on earth. Every other time I’ve seen Vince Clarke, he’s been under a mirror ball, but here he is, sitting in his kitchen, sunlight streaming through the pines, drinking lemonade made for us by his wife. Later, we stroll along the mossy rocks down by the cove, and he smiles in the afternoon sun, pointing out where his neighbors dig for clams and put down their lobster pots. Has he tried fishing here? “I have done,” he says. “There’s striped bass and mackerel. But I’ve not caught anything yet.” Mr. Natural, this guy.
Clarke started Depeche Mode as a teenager in Basildon, England, writing their early hits—“Dreaming of Me,” “New Life,” “Just Can’t Get Enough.” One day, he brought in a tune called “Only You,” played it for the group and excused himself to go to the loo. When he returned, the boys told him that “Only You” was crap. Vince quit, cut a demo of the song with Alison Moyet, a local punk singer he barely knew, and “Only You” became Yaz’s debut single and a No. 2 U.K. smash in 1982. “Great song,” Depeche’s Andy Fletcher later said. “It’s a mistake anyone could make.”
