Despite her hesitation about trying to be a bluesy singer in a synthpop band, she went with it, and their first single “Only You” was born. Yazoo began with a want ad, placed by singer Alison Moyet, who was looking for an R&B/blues type band to sing in, and who got almost the polar opposite of what she was expecting when Vince Clarke, fresh off of his one-album stint with Depeche Mode and eager to make a name for himself apart from the band, figured she’d be a good match for a demo song he was hoping to shop around. It would probably make a rather boring biopic, because they didn’t start off like most bands do, with some schoolmates suddenly getting hit with a lightning bolt of inspiration and thinking, “Let’s make some music together!”, and it ended with neither a rousing sendoff nor a dramatic death – not even a messy, protracted legal battle.
It’s also rather bittersweet, considering how ephemeral the duo’s existence actually was compared to how big of an impact a few of their hit songs had on the music scene back then. The Yazoo story is a bizarre one, to say the least. Heck, I didn’t even know the gender of the lead singer! All I knew was that if I was going to check out electronic music heavyweights Depeche Mode and Erasure during my trip through the 80s, then I might as well check out what Vince Clarke, who famously left the former band right after a handful of singles he had written for their debut album Speak & Spell blew up, was doing in between the two. I vaguely remembered another song of theirs from my childhood – except I’d never have guessed it was them.
YAZOO BITS AND PIECES SERIES
I’d heard a song of theirs several years ago on the television series Once Upon a Time. But they were all edged out by the debut record from Yazoo, an electronic music duo who I knew very little about before I started on my 80s binge. This was also the year that power pop group XTC came out with their double-disc masterpiece English Settlement, and Duran Duran upped their game on the landmark new wave album Rio. There are some really strong contenders from that year – Michael Jackson‘s Thriller looms so large over the history of popular music in general that some would say you’d have to be insane to pick anything else. My #1 album pick for 1982 could certainly be considered a dark horse favorite. This was the moment where my exploration of early 80s electronic music went from, “Hmmm, this is interesting for mostly historical reasons” to “YES, this is EXACTLY the vibe I was looking for!” Yazoo may have only existed for a few short years while Vince Clarke was in between other, far more long-lived bands, but their debut album captured my attention in a way I wasn’t expecting. Certainly a whole lot more than I would have expected from a synthpop act in the genre’s early stages.
In Brief: It’s part classic, part curiosity, and a little bit confusing.
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