As Yazoo’s debut album Upstairs at Eric’s celebrates its 40th anniversary, Alison Moyet looks back and shares some of her personal recollections about writing and recording the album.
Upstairs At Eric's - An Intro
It was about one song. Only You.
Vince had left Depeche and he had this one song begging and so he needed a singer. Daniel Miller – Mute personified, he that had discovered Depeche, wasn’t convinced but said Vince should record it if he wanted to.
I’d known Vince by sight since I was 10 from the council lead Saturday morning music school held at his school – Laindon High Road Comprehensive school and later around town. I was at Nicholas Comprehensive with Fletcher and Martin Gore and our friendship groups merged, mostly up the escalators in our local ‘The Highway’. Vince {I don’t remember him in that pub} was the bloke at impromptu house parties playing guitar and singing Simon and Garfunkel from an armchair. I was gobby Alf.
We all ended up on the local music scene. First being me in late ’77 with my punk group ‘The Vandals’. We had some local notoriety playing car parks, youth clubs and an underused club we found called Turkans. It was upstairs. Upstairs at Turkans. Robert Marlow (Allen), the Vandals’ guitarist, was Vince’s best mate so he had come along at some point. Vince asked Rob if I could sing, Rob later told me. Rob had replied that he’d no idea. We were all volume and distortion and monitors were for wussies. And people that had Gear. I sang very loudly as a consequence.
By then I had migrated to the Canvey scene and had been playing in a blues band called The Screaming Abdabs. Influenced by Billy Boy Arnold, Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie B Huff and Janis. They weren’t so keen on the Janis so I was eventually let go in favour of our mate who played blues harp very well indeed. Fair do’s.
I put an ad in The Melody Maker and there Vince found my number. He called.
I went to his flat. He sang me the song and I sang it by return into his 4 Track porta studio. A week later he called me and said we had the green light to go into Blackwing Studios to lay it down. In a fortnight, it was suggested we make an album together. “Written any songs?” Vince asked me. And we were away up the A127 in his yellow Ford Carola. It was called something like that. I don’t do cars. “We need a name” he said. I liked the word Yazoo. It was a label imprint in my record collection. I wrote it in the grime of the window screen, my feet up on the dash. Him deep in his fag. He nodded and it was decided. We didn’t do briefs or debriefs. We didn’t play each other our favourite 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.
We made Upstairs at Eric’s (Upstairs at Turkan’s/Eric Radcliffe – owner of Blackwing and then-progressive studio engineer) in the studio downtime. Early mornings and late, late nights. We had a reel of tape. All the songs we recorded that didn’t make the album were wiped and recorded over. There were no leftovers and I was still getting pocket money.“
Don't Go
(Contains swears)
When we had recorded Only You and had decided to release it, we needed a B – Side so Vince wrote Don’t Go very quickly. The original melody was much straighter, like a Speak and Spell song, so I shaped it round with my Canvey Delta styling. Daniel Miller came in to listen and suggested adding an instrumental bar between the verse and the chorus. Finished it was decided that Don’t Go was too strong for a B-side, so we’d have to get another song for that purpose.
Don’t Go was the first time Yazoo made a video, my first time being in one. All before MTV and useful discussions about storylines. I’d been up the Highway the night before and had pubbed soundly. Returning home late I thought a haircut would be timely. Going on TV imminently and stuff. I had scissors. In the morning I looked prepared for the ducking-stool. My mate leant me her charity shop Trilby on account of the bald bits. I had wanted to dress up like Cruella DeVil but the word came back that I needed to look like I would on the general telly. They would hire me a coat though. When it was unveiled I was told proudly that it had belonged to Liberace. Fellow had slender arms. I couldn’t get elbow deep in in it. Had to balance it precariously on me shoulders like a twat. Cos we were in a mansion in the country and that, and I had fuck all else with me. Anyway. I went Action!-stupid. Corpsed throughout. ‘Cut’ the word du jour. The camera man thought I was a cunt. I could see it in his eyes. I have sympathy. Now that I’m a professional. They’d have had precious few options in edit. Vince was chill throughout. I was not good at doing video that day. It was just peculiar.
Too Pieces
A Vince song. I really liked this straight off when he played it on his guitar to me. My only dissatisfaction in it’s not having a longer vocal part, because I like it so well. It was good to sing. There’s an argument for stopping words when the message is given, and he does that in a single lyrical round. I sang the melody as written and added a BV counterpoint and then Vince drives us on. It’s one of my favourites.
Bad Connection
Some perfect Vince Pop. There’s a lot of words in this and it was a challenge to find places to snatch air. All of the UAE songs we introduced to each other in the studio on guitar with plain chords. Three studio sessions for each. Two to arrange and record and the third for mixing. In those days I could learn a tune in 2 listens. There was no muscle memory yet though. I’d do three takes. We’d pick a winner and fixed an errant line or word by dropping-in.
I struggled after with BC for a bit. The lightness of it and my dark age. I gave everything angst even when it came to me cheerful and unseasoned. I didn’t skip readily in public. Obscene. What to do with the instrumental break? Vince had written a motif and it was a good one but the section needed an eye. In those days, you could call a telephone exchange operator dialling 100 and an actual person answered and would connect your call if you wanted them to, or would look up a number for you, or you could get them to ask the person you’re calling if they’ll pay the charge. None of that automation bollocks. Unbelievable.
My mother was in fact a telephone operator for a while. On the French Exchange when you couldn’t call abroad direct. You should have heard her roll an R. Anyway. We abused the phone service on Bad Connection, day 2. Eric set up mics and Vince dialled 100 and remains silent. What follows is the call being answered and an understandably irate operator giving whoever what for. Fair play.
The take is unedited. A complete reply cooperating nicely with the time allocation. I did feel bad but it was him m’lud. Fuckin reprobate with his friendly tunes.
I Before E Except After C
Vince and Eric had come upon some reference where the headphone monitor had been set to delay in order to investigate what happens to the spoken voice. I came into the studio and they had been playing with it for a while.
Vince, Eric and Eric’s mum all having recorded readings of random text under the influence of the delay. I did a take myself but was too aware of the outcome to be adequately unguarded. I didn’t add anything.
I don’t have a connection with this track. Not having any part of shaping it myself or observing its compilation, I don’t carry the memory of its layers. For my palate I’d have built a conversation. Something to reach into when the face is tired. I don’t think it befitted by our fast-turn-around schedule in the way that the pop certainly did. I see it as a maquette.
All of that said, I reiterate. Its not my work of expression and so I can fuck right off. UAE was an open handed project and I celebrate the freedoms we both had to explore.
Midnight
I wrote this when I was about 18 still quite certain that Janis would have survived had she met me. Good mate and that.
All the women I was listening to were pretty miserable. And their blokes were right idiots. Plainly. That was something of a comfort when I had yet to experience reciprocal love. Nothing egregious rang unprobeable to me. Better not to love and just to moan about it. Cut out the middle man.
Then, an older fellow from a local recently dissolved band that had had national success was looking for a female singer for his new project. I was introduced to him and I sang him Midnight for my audition. I was fearless.
A No.
Feedback was that I looked like a bloke. I could have said the same about him.
For UAEs I sang Midnight just as I had to my guitar. Vince arranged the backing tracks.
A Yes.
In My Room
I really loved this. All as grim as I like. I could sound as dead upset as I fancied without casting tonal aspersions where nothing lyrically was amiss. An invitation to bawl. It turned out to be the toughest one to sing live. For the life of me I couldn’t stay in tune and I hate that. Transpires none of the tracks are in tune with the rest, so which ever part I clung to, elsewhere I was losing my drawers. That was the joy of analogue though. Miniscule errors that bolden the line. Ripe for accident and chance. A right arsehole when you’re singing live to them, out front is a boom and you can’t make your monitors speak truthfully to you. Jesus, you cling on tight and welcome the end.
Talking about Jesus, my mother gave me such a hard time about the blasphemy in IMR. The Lord’s Prayer that had appeared come session 2. I wouldn’t mind but no one had bothered getting me confirmed. All the guilt and no hope of redemption, and only an aunt over from Americas once had ever taken me to mass. And then I wasn’t allowed the snacks up front when that bit happened. I felt excluded that day, I can tell you.
Only You
The song that Vince had all to prove with is all he’ll ever need as proof.
Perfectly formed with a nursery rhyme lilt that hooks itself to any passing ear. The demo we had made in Vince’s Vange council flat on his portastudio had sounded strange to me. So clean and metronomic. Unique.
Now my first take in front of everyone in a real studio and I was shaking so hard I was part yodel part foghorn. The faces through the dividing glass window were muttering between themselves soundlessly. It looked terminal to me. Then I had to adjust my understanding of volume. Used as I was to dodgy P.A.s. and here assaulting my own ears. Then I settled. The atmosphere when I re-entered the control room was charged. It felt incomparably exciting.
I think the first major iteration of a major work sets its tone. I like to think that in choosing a vocal approach with gravitas I gave weight to his composition and its subsequent regard. While the backdrop really does matter, simple and symmetric are the hardest of all songs to write. We all can imagine that easy is easy. An error.
I am reminded, wanker alert, of Walter De La Mere’s Angel of Words:
Only with envy bid thee watch this face that says so much so flawlessly, and in how small a space.
That’s Only You, that is.
The first time I ever heard myself on radio I was driving again on the A127. Only You, its first play. It was unreal. I have sat here for 10 minutes trying to find the words, but I can’t.
It was unreal
Goodbye '70s
When I was a punk I believed I’d always be a punk. Goodbye ‘70s was my 17 year old self reacting to the wake up call that everything will change. It will.
Quadrophenia. It was my Bell Boy moment, I guess. My mate, the Stormy Sea of us all, was stood outside Laindon Station, where Joan Simms had lived, in his new frills and frippery. ‘State of you’, he said, as I lumbered towards the ticket office, and I knew it was over. My mates we off up the New Romantics. Me in the same garb we had matched the week before. Ah. Pernicious fashion, I thought. What tumbling lies it sells the uninitiated.
1978. I had a job at the time as a photocopy operator for The Fire Offices Committee in that London city. In between sticking my head on the Xerox for selfies, I wrote this song in a scornful huff, slumped like a Teenaged Kevin-heap at my desk. They didn’t take up my 3 month option incidentally. They knew what they were doing.
Tuesday
We never told one another what our songs were about. We never asked.
A woman of 30 must have seemed very grown to us at the time. I like the Englishness of Vince’s melodies. They didn’t really follow any contemporary template. Musical shapes that were logical in their structure, and timeless. He may have had a reference point for Tuesday but I didn’t know it. It may have been another construction. I sang it as found it.
Most experiences are outside your ken at 20. Most things I sang about were projections but somewhere they have to resonate. I have to find a way into the meat of a song to care about it. My dad had a favourite song. It was about old flatulent men eating cabbage soup together. The times he tried to persuade me to cover it. It’s a French thing I reckon. Arse nostalgia. To be fair, there is something appealing about the ambience of an out house. I didn’t mind them at all, even when the garden was pitch black. I told my dad the soup song wouldn’t translate.
Having said that, I might do it one day because I don’t want to. That’s always a fun game.
Winter Kills
I wrote this when I was fresh to Yazoo. There was part of me that felt so alien in the world that everyone else seemed foreign. I was fascinated and somewhat appalled by the notion of romance.
I felt like I mimicked social mores. I was performing my connections and all the time wondering how people became what they were becoming. The common and garden freaks. It was those that gravitated keenly to me that bothered me the most. They inspired my resentment. I was a tricksy misfit who rucked readily. I kept intimacy at a comfortable distance. Crushes inspired my ire. Winter Kills is callous Alf.
I had written Winter Kills on an old piano we’d managed to get in my bedroom at my mum’s. I only write slow songs on piano on account of the fact that I never practise anything. So I play piano like I type. With quizzical pointy fingers introducing themselves again to a keyboard stranger. I write fast songs on guitar because I am entirely without talent at accompanying myself. I don’t know how to hold enough back to both walk and chew gum. Singing takes the whole body. How does anyone share that focus? I get task mesmerised.
Anyway. Vince told me he was impressed that I played the piano without programming it first. He’d programmed a stand alone note. He wasn’t remotely interested in freestyling. I recorded the piano parts in Eric’s Kent Home studio in his basement. We quantised it. Vince laid down the ‘drum’, and it was done.
Bring Your Love Down (Didn't I)
I wrote this at some point but don’t remember when or why. I was requiring no love to come down at the time. I don’t remember our recording it either. I know we did because there is the proof.
* Situation - an aside
The third song we recorded was this. Still going for a B-side for Only You. Vince had written the song with an entirely different chorus. It was wordier and in the form of song-song. More Mamas and Papas. I Canvey’d up the verse melody and rewrote the chorus to the chord structure as was and Situation was made.
In the USA they flipped the single and lead with Situation, making Only You the b-side.
So there we have it. Understanding that conversation about the work and deconstructions never happened between us, I can but cite my memory and the things that caught my notice at the time or retrospectively.
This accounting is then prisoner to my Homer Simpson. Where I have no anecdote there must have been a goat in the studio. I won’t hear anything you say, if there is a goat to introduce myself to. I’m not a wastrel.
The End.
Alf.
~ Alison Moyet, August 2022
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