Yazoo

Yazoo's best-known song was never a number one sung by Yazoo. "Only You" entered the British chart on the seventeenth of April 1982 and peaked a month later, on the sixteenth of May, at number two: ahead of it was "A Little Peace" by Nicole, the song that had won Eurovision that year. It reached number one nineteen months later, and it got there without a single instrument: the a cappella version by The Flying Pickets spent five weeks at the top, was the Christmas number one of 1983 and the first a cappella number one in the history of the British chart. By then Yazoo no longer existed. The duo had lasted two years.

The Melody Maker advert

There was no lucky meeting and no label introduction. There was a classified advert. The Melody Maker of the fourteenth of November 1981 ran this notice on page thirty-four of its classifieds: "Brilliant female vocalist, experienced gigs/studio, seeks great rootsy soul/R&B band.—Alison, Basildon". Alison Moyet placed it, having just been left without a band, and Vince Clarke was the only reply she got. One. The funny detail is that he remembers it wrong: forty years on he still tells it this way: "Alison happened to be advertising in a local paper so I called her."

Vince Clarke —real name Vincent John Martin, born on the third of July 1960 in South Woodford, Essex— had just come out of Depeche Mode, the band he had founded and for which he had written almost all of the initial repertoire: every track on Speak & Spell except two by Martin Gore, and the first three singles, "Dreaming of Me", "New Life" and "Just Can't Get Enough". He announced his departure in November 1981 and his last concert with the original line-up was on the third of December that year. That is: when he answered the advert he had been without a band for weeks and the news was not yet public.

Alison Moyet —real name Geneviève Alison Jane Moyet, born on the eighteenth of June 1961 in Basildon, Essex, to a French father and an English mother— left school at sixteen, worked as a shop assistant and trained as a piano tuner. She sang in the punk, the pub rock and the blues of south-east Essex: The Vandals, which she put together at fifteen with two friends from school, the Screamin' Ab Dabs, the Vicars, the Little Roosters. It was the break-up of the Screamin' Ab Dabs that led her to pay for the advert. And they were not two strangers from different worlds: at eleven they had gone to the same Saturday music school in Basildon, and she was in the same secondary school class as Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher, Clarke's bandmates. She barely knew him; he had seen her sing live several times.

She chose the name too, being a blues fan, in homage to Yazoo Records, the country blues reissue label founded by Nick Perls in the mid-sixties. The homage is where the trouble came from: the label threatened to sue them for improper use of the trademark, for three and a half million pounds. A threat, never a trial, and it is worth putting it that way because it is usually told the other way round. On top of that, a rock band called Yazoo already existed in the United States. For both reasons, in North America the duo was called Yaz.

The B-side filler

Mute wanted "Only You" as the first single and a B-side was needed. Clarke already had "Don't Go", but both of them thought it was too good to spend on the flip, so they wrote a filler together and at speed: "Situation". That filler is the song Sire released as a single in its own right in the United States, against the group's wishes, in the François Kevorkian remix, and the one that turned them into an obligatory club spin: four weeks at number one on the American club chart, number seventy-three on the Hot 100 and number thirty-one among black music singles. It is also where the sound by which most people recognise the duo without knowing whose it is comes from: the laugh. The one on "Situation" is Moyet's and it was not planned: it was her spontaneous reaction to the amount of reverb they had put on her microphone. It has been sampled on around a hundred recordings, the "Macarena" by Los del Río included. The song is credited to both of them, and Clarke sums up the division in one sentence: he wrote it and she corrected it. Moyet redid the chorus, which she found too crammed with words and too singsong, and retouched the melody of the verses.

Upstairs at Eric's came out on the twentieth of August 1982. It was recorded at Blackwing Studios, in south-east London, and produced by the two of them with E.C. Radcliffe —the Eric of the title, the owner of the studio— plus Daniel Miller, the head of Mute, on some tracks. It was recorded at dawn, between five or six and eleven in the morning, because the studio was booked during the day by Fad Gadget, a labelmate. It reached number two on the British albums chart, number one on the independent chart and ninety-two on the Billboard 200. Miller, incidentally, had been fairly indifferent to "Only You": Clarke tells how he played it to him in full in a room and how the man spent the whole time fiddling with a synthesiser, said he liked it and got on with his own business; he only became enthusiastic when the publishers showed interest.

The singles kept up. "Don't Go" came out on the fifth of July, reached number three in Britain and topped the American dance chart for two weeks; "The Other Side of Love", in November, was a stand-alone single outside the album and reached thirteen; in between they played twenty-four concerts across Europe and North America. On the eighth of February 1983, at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, they won the Brit Award for best British newcomer against ABC, Culture Club and Musical Youth. They were also nominated for best British group, which went to Dire Straits.

The split first, the number one afterwards

Clarke always saw Upstairs at Eric's as a one-off. It was his publishers who talked him into making the second album, with an argument that had nothing artistic about it: it would look bad to be seen walking out on two bands in less than a year. Put another way, when he started the second album he was already on his way out. It was recorded between November 1982 and February 1983, four months, and they were hardly ever both in the studio at the same time: him in the morning on the backing tracks, her in the afternoon on the vocals. She told it like this: "We never really knew each other, only through each other's school friends. And we had no time to bond. A demo together and we were making an album within a month. We recorded in the studio down time. Early mornings and late nights and writing the songs as we went. There was never a pub." The album was called You and Me Both, you and me, the two of us, and the irony was deliberate. That method also produced the one Yazoo song Moyet does not sing: "Happy People" is sung by Clarke, because she refused: "I just tried singing it a couple of ways and I just hit him with 'I can't do this, you want it sung, you sing it yourself mate!'… so he sang it himself, fair play to him." And she added that it could have been the beginning of the end, and that in fact it was not, because Vince had already decided to leave.

"Nobody's Diary" came out on the ninth of May 1983, written by Moyet —the credit matters, because it usually ends up ownerless— and it reached number three in Britain and number one on the American club chart. A few days later they announced the split: the NME of the twenty-first of May 1983 ran it on page two, under the headline "Yazoo to split", and the official reason was "personal development reasons". Neither of them ever spoke of rows: both, separately, put it down to a lack of communication. They did not talk to each other. And then, already dissolved, on the fourth of July 1983 You and Me Both was released: it entered the chart on the sixteenth of July and reached number one in Britain, as well as number one in New Zealand and sixty-nine on the Billboard 200. It sold less than the debut —gold, a hundred thousand copies— for a mechanical reason: there were no follow-up singles and not a single live date to push it. There was nobody left to congratulate.

And in November came the punchline. On the twenty-sixth of November 1983 "Only You" entered the British chart sung a cappella by The Flying Pickets, and there it stayed for five weeks at number one, Christmas included; it was also number one in Ireland and, the following year, in West Germany. The song went higher in other people's voices than in Yazoo's, and it got there when Yazoo had been a dissolved band for half a year.

What they did next

Between Yazoo and Erasure there is a step that almost always gets skipped. Clarke put together The Assembly with Eric Radcliffe, a project designed to put out stand-alone singles with a different singer each time. Only one came out: "Never Never", on the thirty-first of October 1983, with Feargal Sharkey, of The Undertones, as guest vocalist —guest, not member—, number four in Britain and ten weeks on the chart. Erasure is from 1985, and it started the same way Yazoo did: Clarke placed his own advert in the Melody Maker asking for a versatile voice, and out of the audition came Andy Bell, who at the time was selling women's shoes. The figures are worth setting down, because they dismantle the idea that Yazoo was the best thing that ever happened to him: Erasure has racked up thirty-five singles in the British top 40, seventeen in the top 10, five number one albums and more than twenty-eight million records sold, and its only number one on singles was the Abba-Esque EP of 1992, five weeks, four ABBA covers. Yazoo is two albums. The spark was the briefest and the most improbable, not the biggest.

Moyet signed to CBS and on the fifth of November 1984 released Alf, number one in Britain and quadruple platinum, one million two hundred thousand copies in the United Kingdom. Her highest-charting single is not on that album or on any other of hers from the period: it is "That Ole Devil Called Love", number two in March 1985, and it is still her ceiling. She won the Brit Award for best British female artist in 1985 and again in 1988. After Essex, in 1994, a drawn-out dispute with Sony left her more than eight years without releasing a studio album. She received the MBE in 2021, took a degree in Printmaking at the University of Brighton in 2023, at sixty-two, and in October 2024 reached number eight with Key. About her health she has spoken herself, in the first person, as a castaway on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 on the eighteenth of May 2014: "I was always an odd girl, I managed to alienate a lot of people. I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry and created a lot of neurosis for myself."

They saw each other again in 2008, in a reunion they called Reconnected: the announcement in January, the first face-to-face meeting in April at a club in Covent Garden, a tour starting in Copenhagen in May and a four-disc box set, In Your Room. There was no new material. The last time they played together was on the fourteenth of May 2011, at the Roundhouse in London, within Erasure's concert at Mute's Short Circuit festival: three songs, "Nobody's Diary", "Ode to Boy" and "Don't Go". Moyet said at the time that she was "99.9% sure it's the last time", and so far it is. They are both still alive and active, separately: in 2026 she is touring with a Yazoo repertoire plus her two most recent albums of her own, and crossing North America with The Human League and Soft Cell; he has announced that Erasure is giving up touring and has formed Doublespeak with Neil Arthur and Benge. Tracy Hurley Martin, to whom he was married for twenty years, died in January 2024.

What to remember

Yazoo fits into two years, two albums and a classified advert that one single person answered. Everything that gets told as irreproducible chemistry was, in the facts, a good deal more prosaic and a good deal more interesting: a blues singer from Basildon who paid for a classified, a songwriter fresh out of another band who picked up the telephone, dawn recordings in the studio hours nobody else wanted, a second album made in morning and afternoon shifts that he only agreed to make so as not to look like the man who walks out on two groups in a year, and a B-side written at a run that ended up being their club song in the United States.

And the order of the events, which is what the popular account inverts. They did not split at the top: they announced the break-up in May 1983 and the number one came to them in July, when they were no longer a group. Then, what is almost a joke of fate: the song they had not been able to take to the top was taken there by another group, a cappella, five weeks, at Christmas that same year. When "Only You" plays and that contralto voice comes in over two synthesiser chords, the whole tally is right there: a number two for them, a number one for others and a duo that had already dissolved before the chart proved it right.

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Sources

Yazoo (Yaz in North America) was an English synth-pop duo formed in late 1981 in Basildon, Essex, by Vince Clarke (synthesisers, programming and songwriting; real name Vincent John Martin, born 3 July 1960 in South Woodford, Essex) and Alison Moyet (voice and songwriting; real name Geneviève Alison Jane Moyet, born 18 June 1961 in Basildon). Active between 1981 and 1983, with one-off reunions in 2008 and 2011. Labels: Mute Records in the United Kingdom and Europe, Sire/Reprise in North America. It was formed out of a classified advert placed by Moyet in "Melody Maker" on 14 November 1981, p. 34, to which Clarke was the only reply; Clarke had announced his departure from Depeche Mode in November 1981 and gave his last concert with the original line-up on 3 December 1981. The name was chosen by Moyet in homage to the blues label Yazoo Records; that label threatened to sue them over use of the trademark for 3.5 million pounds —a threat, not a suit filed— and there was in addition an American band of the same name, hence the change to Yaz in the United States and Canada. "Only You" (Mute, 15 March 1982; written by Vince Clarke) entered the chart on 17 April 1982 and reached no. 2 in Britain on 16 May, the week in which the no. 1 was "A Little Peace" by Nicole, the winner of Eurovision 1982; no. 67 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its B-side, "Situation", credited to Clarke/Moyet, was written at speed as filler because "Don't Go" struck them as too good for the flip; Sire released it as a single in its own right in the United States, against the group's wishes, in a remix by François Kevorkian: no. 1 on Hot Dance Club Play for four weeks, no. 73 on the Hot 100 and no. 31 on Hot Black Singles. The laugh on "Situation" is Moyet's and was an unplanned reaction to the reverb on the microphone; it has been sampled on around a hundred recordings, among them the "Macarena" by Los del Río. "Upstairs at Eric's" (Mute/Sire, 20 August 1982), recorded at Blackwing Studios and produced by the duo with E.C. Radcliffe —the owner of the studio and the origin of the title— and Daniel Miller on some tracks, in dawn sessions because Fad Gadget had the studio booked during the day: no. 2 on albums in the United Kingdom, no. 1 on the independent chart, no. 92 on the Billboard 200, British platinum. "Don't Go" (5 July 1982, written by Clarke): no. 3 in Britain and no. 1 for two weeks on the American Hot Dance/Disco chart. "The Other Side of Love" (November 1982), a non-album single: no. 13. On 8 February 1983 Yazoo won the Brit Award for best British newcomer, against ABC, Culture Club and Musical Youth, in an edition in which the award for best British group went to Dire Straits. "Nobody's Diary" (9 May 1983), written by Alison Moyet: no. 3 in Britain and no. 1 on the American club chart. The "NME" of 21 May 1983, p. 2, published the announcement of the split under the headline "Yazoo to split"; the official reason was "personal development reasons", and both have since attributed it to a lack of communication, not to conflicts. "You and Me Both" (Mute/Sire, 4 July 1983) was released with the duo already dissolved: it entered the chart on 16 July and reached no. 1 in Britain and no. 1 in New Zealand, no. 69 on the Billboard 200, gold in the United Kingdom (100,000). Clarke conceived the first album as a one-off project and agreed to the second having been talked into it by his publishers; it was recorded between November 1982 and February 1983 in shifts, him in the morning and her in the afternoon. "Happy People", on that second album, is sung by Clarke because Moyet refused to sing it. The a cappella version of "Only You" by The Flying Pickets (Virgin) entered the chart on 26 November 1983, was no. 1 in Britain for five weeks and the Christmas no. 1 of 1983, the first a cappella no. 1 in the history of the British chart; also no. 1 in Ireland and in West Germany in 1984. Before Erasure, Clarke formed The Assembly with Eric Radcliffe, whose only single was "Never Never" (Mute, 31 October 1983), with Feargal Sharkey of The Undertones as guest vocalist and not as a member: no. 4 in Britain, ten weeks on the chart. Erasure was formed in 1985 after an advert by Clarke in "Melody Maker" out of which came Andy Bell, and has racked up 35 singles in the British top 40, 17 in the top 10, five no. 1 albums, more than 28 million records sold and a single no. 1 on singles, the EP "Abba-Esque" (1992, five weeks). Moyet signed to CBS and released "Alf" on 5 November 1984: no. 1 in Britain, 4× platinum, 1,200,000 copies in the United Kingdom. Her highest-charting British single is still "That Ole Devil Called Love", no. 2 in March 1985, not included on "Alf". She won the Brit Award for best British female artist in 1985 and in 1988; after "Essex" (1994) a dispute with Sony left her more than eight years without a studio album; she received the MBE in 2021, took a degree in Printmaking at the University of Brighton in 2023 at the age of 62 and "Key" (4 October 2024) reached no. 8. On "Desert Island Discs" (BBC Radio 4, 18 May 2014) she spoke in the first person about her depression and a prolonged agoraphobia. The "Reconnected" reunion was announced on 20 January 2008, with a tour starting in Copenhagen on 26 May and the box set "In Your Room", with no new material; the last joint performance was on 14 May 2011 at the Roundhouse in London, within Mute's Short Circuit festival, with three songs. Tracy Hurley Martin, married to Clarke for twenty years, died in January 2024 at the age of 53. As of October 2026 both are alive and active: Moyet touring with a Yazoo repertoire and with The Human League and Soft Cell in North America, and Clarke with Erasure retired from touring and a new project, Doublespeak. No addiction, criminal case or litigation between the two members is on record. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Official Charts Company, "Melody Maker" (14 November 1981 and 25 June 1983), "NME" (21 May 1983), "The Times" (18 April 2008), "The Independent" (8 June 2008), The Quietus, Classic Pop, Songfacts, The Electricity Club, BBC Radio 4, BBC News, Alison Moyet's official site, "The London Gazette", Jonathan Miller ("Stripped: Depeche Mode", Omnibus Press, 2004) and Wikipedia.