Singer Andy Bell talks to Dominic Smith about looking back for a positive future

ERASURE’S 15th studio album Snow Queen was a solemn affair.

It was written following the death of Andy Bell’s long-term partner and the band’s former manager, Paul Hickey, who had suffered a long illness.

Speaking to The Guide, two years since Hickey died, Bell says the record was a prayer.

“It took me back to my school days. I wasn’t in the choir but I had to go to the cathedral once a term and do assembly. It reminded me of being in there. The peacefulness and organs on it were like a soaring prayer. It felt like saying thank you very much.”

Bell is now in a happier place. After working with club remix-king Dave Audé and making a solo record and Edinburgh fringe one-man show called Torsten The Bareback Saint, he has a new partner and is also reunited with his Erasure right-hand man Vince Clarke.

Bell and Clarke enlisted Richard X to oversee the follow-up to Snow Queen, The Violet Flame, which they recorded in Miami and released in September.

“It’s one of our most exhilarating records that we’ve done since The Innocents. If albums could have notes, it’s very high. I think it’s the thrill of where I am in my life; things are so settled now and I just feel like there are brand new horizons.”

Erasure formed almost 30 years ago when Bell answered an advert Clarke – who had founded and left Depeche Mode and had two hit albums with Alison Moyet in Yazoo – placed in the now defunct music magazine Melody Maker.

Since then the pair have sold more than 25 million albums and produced a string of jukebox classics such as Give A Little Respect and Always. They arrived as champions of the synth when modern technology sidelined guitar bands. Years on, after grunge and Britpop, the synth is again the instrument of choice for writers. Bell, however, still believes the group are outsiders.

“It’s amazing – even with synth music we were outsiders. Vince was to me the essence of cool Britannia before it was invented. He was one of the people I would most have liked to work with. I was amazed when it happened. I was a big Yazoo fan. For ages we were going touring in America, but being underground we would get played in clubs and not necessarily top 40 radio. It was the same all the world over.”

It was the same during Britpop when the radiowaves were filled with guitar bands.

“We were seen as out of fashion, we were so out of fashion we were almost in again. We have always been a bit weird and quirky, never really darlings of the mainstream.”

Bell has always felt like an outsider. He grew up in a council house in Peterborough and managed to get into the local grammar school. He was one of only two boys in the school, but enjoyed his studies.

He found the Cambridgeshire town a little more threatening.

“I got picked on quite a bit. I could never understand why. It made me suspicious of people. It makes you go very insular, very shy, and I didn’t trust people my own age. I would only put trust in people who were older or try to give guidance to younger people.”

That sense of being an outsider gave him a strong centre. It made coming out early in his career and later revealing he is HIV positive easier. He’s now become something of a beacon of hope for sufferers.

“I really love it when you get people coming up to you who have just found out they are positive. They can see someone else and they are not just on their own.”

Erasure Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, Sunday, November 23

Essential info

7pm, SOLD OUT. Call 01273 709709 for returns.