Gore & Clarke back together again

Thirty years after Vince Clarke quit Depeche Mode, he's working again with Martin Gore:

Gore explained that Clarke emailed him about the idea "out of the blue". He said: "Out of the blue I got an email from Vince just saying, 'I'm interested in making a techno album. Are you interested in collaborating?'

First fruits are an EP, Spock, next week; there'll be a full album in 2013. Then something else round the middle of the century.

It was thirty years ago today...

Some of you will feel very, very old indeed on the news that Just Can't Get Enough by Depeche Mode is thirty years old today:



This is the song that effectively split Depeche Mode - Dave Gahan told an anecdote about how they realised they didn't realise what Vince Clarke was going on about when they were followed by a gaggle of teenage girls singing the lyrics at them. Those teenage girls grew up to be The Saturdays. Possibly.

The band promoted the record with a Look-In Colour Centre where, for reasons that were never entirely clear, they dressed up as cricketers. The headline? "Some people think you're cute; others that you're slightly vile." There wasn't even a cricketing pun in there.

Embed and breakfast man: Vince Clarke

Whoever would have expected Dell to add to the quality of Friday morning? Their MotherboardTV has been out to give Vince Clarke the chance to enthuse over electrical things that make noise:

Erasure: Vince Clarke and Andy Bell fill out a package

You'd have to be made of flint to not enjoy at least some of Erasure's fine poppy moments, and those moments have been gathered into a four-disc box set. The music, yes, is exciting, but even more exciting is disc four - a DVD of BBC appearances. And, yes, there's Top Of The Pops stuff in there - but more. Oh, so much more:

01. Sometimes -­ Top Of The Pops
02. It Doesn't Have To Be -­ The Tom O'Connor Roadshow
03. Victim Of Love -­ Daytime Live
04. The Circus -­ Daytime Live
05. Ship Of Fools -­ Wogan
06. Chains Of Love -­ Top Of The Pops
07. A Little Respect -­ Going Live!
08. Stop! -­ Top Of The Pops
09. Chorus ­- Wogan
10. Love To Hate You -­ Top Of The Pops
11. Am I Right? - Top Of The Pops
12. Breath Of Life -­ Top Of The Pops
13. Who Needs Love (Like That) -­ Top Of The Pops
14. Always -­ Top Of The Pops
15. Run To The Sun -­ Top Of The Pops
16. I Love Saturday -­ Smash Hits Poll Winner's Party
17. Stay With Me -­ Pebble Mill
18. Fingers And Thumbs (Cold Summer's Day) -­ Pebble Mill
19. Don't Say Your Love Is Killing Me -­ Top Of The Pops
20. Solsbury Hill -­ Top Of The Pops
21. Breathe -­ Top Of The Pops
22. Top Of The Pops 2 Special
23. Sometimes -­ Tom O'Connor Roadshow
24. How Many Times? -­ The Late Show
25. Miracle -­ Later with Jools Holland
26. Because You're So Sweet -­ Later With Jools Holland
27. Oh L'Amour -­ Promotional Video

The sweetest nuggets have got to be the clips from Tom O'Connor's Roadshow. A smidge of the performance has been teased up onto the YouTube:



Ah, if only they'd included Tom's snow-covered opening title sequence, complete with the annoyed waving of hands at the engine of the broken-down Roadshow mobile...

Back upstairs at Eric's

From the more-attractive-comeback files: Yazoo.

Yes, Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet are getting back together for a UK tour. But don't - inevitably - call it a comeback:

"Playing this material live is not about revision for me," Moyet said. "It is about finishing something we started - writing, recording, performing.

"Three parts of a whole. A salmon cycle. It's like going home."

A salmon cycle? So we can look forward to the pair of them struggling against the tide, only to have their roes munched out by a hungry grizzly seconds before reaching their final goal, then?