As synth icon Vince Clarke releases his debut solo album, Danny Turner discovers how he’s embraced the electronic dark side
Vince Clarke is almost unique in the synth-pop world for attaining significant success with a multitude of electronic bands throughout the ’80s and beyond. Having studied violin and piano at school, the South Woodford, Londonborn songwriter teamed up with schoolmate Andy Fletcher prior to the formation of Depeche Mode, then promptly left the band after their debut album Speak & Spell (1981) hit the top 10.
Shortly after, the introverted electro-pop mastermind met Alison Moyet to have huge but brief success with Yazoo before scoring even greater chart triumphs as one half of the interminable dance-pop duo Erasure, with vocalist Andy Bell. The restless Clarke has also collaborated with Martin Gore for the 2011 album VCMG and other electronic luminaries such as Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware, Jean-Michel Jarre and Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, amongst others.
Indeed, it was during Clarke’s collaboration with Gore that he was introduced to the world of Eurorack. After building a system and spending a few years simply admiring it, he began to dig a lot deeper during the pandemic,surfacing a few years later with a series of tracks simply titled Drone. Persuaded by Mute Records boss Daniel Miller to elongate those recordings, Clarke finally releases his first solo album Songs of Silence – a dark, minimalist ode to sci-fi film soundtracks.
Was your early fascination with electronic sounds led by the music that was around in the ’70s and early ’80s or the technology itself?
“It was the new records that I started hearing in the early ’80s. When bands like The Human League, Soft Cell and OMD started releasing records, it became kind of a scene in my home town for myself and likeminded fans. We were interested in this stuff whenever it was played in the front rooms at various friends’ parties, but it wasn’t a genre back then – it was a whole new sound.”
When you started making electronic music, what access did you have to gear, which was presumably quite expensive at the time?
“At first, I was making music with Andrew Fletcher – we had a drum machine, he was playing bass and I was playing guitar and singing badly. Then Martin Gore, who was a friend of Andy’s joined and he had his own synthesiser. We looked at this thing and thought, okay, this is a lot easier than learning chords on a guitar and you only need one finger to play it. That’s when I started getting interested in the technology and the fact that I could maybe reproduce or do something similar to the music I loved at the time. It was all-analogue and very expensive, but then so were guitars and amplifiers, so we had all our synth
