This interview with Robert Marlow was first published on the original EIS website back in 1999.
'I think it was back in the early 70's that we met. We met each other in Boys' Brigade when we were six, he always says when we were seven, but it was when we were six. He lived round the corner from me in Basildon, and we just became really, really good friends.
We both got into music at about the same time; I was at St Nicholas School and was having piano lessons, and Vince was at Laindon High Road and had violin lessons. And so we started playing guitar together, terrible versions of 'Get Back' by The Beatles and 'Pinball Wizard' by The Who. I remember jumping around in my bedroom trying to be Pete Townsend.
And a few years later what happened was that Alison Moyet, who was then in the year above me at school, came up to me and said, 'You play guitar, don't you? We're playing a gig next week at The Grand and you're playing.' And I only had a Winfield 12-amp guitar amp, a really tiny thing my mum had bought for me, so when we arrived - and this was the first proper gig that I'd ever been to - there were all these big amplifiers and when I plugged my guitar in immediately it just started feeding back, and I didn't know how to control any of it. We played this really ramshackle set - obviously I couldn't hear anything.
Ages later, Vince told me that she had a good voice, but I could never tell because at all the gigs I ever played with her it was like, 'One Two Three Four' and giving it the full bifta, like.
And then, all of a sudden, round here we were quite the thing. Because of her voice, I thought it was because of my guitar playing but obviously it wasn't! That was the Vandals. We were influenced by X-Ray Spex, the Clash and the Pistols and the whole punk thing. The gig at The Grand was our biggest profile gig, really - after that we went on to just play in youth clubs.
And then after that, Vince and I decided we'd have a band because then, all of a sudden, the next big thing was like electronic music. We'd already started listening to Kraftwerk and a lot of Fad Gadget - and obviously Daniel Miller's stuff, you know, 'Music For Parties' we already had the album of.
Vince was really into Buggles which I thought was really crap, but actually they did have a couple of good singles, I quite liked the one [sings] 'Pogo Jonny hit me in the head'. And so we decided to get this band together, called The Plan. This must have been in 1979. We rehearsed in Rayleigh down the road, Vince played guitar, and we had a friend of ours, Paul Langwith, who played drums. I'd bought a synthesiser on hire purchase, a Korg 700, which was one of the best synthesisers ever. Down in Vince's cellar at his studio he's got one of these fuckers and I want it, I want it badly! It's not MIDI, this was long before MIDI, and it was great. It was colour coordinated, you'd just switch the LFO on and then you had a thing called a Traveller which opened up the filter and you could make great 'wwwwwwaaaarp' noises.
I was influenced by Ultravox, John Foxx Ultravox not poofy Midge Ure Ultravox, who else…
Human League definitely, I mean with me being quite theatrical at the time - I was studying drama - Human League were very theatrical. I'd listened to a lot before that to sort of people like Hawkwind and I remember thinking that the Human League were like the 80's Hawkwind! I mean, between me and Vince, he was more the electro-head - certainly at the time he was - and I was a bit more of a glam-rock-head. I mean, I enjoyed, and still do enjoy, Kraftwerk, but my major influences were more Marc Bolan and T-Rex, Bowie and Roxy Music. Vince is also a mad Paul Simon fan, he's really bonkers about Simon & Garfunkel and stuff like that. Quiet music, old people's music, sitting-down-and-listening-politely music.
So we had this band. And then I decided I didn't want to do it any more, I wanted to go grape-picking in France, and then I'd save up some more money and get more equipment, more synthesisers and things. In the end I didn't bother, but Vince was really keen and kept at it.
Obviously by then he'd had the idea of doing stuff on his own. So he started working for a company who Andy Fletcher's dad worked for called CS&S, a cleaning company, and basically Vince's job was to drive around Southend airport and empty the chemical loo toilets from the aeroplanes! He's probably forgotten about it, but when he used to come home - and his mum always tells this story - he would come home and pile the money up because he really, really wanted to buy a synthesiser. I mean, I already had one, I was a bit spoiled really, [sings] 'His mum bought a synthesiser', 'My Perfect Cousin' by The Undertones indeed!
Eventually he bought his synthesiser, and he went and did a demo on his own in this studio called the Lower Wapping Conker Company in Barking. Now there's a thing to have, listeners!
I mean, I get sent things, somebody sent this thing to me on the internet saying, 'this is a Composition Of Sound tape' - that was Vince's first band. That was pre-Depeche Mode, it had Andy Fletcher on bass guitar, Martin Gore played the synthesiser, and Vince played guitar and sang. They were called Composition Of Sound and I thought they were quite good, actually. Anyway, this guy from Germany or somewhere sent me this .mp3 file, saying , 'this is Composition Of Sound', and I downloaded it and it was crap, it was nothing like them - for one thing the voice was really good so obviously it wasn't Clarkey! It was weird, I actually had to write back to this guy who was saying, 'this is a lost legendary Vince recording' and tell him it wasn't! But I'd love to get hold of that tape he did at the Lower Wapping Conker Company, three tracks I think it was.
Then I'd formed this band called French Look; I was the singer and played keyboards, and we had this other guy, Paul Redmond - he was a bricklayer, but he was in because he had a synthesiser, he had a Korg MS10 - wa-hey! And then we got Martin Gore. Martin came in to play with us, and as a result Vince and I had this big falling out because I'd poached his protege. Vince had already formed Depeche Mode by this point, and was living with a mate of ours in a bit of squat, really. I say, protege, but actually Martin was probably the most musical of all us. And so Vince and I had a really big falling-out, and we didn't speak to each other for ages. At the time it seemed like months, it was probably about a week! And then I saw him in the street, and we had a laugh and it was all back together again.
And so anyway Martin was sort of dangled between the two bands; culminating in our famous gig at the St. Nicholas School Youth Club.
It was a Saturday night - and I was talking to Vince about this the other day because in the new Depeche Mode book it mentions this gig. God knows where they get all this information from, from interviews like this I suppose! And the book mentions that the two bands fell out, which was true, because Depeche Mode deliberately sabotaged our set! I think we were headlining, and they were on first, and we were both using the same keyboards - Fletcher was playing my Korg, well, to be honest he didn't play much - except at this gig they messed up all the settings before we went on!
And after that I sort of lost contact with Vince for a while, because I moved up here, and I went to the local technical college to do drama. Meanwhile Depeche Mode started to play gigs at The Bridgehouse; Vince spent all of his time getting gigs or trying to get record company interest. I think they played four or five gigs at The Bridgehouse, some gigs at Croc's.
Then, after a while I went back to Basildon, bored, and Vince had actually secured the Mute deal, and they had put out their first album. I formed another band called Film Noir, and we supported Depeche Mode on their tour, but only on one date, which was in Basildon! They played at 'Raquels', this would be in 1981 I guess. And with me in Film Noir was a guy called Perry Bamonte, who subsequently became the keyboard player in The Cure, because Daryl, his brother, used to be Depeche Mode's roadie.
Me and Vince were talking about this the other day, we were going to do one of those rock family trees things, with all these bands. It would be fascinating, actually, like who was where and in what band.
So I had this band, Film Noir, and I had a few songs, one of them being 'The Face Of Dorian Gray'. I went to Vince and just like bullied him , saying, 'Oh, go on, give us a day in the studio.' So he said, 'I'll give you one day', we went up and recorded this song, and that day turned into two days, three days then three weeks. But at the end of it we had this track, we had a b-side, and we had 12" mixes, and Vince said we might as well try to get record company interest for it. I'd already done some demos round his flat on his 4-track.
We actually got some interest from RCA who said, 'Great!'. I think to be honest they probably thought they were getting Vince Clarke! But they got me! [laughs]
That track was produced by Vince and Eric Radcliffe. Eric's not from Basildon, he lives in Gravesend in Kent. We did a lot of programming around his house, with his mum, fantastic woman, she used to keep us constantly fuelled with tea. Eric's mum appears on the first Yazoo album, on 'I Before E Except After C', where they had this weird idea of putting somebody in front of a microphone with the headphones on, but only feeding them with tape delay. So the effect is that you can't hear your own voice when you actually say it, but only when it comes back a fraction of a second later. And she was trying to speak along to it, so it came out, 'Yeesss, I'm aaalll riiiiightt'. And Vince got all these different people to read bits of newspaper or whatever - 'Dragons!' - and then cut it all up. It was very good, a great track - 'Dragons!' - that idea just makes people sound really weird - 'Oh, I've lost my eggs' she'd say as her headphones fell off - really drugged up.
So that was Eric's mum, and we did a lot of the programming of the album at his house. And then I did some live stuff, I did a little tour supporting Blancmange with Vince coming along to the gigs, and then RCA took up the option on my single. Vince had said, 'we'll release it on our label and license it to a major', that was the plan, but in the end it didn't get enough radio airplay and didn't work out.
After that I did two more singles on RCA, 'I Just Want To Dance' and 'Claudette', and then the fourth single 'Calling All Destroyers' was on Sonet. Which was, in retrospect, not a very good idea, because Sonet were only a very small blues company who managed Martin's, Vince's and my publishing. Rod Buckle [manager of Sonet] is a great character but really they were a Swedish-based company.
And so 'Calling All Destroyers' flopped, which I think could have been the one, because at the time it was just when hi-NRG was coming out, and 'Calling All Destroyers' was definitely a real rip-off of Stock Aitken and Waterman. Somebody said to me the other day, this guy from Buenos Aires emailed me, and said, 'I think it sounds like 'Oh L'Amour''. I think, if it does, it's because it's very much from around the same time, 1984, in the same sort of vein, recorded in the same studio on the same equipment.
And then I did some more acting, and went away to India just as Calling All Destroyers was being released. I was thinking, 'Ooh, I could come back to a big hit', but very soon it was back on the dole and the album was shelved.
After that, Vince and I stayed in contact, I still went along to Erasure gigs and so on. I think one of my first Erasure gigs was seeing them at Basildon, at the Gloucester Park Peace Festival [July 13 1986].
I think I was third on the bill, then there was Psychic TV and Erasure headlined. Unfortunately it was quite dark and everyone went home before they came on. But I was really pleased that Vince said he'd do it, he'd had an offer to go to America, but instead he did this concert for me as a favour - at the time I was a member of CND.
After that I kind of carried on in various bands, but stopped trying to be a pop star. Until last year, when Vince rang me up and said, 'Look, you'll never believe what's happened. You know Rod Buckle, our old publisher? Well, he's taken this cassette of your stuff to Sweden and this guy at Energy Rekords wants to release it!'
Our next problem was that we had to find the master tapes of the album, 'The Peter Pan Effect'. They were in storage at Blackwing Studios, which is a converted church in Southwark, and all of the tapes were piled away up in the bell tower.
So poor old Eric Radcliffe [who manages the studios] had to climb up into this dusty old tower and find out whether they were still intact. A lot of people have asked me why the b-sides and 12" mixes weren't included on the album, and the main reason was that Eric couldn't find those tapes, or if he could find them they had deteriorated really badly. So Eric made up this CD, and sent it over to Energy Rekords who remastered it at Polar Studios, where ABBA used to record. I'm really pleased with the remastering; I mean, it still sounds like it was recorded in 1983, but it sounds really good. It doesn't sound like its been stuck in a bell tower for fifteen years.
And so that's what happened, the album got released and is now available from Energy Rekords, and is in the shops in Germany and Belgium and places like that, but mostly in Sweden.
And after that, through the record, I got in touch with this guy called Richard Johansen, who is in a band called Elegant Machinery - they're great, they sound much like early Depeche Mode - and he ask me and my music partner, a guy called Gary Durran, to play the Helsinborg Synth Festival, which is funnily enough in Helsinborg in southern Sweden. And so we went over. I thought I would be playing a little club with five people and a dog, but the place was just packed with people. I was absolutely knocked out, I was amazed. Everybody knew all the words, it was like Beatlemania, it was brilliant. I spent the whole day doing interviews, it was like being a real pop star!
And now I've been invited back, so I'm going to a small tour of Scandinavia , I'm playing at Copenhagen, Lundt, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Oslo. So that's sort of the 'story so far'. It's rekindled my interest in music, writing stuff and so on.
I've now put together this band - called Marlow - with this guy called Gary, who's been in loads of local synth bands. He's a real Erasure fan but despite that he's also very musical! [Laughs] We've set up a studio in my house and we've been working on lots of new stuff.
For the gig in Helsinborg, Vince helped out remixing the backing tracks that we'd done, because he's got more synthesisers than us, basically. The festival organisers wanted it to sound just like the album, which we didn't do, but Vince sort of put his '1983 head' on, and we had a wonderful weekend at his house remixing the backing tapes.
But now, for the next concerts, Gary and I are working principally at home, and we've been a bit more extravagant with our backing arrangements, sort of doing live 12" remixes and stuff like that, incorporating a bit of live playing and so on. I'm 38 now, so obviously it's better quality.
The sound has got a bit of a darker feel, we're not talking dark like Nitzer Ebb, it still has that sort of quirky edge.
Vince has been really great about it, helping out, he's really up for it. There's talk about the album 'The Peter Pan Effect' getting a proper release in America, which would be cool [the album has since been released on Cleopatra Records]. I talk with Vince quite a lot, two or three times a week. You have to catch him early, though, because he goes to bed very, very early, off to bed with a nice cup of cocoa. Yeah, he's the wild man of rock! And Vince has got me into The Archers recently, he keeps me updated with Archers news, 'She never! He did! She never!'
For more details on Robert's music, visit Marlow.