Erasure • Features • Private Ear

I would know all the lyrics, catalogue numbers, remix variations... I'd be on the internet discussion groups, on the Wonderland mailing list and I would be showing off how much I knew. I remember posting that the b-side of the new Erasure single would be 'Tragic', that it wouldn't be an instrumental and that was about a year before Always was released - it was just things that I had picked up on through the grape-vine.

So in a poacher turned gamekeeper type move, when Janet decided that she didn't want to do Erasure full time anymore and start working on Mute's website, my name was brought forward as a suitable candidate to take over. I had worked on magazines (working on a student newspaper) and had a background in doing that sort of thing.

When I took the job I was on a three month probation and part of my thinking was after that time I would go back to university and resume my maths degree, but I didn't! I suddenly discovered my limits in the word of maths and that they stopped at the second year level! [laughs]

I went for the Erasure job as I loved Erasure, the idea of working in the media and the record industry - it was all terribly glamorous from the outside to be involved in it! Also the job involved moving to London, which helped me progress with my writing career. With writing you basically have to be living in London and I was travelling to London every week anyway to take part in script meetings for a radio show.

What was your first meeting with Andy and Vince like?

My first meeting with them was long before the EIS job. Somehow I had managed to get tickets to see them on Top Of The Pops with them doing their first performance of 'Stay With Me'. I can be seen in the audience looking extraordinary thin and nerdy! [laughs]

And that's when I met them for the first time. I was extremely nervous and awe struck, all those sorts of things. By that time I had already been doing cartoons for the Private Ear magazine, so they vaguely knew of me and my girlfriend from doing that.

It was about three to four months after working at the EIS that I meet them again. And it was a couple of months after that that Vince stopped calling me Steve! He just got it into his head that I was Steve! I was in the position where I was so awe-struck that I didn't want to correct him, and that maybe I should call myself Steve now!

But meeting them... Janet and I got a train down to Chertsey and went to Vince's house. He made us a meal, we drank, was shown round his house and chilled out!

What is your proudest achievement as being part of the EIS?

For myself and my own ego, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, appearing on stage with the band at a concert. You're not going to get any better than that, it's the ultimate fan dream and I'm a massive fan. I'm sure I was in front of 2,000 people burning with jealously!

I'm proud of some of the early Private Ear's that I did, when I brought in colour, and some of the more in-depth interviews that I did making it a little more serious. Also the first version of the website that I did it, the one that was based on the box-sets. I was learning html at the time and am pretty proud of it. It also gives me enormous satisfaction seeing how much Buried Treasure gets on eBay. [laughs] I had to fight for that CD and it was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it. People value it very highly and I appreciate that. Plus I got my name on the back of two Erasure CDs as producer! [laughs]

What have been the highlights with working for the band?

Well one was seeing Jon Bon Jovi support Erasure! Great concert, it was onboard an aircraft carrier [USS Intrepid] as part of a radio show. Also the Sheppard's Bush concerts were fantastic and the Wembley Arena concert with 50,000 people doing the Stop! dance. [laughs] I remember thinking "I work for these guys" and that was really cool.

Any worst moments?

Hmmm I don't tend to remember those as much.

There was a very frustrating time that was the aftermath of Cowboy, which was a great album and had a great sell-out tour. But things suddenly lost the momentum, particularly with the single Rain that kept being pushed back which I think tried a lot of people's patience.

I think Rain finally got released in December which was far too late, and Mute seemed to be unsure about the single, and it showed with the number of remixes that it had.

I wasn't kept in the loop with Cowboy, and there was a long period where there wasn't any news from Erasure. Vince was doing other stuff and it seemed that the band was grinding to a halt and I had the suspicion that Cowboy would be their last album. But after Cowboy we heard good things about Loveboat and that it would be a new sound from the band, with it featuring guitars etc. Andy and Vince were up for a tour, which I think was pencilled, if not penned in at that stage.

Then I heard 'Freedom' and it wasn't what I was expecting, and as a fan I felt disheartened about it, and felt uncomfortable about trying to sell it to the 6,000 or so fan members. But the record company were behind it, and the band believed in it. I then heard the album and I was even less certain about the whole project. I was still going for it and was behind the project, and we did the launch party on the boat where Vince was charging a pound for his autograph as he was quite drunk! [laughs]

At this time I felt the EIS wasn't part of the team, this changed during the next album project quite dramatically. But with the performance at the ICA which wasn't a huge launch, it was almost a relief that the project was halted in that it enabled people to rethink what they were doing.

Erasure were out of fashion at that time and were not getting airplay, and if you can't appeal to the fans or those who remember Erasure with nostalgia... well it was bleak. It wasn't a good time for me and I wanted to leave and I was applying for other jobs but nothing came up. I might seem savagely critical, but I do love everything else that they have done, so it was quite a knock.

What were the reasons for ceasing the Private Ear magazine?

I thought we weren't going to talk about this?! [laughs]

What happened is that more and more of the fan base were becoming internet based, and more of my time was based on the internet in terms of what I was doing as part of my job. I was looking around and seeing what other fan clubs were doing at the time; the more forward thinking ones, the bands that were current, were all internet based and they were using there websites to reach out to people.

I wanted Erasure to have its own website, and it was overdue for them to have one. So it got to the point where it had to be decided, do Erasure have a website, or should they continue to have a subscription based service? I wanted to maximise their success and bring people in, rather than just cater for the people that were paying, so I chose to do the website, which eventually took off.

How did things change with the Other People's Songs release?

With Other People Song's first single going top ten, well that was due almost entirely to an internet fan based campaign, and I'm quite happy to take sole credit for that as those were the people that bought the single.

Before that I think the fan club and the record company hadn't quite meshed in terms of their campaigns, as they were still thinking in terms of posters and airplay and sending out promotional mixes to clubs, and the fan club sending out promotional mixes to clubs, and the fan club was only interested in getting the same 3 / 4,000 people to buy as many formats as possible. I think with Other People's Songs these two areas finally worked together probably, which was a lesson we had learnt with Cowboy were we had been running in opposite directions.

The Abba-equse album April fools joke - the EIS still receives emails about it now... Would you care to explain?

[laughs]

Before this I was a Beatles fan, and someone had come up with a track called "In Spite Of All The Danger", which at the time was a legendary lost Beatles track and they had got a band to record it and make it sound all scratchy. Tens of thousands of Beatles fans had been taken in by it, and I was just inspired by the deliciousness of that April Fool!

So I got a couple of friends to say that they had been to a record fair in the UK and had purchased these internal listening cassettes of "Abba-eque The Album" with ten tracks on them, claiming that there were finished and unfinished tracks on them. This was posted on the Erasure discussion list, with them asking if this tape was genuine and I replied yes, it sounded like the genuine thing.

Some Erasure fans got extraordinarily excited, as you would, and another friend claimed to have found copies of it and he put mp3's up on his website that he had cunningly designed to be corrupted so you wouldn't be able to listen to them! By the time it got to April 1st it was almost a relief as the joke had worn thin. The fact that the album track listing was 1041997 or something similar, well there were clues in there that people didn't pick up on.

There was one fan who was particularly irritated, who said he was going to [censored] me with a [censored]. I've since turned very kinky and he hasn't lived up to his promise yet, so I'm still waiting!

What are your thoughts on the EIS now?

I'm really proud of what I did in the job for the first four, five years. I think I made the magazine very good, I think the websites I did were good.

In my last year my heart wasn't really in it and I wanted to move on, and I had been doing it for too long. So I think one of the best things I did was leaving, and leaving when I did, when there was a new album, new tour etc. There was lots of stuff happening and it was exciting, and I wanted someone else to take over when it was good fun to run the EIS.

Any plans for further Doctor Who books?

Well it was fun writing Dr Who books, and during the time that Erasure were not doing much, it gave me time to daydream and think about plots whilst I was laminating membership cards! [laughs] In fact a lot of the Dr Who interest leaked into Erasure, as with Dr Who you had people interviewing producers, going behind the scenes etc and I brought a lot of mentality into the approach with the band and the EIS. I made it more nerdy!! That's my epitaph!