Erasure, "Drama!"
Of course we loved Erasure, back in the day. I think my friend Steve found them first. This would have been in 1988, a date I can pinpoint because the first Erasure song any of us heard was “Chains of Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), a single from The Innocents that garnered some negligible amount of airplay on Northeastern Ohio radio. And The Innocents, Erasure’s third album, was released in April of that year.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, see “Black Celebration,” we saw Depeche Mode live in May 1988, when they were touring on Music for the Masses. Some of us—ahem—had gone for the opening act, which was OMD, but all of us came home rip-roaring for Depeche Mode and eager to find like-sounding bands. I can’t say for certain that when he first presented us with The Innocents, Steve knew that Erasure and Depeche Mode were related: step-brothers, arguably, in that Depeche Mode was Vince Clarke’s literal first act and Erasure his third, with Yaz/ Yazoo in between. In those days we didn’t have ready means for looking up the lineups and lineages of pop groups. Soon enough we would become aware of the Clarke connection, but it’s likely that Erasure landed on our desks simply because Steve had a great ear and NASA-grade antenna for picking up synth-pop. His readings could detect bands like Celebrate the Nun and Anything Box fizzling in the ether; of course he wouldn’t miss an act like Erasure, when it thundered onto the scene.
We liked “Chains of Love” well enough, but it barely registered when compared to “A Little Respect” (Apple Music, Spotify), which was the first track on the LP. You bought the cassette, dropped it into your Walkman, pressed Play, and you immediately thought: Well, THAT’s one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. Why wasn’t IT the single? And the band and its label duly addressed this issue in September, when “A Little Respect” was released as The Innocents’ second single, and our town’s recalcitrant DJs (see “The Only One I Know”) gave it, I dunno, 50% more spins over the airwaves than “Chains of Love” ever got. A better showing, for sure, but far short of what it deserved.
The Innocents’ album art was elegant, understated, and gorgeous—miles better than the frumpy, clip-art cover for Wild! that I’ve regrettably had to install at the top of this post. The problem is I like today’s song too much, and it’s on Wild! rather than The Innocents. For its part, The Innocents’ cover featured a photograph of St. James and Charlemagne in stained glass, set against a white background. The actual window is somewhere in Chartres Cathedral, though I’m damned if I can find it on their website. But here it is on the Erasure album cover:
That cover made a deep impression on me and in so doing raised a chicken-and-egg question: were the songs on The Innocents written, arranged, and recorded to carry a medieval tinge to them, so that the cover was chosen to align with their sound? Or did I only hear this because St. James and Charlemagne suggested it to me? Earlier this week I played the record through again, to take stock. As it turns out—and quoting one of the songs (Apple Music, Spotify)—this was just my imagination running wild and too fast. This music reeks of the 1980s, not the 980s.
For sure, “Ship of Fools” (Apple Music, Spotify) has a kind of Gothic stone-edifice solemnity to it, but no more so than, say, “Leave in Silence” (Apple Music, Spotify) off Depeche Mode’s first record without Vince Clarke. If any part of The Innocents can be fairly said to nod toward the Middle Ages, it’s “Witch in the Ditch” (Apple Music, Spotify), with its traditional 6/8 tempo and lyrics trafficking in Old World superstitions. This might be a song the peasant women sang while their husbands cut the stone to build their church. But “Witch” was just one of thirteen tracks, one of them an Ike & Tina Turner cover quite a ways from Hildegard von Bingen. And a song like “Yahoo!” (Apple Music, Spotify), while certainly religious-themed, was tent revival stuff, miles and centuries away from bowed heads in the nave:
I pray to the Lord on high to set you free. Yahoo! Aaaaah—higher higher higher. Yahoo! Aaaaah—find your way unto the Lord.
I didn’t know quite what to make of this track, back in the day. Here was vocalist Andy Bell positively bursting with the Spirit, and baked by gospel singers. No markers of irony to be found, no snarky asides, no sharp turn into cynicism at the end. What was this? I was starting the hard work of forging my identity, and I was counting on my cassette collection to do a lot of that work for me. As I’d had barely any opportunity to do any meaningful sinning, I sure as hell wasn’t ready to come to Jesus at 15. Were Andy and Vince evangelicals, or as they termed themselves in those days, born again?
Uh, no. Born this way, more like, at least in Andy’s case.
As uncomfortable as I was with “Yahoo!”—and often as not I fast-forwarded through it—I played The Innocents a ton, and along with the rest of my gang, I dug deeper into Erasure. We bought the prior two studio records, Wonderland and The Circus, and the live album, The Two Ring Circus. Wild! came out in September 1989, and a handful of us got tickets to see Erasure live at the Cleveland Music Hall the following February, during our junior year. To put it mildly, this concert was eye-opening for all of us. I may be remembering this imperfectly, but I believe the show opened with Andy Bell riding in from stage right on a giant glossy sculpture of a snail, wearing a reflective silver wrestling singlet (Andy, that is, not the snail). That’s a choice, we all thought. And as we stood by, bemused, almost straightaway there was a burst of enthusiasm behind us—felt, I should say, more than heard—and we turned to find four very flamboyant men whooping and dancing as if they were celebrants at some Dionysian festival. Which of course they were.
We looked to our left, then to our right, then back at the stage, and as a pair of perfectly constructed male dancers, sculpted and shaved, appeared on either side of Andy, we all came to the same realization simultaneously:
We may be the only straight men at this concert.
That’s of course an overstatement. This was Cleveland, after all, at the dawning of the 1990s. We’d put Reagan behind us, but we’d never heard the name Bill Clinton, and at the time I couldn’t wait to turn 18 so I could vote to re-elect the elder Bush. Looking back on this show, with the additive benefit of three decades of wisdom and further understanding of how the world works, I can look past my initial emotional response—which does so much to sear an event into memory—and estimate that Erasure’s crowd that night was composed of probably 30% gay men in their twenties and thirties and 65% alt-rock high school and college kids, with maybe a smattering of lesbian women filling in the gaps. Rough guess. But that first 30% sure made an impression on us in the moment.
Remember: we were teenage boys from the Midwestern suburbs. We understood that there was an LGBTQ+ community in the wider world, though we were probably plugged into only the first two or three letters in that list. And we had a pretty good idea that certain of our classmates were inclined in this direction—or at least we had a strong notion that they might be. This put us in a tweener space between, I dunno, President Ahmedinejad’s Iran (NOBODY HERE IS GAY … remember him?) and the Pride movements we heard tell of in coastal cities. And sadly, much closer to Iran on that continuum. This was a time when, at least in our neck of the woods, you couldn’t be out. At least not in high school. The F-slur was—and this is unimaginable today—in regular, widespread use, and perfectly lovely human beings in my grade, beautiful souls with feelings and dignity and somehow someway endless reserves of grace, were pressed into the margins, called names in band practice, and treated with disdain or worse. Intolerance was as much as fact of life as the shuttered steel mills, and looking back on those days, it maddens me that we obsessed about one of these things and were oblivious to the other.
Because let’s be clear—few if any of us were upstanders. You put your head down and you moved along down the hall, so as not to be “guilty” by association. Just as an example, up until maybe six weeks into eighth grade, my mother picked out my clothes for me. She bought them for me at the department store, and she pulled outfits out of the closet for me on school nights. She did this for probably longer than she should have, because up to and through puberty I didn’t especially care what I wore—it all would get covered in my snot and spit anyway—whereas she did. And in the insular private elementary school I attended for so many years, ten miles down the road from where we lived, my mother dressing me, sometimes funny and sometimes not, was all well and good.
But when I switched over to the local public junior high, the baggy yellow pants and matching purple sweatshirt and trousers tripped all kinds of alarms about the new kid in the 8th grade class. Burnouts in their denim jackets—blue on blue was a passable combination, apparently—made derisive comments as I walked down the hall. I was slow on the uptake, but over time I did start to suspect that my costuming might be affecting my chances with the girls, and after a fair amount of internal deliberation on the question, I started picking my own outfits to leave in my parents’ bathroom each night for ironing.
(Side note here: My mother ironed my clothes every night before school. Often as not my kids went to school with dried avocado on their shirts.)
Shortly thereafter I insisted that my parents take me to the Mall to get some jeans. This was a hard thing, because I felt lousy telling my mother that I wasn’t on board with her choice anymore. Not that she ever expressed any hurt feelings over it—she was a teacher, after all, and she knew the score. From time to time after this we would lock horns over whether I could wear concert merch to school, and I never did get the Bart Simpson T-shirt I wanted so badly. But by and large I was able to steer my couture toward earth tones, and as time wore on I was able to establish some degree of hetero-masculinity in the eyes of whoever was monitoring these matters—enough at least to see that others, and not I, had the F-slur hurled at them on the regular. Some hero I was. And it would bear out, too, that it wasn’t just radioactive yellow pants impeding my romantic life. But that’s another story.
Of course, whatever Kaufmann’s department store was selling to mothers that would earn their kids shunning and abuse in the halls of a public high school was nothing compared to the several costumes Andy Bell was rocking in Cleveland Music Hall on that wintry night in 1990. Yet again I call upon YouTube to serve as memory aid, and wouldn’t you know it, here’s a full-length video of a live show from the same Wild! tour I was able to see in Cleveland. I’ve had this playing in the background while I write, so I can’t say I’ve had eyes fixed on the video from start to finish. But I’m not seeing the snail ride, so you’ll have to content yourself with that image as I’ve drawn it.
Even so, there’s enough here to see just how Andy Bell, in his fullest glory, might have taken our narrowed minds by surprise. Admittedly, we might have guessed a thing or two about his sexuality, based on the songs we knew and loved going into the show. Let’s be honest: the guy was shooting up flares. I’d been taking German classes since the fall of 1987, so that when Andy sang the following in “Witch in the Ditch”:
Yes it was you, my love, that made me turn around. Yes it was you, mein Herr, who turned me upside down—
I might have given some thought to why he opted for Herr instead of Fraülein. Likewise, “Oh L’Amour” (Apple Music, Spotify) was the flagship Erasure track, at least until “A Little Respect” landed. Its chorus?
Oh, l’amour: broke my heart, now I’m aching for you. Mon amour: what’s a boy in love supposed to do?
A bit more subtle, this one, but still: my entire gang at the show were French students, and even I had learned enough of it in elementary school to know my gendered pronouns.
By the time you get to GIMME GIMME GIMME A MAN AFTER MIDNIGHT (Apple Music, Spotify), he’s basically screaming from the rooftops: DO YOU GET IT YET, OHIO KIDS? And still we didn’t. This was an ABBA cover, after all, and you take the lyrics you’re given. Never mind that Deborah Harry troubled herself to change “Denise” (Apple Music, Spotify) to “Denis” (Apple Music, Spotify), right?
And all this goes to show how generally in denial boys of a certain age at a certain time in a certain place could be about stuff like this. So much so that we could overlook all the accumulated evidence, we could take so little account of Andy Bell’s pride in declaring who he was, who he loved, and what he stood for in the hidebound 1980s. Truth be told, we needed Andy on that snail, in that unitard, singing and dancing and living his truth, whether or not we could handle it at that point in time. And we needed to see 30% of the crowd reflecting his pride right back at him, feeling free—in that moment and setting, at least—to be exactly who they were. Now I won’t lie: this didn’t just take us by surprise. It shook us. It shook every single one of us. And stooges that we were, we wrestled with the question of what it meant to be so enthusiastic for a music group that, as it turned out, had a flamboyantly gay front man who, at least per the video I’m watching today (my memory fails me on this point) likely sang a flamenco parody in drag that night.
I wish we could say we were secure enough in ourselves to cut loose and dance like and with the guys behind us, that we didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time at the concert with our heads cocked, wondering what we’d got into and was it safe for us? The answer to the latter question was of course yes, but we wouldn’t know that be true until some time later, after we grew the fuck up, fanned across the country, and variously spent weekends in Provincetown, discovered—Jesus Christ Almighty—David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and/or fell in love with the characters in Will and Grace and Brokeback Mountain. Or with films cleared from our eyes, we became able to see people in our own lives: foundational people, important and essential and delightful, who worked alongside us or filled our cavities or managed our money and might have taught us algebra—and most importantly people we cared deeply for and loved all along. And once we saw them, they wouldn’t seem at all blinding or alien to us, as Andy Bell did that night.
To be fair to these earlier iterations of ourselves, the handful of us who were so nonplussed at the Erasure show had been shaped by a culture that was broken in a lot of ways. Note that I wrote earlier that our minds weren’t narrow by nature but narrowed by the lives we had lived to date. We fancied ourselves as nonconformists, alt-rock kids who rejected the put-on masculinity of the tough-guy seniors who felt they could cut us in the lunch line on Fridays, because they were wearing football jerseys. But when presented with an actual challenge—say, when one of our classmates was menacing another, or when Erasure was putting on a surprise Pride Parade in Cleveland—we shrank from it. To be sure, we didn’t come by this cowardice naturally. We were casualties of a culture that, like the invisible hand, see “My City Was Gone,” had constructed a pretty drab day-to-day reality for us and moved us around in it like toy soldiers, often as not.
Yet by the same token, that same culture couldn’t have been all bad, because it also shuffled Erasure records into the NRM and Musicland racks for us to buy, and we had enough of something sparking up in us, perhaps by way of MTV—Culture Club, Dead or Alive, Kajagoogoo—to find our way to them. And it was the culture, too, that conjured us up to the shores of Lake Erie, in the cold and wind and snow, so that Andy Bell could deliver us the short, sharp shock of his unitard-and-snail ensemble. If our minds didn’t blow open that night (they were most certainly blown, if not necessarily open), we were at least treated to a brighter, more colorful corner of humanity than we were accustomed to seeing. Now if I’d only had Jeanine’s help dressing for the occasion …
Anyway.
We drove down to New York City on Friday night. Got a late start leaving at 9:30, and I was in a foul mood. The work week had been long, the Guardians had shown zero signs of life in dropping a 3-1 stinker to Tampa Bay, and the miles stretched out ahead of us, I thought endlessly. Kate was driving, and she asked me to put on some music. As I’d already decided I would write about Erasure, I played a few of their hits—songs I hadn’t heard for years, like the aforementioned “Oh, L’Amour,” “Victim of Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Who Needs Love Like That” (Apple Music, Spotify), and some of the ABBA covers, of which there are several.
As I read down through Apple Music’s list of Erasure Essentials, I paused over “Drama!” (Apple Music, Spotify). I remembered nothing about that song except that I liked it a hell of a lot. After a second or two recoiling at the album cover—[sigh]—I played it. This would be the first of, I dunno, fifteen or twenty times I’ve listened to this track over the weekend. It was a slow burn that first time, and the song didn’t take for me until the chorus, which started with Andy singing You are guilty. Almost immediately a crush of voices—I like to think it’s a jury, with Andy as perhaps the foreman—chimed in to affirm the verdict of GUILTY!, which Andy echoes in falsetto. This twice-repeated pronouncement of the word guilty is about as powerful as four-on-the-floor ’80s dance-pop gets.
We are guilty—GUILTY! (guilty!)—and how we ever entered into this life … God only knows we’re not to sacrifice the art of LOVE.
But let’s go back to the beginning, because I’m finding these lyrics to be very much on-point.
One rule for us—for you another. Do unto yourself as you see fit for your brother. Is that not within your realm of understanding? A fifty-second capacity of mind too demanding? Well, then, poor unfortunate you.
Your shame is never ending. Just one psychological drama after another. You are guilty. GUILTY!
We are guilty—GUILTY!—and how we ever entered into this life—
And here’s the kicker, landing on the final chord—
God only knows the ultimate necessity of LOVE.
Amen, Andy. Now play it all over again and again and again.