Andy Bell of Erasure

When you reach a milestone in your life, what’s the best way to mark it? By embracing it, glorying in it – crowning it, in fact – with an album of euphoric songs produced and polished in Nashville, of course!

The name of Andy Bell’s third solo album, Ten Crowns – like its cover art, featuring his head on a glistening gold coin – is making Andy smile today: "It sounds like a pub!”, he jokes. But behind that title lies ten songs of dazzling, joyous pop, inspired by the dancefloor and gospel, completed in the year he turned 60. 

The name also refers to the tarot, he says: “The ten crowns on the tree of life, which is a very powerful card to have. And I’d just got my crowns on my teeth done in Miami when I was trying to think about a title!”, he laughs.

After Erasure’s last two fabulous albums – 2020’s The Neon and its 2021 companion piece Day-Glo (Based On A True Story), full of fascinating experimental reconstructions of The Neon’s tracks – Bell threw himself into writing with Dave Audé, a producer with whom he’s been close for over a decade. Dave met Andy while DJing at a club in 2010 run by a mutual friend, Stephen Moss, who became Andy’s partner and husband (Stephen and Andy live together in London and Atlanta).

Working with someone who is not Vince Clarke introduces a new set of dynamics, Andy says – although Erasure fans should know that forty years on, they are still going strong and recently reunited to begin work on the next Erasure album. “I still love working with Vince, but when you're writing with another person, it’s like the same feeling as going to another country or moving to America. You can just invent who you are, become a brand new person.”

Andy and Dave have already released two US dance chart number ones together: 2014’s ‘Aftermath (Here We Go)’ and 2016’s ‘True Original’, the latter arriving in the same year that Dave won a Grammy for his remix of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk’. After those dance tracks, the pair “just kind of carried on writing as an exercise”, Andy explains, “and after that, Dave moved his family to Nashville because LA was so expensive, and so our writing took this kind of gospel-tinged Nashville twist."

He describes how in Nashville there’s a church on every corner (“it reminded me of singing in choirs and cathedral school as a child, where the spirit of the church is imbued in the music"). Not that Ten Crowns is a sombre, spiritual set. It’s propulsive, electronic, passionate, driven by the need to encounter new emotions and experiences as life races on. “I mean, I’ve got everything I could possibly wish for, you know, I really have, but that’s not to say I’m always fulfilled,” Andy adds. “This album’s about picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, embracing life – and about taking that feeling on even when you’re fighting demons in the world, like homophobia, and fighting demons in yourself. It’s about being celebratory and uplifting.”

Ten Crowns also features Andy’s ultimate pop heroine – one he sang about on a track back in 2010, ‘DHDQ’, and now sings alongside on the yearningly wistful ‘Heart's A Liar.’ “To have Debbie Harry singing with me – you know, I still can’t quite believe it.” He’s known Blondie for years, he explains, and they have always been kind to him, inviting him backstage at their gigs, Chris Stein giving him hugs, Debbie “sitting in the corner, teasing me... she knows how much of a fan I am of the band”

Debbie's an inspiration to Andy in other ways, too – although he hasn't got the energy to emulate her, he laughs. “I mean she’s eighty this year and one minute she’s in Australia, the next she’s at Paris Fashion Week. Bloody hell!” The song is Andy’s rewrite of a track by English-Italian singer-songwriter and regular Dave Audé collaborator Luciana, which Andy imagines being about two lovers being no good for each other. “Debbie gives it this gravitas and this coquettishness, but she’s still very in command. And she recorded her vocals in the studio on Gay Pride, which I thought when I heard it, oh, trust her!”

Ten Crowns begins, however, with a cosmic flash. ‘Breaking Thru The Interstellar’ sees Andy dance us “towards another paradise…ready for a new dimension / On our galactic journey”. Inspired by Andy’s love of reading BBC science magazines, and the possible existence of wormholes that allow travel through space, the song also reminds him of Boney M’s ‘Nightflight to Venus and Leila K’s ‘Open Sesame’. “It's on first because I wanted to let people know we're going to go for a ride now, you know!"

‘Lies So Deep’ follows, a song about getting over the intensity of heartbreak, where your heart is like a toffee apple but you’re desperate for somebody to come along and break it. Parts of it remind Andy of Stevie Nicks and Adele, and he’s joined for the middle-eight by another Audé collaborator, Sarah Potenza, who broke through in the US on The Voice. “I wanted someone who was like Whitney Houston crossed with Yazoo, and Sarah’s thing was country and gospel. But as soon as I heard her sing these lines, I was like, Oh, my God – that’s it. She brings its emotions to life.”

The album’s full-blooded spirit continues thereafter. ‘For Today’ is radio-perfect, Human League-style electronic pop. ‘Dance For Mercy’ uses the bassline of Sheila and B Devotion’s ‘Spacer’ as the brilliant foundation of a track about reconnecting with your time on earth (“my feet never touched the ground / Walked through the tunnel / Went towards the light / But they said that it wasn’t my time”). There’s a lot of dancing on this album, Andy points out. “Even in Peterborough when I grew up, with my mum and dad in working men's clubs, I would dance the whole evening. And my heart's always been in dance music, even if" – he rolls his eyes with self-deprecation – "I don’t really go to clubs anymore!”

Some songs hint at the emotional journey Andy has been on in his life. “It’s so very hard to say hello / When your whole world comes crashing down,” he sings, movingly, on ‘Don’t Cha Know’ (“the most ABBA song on here”). ‘Godspell’ moves from feelings of rapture to castigation in its pounding rhythms and fabulous lyrics: “Get thee behind me, charlatan / Get thee behind me, sycophant / Get thee behind me, false prophet.” 

Comments on modern life also sparkle lightly around Ten Crowns' golden edges. Featuring a chorus written by Sisely Treasure of the band Shiny Toy Guns, ‘Put Your Empathy On Ice’ sharply satirises today’s overwhelming online world (“No-one can make up their minds / Because their minds are made up for them”). The stunning ‘Dawn Of Heaven’s Gate’ begins differently, with a dream: “If there’s anything I could do for you / Absolutely anything / I would get down on my knees / And pray to the highest power / It wouldn’t be just any power / It would be the power to believe / That we could change everything.”

"That song's partly about this idea of wondering why in the hell we can't all get on,” Andy explains. “The whole album is like asking for salvation, really, in a world where everybody ultimately wants to be loved.” Ten Crowns concludes with a very moving moment, a song that Andy thinks might partly inspired by his mum, called ‘Thank You’. It's about seeing the light as the end of life approaches, directed to “all the people and friends / that came along for the ride / I thank you truly”. As euphoric funeral songs go, it’s hard to think of any better.

Ten Crowns marks a properly majestic moment in Andy Bell’s forty-year career. His joy about what that holds, and where it can go, clearly excites him. “It’s my third sort of solo record [following 2005’s Electric Blue and 2010’s Non-Stop] and in Erasure, our third album was our most successful out of all that we’ve done, so maybe I’m taking that spirit with me!"

Travelling into new dimensions and possibilities with gospel in the heart and dancing in the soul clearly suits him. Ten Crowns is Andy Bell imperial, gleaming, ready for his coronation.