“To be honest, I was quite surprised that this album actually ended up being released,” Vince Clarke chuckles. “I guess when Neil and Benge’s manager got involved and took it to London Records—and, shockingly, London thought that it was worth releasing—it became a thing for sure. I thought that we would just carry on doing demos forever.”
Clarke is speaking from his San Diego home, joined on Zoom by Blancmange’s Neil Arthur and British record producer Benge, to discuss Doublespeak, the eponymous debut covers collection from their new-ish post-punk supergroup. The record follows Clarke’s similarly unpressured debut solo album, 2023’s Songs of Silence, which he says was “the first thing I did where there was no expectation.” “There wasn’t any kind of clear vision about where this might go,” adds Arthur, who conceived the Doublespeak idea back in 2017 when he began excitedly sending his good friend and fellow synthpop pioneer Clarke cover-song suggestions. “I think the attraction in doing it was because it wasn’t focused,” Clarke says. “There was no real vision of where it would end up, there wasn’t a plan or a schedule or anything like that, and there was certainly no pressure from anybody.”
Arthur and Clarke thus took their time with Doublespeak, with Arthur’s regular collaborator Benge eventually coming on board about three years later. “When I got involved, the songs were quite well-developed, and they were much more than demos,” says Benge. “They were fully arranged, all the vocals were done, and, of course, all of Vince’s amazing synth lines were in there.” Both Clarke and Arthur were at the forefront of Britain’s synthpop revolution: Arthur and his late-’70s art school classmate/Blancmange bandmate Stephen Luscombe started off playing found objects like washing machines and vacuum cleaners until they were able to “beg, steal, and borrow synthesizers,” and Clarke founded one of the most influential electronic groups of all time, Depeche Mode, before striking new-wave gold two more times with Yazoo and Erasure.
Vince Clarke
Harnessing their skills with Benge’s, and utilizing both analog equipment and modern technology, they resynthesized Doublespeak’s wide-ranging, decade-spanning covers in ways that somehow ended up sounding vintage, futuristic, and timeless, all at once. “When I was working down in Cornwall, the studio was full of analog synths and effects units and analog mixing desks and drum machines,” Benge explains. “So the eventual mix that you hear on the record is basically everything’s gone through an analog process and it’s made into a wonky analog sound. But the difference is back in the ’80s, the recording formats weren’t so accurate. Now you can use that old equipment, but it sounds really amazing through the modern recording process. So even if you’re using old equipment, it still sounds fresh.”
While eight of the album’s 11 song suggestions came from Doublespeak’s driving force, Arthur (“Basically, it’s all Neil,” Clarke quips), all three band members had veto power, so over the course of the recording process, a few cover attempts didn’t make the final cut. “There were several tracks that didn’t get onto the album because of me,” Benge confesses. “We had three or four tracks that were done that I didn’t personally think fit into the sound of the album, and I was struggling to make them work.” Rejected Doublespeak covers included an unnamed Suicide song, Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s a Winner,” Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” (a tune Clarke had not heard before, but became “obsessed” with), and Van McCoy’s disco one-hit wonder “The Hustle.” “I think the most challenging [covers] were the ones that we didn’t use,” says Clarke. “But ‘The Hustle’ was easy. I mean, that definitely should have been on the album. I’m angry about that!”
Benge
Now that Doublespeak have become a real band, with an actual record release, they likely won’t be a one-album wonder—but Clarke is actually less interested in unarchiving “The Hustle” or “Stuck in the Middle” from the vaults for their sophomore LP, explaining that he’d rather follow up with a collection of originals. “We did two original tracks,” he reveals, “and it just seemed to work really well, the way that we got them together. I’d definitely be interested in continuing that process and making a record of original songs.” In the meantime, however, for Doublespeak’s self-titled debut, as Arthur puts it, “Lucky thing for us, the songs were already written.”
In the track-by-track guide below, Arthur, Clarke, and Benge delve into the album’s interesting and sometimes unexpected inspirations—ranging from Fad Gadget’s “Back to Nature” and synthpop deep cuts by the likes of The Sound and Young Marble Giants, to sentimental easy-listening favorites like The Carpenters and Clarke’s one cover suggestion, a certain “fucking amazing” Swedish pop sensation that he and Arthur bonded over poolside while on holiday in 1982.
1. “Back to Nature” (Fad Gadget, 1979)
Vince Clarke: When I was growing up, [Fad Gadget, a.k.a. Frank Tovey] was an idol. Basically, there was “Ricky’s Hand” and there was [Mute Records founder Daniel Miller’s] The Normal, and those were the two records that me and my mates grew up with. It was so different. It was so not-punk. But in those early electro days, it was more punk than punk—because you could make records and really know nothing. If you were in the Sex Pistols, you had to know at least three chords, whereas if you made electronic music, you just needed to know the one.
Neil Arthur: Frank was an amazing performer, and he just connected me and Vince. There
are quite a few post-punk songs on the album, not all that Vince and Benge knew, but it
was great fun having a go at this one.
Clarke: I knew Frank because when Depeche Mode started, we were recording at the same studio as him. And I broke his guitar! We couldn’t believe we were in the friggin’ recording studio. It was just so exciting. And I think I started messing about with his guitar and managed to break it somehow. Oh yeah, he was mad.
2. “Brand New Life” (Young Marble Giants, 1980)
Arthur: I used to go and see Young Marble Giants play. In fact, Blancmange did an early cover of this song, way before we had a record deal. I love the album Colossal Youth, and I was so inspired by them that I ended up going back to Stephen [Luscombe] with some ideas for songs like “Waves,” “I’ve Seen the Word,” and “I Can’t Explain” on our first album. I was trying to understand how [Young Marble Giants] had put their songs together, to see if we could Blancmange-ify that for our own songs.
3. “The Visitors” (ABBA, 1981)
Clarke: At the end of the day, ABBA wrote really, really, really good songs. And you can’t put a good song down.
Arthur: Stephen and I went on holiday after “Living on the Ceiling” was a hit for Blancmange. We went to the Canary Islands, Tenerife: Stephen and his partner, myself and my partner, and Vince with his then-partner. And we sat around a pool with an early Walkman, and one of the cassettes we had was ABBA’s Singles Collection. And Stephen and I said, ’round the pool, “We’re going to do an ABBA song!” [Blancmange eventually released a cover of ABBA’s “The Day Before You Came” in 1984.] And at that point, Vince said, “I’m going to do an ABBA song as well,” which he did later [on Erasure’s 1992 EP, Abba-esque].
Benge: Everybody loved ABBA, but they weren’t allowed to say it. So eventually, when you were allowed to say it, everyone did.
Arthur: ABBA weren’t seen in the same shining light as they are now, back in that period of the ’80s. But we all agreed, the six of us sitting around that pool, that ABBA was still at the top. For us, they were immense, like fucking amazing.
Clarke: I’ve always liked this song. It was on ABBA’s last album [prior to their 2021 reunion], and I just like it because it sort of sounds sci-fi-ish. I mean, they weren’t an electronic band, really, but the arrangement is kind of unusual. And I think also the song has a certain pathos—the way that the chorus works, the harmonies and everything, that kind of beat that they do with the vocals. I just found that pretty exciting, and I thought that would be an interesting one for Neil to try and sing.
Arthur: “Interesting” being the operative word.
4. “ I Can’t Escape Myself” (The Sound, 1980)
Clarke: What’s been interesting about the suggestions that Neil made for this record is that a lot of these tracks are very, very simple, so when you hear something like that—for me, anyway—it gives me room to think, “Oh, OK, there’s space for me to do something interesting here.”
Benge: It’s another one of those really simple but really well-constructed post-punk/new wave songs. It just feels really of-its-time, but we put our own spin on it.
Clarke: They’re like bare-bones demos, almost, and they’re songs that I’m not familiar with, so I’m coming into it from a different place. If we were covering a well-known song, then there’d be expectations and it’d be very hard, possibly, to make it better than it was. But with this sort of song, we could bring something new to the track.
Arthur: They’re covers, but they’re not a tribute. They’re not copies. They’re interpretations. And that’s the fun. That’s the exciting thing. And it becomes a creative process. That’s how you get into it.
5. “Goodbye to Love” (The Carpenters, 1972)
Benge: There’s a very famous fuzz guitar solo on the original track [played by Tony Peluso] that’s amazingly great, but we decided to not try and reinterpret that. We put our own melodies on at the end and our own drum patterns, and just treated it like it was a new song for us, even though it was such a famous song.
Neil: I listened to this song before quite a lot [before recording it], particularly as a singer, because I wanted to know how to get my head around it and figure out what I was capable of singing. Where could I go with it? I ain’t Karen Carpenter, let’s face it.
Benge: I always loved Karen’s voice and the production on those Carpenters songs, but also the songwriting is just incredible. And Karen’s a really cool drummer.
6. “Rock On” (David Essex, 1973)
Arthur: This was from that glam-rock period, something that I grew up with. When I suggested the idea to Vince, he said that he’d bought the single [as a kid].
Clarke: I’ve still got the 45, yeah!
Arthur: So it clicked for both of us. And it’s such a beautiful, structured-sounding, and very unusual song. So it was a good place to start, really.
Benge: This was my first trial at seeing if I could get my head around the Doublespeak project. And I loved doing this track and was really excited to be part of it.
Arthur: Vince had done his wonderful stuff on it after I’d made a mess of it initially. It was something that started defining a Doublespeak sound that would move us forward, give us parameters. And if you’ve got parameters, then you should always stretch them anyway.
7. “Smoke and Mirrors” (The Magnetic Fields, 1995)
Arthur: This was a suggestion from [Blancmange and Benge’s] manager Steve Malins. I know the song really well, though.
Clarke: I didn’t know the song. I didn’t know the artist. So again, it was one of those songs where I thought, “Hmmm, this sounds a bit like a demo. If I was doing a remix of this, I could do something really special with it.” And that made me interested in doing a cover version of it.
8. “Day Breaks, Night Heals” (Thomas Leer & Robert Rental, 1979)
Arthur: I think it’s just an incredible song. The fact that they even got the few synths and the rhythm units running together—because that was always a challenge pre-MIDI—is also quite interesting.
Benge: It’s still a challenge now!
Arthur: I think it’s recorded on four-track. I’ve had the experience with recording on four-track, and we never got anywhere near this. The original is just a sensational piece of music, I think.
Benge: This is another one that Vince and I had never heard, so we treated it as a kind of brand-new song.
Clarke: When you get as old as I am, it’s all about trying to keep things interesting.
9. “Gentle on My Mind” (John Hartford, 1967)
Arthur: Again, this one’s my fault for suggesting it! I could look on a hard drive and I would find probably five versions of this song to get to this stage. I first did a Blancmange version, which is on one of those boxed sets that London Records released called Blanc Tapes. It’s on the demos disc; I did a demo of it in ’86. It was part of my home life growing up, and I just thought it might be a good idea. And fortunately, Vince initially, and then Benge, took it on.
Benge: It’s an extremely difficult song to sing, I can imagine. And Neil did an incredible job with it. I always like listening to his accent on it because it’s kind of got a country twang to it. But an English country twang.
10. “Richard!” (Ed Dowie, 2017)
Benge: This is probably one of my favorites on the album, actually. And I don’t know quite why, but it’s just got a great lyric.
Arthur: I saw Ed Dowie play live at a local pub in a village near me; he was doing a tour and had a night off and came and did a small set at the pub, the Prince Albert. And I was completely floored by this person’s voice and charisma.
Benge: There’s something just so honest and simple about the song—and all of the Ed stuff, actually. I was a fan of his work before I worked on this project.
Arthur: We’ve actually started writing a few songs together, but he hasn’t been well. I feel really terrible talking about it, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him. I only have his email contact. I sent him a pre-mix [of “Richard!”]—which he thoroughly approved of, thankfully.
11. “End Credits” (Laptop, 1997)
Arthur: Well, I think it’s in the right place on the album.
Benge: We worked it out from a vinyl point of view. Side A had to have a good opener, which was “Back to Nature,” and an appropriate ending track, “Rock On”—and then the same on side B. It’s all about getting the album to flow. I think that’s just the best way to do an album, rather than chronologically or some kind of conceptual idea. I think it just made sense.
