Yazoo - In Your Room

I’ve written at length at how completely influential this band was to my own creative development, so why not shell out a few extra clams that housed this electronic duo’s only two albums and a few extra oddities.
Allow me to justify.
My cd of Upstairs At Eric’s recently bit the dust and I used an old strategy of trying to gently rub out the scratches with toothpaste. It didn’t work. In fact, it made it worse. I swear, I’ve gotten it to work wonders in the past but for whatever reason…
I don’t have You & Me Both on cd; only on vinyl. It’s the original copy that I got in ’83 from Disc Jockey in Keokuk. A girl we nicknamed Denda was eyeballing a copy of it at the same time I was at the end cap of “New Releases” towards the entrance. We both picked up a copy and marched straight to the checkout. Shortly after, the store began carrying 12” singles of Yazoo stuff. I still have those too. Thankfully, those are all included in In Your Room.
I got into Yazoo before I got into Depeche Mode. And even then, I only liked Speak & Spell because it was the only album with Vince Clarke in it before he quit and formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet. After Yazoo broke up, about 18 months after they first began, we began scouring the record stores for their last single “The Other Side Of Love,” available only as an import. A friend of mine found it, along with Clarke’s post-Yazoo side project called The Assembly.
Then he formed Erasure and I hated them. The dude sounded just like Alison, but he didn’t write as good as her. I couldn’t understand why he would break up Yazoo for something with less substance.
Then came the reunion shows of last year, a quick outing to bring attention to the In Your Room box and to travel to a few places that never even got a chance to see them during the first round. Actually, that’s just about everyone since Yazoo only played two dozen gigs during their entire existence and only two of those were on American soil.
When I read about the shows, I nearly wept.
When I saw that they were playing Chicago, I nabbed the first pair of tickets that I could find.
Good thing too, the band promptly ended the reunion and any hopes of new material after two more shows were played.
So what is it about this band that conjures up so much emotion and blind allegiance with me? First off, Upstairs At Eric’s is a masterpiece. It’s an exercise of cold electronic minimalism against the warm, soulful voice of Alison Moyet. It’s two things that shouldn’t be together at all, but the way these two put it together, it’s eye-opening.
It also contains one of the best songs in the past 50 years with “Only You,” a timeless love song that should have been a massive hit in the States. I’ve heard dozens of versions of it since then, but none can match Moyet’s original take.
Eric’s also has one of the best dance songs ever put to wax, “Situation,” an ass-shaking bit tune that has been remixed countless times because the original is still so recognizable that it needs new window dressings every five years or so. There are five versions of it on In Your Room and there’s probably another dozen or so floating around.
You & Me Both is the break-up album. Literally. Most of the songs are related to breaking up and the album itself was recorded in the midst of Vince and Alf’s separation. Vince recording his part in the afternoon, Alison came in to do her vocals in the evening.
It’s not as weird as Eric’s and, admittedly, not as good. But there are enough good moments to make it a worthy purchase and it’s home to another fantastic single, “Nobody’s Diary.”
The American version had “State Farm.” The UK version had “Happy People.” I remember hearing “State Farm” on a small college station out of Quincy, Illinois once and immediately calling directory assistance just to find the station’s phone number so that I could thank him. He was playing the extended version (also on In Your Room) and I thought we might make a music connection; a mutual love of Yazoo. Imagine my disappointment when he had no idea what I was talking about. He was merely “following the playlist” that was provided to him by the music director.
So virtually everything is on In My Room. I had to get it. It also contains a short documentary, video clips, songs the two lip-synched on Top Of The Pops (many of them repeated) and 5.1 versions of the two proper albums. It’s perfect for the uber-fan and completists. It’s not the place that a newcomer should start.
I finally found a copy-suspiciously cheap from a dude in Hong Kong-and rolled the dice to see if it was legit. It was. Everything’s cool. It doesn’t appear to be a bootleg of the proper release. I’m stoked. Essentially, I got the thing for under $10 a disc and if you can manage to find a similar deal, then by all means nab it.
If not, or if the idea of jumping head first into a band you’re not familiar with ain’t your thing, then fork over the $10 for Upstairs At Eric’s. Fuck those single-disc compilations; that first album is awesome, like a science project that manages to split atoms or something. From there, I’m sure you’ll be searching for the follow-up in no time, or kicking yourself for not just getting the box set to begin with.
As the documentary title says: “2 albums, 4 singles, and that was it…”
And what it was, was gone way too soon.