You could say Andy Bell is a serial monogamist. He was in a committed relationship with his late manager, Paul M. Hickey, for 25 years, and he’s been happily married to American nightclub owner Stephen Moss since 2013. And of course, in his professional life, Bell has been musical partners with Erasure bandmate Vince Clarke for 40 years — which is decades longer than Clarke lasted with his previous projects, Depeche Mode and Yazoo. And even when Bell makes music outside of Erasure, he’s a loyal guy: He first released music with his other regular collaborator, Dave Aude, in 2014 (the No. 1 dance hit “Aftermath”), and the two actually worked on Bell’s new solo album, Ten Crowns, for more than 12 years.
“I think that’s a Taurean trait: You find someone, and if you trust them, they learn to trust you,” Bell muses, adding with a chuckle, “[The Ten Crowns track] ‘Don’t Cha Know’ was one of the first songs that [Aude and I] wrote together. So, people hear it and say, ‘Oh, you sound so fresh!’ And I’m like, ‘Um, yeah, as it should be! It was a while ago!’ But hopefully, the other vocals on the album match that freshness.”
Bell, a Taurus, and Aude finished most of Ten Crowns in the year that he celebrated his milestone 60th birthday, and the pop singer, who turned 61 a week before the album’s release, has endured many struggles in his six decades. He has been living with HIV since 1998; his former partner Hickey died of AIDS in 2012; and a condition called avascular necrosis forced Bell to undergo a double hip replacement in 2004, the same year that he went public with his HIV-positive status. But Bell radiates vitality and all-around good energy throughout his Zoom interview with Gold Derby, and only Ten Crowns’ final track, “Thank You” — which Bell describes as a “closing curtain” and “euphoric funeral song” — hints at him grappling with any sense of his own mortality.
“That song is a genuine thank-you to the people. The best feeling is in the world is when you’re walking onto the stage and you’re just on your own, there’s one spotlight shining on you, and you have the audience there, and you bare your soul to them and you say, ‘Thank you, everybody,’” explains Bell, who’s excited to embark on a solo world tour starting May 1 to support Ten Crowns. “Even if it’s just one person, you say, ‘Thank you, everybody.’ Because I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all you people. I wouldn’t be here without that love. It sounds so corny, but that love has enabled me to be here.”
photo: Sean Black
Bell is clearly most grateful for Clarke, who truly made his entire career possible, and he never seems to tire of telling the adorable and fateful tale of how he and Clarke met in 1985. He admits that he was “enamored with Vince,” thought Clarke was “the coolest person I could work with in pop,” used to rehearse to Yazoo records at home, and was even planning to send a fan letter asking if Clarke needed a new vocalist. But before he actually got around to writing that letter, he answered a mysterious Melody Maker advertisement that read, “Established songwriter seeks versatile singer.” And when he found out that the “established songwriter” was in fact his hero Clarke, he was so elated and nervous that he “went screaming around the house, running up and down the stairs.”
Bell obviously aced that Erasure audition. “I can’t believe my bravado, because when I hear my voice on those audition tapes now, to me, it was kind of quite weak. But for some reason, when I sang ‘Who Needs Love Like That,’ which is one of the demo songs, my falsetto just sprang out,” he recalls. “I’d never done it before — and it just sprang out!’ And I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’” Once Erasure began working on their first album, however, Bell’s shyness and fanboyishness got the better of him.
“We were in the studio for six months, and I wouldn’t say a word. I would just be in the studio, staring at Vince. He probably thought I was crazy,” Bell laughs. “I could not believe I was in the same studio with him. Flood, the producer, tried to get me to relax; they had me laying on the floor on my back, to trying to get me breathing, telling me jokes. Honestly, they did everything they could to make me relax. But it took us being on the road together. And then when we did our first true co-write, which was ‘Sometimes’ from the second album, I felt like my guard dropped down. I had this sort of starry-eyed fan thing going on, and I think when you’re a fan, you never, ever forget it.”
photo: Sean Black
Despite Clarke being “very guarded, because he’s been famous since he was 17,” Bell and Clarke’s bond grew strong over the years, and Erasure have already begun work on the follow-up to their acclaimed 2020 album, The Neon. “So many things have happened in between, for Vince especially,” Bell says softly, referring to the 2024 death from stomach cancer of Tracy Hurley Martin, Clarke’s wife of 20 years. “We’ve visited each other. I had some songs sent by Vince to me, and then we got together, started writing. We haven’t finished. We are meeting again in August, so we want to get it right. We want the right feeling, and we’ll know. … We are a family. And I’m going to call him tonight after this [interview], because I want him to know that we are here. I’m here. He’s not the easiest person to get through to, but we’ve had some really lovely conversations since. So, yeah, I love him.”
In the meantime, Ten Crowns finds Bell fanboying out all over again, just like he did 40 years ago at his Erasure audition, as he teams with another new wave icon and another one of his idols. “She’s my beauty,” Bell gushes of his “Heart’s a Liar” duet partner, Debbie Harry. “I had a crush on this boy when [Blondie’s] ‘Denis’ came out, and I was like, ‘Oh, who is this lady singing?’ And then once I saw her, I was like, wow. I saw the backlit halo, the hair, and I went and bought my first packet of bleach and bleached my hair in school because of Debbie. … She gave me the confidence to be who I was as a teenager. And then when ‘Dreaming’ came out, I would just rush onto the dance floor and do that waving-arm, circular dance that she did. A lot of my idiosyncrasies onstage come from her.”
Bell says it was difficult to shed the “teenage angst” of his youth, admitting that despite spending his first Erasure paycheck on a pleasure trip to Ibiza and “inviting lots of boys to the studio because I was kind of showing off” when Erasure made it big, he was “very shy going to gay clubs. I thought, ‘Oh my God, these people, they’re so good-looking! … And to be honest, I’ve never been chatted up [at nightclubs]. Probably only once in my life. I’ve always had to do the chasing. I wouldn’t consider myself ‘alpha,’ but that’s sort of an alpha thing to do. But it was out of necessity!” Onstage, however, Bell, “a raw, working-class boy with no clue about fashion,” became a superhumanly confident star, rocking his Blondie-inspired peroxide job and sequined stage outfits like catsuits, hot pants, corsets, harlequin unitards, and backless chaps. He was fearless, flamboyant, and always unapologetically, unquestionably gay.
“In those days, you created your own look. And I loved Boy George, I loved Marc Almond, but they were kind of androgynous; you kind of didn’t know [if they were gay], but you assumed. For me, it was like, I just wanted people to know. I wanted them to have no doubt whatsoever,” Bell explains. “So, my persona, my bravado, my armor, was to be the campiest queen possible. I am quite camp in my real life, I suppose, but I just made it more over-the-top! Maybe it was a cliché, and therefore I wasn’t taken seriously in the pop fraternity, which it is kind of easy to see. But I think they missed the point.”
photo: Sean Black
Bell — who came out in a letter that he did manage to write, to his mother, at age 17 — knows he “took the hard road” by being open about his sexuality from Erasure’s inception. But he also acknowledges that he wasn’t as overtly political as some of his queer ’80s peers, like Bronski Beat. And that’s perhaps why Erasure were never taken seriously by critics, despite selling more than 25 million records and creating some of synthpop’s most enduring anthems like “Victim of Love,” “Chains of Love,” and “A Little Respect.”
“Jimmy Somerville was at the forefront for me. He was a foot soldier, and I felt like I was kind of in the background because we were vocal, but not as political,” says Bell. “But I kind of felt like to appeal to the ordinary man or woman, you just made [homosexuality] a normal-conversation kind of thing. Therefore, I would never go in the front in marches, which seems a bit cowardly — but I didn’t want to be arrested! But we did the die-ins and all those kinds of things for Stonewall. And at the same time, it was really scary. It was very scary. Even performing in the U.S. at that time, you just didn’t know what was going to happen at any time. Sometimes I was grateful that we weren’t played on the radio, because I didn’t want my profile to be that high that everybody knew all at once. So, maybe I was slightly ‘closeted’ in my being out.”
But Bell made political statements in his own way. “I think you have to write between the lines,” he says. “You can have a subliminal message, and people hopefully understand where you are coming from.” In fact, Bell pushed Clarke to make Erasure’s debut album, Wonderland, draw from the “high-energy music” that he was enjoying in London and Ibiza’s gay club scenes, even though “radio wasn’t very friendly towards it” at the time, because he “felt like we kind of had a duty towards the [club kids]. … They were dying [from the AIDS epidemic], and I thought, ‘We’ve got to keep the flame alive.’”
Bell recalls with a shudder how the Reagan Administration ignored the AIDS crisis at that time, and four decades later, he laments, “That’s what we are battling against now, still. The funding [for HIV drugs] has being cut. I know it seems like a long way away, but still, it can happen to anyone, and we can’t take it for granted that you’re going to have access to these medicines. And neither can I. It’s precarious. … It could easily be taken away just with a signature on a piece of paper: Somebody signs a piece of paper and they put, ‘No, this drug’s no longer accessible to this group of people.’ And then you will have to protect yourself with condoms, how we did in the old-fashioned way. And sex education is very important, even though it’s being curtailed in lots of places too.”
Bell, who splits his time between homes with Moss in the Europe, U.K., and the Florida, doesn’t get overtly political on Ten Crowns, but he offers his own impactful social commentary on tracks like “Dawn of Heaven’s Gate,” a song about salvation and “why in the hell we can’t all get on,” and especially “Godspell,” in which he sings in his unmistakably ringing, vibrato-laden, three-octave tenor, “Get thee behind me, charlatan/Get thee behind me, sycophant/Get thee behind me, false prophet.”
“That song is just about having your circle of people that you love and that you trust and that are going to take care of you no matter what,” says Bell, returning to that theme of Taurean loyalty. “I can’t understand how any parent can throw out their child, their own child of their own creation, onto the street because they don’t adhere to your principles or what you’ve been taught. It makes me very upset sometimes. I went to a cathedral school. We sang hymns. I love singing hymns. I love being in the church. I don’t necessarily understand the Bible, but I just think, how can you disclude anyone? At the end of a prayer, you always say amen. And ‘amen’ means ‘unto all the people.’ It means unto everybody. So, if you’re not saying unto everybody, you can’t say amen at the end of a prayer. … Any religion, the basis to me should be about spirituality, lifting people up, helping people, helping your neighbor, helping the poorest people, not demonizing people for being homeless or for being from another country. It’s just inclusion. That’s it.”
There’s no doubt that Bell has helped a lot of marginalized people — those loyal fans that he so gratefully addresses on “Thank You” — feel included over the years, just by being himself. And while he hasn’t always gotten his flowers or been recognized as the queer pioneer and survivor that he truly is, those fans know he deserves more than just a little respect.
“To me, it’s always been about fun; I never care about how [I am] perceived,” Bell shrugs, when asked about getting his critical due. “Of course, it kind of hurts, like anything else, therefore Vince has always told me, ‘You shouldn’t read your reviews’ — which I always do! … That’s my own un-self-confident undercurrent that’s dispelling itself right now. At the same time, I don’t want to be some arrogant person with my nose stuck in the air. You’ve got to just have a certain amount of humility — but at the same time, know where you stand.”
This interview originally ran on Gold Derby.
