Pioneering synthpop act Blancmange are about to embark on a U.S. tour — which includes a set at Pasadena’s post-punk Cruel World festival alongside their British peers New Order, OMD, Alison Moyet, and Midge Ure — incredibly, for the first time since 1986. That was the year that co-founders Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe historically split, right after playing a charity gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall… and right when they seem poised to fully break America after cracking the Billboard Dance chart with “Living on the Ceiling,” “Blind Vision,” and “Don’t Tell Me.”
But Arthur, who since 2015 has recorded and toured under the Blancmange name on his own, is “not bothered” about what might have been.
“Of course, yeah, I have looked back from time to time,” Arthur tells Lyndsanity, speaking via Zoom from his U.K. rehearsal space. “There was a lot about the [music industry] machine that we felt we became a victim of. I mean, it’s our fault as much as it’s not — we could have stepped off earlier, or we could have carried on and found a way around it. My feeling is, I got out to the right time. I am so pleased I stopped doing it, I really am. It probably saved me. I wouldn’t say I’m sane, but I would be less sane if I’d carried on doing it.”
Arthur and Luscombe had no aspirations to be MTV pop stars when they met in art college in 1979 and formed a band that played found objects like washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Despite later being labeled a synthpop act, Blancmange’s early incarnation actually featured no synths at all. “We couldn’t afford a synthesizer, no way!” laughs Arthur. “With the instruments we had, we used to try and make them sound like what we imagined a synthesizer might sound like. We’d just kind of use stuff from the kitchen, around the house. … In those days, we used to beg, steal, and borrow synthesizers if they were available, and what we used to do with them was record noises onto cassettes, and then we’d spin them in the background through the other noises we were making. And eventually we cobbled together a few songs. And, one thing leads to another.”
Like many of the British new wave acts who were experimenting with electronic music at the time, Blancmange were sometimes dismissed by rockists/purists as not being “real” musicians. But Arthur chuckles, “I quite like the idea of being a ‘musical non-musician,’ which is where we came from. It was just a means of expression. … If somebody had said to me, ‘That’s proper music,’ I probably wouldn’t have done it! I wanted to do something that was kind of not intentionally different, but I just didn’t want to be in a conventional band. And if you were working with Stephen, there was no way anything was going to be conventional. He was always going to be, ‘Let’s go at an odd angle at this.’ I think that’s why we got on so well. We just wanted to try different things.
“We were amazed that were amazed that a record company even let us put a record out! It was just, ‘Wow, we’ve managed to make a single!’ Because not that long before, we were writing songs called ‘The Problem Solving When My Mother Pulled Up the Radishes,’” Arthur continues. “So, to get from that to a point where we have ‘God’s Kitchen’/’I’ve Seen the Word’ as a double A-side for our first single, if that would’ve been the only record we’d released with a record label, we’d have just gone, ‘All right, let’s get back to work now. That was good fun.’ But anyway, it carried on for a bit longer.”
And for a bit longer, the “chalk-and-cheese” dynamic between school chums Arthur and Luscombe worked and was a “catalyst for creativity.” But, as Arthur explains, “When it starts getting negative and gets destructive, then that’s difficult.”
Arthur recalls the “kiss-of-death moment” leading up to Blancmange’s breakup and 25-year hiatus, when he and Luscombe were about to release their third album, Believe You Me, which had been “very difficult to make.” The band’s record label was convinced that the album’s first track, “Lose Your Love,” was going to be a smash. Arthur remembers leaving London’s famed Samm East Studio with producer Peter Collins, who told the band they’d just written their first No. 1 single. “And I just went, ‘Oh, please don’t say that. This is just not what I want to hear.’ And Peter said, ‘Why? I just think it’s a really, really good song!’ So, of course, the record company really liked it as well, so they’re going, ‘Right, we’ll make a big video.’ So, they made the big, big, bad video for it.”
Arthur and Luscombe ended up in Manhattan’s old Cunard shipping terminal, shooting a “bonkers” video with MTV VMAs Video Vanguard Award winner Zbigniew Rybczyński (known for the Art of Noise’s “Close to the Edit”) that cost “a fortune.” The quirky clip merely starred the duo “smashing stuff up” in a “slapstick” manner, but, as Arthur recalls, “Upon its first showing in the U.K., it had one showing and was banned. … I think for something like ‘inciting violence in the home.’ … Of course, the knock on from that is if we can’t get that on television, if MTV or particularly our terrestrial stations aren’t willing to show it, then we’re going to have difficulty getting a plugger to persuade the radio to go with it.”
Luscombe made matters worse at radio when he had a “massive fallout” with a Radio 1 DJ during a charity event, and while Arthur says that incident was “hysterical” and “saved by Suggs and Chas from Madness,” the damage was done. “Let’s say several bunches of flowers had to be sent to the BBC, and I don’t think that rectified the issue,” he says. “So, this is all part of a story where there’s already tension, there’s lots of other things going on. But that song was the one that, if anything off that album, was meant to be the one that kind of goes, ‘OK, hello, America!’”
Eventually, the friction came to a head backstage at Royal Albert Hall, which was the “last straw” for Arthur. “There had been other things going on before that Stephen and I had discussed, and I think it had been working towards an inevitable conclusion,” he says. “I think we were both jaded by the ‘machine’ — the machine being the record label, the need for us to be in the machine producing another single that was more successful last one, or another album. I didn’t know how shattered I was by it. And we weren’t even anywhere near the top of the bloody thing, were we? But we were in it, and it was relentless.
“It was very direct destructiveness between us,” Arthur continues, reflecting on the tension between him at Luscombe in 1986. “I mean, we were in each other’s pockets all the time — every day, practically, for that period of time — and it becomes like a marriage. It’s just like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be married to Stephen!’ And he didn’t want to be married to me. And we had a couple of conversations, and to cut a long story short, I walked offstage at the Royal Albert Hall and I just said to Stephen, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I really don’t want to do this.’ And the lovely thing was that he kind of respected that. And I think in us discussing it like that — because we’d had spats and flare-ups, without a doubt, there’d been a few hissyfits — but now we didn’t have those anymore. And the wonderful thing about that was, it saved a friendship. And that was far more important than keeping Blancmange together for us. So, it saved the friendship, and that friendship endures.”
Ironically, in 1986, the year of Blancmange’s breakup and a year after the “Lose Your Love” video was banned from British television, that video appeared in the Disney sci-fi film Flight of the Navigator — so obviously it couldn’t have been that offensive. “Lose Your Love” even went to No. 2 on the Billboard Dance/Club Play Songs chart, making it Blancmange’s biggest U.S. hit. (“Somebody told me the other day that it did quite well on Billboard, but I can’t imagine it being a dance floor song,” a bemused Arthur shrugs.) But Arthur and Luscombe, while remaining friends, still went their separate ways professionally, working on other projects, until Blancmange’s reunion album, Blanc Burn, in 2011.
Unfortunately, Luscombe had to retire after Blanc Burn due to health problems, but Blancmange has carried on as a vehicle for Arthur, who’s since released 11 Blancmange albums on his own. The recent 38-track, double-disc Blancmange anthology Everything Is Connected showcases the breadth and depth of the group’s work over the decades, but Arthur says he’ll mostly stick with the hits on Blancmange’s upcoming American tour. He admits that he’s “forgotten” about the doomed “Lose Your Love” and doesn’t plan to play that one, but he’s still mulling over whether another anomaly in the Blancmange discography — their cover of ABBA’s “The Day Before You Came” — will make it onto the setlist.
Blancmange’s “The Day Before You Came” was released in 1984 — long before it was “cool” to admit to liking ABBA again, even ironically. In fact, Arthur says when Blancmange went to their label with idea, “the record company was aghast.” But Arthur and Luscombe picked this particular song because it was unusually somber for ABBA (it was the Swedish pop group’s final single before they split, professionally and romantically), explaining, “It is dark, and we go down that route. … That’s why I and Steven loved it so much.”
Blancmange’s version actually ended up charting higher in the U.K. than ABBA’s original, and was endorsed by ABBA themselves: Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad sent Blancmange a fan letter expressing their approval (“We couldn’t quite believe it. We were humbled that they liked what we’d done. We even chased some of the lyrics, a couple of words, and they didn’t mind!”), and ABBA even allowed Blancmange to use footage from ABBA’s “The Day Before You Came” music video in Blancmange’s promo. And this was eight years before Arthur’s colleague, Vince Clarke, released an entire EP of ABBA covers with Erasure.
“Stephen and I always loved ABBA. I was brought up on ABBA through the ‘70s, and I absolutely love them,” says Arthur. “So, we went on holiday after ‘Living on the Ceiling’ was a hit for us on this side of the pond. … We went to the Canary Islands with Stephen and his partner, myself and my partner, and Vince Clarke and his then-partner, and we sat around a pool with an early Walkman on cassettes. And one of the cassettes we had was ABBA’s The Singles: The First Ten Years, and the penultimate track was ‘The Day Before You Came.’ And Stephen and I said, around the pool. ‘We’re going to do an ABBA song!’ At that point Vince said, ‘I’m going to do an ABBA song as well’ — which he did later.”
Neil Arthur today (photo: Helen Kincaid)
Arthur is still in touch with Clarke, who he’s known since Blancmange and Clarke’s former band, Depeche Mode, appeared on the groundbreaking Some Bizzare Album compilation in 1981, and they’ve been working “for a number of years” on a different sort of covers album. He’s keeping the details about that project under wraps for now, but says “there’s some unusual ones in there” and “it’d be nice if it was [released] sooner rather than later, because we’ve been working on it for a while.”
Obviously, Arthur remains prolific, with and without Blancmange (case in point: on Blancmange’s 2024 U.K. tour he opened for himself, in one of his other bands, the Remainder). And once again, he stresses that has absolutely no regrets.
“I’m not really one for nostalgia. … I’m happy to have done what I did,” Arthur states. “I’m very proud of being able to make the music that Stephen and I did. I’m very, very pleased to be able to make new music, as I do on my terms now, whether it comes out on the wonderful London Records or it comes out on my own label. To be creative and have that freedom is fantastic. I’m a lucky man.”
