is sat on a sofa in his dressing room at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, just after finishing the second night of his solo tour.

He is relaxed and contented, at ease and quietly satisfied with his performance, his breathing measured and meditative. Whereas on stage he was animated, full of boundless energy and engaging his audience, backstage he is reserved, his glittering suit replaced by a Keith Haring t-shirt, shorts and a comfy pair of socks.

His performance, in support of his third solo album ‘Ten Crowns’, is full of power. A mixture of songs from the album, a cover of the theme tune from ‘Xanadu’ and numerous classics from his Erasure back catalogue, Bell is accompanied by a live band that adds a level of fluidity to these tracks, while still keeping them true to his electronic pop roots. The positive reaction to the songs from ‘Ten Crowns’, released the same day as the Birmingham gig, is one reason that Bell looks so assured after the show. “They knew every word,” he muses at one point, with a smile. He is satisfied. Relieved, maybe. Grateful. Happy.

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At the heart of both the performance and ‘Ten Crowns’ is an artist whose voice has never sounded stronger. “He’s rediscovered his confidence,” whispers Stephen, his husband and manager, when I comment on this new strength. “He’s rediscovered what he loves, so he’s invested in his voice and we’re making sure he always looks after it.”

It’s that distinctive voice, so unique and so familiar from Erasure, that dominates the ten songs on ‘Ten Crowns’. It is an album that Bell has wanted to make for a very long time, which he would have struggled to make earlier in his life. Split between tracks containing wild, high-energy electronic dance music and nuanced, bold, cathartic introspection, it is not simply a solo album made by someone taking time out from the group that has nurtured and framed his talent.

It is, instead, an album in its own right, one that establishes Bell as an independent artist capable of operating successfully without the scaffold and comfort blanket of Erasure, something his previous solo albums offered a glimpse of but which were ultimately held back by his own surprising lack of self-belief.

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“I worry about everything.”

– Andy Bell, ‘Running Out’ (2010)

“I just did this thing with Lene Lovich,” said Bell back at the start of the 1990s. “It was an animal rights thing. They asked if I’d like to sing on it. And I heard the backing track and thought, ‘I really need Vince to work on this.’”

Bell was talking after Erasure had recorded ‘Rage’ with Lovich, released in the wake of their fourth album ‘Wild!’ (1989) and before they’d started work on ‘Chorus’ (1991). The point was that it wasn’t originally intended to be an Erasure track: it was intended to be a solo Andy Bell song, but Bell was gripped by nerves and uncertainty, and so he gravitated back to the comfort of Vince Clarke, his partner in Erasure.

It was a situation that would play itself out many more times over the ensuing years. The most notable occasion was with ‘Other People’s Songs’, Erasure’s 2003 covers album, which saw them delivering versions of songs by Buggles, Phil Spector, Peter Gabriel, Steve Harley and others. That project had originally been conceived as a Bell solo vehicle consisting entirely of Spector covers, but a lack of self-confidence once again took a hold of him. It became a pivotal album for the duo, restoring them to public view after a spell in the fickle pop wilderness, but it was never intended to be an Erasure project.

A year after ‘Other People’s Songs’, Bell loaned his voice to ‘Will I Ever?’, a track by electronic group In_Vox, released during a period where legacy artists from the 1980s were constantly popping up on other people’s dance music tracks. It felt like Bell had arrived late at the party, even if ‘Will I Ever?’ showed one of his best non-Erasure vocal performances. He would later lend his voice to the 2014 album ‘iPop’ by Shelter.

“I think ‘iPop’ was really good,” gushes Bell. “They’re amazing, Shelter. That being said, when we made that album, I didn’t take it too seriously, which kind of gave it a sort of lightness and poppiness.”

That Bell consented to these collaborations at all is perhaps surprising, owing to some sagely advice from Daniel Miller, founder of the Mute label that Erasure have been signed to since forming in 1985.

“I remember Daniel once saying to me, ‘Andy, you must be careful of what you lend your voice to.’ I used to wonder what he meant by that. I now understand it. He was basically cautioning me against spreading myself too thinly. You have to be more precious about it – not about who you’re working with, necessarily, but what you do with your voice.”

I suggest that Daniel’s advice suggests treating his voice like a precious commodity.

“You don’t want to give that out for free,” agrees Bell. The fact that he acknowledges this, today, is a subtle marker of a newfound assuredness.

In 2005, Bell recorded his first solo album. Titled ‘Electric Blue’, it found Bell working with a duo, Manhattan Clique (Philip Larsen and Chris Smith) who would later tour with Erasure. It was released by Sanctuary, the first time Bell had been disconnected from Mute in the UK, and found Bell collaborating with Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and Propaganda’s Claudia Brücken. The eclectic tracks that formed the album were mostly sharp, high-gloss, high-energy tracks and hardly sounded like a tentative first foray into the world of solo music for Bell, whose voice was nothing short of rapturous. 

“Making that album was quite easy,” admits Bell. “They lived and worked around the corner from my house in Highgate, so I just used to go over to their place loads. We would just have fun playing records and singing.”

‘Electric Blue’ was followed, in 2010, by ‘Non-Stop’. The album was made with Kylie producer Pascal Gabriel, and was an exploration of cool, edgy dance music. Unlike ‘Electric Blue’, the album was released by Mute, the only label in the UK that Erasure have ever been signed to.

“When I was with Pascal, we stayed at his house in France,” Bell recalls. “It was serious, because Mute were paying for it. In some ways it was ahead of its time, because it was this minimal electro thing before other artists did it. Unfortunately, ‘Non-Stop’ was very overlooked.”

Curiously, the album’s first singles weren’t even released under Bell’s own name but instead as the anonymous MiMó. That decision feels like an embodiment of Bell’s insecurities that he felt he had to hide his solo work out of sight, under a faceless identity.

Bell nods when I ask whether his tentative solo work was framed by a lack of self-confidence.

“I think it’s a lot of that,” he admits, quietly. He pauses, as if he’s changing his mind. “No, that’s exactly what it is. I didn’t have the confidence before. When I look at people like George Michael, or Sam Smith, I think to myself, ‘Oh, how do you do that? How do you go out on your own and make a success of it?’ You equate success with whether you have a hit or not, and that, in the end, is part of your downfall, because that’s your insecurity taking over.

“I never, ever thought of the other solo albums as being stepping stones toward ‘Ten Crowns’,” continues Bell. “I never thought of them in that way, but now, when I look back on them, perhaps they were.” 

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“Long time coming, yes it’s been a long time coming.”

– Erasure ‘Catch 22’ (2000)

‘Ten Crowns’ was over three years in the making. 

It is the product of a ongoing creative friendship with Nashville producer and DJ Dave Audé. Bell and Audé first began working together way back in 2014 with ‘Aftermath (Here We Go)’. Unlike Bell’s work with, say, Shelter, this would turn out to be much more than a one-off collaboration, and ‘True Original’ followed in 2016. On both tracks, the combination of Audé’s club-oriented production and skills, his reverential nods toward melodies and sounds Clarke would be proud of, and Bell’s ascendant vocal, can be seen as setting the template for the future ‘Ten Crowns’ album. In the downtime that followed the release of Erasure’s last album, ‘The Neon’ (2020) and its abruptly shortened tour, Bell set about working with Audé on a collection of songs, without really intending them to be for a full album.

That in itself is important. I’ve spoken to Bell many times over the last few years for the liner notes to Erasure’s ongoing album reissue programme, and I’ve been able to chart his creative arc. For some albums, I could tell that writing lyrics was a struggle, where he had to force himself to knuckle down and write; for others, the creative process was far easier, and words flowed more fluidly, leading to far more songs than was needed for the album.

That’s where we find Bell for ‘Ten Crowns’ – in a place where song ideas formed much more easily. 

“It’s true,” says Bell, with a contented smile. “I had this thing in my mind that I wanted to do something, that if I didn’t do it now, then I probably never would. I just wanted people to see all the work that I’ve done and get it all together, almost like a collection. That’s what it was going to be in the first place.”

At some point during this newfound burst of creative energy, Bell started writing with other people to complement the tracks written with Audé, accumulating a body of other songs that have yet to see the light of day. 

“In the end, we didn’t think they were of a high enough standard to be on an album,” he says. “So I eventually thought to myself, ‘Hang on a minute. You’ve already got all these songs with Dave, why don’t you just finish those and have those as the collection?’ And that’s what happened.”

It’s almost as if, alongside taking better care of his voice, Bell has finally recognised his strength and skills as a songwriter in order for these songs to have come together without major anguish. To explain this, we need to consider the idea of trust, and Bell’s connection to it.

Creatively, Bell has had two enduring partners who both have his complete and unwavering trust. One is Vince Clarke, for whom he auditioned for Erasure – as a star-struck fan of Clarke’s previous group, Yazoo – forty years ago. Clarke nurtured Bell from the very beginning, their bond cemented as they painfully watched their first album, ‘Wonderland’, fail to achieve the success it deserved, and a tour that hardly anyone came along to. That initial phase of their career is now a long, long way behind them, but it’s something they’ve never forgotten, even as the hits started flowing. “I really miss Vince,” says Bell with a forlorn sigh, underlining how important that relationship is to him.

The other creative partnership that Bell has enjoyed is with the poet and playwright Barney Ashton-Bullock, who created the character of Torsten The Bareback Saint specifically for Bell. The Torsten project began as a small show for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 and has blossomed into a series of individual musicals, albums and books, allowing Bell to fully lean into theatrical performances filled with anguish, pathos and wry humour. Taking the stage in this way was a brave, nerve-racking process for Bell, but his absolute trust in his friend Ashton-Bullock helped him overcome his discomfort. 

To Clarke and Ashton-Bullock can be added a third, in the form of Dave Audé. Tall, down-to-earth but something of an intense perfectionist in the studio and stood behind Bell on stage, Audé has also established himself at the centre of Bell’s circle of trust. Like Clarke has done for forty years, Audé has formed a friendship that has inspired Bell to produce some of the best work of his entire career. The fact that Audé is a self-proclaimed, lifelong Erasure fan has also allowed him to provide the best supporting musical framework and encouragement as Bell navigated the process of taking his writing in a different direction.

“I find working with Dave so comfortable,” says Bell. “I felt so comfortable staying with him in his house, where the studio’s in the basement. Our relationship has developed over the years, so rather than it being just a short, sharp shock making this record, it’s been this really lovely, long journey. And I think that sort of shows in what we’ve done.”

There are others, of course. There’s Gareth Jones, who has consistently recorded some of Bell’s most nuanced vocal performances. There’s Daniel Miller from Mute, who never lost faith in Erasure even after their false start. There’s Richard Evans, who oversees all of Erasure’s activities and provides quiet encouragement from the sidelines. Bell’s husband and manager, Stephen Moss, is another, providing a rock of confidence-boosting stability to help Bell overcome his myriad fears and inhibitions.

Once you find yourself in that place of trust, Bell is loyal and dependable; it just takes time to get past his initial caution. When asked where this come from, Bell attributes it to being a Taurus. He talks about these relationships as being like great love affairs: it is rare to find yourself experiencing more than one, and yet Bell has accumulated several.

“I feel so lucky,” he says, humbly. “I just feel like, once you’ve gained someone’s trust, you just feel completely comfortable ingratiating yourself.”

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“This was always a dream of mine – to let the inside out.”

– Andy Bell ‘Dance For Mercy’ (2025)

One of the standout tracks on ‘Ten Crowns’ is ‘For Today’, which carries a message of defiance and determination, while also reflecting on the idea of living in the moment.

“That’s the mantra you repeat when you go to NA,” he says. “I think that’s rule number one on their list. It’s also about just taking a chance, spontaneously. It’s like in the olden days, when gay men used to cruise, and you could meet somebody on the Tube. It’s not like that anymore. Those days are very much in the past now.”

‘Dance For Mercy’ carries a similar defiance, but eschews electronic dance music in favour of a disco flavour, complete with orchestral stabs and retro, 1970s rhythms.

“I really loved disco,” reflects Bell, fondly. “I was in my ‘going out’ period in Peterborough, where I grew up. It was at a time when you go to your parents’ working men’s clubs, but you sort of break away from them. So I used to go there and just dance my tits off to things like ‘Off The Wall’ by Michael Jackson and ‘Dreamin’’ by Loleatta Holloway. As soon as ‘Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)’ came on from The Jacksons, I just had to go and dance. I just had to. There was just no way I was not going to dance.”

The apparent levity of the disco shapes within ‘Dance For Mercy’ mask a more earnest, troubling message at the core of the song.

“When I was writing this, I was thinking that gay people are literally dancing for mercy right now,” he says. “They’re facing persecution in lots of places in the world, which is really troubling after everything we fought for. So this song is a bit like ‘Fuck it – just sing hallelujah.’”

The album’s closing track, ‘Thank You’, finds Bell striking a grateful, humble pose. Slow, graceful and muted, its references to looking back and finding peace at acceptance could be construed as an artist delivering their final, tragic swan song. Happily, that’s not the case for Bell. There’s another Erasure album that will follow ‘Ten Crowns’ and anyone who’s seen one of his live performances on the tour accompanying ‘Ten Crowns’ will have witnessed, first hand, how much he still has to give. 

“It’s a really sincere song,” he says. “I really feel it. It kind of reminds me of when Erasure did the Phantasmagorical Tour in 1992. At the end, Vince and I would come on stage in our dressing gowns and sit on the side of the stage to perform ‘Perfect Stranger’. So, on the one hand, it reminds me of that. In other ways, it’s a real diva moment. It’s a bit like coming onto the stage where you don’t need anything but you and your voice. You just have one spotlight on you, and there’s no musicians or anything on the stage. You just come in with a one mic stand, one light, and you sing that song. I think it’s a bit like the first song in a musical.”

Bell is evidently happy and contended with all the songs on ‘Ten Crowns’, but one stands out more than others. It is ‘Heart’s A Liar’, a duet with an artist whose music he has been besotted with most of his life: Blondie’s Debbie Harry. That love affair has been explored numerous times throughout his career, like a recurring motif. Erasure covered ‘Rapture’ and ‘Heart Of Glass’, the opening track on ‘Light At The End Of The World’ (2007) opened with a track reverentially titled ‘Sunday Girl’, and his second album ‘Non-Stop’ included a track called ‘DHDQ’ – ‘Debbie Harry Drag Queen’. To perform a duet with her is, I suggest, a dream come true. 

In context, and becoming uncharacteristically unapologetically personal for a moment, think I know what it’s like for dreams to come true. After all, I’m talking to Andy Bell. I grew up as a huge Erasure fan, and never in a million years did I ever imagine I’d end up being in a position to talk to him, in detail, about the inner machinations and motivations of an album. Each time I speak with him, or Vince, it’s a pinch-yourself moment. I suggest that ‘Heart’s A Liar’ must be a bit like that, for him.

He pauses, briefly lost for words, and I can see tears forming in his eyes. “I honestly feel like I’ve got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” he says, his voice cracking. “I really do. It makes me feel like I’ve been blessed by her. It’s such a huge thing for me. It was very humbling of her to agree to do the song. She generally doesn’t lend her voice to other people’s songs like this. I really do feel blessed. I couldn’t be happier with how that song turned out. It’s just magical for me.”

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On stage at the Birmingham show, Bell is in his element.

Backed by a full band consisting of Audé and the accomplished Nashville group Steele Fountains – vocalist Hailey Steele, guitarist Jerry Fuentes and drummer Sarah Tomek – Bell seems to thrive on the way the songs are presented, giving him a newfound energy.

He runs through pivotal Erasure hits like ‘Sometimes’, ‘Drama!’, ‘Chorus’, ‘Love To Hate You’ and ‘Oh L’Amour’ with a conviction, confidence and accuracy that he hasn’t brought to his performance for years. It seems hackneyed to say this, but with him having turned 61 the week before, it feels like he’s found a new lease of life, or new purpose, or a new appreciation of what it is that he does so well. Elsewhere, the new songs have an authority and impact, driven by the resurgent power of his voice.

“It’s kind of like an inner strength,” he reflects. “I can feel it with my voice. It’s no longer surface singing. I’m not singing for vanity. I’m singing from inside. It doesn’t mean that I have nerves of steel or an iron core or anything like that, but it’s just like I’ve just placed myself at the centre of these songs more than I ever have before.”

These truly are some of Bell’s best on-stage performances for years, and even he is a little taken aback by what he has achieved with ‘Ten Crowns’.

“It’s quite mind blowing,” he says, with a contended smile that turns quickly to introspection, a window back into his inner insecurities. “There’s just this thing that I see in other artists, like Annie Lennox, or George Michael. They have this grandeur that I feel like I haven’t really approached in Erasure. What I mean by that is their standing within the industry, as solo artists.

“For whatever reason, that just hasn’t happened for me before,” he concludes. “I hope that I’m able to work toward that with ‘Ten Crowns’. It really feels like I’ve made a start at taking a stance like any other solo artist.”

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Andy Bell’s new album ‘Ten Crowns’ is out now.

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Photography:

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