Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

If you are going to go out, leave them demanding more. A maxim that suits Yazoo’s second album You and Me Both right down to the ground. After the huge success of the band’s debut album Upstairs At Eric’s which reached the near unprecedented heights of number two in the U.K. album chart and breaking the U.S Billboard Hot 100, the creativity that Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke weaved together followed through in to the recording of You And Me Both and yet on the eve of the album’s release they announced their separation. Whilst they would eventually get back together for a series of gigs in 2008, the flow had been broken but at least fans have the debut and this excellent follow up to remind them of what exactly the pair bought to the table.

Vince Clarke’s pioneering work with Depeche Mode was seamless, there was no fault at all in his work as the main musical maestro and the good creations he started in Depeche Mode carried over into this new venture. Alison Moyet was in  her early twenties when she recorded these two albums and throughout the sound she creates marks her out as having at the time and through the next thirty years one of the best British female blues voices to have been captured on any recording. It was her song-writing though that started to capture the imagination and coupled with her incredible depth of voice made her shine like no one else at the time.

Nobody’s Diary is perhaps even to this day one of the finest songs credited to Alison Moyet and it is an outstanding opener to the pairing’s second album, a near perfect fusing of the talent that lay in the hearts of both protagonists, Vince Clarke’s mournful music that surrounds the expressionistic soulful sound that seemed almost unique to the young woman from Billericay is just scintillating. The words that flow like a pleading confession, the yearning to be free from her lovers memories of her and not to become a by line or afterthought that frays and yellows and eventually fades, or worse to have a sense of vigil in years to come as the person turns her memory into a shrine. This is Alison Moyet at her very best, the ability to create imagery whilst portraying the aura of a woman whose mystery and beguilement appealed across the board and to both sexes.

The imploring sense of mystery in her voice makes the listener want to know more about the woman who asks her would be chronicler and the person who is using her for memory and also makes the listener mourn for a loss of life that she wants written out. Throughout the song it is her voice that carries the sentiment even though it is the lovers’ story, it is their life she is asking to be erased, even if it just the one page or day. The telling word in the song is history. Even though the song is beseeching, begging almost to be written of the person’s life, the word history only appears right towards the very end as if the finality of it all is even too much for her to spell out. History is only written by the winners; those that lose in battle or love are rubbed out or made to out to be more than enemies, perhaps even evil. In the same way that William Shakespeare is alleged to be nothing more than a Tudor apologist and his cruel characterisation of Richard III, history will not be kind to the woman who beguiles with her desperate and heartfelt longing to be left out that person’s life.

It wasn’t just Ms. Moyet’s song-writing who captured the hearts of those who sent this album to number one, Vince Clarke had shared the writing responsibilities for half the album and on tracks such as Mr. Blue, Walk Away From Love and the excellent Unmarked the lyrics were playful, deep and in the case of Unmarked a call to give up arms, or at least the dreams of serving a country that had no time for its youth but to use them as cannon fodder or as trained state sponsored killers. The opening lines seem to suggest that the only way family could ever be proud of their son, especially in the Britain of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the economic climate drove more young men into thinking about joining up in the services to escape unemployment in whatever area of Britain they lived in. There is a dichotomy in the third line to the fourth in which the father says sees the world, an imploring for the son to go out and make his mark, specifically to find a life and make a new place his home, but the message changes to making a mark as taking a life and ‘learn to use a gun’.

Both these songs capture the spirit that Yazoo were breaking ground with, the technology that Vince Clarke was making use of and creating incredible and quality sounds with coupled with the astonishing voice that Alison Moyet had at her disposal, would see You And Me Both as one of the outstanding albums of the early 1980s and whilst both artists would have deserved future success as the years went past, there was something very special about July 1983 and the memories that this album would create.

Ian D. Hall