Apparently this week sees the release of a ‘new’ EP by Erasure, Erasure Club – Six Classic Remixes. I say apparently because, despite the fact that I worked for them for six years, the mean sods haven’t seen fit to send me a freebie. And at this point I should make it clear that this is a joke.
I put the quotation marks around the word ‘new’ in the previous paragraph because these mixes first came out back in 1990, as 12” ‘club’ promos. I’m not entirely sure what the thinking was behind this but then, I was never very clear on the thinking behind ‘club’ mixes in the first place; I mean, even if people love the remix, if they can’t tell that it’s Erasure then what’s the point?
A couple of the better remixes – Danny Rampling’s shoegazey ‘Sometimes’ and The Orb’s ‘Ship Of Fools’ – were on the 1992 reissue of ‘Who Needs Love Like That’ (I still know all this stuff, it will stay with me to my death bed). As for the others, I dimly remember there was a clearance problem...? I also remember that it was one of those things where, every year or so, someone would ask why they’d never been properly released; I never had any say on the matter, and when we did the fan club CDs, there were much more interesting ‘proper’ Erasure things to release instead. I remember discovering a box load of the promotional 12”s as returns; I always felt slightly embarrassed about this (because fans had been paying quite a lot for them) so I tried to give them all away in competitions.
Still, I haven’t heard these mixes for a decade, I remember the ‘Weight Of The World’ one being excellent, so I’ll be downloading.