Just Can't Get Enough was the track that helped propel Depeche Mode to superstardom, and a great springboard for its departing writer, Vince Clarke, to score massive hits with a variety of new musical partners, including Yazoo, The Assembly and Erasure.
But it was another track that would help seal the deal for Clarke, and confirm that he'd made the right choice leaving Depeche Mode, and that was Only You.
This became Clarke's own launchpad to a successful career. Really then, it could be said to be the most important song he's ever written, not to mention the best song Depeche never recorded.
Article continues belowIt's 1981 and a young Vince Clarke has just departed Depeche Mode, taking with him a couple of analogue synths and a sequencer to help play them.
He's left the band with a couple of sure-fire hits, (we detail how one, Just Can't Get Enough, came to be here), and while there is a bit of resentment on both sides, everything will turn out just fine for both parties in the end.
Clarke's departure will force Martin Gore to become one of the best songwriters of a generation, and for Depeche Mode to recruit Alan Wilder who would help give those songs the kind of dark atmosphere and menace the band will need to move on from their Clarke-laden, synth-pop roots.
40-odd years later and they're still doing it, albeit minus Wilder who left in 1995, and founder Andrew Fletcher who sadly passed away in 2022.
Back to 1981 and according to Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode discoverer and head-honcho of Mute Records), Vince's departure from the original Basildon 4-piece was not unexpected.
“We did a little tour of Europe playing Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg, and Brussels," he told this writer in an interview with Classic Pop back in 2020. "I was driving the van, 'tour managing’, and I noticed that Vince had become very distant from the rest of the band. He would sit in the front next to me and the others would be in the back larking around and he would just be very quiet, you know?
"When he decided to leave, I guess it was a shock but I felt something wasn't quite right. The other thing I remember was when he played the band a rough version of Just Can't Get Enough, the band really didn't want to do it because they thought it was too poppy, so I think there was already a bit of a musical difference, not big but an undercurrent."
Perhaps not surprisingly, given Vince's love for synthesisers, part of his decision to quit Depeche was down to the opportunities that tech provided to effectively become a one-man band. Namely, a sequencer and a Roland MC4.
"The MC4 came in very useful when I left Depeche Mode and formed Yazoo, because I used it in place of other musicians," he told Electronics & Music Maker in 1984. "I'm not technically a very good keyboard player, and after I got a Jupiter 4 I bought an MC4 Microcomposer, and I used it mainly to play parts that I wasn't capable of playing myself."
He went on to detail the all-new sequencing technology of the time for 1984 musicians to get their heads around: "It means that, if you compose a melody, you can store it in the machine's memory and more or less forget about it, which really enables you to concentrate on getting the sound right for that part. The situation's much the same when you're recording as well, because you don't have to worry about playing the part absolutely right: it's there in one take and it leaves you free to concentrate on the recording process itself."
Vince would find success pretty much straight away with fellow Essex singer Alison Moyet in the duo Yazoo, (shortened to Yaz in the States to avoid clashing with another 'Yazoo'), where his analogue pop songwriting would marry brilliantly with Moyet's gospel-style vocal, creating a quirky blend of soul and synths for the early '80s.
Moyet had been to the same school as both the Mode's Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher, although Clarke didn't know her that well. Alison was also looking for new collaborators so had taken an ad out in a local paper.
"I was looking for another bunch of blues musicians to work with," she told The Quietus in 2011. "Vince was looking for a singer who was different to Dave Gahan, but also looking for my number at the same time, so it was real serendipity that he just opened the paper and there was my number. It was like it was meant to be."
Vince wasn't exactly her target musician, but she was impressed with his attitude and the fact that he did what he promised (and had already done so with Depeche). Plus she wanted to record a demo to show off her vocal range, so this was perfect timing.
"Everything we did at that time just kind of worked," she recalled "I don’t think Vince ever intended to start a band with me. He was still very sore, Depeche were his mates and leaving them was like the break-up of a marriage. I think he was feeling angry and disillusioned and wanted to prove himself as a writer, so we got together without having a future, and it just rollercoastered."
The first track they worked on was Vince's Only You, a more mature song with a forlorn lyric which depicted the shattered, longing emotions following a breakup.
All I needed was the love you gave
All I needed for another day
And all I ever knew
Only you
Fans eager to read its lyric as an allegory of his departure from his former band have stated often that the song was rejected by Depeche Mode. While this isn't true, it was nearly shunned by label boss Daniel Miller, who was less than impressed by an early version of the song.
“I understood it as a great pop song, but I wasn't sure on the very first listen as to whether I liked it or not. I was kind of distracted as I was trying to do something else [he was playing with his synthesizers, Ed]. I'm always distracted when these moments happen! [Miller laughs as he recalls nearly rejecting Depeche Mode in similar circumstances]. But of course we ended up working on it, and it was a brilliant project.”
What happened next - though the exact order of events is not absolutely set in stone - is that Vince sent Alison a demo of Only You, and she supplied some rough vocals. This convinced Miller to record the track properly and then release it as a single, one of three early Yazoo tracks that included Don't Go and Situation.
"When I started Yazoo," Vince told E&MM, "I don't think anything musical had really changed, though I suppose my lyrics might have got a bit more serious. One of the things I regret is that I don't seem to be able to write as frivolously as I used to. Lyrics seem to be more important to me, even though I know they're not. I've never wanted to say anything of particularly earth-shattering importance in my lyrics. I've got my opinions, but I'm not so sure anybody would be very interested in them."
Only You catapulted Vince back into the charts, reaching a UK number 2 in May 1982, and stamping his new partnership onto the synth-pop landscape.
Alison, not used to success like this, was swept along for the ride: “We released Only You. It did really well. Then we released another and that did really well too. And an album. The whole thing all happened within about three months,” Moyet told the Independent. “We never spoke about anything other than recording – nothing. Suddenly we were in a really successful band but we hadn't even ever gone for a pint together. It was really weird, almost like an arranged marriage.
“Only You became a massive hit very quickly," Miller recalls. "Vince had already been there and it thrust Alison into this world that she [didn't know]. She was basically a blues singer and I don't think she particularly liked electronic music. Very quickly it exploded and we were travelling around Europe and going to America."
Vince and Alison's relationship would soon become strained, especially in the studio where they recorded Yazoo's debut album, Upstairs at Eric's. Its name came from the fact that it was recorded upstairs at Eric Radcliffe's Blackwing Studios where Depeche had recorded their debut, Speak & Spell.
"I would write a song and he would just arrange it," Moyet recalls. "Then I’d sing on it, or he’d sing me a song on the guitar and then I would play with the melody or not, add vocal pieces and sing it the way that I wanted to. There was no talk about whether this was a gentle song or a dance song, I just sang it as I saw fit."
It even reached a point where she refused one song (Happy People, which Vince sang), and although they stumbled through a follow up album (the actually rather good You And Me Both), the pressure of fame was too much for Alison who had to take most of the limelight while Vince hid behind his synths.
"They didn't have a particularly strong relationship before," said Miller. “They just knew each other. Of course it was exciting but I think it also took a toll on both of them. Alison was not a conventional front woman of the early eighties. There was a kind of stereotype front person at that time and she wasn't that stereotype.
"She was, I dunno, 19 or 20 at the time; they were young people plucked out of housing estates in Essex and put into this other world. It's a lot of pressure."
And it got both of them very quickly, as Alison told The Quietus: "Even as we began the second album we knew that it was over; he had already decided he didn’t want to work with me anymore."
But if all of this sounds a bit 'be careful what you wish for', this fractured relationship would ultimately form the basis of two very successful careers, as Moyet carved out a successful solo journey, and Vince, of course, went on to score even more hits with The Assembly, (with Feargal Sharkey and the track Never Never) and Erasure.
There was even a Yazoo reunion in 2008, 25 years after they split, which was very much a celebration of the success they'd had so many years before, and which both appeared to finally enjoy. Closure, if you will.
On the reunion, Moyet said, “The irony was, we really wanted to talk to each other. The conversation flowed and it was like, ‘Wow, after all this, we actually have so much in common,’” she told The Independent.
Only You, the track that started it all, would have a surprise, bonus extra life shortly after its release when the a cappella group The Flying Pickets took their version of it to number one in the UK, one place higher than the original.
Vince finally got his first number one and the scene was set for world domination.
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