In their self-titled debut album, synthpop supergroup Doublespeak unite legends of the genre Vince Clarke (founding member of Erasure, Depeche Mode, and Yazoo), Neil Arthur (of Blancmange fame), and Benge (experimental superproducer) for an at-a-glance eclectic album of covers.
Featuring tracks spanning from the late 1960s to the 2010s, the album serves less as a collection of faithful tributes than a cohesive reconstruction of seemingly disparate tracks. Erring more toward remix than rendition, the record took on the quality of a musical assembly line during production, with tracks originating with Arthur, trickling down to Clarke, and then finally making their way to Benge, refracting through each member’s creative lens along the way.
While PopMatters got the trio together for a chat over Zoom, they’re yet to meet face-to-face as a group. Of whether this kind of asynchronous, remote production allowed for anything creatively that being physically together might not have, Arthur, the group’s lead singer, joked that it definitely kept meals and bar tabs cheaper.
Clarke, on the other hand, told us, “It’s just a different process. Neil would send me something, I would work on it, then Benge would work on it on a later day, so it would all sort of give you time to get a different perspective. We have the luxury of time. In this instance it helps and flavors the sound of the record.”
He explained, “Personally, I listen to music very intensely when I’m working on something, and then I don’t listen to it at all, so I found the way we did this project quite good.”
Benge, while coming to the project a few years later than Clarke and Arthur, agreed that time was a crucial component in the project’s success, telling us, “We had lots of time in between to kind of change things or rethink things, live with it all. That is a luxury, really. Normally you’re under pressure to finish things really quickly, but we just took our time.”
“There was no deadline to aim for,” Arthur added, “we didn’t really have a plan other than we enjoyed being creative together and exchanging files.”
What began nearly a decade ago as a friendly exchange of files between Clarke and Arthur quickly evolved into something more substantial when Arthur approached Benge (Arthur’s co-producer on six Blancmange albums) about working on the album’s first track, “Back to Nature”, a modernized cover of the 1979 Fad Gadget track of the same name.
“We’d done quite a bit of work on it [“Back to Nature”], but there was something about the sound that Benge got. For me that was really a turning point,” Arthur told us, citing Benge’s removal, rather than addition, of sound as most significantly shaping the project early on.
“When Benge got involved was the moment we realized we were working with a professional, so we really had to get it together,” Clarke adds with a laugh.
When asked if he’d felt any sense of trepidation stepping into a project that’d already been long established, Benge concedes, “Yes. I’ve got a rule now that I only take on things I really love and want to get involved in. I used to take on just whatever, but I stopped doing that about 15 years ago and made the decision just only ever to do stuff I really, really love. So I was talking to Neil and just listening to the tracks, and I was really, really excited to get involved.
“It was almost like going for a job interview,” he continues, “I really wanted to make a mark with the production of the ‘Rock On’ track [one of the project’s early selections]. I’m not sure what took me in that direction, but it was this sort of edgy, Cold War kind of vibe, and that’s what I wanted to bring to the project, and luckily they liked what I’d done so that was almost like the template for the other tracks after that.”
While Arthur has acknowledged his being the primary curator of the album’s tracks, the project is said to have ultimately followed a democratic creative process to select its 11 covers.
“For example, I suggested the Young Marble Giant’s song, and the Young Marble Giant’s were a huge influence on Blancmange. So I suggested that song,” Arthur explained.
“There were other songs from the period of my life growing up. My parents used to play the Carpenters, and one song that stuck with me was ‘Goodbye to Love’. Another one that I really liked was John Hartford’s ‘Gentle on My Mind’. When I suggested those songs, Vince’s reaction was so positive. I’d just sketch out a demo and send it to him or vice versa.”
When asked if an artist’s biography, particularly one as steeped in tragedy as Karen Carpenter’s, plays a role in their approach to a cover, Clarke told us, “For sure, because of that particular track and that particular story, it gives that track a certain weight. Apart from being a great song, you can’t help it. We can’t emulate that, but it’s still in the back of your mind.”
Of which cover on the album gave them the most trouble to get right, Benge admitted that the Carpenters track was most difficult for him to nail down. “It’s very different from the other tracks on the album. It’s a slow ballad-y kind of song from a different period. It’s got a different feel to it because of that, and for me that made it quite difficult,” he recounted.
“I think it must have been hard for Neil in a way,” Benge explained (“It always hard for me!” Arthur interjects). “In the sense that you’re covering all these amazing vocalists. When you’re playing something with synths or drum machines you can hide behind them, but Neil’s personality had to come through, which I think is an amazing feat personally.”
“Some of the songs were undoubtedly a challenge,” Arthur added. “You’ve got to find your way into them. I’ve sung for decades, but I’m not trained to sing. I’ve just sung for a long time now. I mean, Helen [Arthur’s partner] tells me to shut up all the time when I’m singing. I just did my best with it.”
While Arthur was certainly acquainted with the tracks he’d chosen for the project, Clarke and Benge, for their part, both found themselves largely unfamiliar with the selections.
“There were tracks on this album Benge and I didn’t know,” Arthur elaborates. “But I did go into Spotify and start looking at the bands. It definitely made me curious, and I think it’ll make others curious as well.”
“A lot of the tracks I’d never heard before and I deliberately didn’t go and listen to them,” Benge adds, explaining that he’d tried to approach each track like a brand new Blancmange demo rather than a cover.
On whether or not that degree of distance from the original track was helpful creatively, Benge recalls: “Definitely. They’re not really covers as such. They’re kind of reinterpretations, or as I call it, ‘resynthesizing’ them.”
Alongside the covers that appear on the album, the group recorded two original tracks to serve as the album’s B-sides. “I remember thinking to myself: Do people still make B-sides?” Clarke joked, adding that the two original tracks the group worked on came quite naturally.
“It’s a different set of rules,” Clarke remarked of the experience making original tracks versus covers alongside the group. “You’re not trying to better or reinterpret a cover; there are just no rules whatsoever. You can do whatever you like.” Clarke added that the B-sides for this project came to resemble the B-sides of yesteryear, more intuitive and created within the confines of a brief period, unlike much of the project’s main tracks.
While restricting a project to covers might prove limiting to some artists, Clarke and Benge in particular seem to flourish within creative confines of their own making (Clarke, most notably, in his 2023 album Songs of Silence, and Benge through his ongoing “one-synethisizer-per-album” project concept).
The pair also share an affinity for the more “analog” side of electronica, each finding themselves drawn to the unpredictable sound more “retro” synthesizers tend to produce in contrast to the exacting, hyperprecise production of digital synths.
However, this is not to say either’s affinity stems from some technophobia or proto-luddism; quite the opposite, as both Clarke and Benge regularly produce music digitally yet still find themselves drawn to the inimitable unpredictability of analogue synthesizers.
“We’re both sort of very ‘analog’-y,” Clarke noted. “We’ll work on a track in the computer and convert it to analog. The reason I do it is that it’s more interesting, more of a challenge. I love using instruments that I can actually touch, rather than just messing around with a mouse. It’s unpredictable. I’ve done that for years, and I still love doing it because you’re finding new things all the time.”
“There are always surprises with analog,” Arthur agreed.
“Yeah, but there can be too many,” Benge conceded. “If you’re sitting in a room with loads and loads of synths with millions of options in front of you, it can be a bit overwhelming, or you spend the whole day programming something that just doesn’t work because there are too many options. Sometimes it is nice to bring those limitations in. For my own work, I like to put restrictions on it because it forces you to get to know that one particular synth or something like that. It brings down the options from being infinite to something manageable.”