Neil Arthur of Blancmange: ‘These songs are bits of me’
One of a slew of British bands who made their name in the new and exciting world of electronic music in the early ’80s, synth-pop favourites Blancmange are back with a new album and tour.
The extensive jaunt, which stops off at the Cambridge Junction in October, will follow the release of the group’s new album, Private View, which is out today (September 30). The release has been preceded by the moving track Take Me.
Joining bandleader and founding member Neil Arthur – he formed the band in 1979 with Stephen Luscombe and is now the sole official member – is the returning Benge (musician and producer Ben Edwards) and guitarist David Rhodes (Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Scott Walker).
Praised for his guitar work by Neil, Rhodes previously performed with the band on their 1982 debut album Happy Families, as well as on several other Blancmange albums.
Neil says of Private View: “The title comes from the image that’s on the cover of the album... I was down at Dungeness with my daughter and my partner, Helen, and my daughter requested some photographs taken of the back of her.
“So you imagine like a portrait, but instead of facing the camera, she’s facing away from it and she’s looking out into the sea. It was a really moving image because you don’t see the face, you see the back of somebody.
“Obviously you’re observing, possibly, what they’re looking at and you start to consider, ‘What are they actually thinking as they’re looking at this?’ My daughter’s at art college and she started doing some paintings, different stuff, not just that image that I’ve used but many images of the back of people – never showing the front – and I kind of ran with this idea.
“I like the idea of wordplay so taking somebody’s private view, or it could be at the opening of an exhibition and it’s the night of the private view. As a graphic designer – that’s what I trained as – I messed around with that and then Paul Agar, who makes sense of my nonsense, made it look like it makes some type of cover.”
Blancmange first broke through in the early ’80s with their appealing mix of synthesiers and surrealism, apparent in singles such as Feel Me, Living on the Ceiling, Blind Vision and Don’t Tell Me – plus the epic synthpop of Waves.
The band initially went their separate ways in the mid-’80s. Since reforming in 2011 – Stephen Luscombe had to leave shortly afterwards for health reasons – Neil has harnessed a duality of experimentation and seamless pop melody to release 14-odd albums in the last decade alone – staggering considering that only three Blancmange albums came out in the ’80s!
Private View is his seventh album as Blancmange since 2020. “It was probably my way of dealing with the difficulties that were going on,” recalls Neil. “I spoke to other people who did find this difficult but I found it a good time, not particularly for reflecting at all actually.
“I just started thinking, ‘Well, this is my way of coping, luckily enough. Obviously I can’t go out on tour’. But it didn’t mean to say that I had to put my thought pattern on hold, so I started writing a number of songs, both instrumental and some with lyrics, and initially sent them through to Benge and we started working remotely on it.”
Neil, who describes himself as “a bit of a fidget – I don’t really relax very well” – notes that when there was a window during the lockdowns, he got together with Benge to work on the music in person.
“We managed to finish off [2021’s] Commercial Break, which was an album that reflected very much on the time it was written,” he says. Thematically, Private View explores past memories, some good and some not so good.
“The thing is, these songs are bits of me – it can’t be any other way because I’m writing them, but they’re not particularly about me,” explains Neil, who admits that he doesn’t really like the name ‘Blancmange’.
“They’re about experiences that morph into something else that maybe other people can identify with when they listen to it. Take Me is certainly about the experience of – and ups and downs and longevity of – relationships that have lasted a long time.
“And sometimes I would question how people put up with each other for their idiosyncratic ways and their behaviour and lack of understanding, lack of empathy – but somehow people manage to find a way through. Any couple that tells you they don’t argue are liars!”
[Read more: Singer Tom Chaplin: ‘Middle age is interesting and unexplored’, Midge Ure: ‘We thought our music had a shelf life of three months’]
Elaborating on this theme of relationships – albeit this time with his former bandmate – the 60-something musician, who regularly plays football and cycles, says: “We nearly split up because of musical similarities, me and Stephen, back in the day. We agreed on the music that we liked, from Captain Beefheart to Eno, to the Velvet Underground to early Roxy Music and experimental stuff...
“The thing is, I don’t have any experience of it really but I know people who have been in larger bands and I think probably sometimes the tension can be dissipated if you’ve got a few more people, but the excitement of the chalk and cheese that made early Blancmange was quite interesting because when that kind of friction was constructive it led to a really positive creativity.
“Unfortunately, there were times when it can get disruptive, which is one of the reasons we decided to stop doing it, because it was better to preserve a friendship, which has endured. That’s far more important than making music.”
Across the tour, Blancmange will be joined by a number of stellar support acts including Rodney Cromwell, Bernholz, Oblong, Alice Hubble, and Stephen Mallinder. They will be performing at the Junction’s
J1 on Friday, October 7.
For tickets, visit junction.co.uk. For more on Blancmange, go to blancmange.co.uk.
