Doublespeak find the joy in translation

You could call them a supergroup, but over the hour of our chat the recurring theme which bonds these three acclaimed musicians is one of friendship. Collaborating to create a body of work that reinterprets a broad and diverse collection of hits and uncovered gems, the Doublespeak project and self-titled album has its roots back in the early eighties. 

Arthur, of synth-pop ground Blancmange, met Vince Clarke, whose accolades include Depeche Mode, Erasure and Yazoo, at the start of the decade when both featured on the now legendary compilation Some Bizarre Album. Blancmange went on to tour with Depeche Mode and the pair became friends; a group holiday quickly followed. “When I met Vince, we weren't signed, so they were signed to Mute and we were yet to be signed,” says Arthur. “Then in a kind of whirlwind year, by the end of the next year, we had a record in the top ten. I was living on the ceiling and we'd been taking that around Britain and Europe touring. We decided to have a bit of a break, so six of us went on holiday to Tenerife.”

“It was a really great holiday,” laughs Clarke. “I was very close to Steve, Neil's partner. I think it was towards the end of the holiday, I think we're in a bar somewhere - [ABBA] was being played in the bar and then we discussed the idea of doing covers. Then, of course, Neil and Stephen did their cover, and Andy I did an EP of songs. So there's always been this kind of ABBA connection.”

Mapping the myriad connections that brought together each member of Doublespeak requires some kind of synthpop spider diagram. After their infamous Tenerife holiday, Clarke collaborated with Blancmange’s Stephen Luscombe, who passed away last year, on his West India Company project with composer and percussionist Pandit Dinesh. “Stephen was working with Dinesh and Vince got involved in that and I ended up writing some lyrics for it as well,” says Arthur. “Sadly, obviously Stephen's no longer with us, which when you say it, it's still difficult to quite come to terms with that because we were so close. I miss him dearly.”

Arthur also collaborated with Clarke on both Yazoo and The Assembly, but neither effort ever saw the light of day. “They were experiments, because I had access to a studio which was amazing. So there was studio time available,” says Clarke.

“It was good fun,” continues Arthur. “Some things just don't pan out. We had a go at it but here we go - years and years later, we decided to have another go. Then Mr. Edwards gets involved as well - makes it all sound very nice.”

Producer Ben Edwards – who goes by Benge – came on board a few years after the Doublespeak project had initially started. Sharing management with Arthur, the two met when Edwards was working on new music, their connection leading to the formation of electronic project Fader. “I'd been to LA for two months to sort of clear my head of all the kind of rubbish that was going on in London at the time in my life,” says Edwards. “I did a studio swap with some friends of mine and I wrote a load of music with the idea that I would get a vocalist involved later on, and that became what turned into the first Fader album. Neil essentially added vocals onto the tracks I'd made in LA.”

Edwards has since produced the last six Blancmange records and came to the Doublespeak project to co-produce and mix, bringing a fresh perspective to the songs Arthur and Clarke were passing back and forth. “The crucial thing is you don't step on each other's toes,” Arthur says. “You give each other space. The same thing happened with Vince, myself, and Benge. We know our roles and it does cross over from time to time, but we give each other space and that's a crucial thing.” 

The project initially started in 2017 when Arthur reached out to Clarke suggesting they try a collaboration that centred around covers. “We intended to make a body of work, but I wasn't certainly seeing it as kind of an album,” Clarke says. “It was more of a project, because it took so long. You do a little bit and then we'd have time off and do other things, and then we do a little bit more. There was never really an end product in my mind. I thought that we would just continue messing around and sending files and exchanging ideas.”

Centred on their friendship and the joy of bouncing ideas off each other, it wasn’t until Covid hit that the pair began to focus on what they were creating. “When the lockdown happened in New York it was so amazing, in a bad way, and no one knew when it would finish. I hate sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, I have to be doing something. So this was one of the projects that I really dove into,” Clarke explains. “I think it was a fun project to do with a friend, and a challenge as well. All music for me is a bit of a puzzle. You're trying to work out obviously the best parts, the right percussion, the right sounds, the right groove and everything else and putting that together and making it cohesive. I like that whole process.”

Bringing Edwards into the project gave it a fresh sense of purpose, and despite he and Clarke never meeting in person, and still haven’t to this day, his objectivity helped hone their song choices into a unified sound. A third opinion also helped break any deadlock on what would make the cut. “Quite a few didn't get into the studio - quite a few didn't get out of the studio,” laughs Arthur. “I was looking through some files the other day and there were some surprises in there. I think Vince at one point had suggested we do ‘When Will I See You Again’ by The Three Degrees, which would have been quite interesting. I'd suggested ‘Dream Baby Dream’ by Suicide. Vince suggested ‘The Hustle’ and we did ‘The Hustle’ and recorded and mixed it, but decided it wasn't going on the album. That was Benge’s diplomacy.”

“I really enjoyed doing ‘The Hustle,’” shrugs Clarke. “That was one of my suggestions. I just thought it was a lot of fun to record. But then Benge was the one who said it doesn't really fit in. I wasn't going to argue about it. I mean it's whatever, you can do more songs, and also I own the master so it may well come out.”

“My role was to kind of make it sound like an album rather than a mixture of random tracks,” Benge explains. “I felt like some of the tracks were going in a different direction and they were more sort of disco, and we got most of the tracks with this more new-wave sort of vibe. The bulk of the album was that feel, and so it was a case of just balancing the album so it worked as a whole really, and that's kind of one of the things that I could bring to it at that stage.”

Across the album they tackle a vast array of artists and genres from the avant-garde electronica of Fad Gadget to the soft rock of The Carpenters, all integrated into their own glitching and glowing synth-wave signature. The process for creating a final master from Arthur and Clarke’s original demos gave Edwards an additional challenge, but one he feels benefited the song’s final sonics. 

While both Arthur and Clarke were working in Logic, Edwards favoured Digital Performer software. “It’s an ancient system that no one else uses anymore, but I think it's the best one,” he laughs. “If I had done it in Logic, it's so easy just to import it all, use the same plugins, and then suddenly it all just sounds the same. But because we had to go through this process of reloading it into my system in a different way and then re-recording some of the parts with my analog synths and all my effects units, which are all old actual real effects units rather than plugins, it all sounds kind of different to the other stuff that's out there at the moment in the world.”

Another interesting aspect of the project for Edwards was that his first time listening to some of the chosen songs was via Arthur and Clarke’s demos. “Most of the songs I was approaching like they were just new songs,” he says. “Neil interpreted his interpretation of the original song. It went off to Vince who didn't know the original song and he then interpreted what Neil had done, and then I came in after that process, again not knowing the original, and added some new bits to it or different drum patterns. So the end result in some of the songs is actually quite a long way from the original.” 

“Mostly Neil would present his rough vocal and a rough demo idea, with very minimal synthesisers, and then I would start embellishing it in my studio which was in New York at the time, and then it would go to Benge,” says Clarke. “So a little production line in a way, I guess. I knew Benge’s music because a friend and I used to do a radio show and for electronic music and Benge’s tracks often came up, so I was aware of who he was. Then Neil just said, ‘This guy's a really good mixer and also you two will get along because you both own shitloads of synthesisers.’ We sent him ‘Rock On’ and it just came back sounding really unique and different, and different from the piece that Neil and I had semi-finished, so it just clicked.”

The first track they finished was a version of the David Essex hit “Rock On” from 1973. While the original pushed the boundaries of radio pop, the Doublespeak take emphasises the dark undertones and propels the production even further. “I'd always absolutely adored this song,” says Arthur. “When I was young and it came out, it just seemed like such a unique sounding pop record. It was just such a standout production - it's almost like a proto Prince at times.”

“I did know that one just because it was such a big hit,” says Edwards. “When I got involved with the production I just wanted to make it sound really edgy and push all the sounds into distortion a little bit more, and make it sound almost post-punky in a way. I then got an idea of how I was going to approach the other tracks that I did after that.”

“It's such a weird track. I hadn't listened to it for a long, long, long time and then I listened to it again, I thought, yeah, that's going to be really good,” says Clarke. “Of course, Neil has this very distinctive voice, so immediately it sounds different. I thought it was a great choice. I thought it was unusual, but that was true of a lot of the songs on this album. I knew this song, but many of the songs on the album I didn't know at all. Neil was the person that introduced me to those tracks and to these artists, which was really refreshing because the problem with doing covers, from my perspective, is that you do a cover of something because you love it and then you finish it and you go, it was already brilliant. Why did I think that I could make it any better? But with these songs, a lot of them were very, very basic and open and raw and electronic, of course, so I could see scope there. I could see places I could put things or I could hear sounds in them before I even got to record those sounds. Hopefully that's the thing that makes this covers album different from your normal covers album.”

Of course, given the history of both Clarke and Arthur, there had to be an ABBA cover on the record. “Funnily enough, we hadn't thought of doing an ABBA song,” Arthur laughs. “It was our manager who said, ‘You and Vince, you've done ABBA songs before, why do you not think about one for this?’ Vince suggested ‘The Visitors,’ and then I had to bloody sing it.”

“That's one of the songs I didn't know. I think it's quite an obscure one of theirs. It wasn't a big hit,” says Edwards. “It's not your typical ABBA song, really. It's got more edge to it and a lot of ABBA lyrics are quite dark actually, but that one in particular, it's got this kind of cold war theme going through it somehow, which we played on.”

“I sent Neil ‘The Visitors’ and he just got into it,” says Clarke. “I mean, it's such an unusual track. I think a lot of people, even if they're fans of ABBA, probably won't be that familiar with it. It was on their last album and it just sounds so different from everything else that they've done - sounds kind of space age-y. It sounds like the title, so to speak. It's unusual for ABBA. I mean probably in retrospect I would have done ‘Thank You For The Music,’ just because it’s so bad, but that would never get past Benge.”

Their tracklist journey posed several different opportunities for the trio. As well as celebrating music they love and sharing in that discovery, there was the ability to shine a light on artists that are lesser known. The most recent track they covered is “Richard!” by British songwriter Ed Dowie, the Doublespeak version creating a slow pulse of cinematic synthwave. “I absolutely love Ed Dowie's music and we thought it would be a really nice song to have a go at,” says Arthur. “Lyrically, I think it's absolutely fantastic. The thing is, about all the songs on the album as you start unpicking aspects of them, you just think, bloody hell these are really good. Which is why we chose them, because they are really good songs. It's such a different way to go about making an album. Normally, you start with a blank canvas and eventually some marks start getting made. We had a massive amount of noise right at the beginning, and then it's just picking bits out that you want and then from that, and particularly because of the way Vince and Benge went about putting their parts in there, you end up with new parts that aren't on the originals. It's bloody interesting.” 

One of the album’s highlights is their delicate and emotionally-loaded take on The Carpenter’s “Goodbye To Love.” “They’re an interesting band, The Carpenters. I think what makes it more poignant, obviously, is the fact that it's such a tragic story. You can't help for that not to creep into your appreciation of the track,” says Clarke. “You're not just thinking about the song and the lyrics. You're thinking about the person behind it or the people behind it, and it is a very, very, sad song for sure.”

After much debate, and despite Arthur’s long-term love of it, the song’s sterling solo outro was shelved, instead allowing space for the sentiment to linger. “We did a version with the solo on it. I'm glad we changed it. I'm really glad it kind of made it slightly more minimal,” he says. 

“It did make room on the end and Vince brought in this beautiful melody that is a new melody that he wrote that comes in right at the end of the song and it really lifts it, I think,” says Edwards. 

While some songs have an added weight from their own story, other choices are personal to the Doublespeak members. Working with that context created another layer of interpretation on the final track. “‘Gentle On My Mind’ is something that I've probably done four or five versions in the time I've been making music,” says Arthur. “It's a song that was with me when I was a child in our house.” 

A true country original and a hit for Glen Campbell, the Doublespeak version somehow channels the intonation and energy of the song across a luscious background of expansive synths. “The idea of making an electronic version of that with Neil's kind of rich baritone voice I thought that was a really cool move,” says Clarke. 

Across the record, the selections lean slightly towards the foundational period of Clarke and Arthur’s careers with choices such as Fad Gadget, The Sound and Young Marble Giants being artists either member had known or frequently watched live. Again, that personal connection added another layer of pressure on the interpretation process. “I did know Frank [Fad Gadget] quite well because he was on the same label as us. I met him a few times back in the day, in the 80s,” says Clarke. “I think the thing that makes it work for us is Neil's voice, because it's so different from Frank's. I think that there is more pressure, definitely, but most people who get to hear this will not have been alive when it was first released.” 

On Doublespeak the three members play with curation, sentimentality, and the joy of discovery. What shines through, on both the record and in conversation, is the delight they take from collaborating together. “In the 80s, me and my friends, we used to make little mixtapes on cassette and give them to each other, and that would be a really good way of hearing new tracks that you wouldn't have heard on the radio - stuff that was really obscure,” says Edwards. “So I guess this album's a little bit sort of a mixtape in a way.”