#atozchallenge #wis I is for In My Room

Yazoo (aka 'Yaz' in the US during their time together) was the duo of ex-Depeche Mode keyboardist/songwriter Vince Clarke and that band's friend and local pub singer Alison Moyet. They were only together for just about two or so years (1981-1983) before Vince eventually started Erasure and Alison went onto a brilliant solo career, but they left behind two albums (Upstairs at Eric's and You and Me Both) and a handful of singles that are considered classic synthpop hits and well worth picking up if you haven't already.

Upstairs at Eric's was an album I'd seen plenty of times in the past, and knew the single "Don't Go" from their low-budget and somewhat silly horror movie-themed video from the early days of MTV (and one of our local TV stations used the opening instrumental bit to "Situation" as the opening theme for one of their talk shows around the same time). You'd always see it in the midprice bins at the record stores where you could get tapes for five bucks. This is another one I had someone dub for me early on, and I had that copy for quite some time until I finally bought it myself.

This was part and parcel of music obsession back in the 80s, especially with us kids who were into the college rock sound and didn't have easy access to indie record stores. It was like proto-filesharing in a way, really. One of us would head over to the other person's house, peruse their music collection, and borrow a few albums for dubbing and mixtape purposes. Memorex and Maxell must have made a decent profit off us back then, with all the blank tapes we bought. We laughed at the "Hope taping is killing music" movement, not because we were rebelling against it, but because of how misguided it was. They missed the point--for a lot of us, it had nothing to do with wanting an album for free at all--it was that we wanted copies of these albums to listen to because we loved the music on them, and nine times out of ten we were going to eventually buy new copies when we had money or found them used and cheap. If we didn't, it was usually because we didn't like the album nearly as much as we thought, and it would eventually get taped over. It was our way of sharing the music we loved with our friends, and introducing new stuff to them that they may never have heard.

A lot of my tapes dating from 1985 to 1990 were second-generation copies of albums.  We'd borrow the titles or hand them blank tapes throughout the school year, and it sort of became a rite of passage come May, to copy as many albums as possible once we went on our separate ways to college. I was known for actually being a bit picky, telling friends which albums should be paired together on a 90 minute tape, or which songs should be placed in the blank spots if there was space left on a 60 minute tape. There was a two-part reason for it--paired albums were usually from the same band and in chronological order, so they would make sense in my collection, and extra songs at the end of an album had to have the same sound, or at least the same feel, as the main dubbed release, just to keep the ambience. In this case, Yazoo's two albums fit quite nicely on a single 90 minute tape. Yes, I was a bit too obsessive back even then...but it was all in fun, and I heard (and eventually bought) a lot of great music in the process.