“As soon as I played the demo I was just like ‘Yes! There he is!’ It was at the level of his old Erasure stuff, of Yazoo and his period of Depeche Mode": Producer Danny L Harle and Olly Alexander on their "extraordinary" collab with a synth-pop legend

Producer Danny L Harle and Olly Alexander have been discussing their experience of working with synth-pop legend Vince Clarke on Make Me A Man, a track from Alexander’s new album, Polari.

Speaking to the Tape Notes Podcast, Harle explained that getting Clarke onboard turned out to be as simple as sending him an email, but his decision to say yes to the collaboration was by no means a given.

“Vince Clarke does not work with just anyone,” says Harle, accurately - we can’t imagine he’d agree to work on a track with us, for example - but the producer definitely had him in mind when he was thinking about the sound of Alexander’s album.

“In the sort of synth-pop world you can just use electronic sound emotionally in a way where you don’t have to hide that it’s electronic,” says Harle, who last year worked across Dua Lipa's third album Radical Optimism. “That’s a thing that a producer I very much admire, called Vince Clarke, I want to say pioneered an approach to, and I was very honoured to get to work with him on one of the tracks on the album.”

After he’d agreed to take part, Harle says that it quickly became apparent that Clarke is still at the top of his game and was ready to get involved from the songwriting stage onwards.

“Vince is just exactly at that same level of artistry that he’s always been at,” he confirms. “When I was talking to him, he takes what he does very seriously because it is legitimately serious. He sent over some demo ideas to sort of like get us going on some songs, because he didn’t just produce the track - he wrote a lot of the chords as well.”

Of course, there’s always the danger that working with one of your heroes could end up being a massive disappointment, but when Harle listened to what Clarke sent him, he was delighted to find that it was as good as he’d been hoping it would be.

“As soon as I played the demo I was just like ‘Yes! There he is!’” he recalls. “It was at the level of his old Erasure stuff, of Yazoo and his period of Depeche Mode. It was right there, and it was so exciting. That level of collaboration was really quite extraordinary.”

Taking Clarke’s demo as a starting point, Harle says that he and Alexander were inspired to get to work. “We rejigged some structural things about it. We wrote the song over it, sent it back to him. He was really happy with it.”

Clarke’s involvement didn’t end there, though: “He had a good suggestion on the chorus that we kind of switched-up on his recommendation which was a very good note I thought,” says Alexander, formerly of Years & Years.

Although this was a close collaboration in many respects, Harle and Alexander were never actually in the same studio as Clarke, and a lot of the Erasure man’s advice was delivered via what Alexander describes as “succinct three-word emails.”

In fact, Harle says that Clarke’s communication style is “just like his music” in the sense that “the sound is so clear and simple and what he’s working with, and just the purity of it is just quite something. His musical point is so distilled in his music, and he’s the same in the way he talks. He’s a man of few words.”

You can hear a snippet of Clarke’s unreleased demo in the video below, and the full interview with Harle and Alexander is available on the Tape Notes Podcast website.

Exclusive Vince Clarke Demo for "Make Me A Man" Revealed by Olly Alexander & Danny L Harle - YouTube

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