When you reach a milestone in your life, what’s the best way to mark it? By embracing it, glorying in it – crowning it, in fact – with an album of euphoric songs produced and polished in Nashville, of course! The name of Andy Bell‘s third solo album, Ten Crowns – like its cover art, featuring his head on a glistening gold coin – is making Andy smile today: “It sounds like a pub!”, he jokes. But behind that title lies ten songs of dazzling, joyous pop, inspired by the dancefloor and gospel, completed in the year he turned 60. The name also refers to the tarot, he says: “The ten crowns on the tree of life, which is a very powerful card to have. And I’d just got my crowns on my teeth done in Miami when I was trying to think about a title!”, he laughs.
The album release follows the singles, ‘Lies So Deep‘ featuring Sarah Potenza, ‘Heart’s A Liar‘, with Debbie Harry, ‘Don’t Cha Know‘, ‘Dance For Mercy‘, and ‘Breaking Thru The Interstellar‘, spectacular introductions to Ten Crowns, marking a majestic moment in Bell’s career, and reconfirming that he is one of the great pop vocalists of our time.
No stranger to collaboration – his four decades of writing and recording with Vince Clarke as Erasure are still going strong, and the duo recently began work on a new album together – Bell threw himself into writing with close friend Dave Audé, the Grammy award-winning producer, remixer and DJ. Andy and Dave had previously collaborated on two Billboard Dance Club number ones together: 2014’s ‘Aftermath (Here We Go)‘ and 2016’s ‘True Original‘, and after those dance tracks, the pair “just kind of carried on writing as an exercise”, Andy explains, “and after that, Dave moved his family to Nashville because LA was so expensive, and so our writing took this kind of gospel-tinged Nashville twist.”
He describes how in Nashville there’s a church on every corner (“it reminded me of singing in choirs and cathedral school as a child, where the spirit of the church is imbued in the music“). Not that Ten Crowns is a sombre, spiritual set. It’s propulsive, electronic, passionate, driven by the need to encounter new emotions and experiences as life races on. “I mean, I’ve got everything I could possibly wish for, you know, I really have, but that’s not to say I’m always fulfilled,” Andy adds. “This album’s about picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, embracing life – and about taking that feeling on even when you’re fighting demons in the world, like homophobia, and fighting demons in yourself. It’s about being celebratory and uplifting.”
Ten Crowns marks a magisterial moment in Andy Bell’s forty-year career. His joy about what that holds, and where it can go, clearly excites him. “It’s my third (sort of) solo record [following 2005’s Electric Blue and 2010’s Non-Stop] and in Erasure, our third album was our most successful out of all that we’ve done, so I’m taking that spirit with me!”
Travelling into new dimensions and possibilities with gospel in the heart and dancing in the soul clearly suits him. Ten Crowns is Andy Bell imperial, gleaming, ready for his coronation.
