The drive to Vince Clarke's house heads into the quaint, quintessentially New England village of Damariscotta, then snakes through the downtown, goes out past town limits, and runs through a rural area of open fields. When the pavement turns to dirt and the trees grow dense, it begins to sink in, just how strange it is that one of the fathers of British synthpop music lives out here in the woods on the Maine coast.
Clarke steps out of his four-wheel-drive Jeep Laredo and walks out back, beyond his cedar-shingled cottage with the plastic toy lawnmower on the front porch, down a steeply inclined wooded path, brushing aside branches and stepping over downed pine trees. At the bottom of the path the view opens up, and there it is: the gently flowing Damariscotta River, a rocky shore, an island you can walk to at low tide.
"Nice spot, huh?" he says.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ARTISTS/ILLUSTARTION TT
This secluded slice of Maine paradise is the last place one expects to find him living. Clarke, 47, is one of the founding members of the synth-rock band Depeche Mode and the guy who wrote one of the most recognizable songs of the early 1980s, Just Can't Get Enough. He left the band after one album and quickly formed Yaz with the singer Alison Moyet, recording two albums that generated such hits as Don't Go and Situation. In 1985 he formed his most lasting partnership, Erasure, with the flamboyant singer Andy Bell. The odd-couple duo — Clarke is straight, quiet, and introspective; Bell is gay, outgoing, and talkative — has put together an impressive string of discs and hits over the past 22 years, including their best-known song, A Little Respect, which quickly became a gay-pride anthem.
Erasure's 13th studio album, Light at the End of the World, arrived Tuesday. Like most of its predecessors, it is very much music of the city — tight pop songs with pulsating dance beats and hook-filled melodies carved with drum machines, electronic keyboards, and computers. So it is a little startling to learn not only that the album was recorded in a house in Maine but that Clarke has put down roots here, making his home year-round in a tiny town an hour north of Portland.
"He's a real outdoors guy," said Erasure's manager and agent, Michael Pagnotta. "A lot of people don't know that about Vince."
Small-town boy
Clarke left his home in suburban London four years ago to move to New York to be near his girlfriend, Tracy Hurley, who was a publicist working for the company that represented Erasure. They married and lived in New York for a couple of years but grew tired of the city. They had vacationed in Maine and decided to settle there, renting an apartment on the Portland waterfront for a year before buying their 20-year-old house just outside Damariscotta.
"I grew up in a small town. I lived in London for quite a few years, but I never really got on there either. I think you always carry with you that small-town mentality," Clarke says. "We were going to live farther up north, but then we had the baby, so it became a question of having to be near a hospital."
The baby. Clarke's devotion to his 18-month-old son, Oscar, drives many of his decisions these days and dominates his time and attention. "We just listened to the Wiggles, and every Sesame Street DVD out there," he says. "The great thing about having a boy is I get to have all the toys I wanted when I was a kid and couldn't afford, all the radio-controlled stuff."
Over lunch at a nearby cafe and later on the shore behind his house, Clarke talks incessantly about his child, whose babysitter was pulling him along the dirt road in a red wagon. ("This is a great place for kids to grow up in — it's a wonderland for a child," he says, playing off the title of Erasure's first album, Wonderland.) Tracy was out buying lobsters for that night's dinner.
Playing with his little boy, hiking in the woods, preparing lobster dinners, sitting on the rocks at Pemaquid Point — this is not quite the wild life one would expect of a rock star. But those who know him well aren't surprised that this is where Clarke's life has taken him.
"I think it's quite a typical Vince thing to do," Bell, the singing half of Erasure, says over the phone from his home in London. "Before he met his American wife, he was going to build a house in the UK, out there in the middle of nowhere, 8km from the nearest pub. That's what he's like. He's kind of a hermit."
Clarke and Bell are about to hit the road for two months; Erasure is part of the True Colors Tour — which arrives in Boston with Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry, and several other artists on June 16 — and then the duo headlines a tour of its own. While the tour will take him away from his family, making the album kept him right near home. Clarke and Bell rented a room in Portland and spent a month writing songs there, then they rented a house in Falmouth, a few minutes north of Portland, and converted it into a temporary studio.
"We put in a computer, a couple of speakers, and a microphone basically — that's kind of all you need now," Clarke says. "It was a really nice atmosphere, just being in a nice place rather than being stuck in a studio."
'A whole new world'
Sarah's Cafe, across the bridge in Wiscasset, gets a lot of locals for lunch on a weekday earlier this month. People know one another. The thin, small-framed man with the shaved head, brown corduroy jacket, small gold earrings, and thick British accent piques some interest — necks crane, eyes dart to his table now and again — but no one seems to recognize him. He's clearly from away, as they say in Maine, but no one here has any clue that they're eating next to the man responsible for such big hits as Just Can't Get Enough and A Little Respect.
"People pretty much leave you alone," he says. "The neighbors — they're so nice. You know how on films when people come around with baskets of gifts when you move into a house? Well, I always thought that was just in movies. But they did! We moved in, and one neighbor came around that day to say hello. The next day there was a basket of flowers at the door."
Now he goes out fishing on his neighbor's boat, and many of the others who live on his private road — most of them are retired, Clarke says — plan to make the trek to Boston next month for Erasure's performance at the Bank of America Pavilion.
"We know them pretty well now," he says. "We've been around their houses, most of them, for dinner and stuff. And then we have the association meetings, the road association, to talk about snowplowing. It's a whole new world for me."
For the most part, though, the town doesn't realize it has a rock star in its midst. The owner of the Puffins Nest gift shop in downtown Damariscotta says she's never heard of Clarke. Neither have the four teenage girls drinking fruit smoothies outside the bookstore across the street. The employees at the gas station and mini-market near Clarke's house are pretty sure they've seen a small bald guy with a British accent filling up a Jeep, but they had no idea he's some sort of celebrity.
"I think I know exactly who you're talking about," says Cathy Hatch, who works there. She and the owner, Greg Hanley, are surprised to learn he's some sort of famous musician. "Technopop?" Hatch says. "We don't know technopop."
What about Just Can't Get Enough? Has anyone here heard the song?
"Ohhhhh," she says. "Oh, sure."
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