I’m a huge Erasure fan, for which I am grateful to my ex. The band’s first real success was with Sometimes in 1985, the year after I left school, but at the time my leanings were more rock than pop. I definitely danced to their stuff at student parties but I didn’t have any of it in my music collection.
I met D in 1990. He was a huge fan of the band and had pretty much everything they had released to and I soon became as big a fan as him – maybe a bigger one. We bought everything Andy and Vince released and saw them in concert several times, starting with their outdoor gig at Milton Keynes in 1990. We also saw them twice in one week in 1992 at the Hammersmith Odeon after D. won tickets on Capital Radio after we’d already been!
I’ve chosen Stop! from the Crackers International EP (released for Christmas 1988) as it was a big part of my path to fandom. Bizarrely I didn’t know the EP at all until D introduced me to it despite it’s success at the time of its release.