The Assembly ended up being a one-off idea, which is a shame, because this turned out to be one of the very last great singles of the synth-pop era. The idea behind the Assembly was that Vince Clarke was going to work with a revolving door of singers performing his own material. It made perfect sense, since his brief tenure in Depeche Mode (writing nearly all of their debut album Speak and Spell but leaving before the band managed to record its followup) and the short-lived duo Yazoo (with the underrated powerhouse singer Alison Moyet, who never again sounded as good as she did on their two albums Upstairs At Eric's and You and Me Both) suggested that maybe he wasn't the easiest guy to work with. But the Assembly only managed this one single with singer Feargal Sharkey before being consigned to the scrapheap of ideas. Sharkey, fresh from the recently dissolved Undertones, sings the song in the same Northern Irish Soul Man mode that he's used on The Sin of Pride, but it's a better fit here than it had been on that album. This song also easily beats the crap out of anything on Sharkey's two utterly wretched solo albums. While Sharkey went on to the ignominy of those albums, Clarke hooked up with an unknown singer named Andy Bell with whom he formed a new duo called Erasure; improbably, considering the instability of Clarke's earlier career, they're still releasing albums today.

I bought this 12" single from the cheap bins at University Records in Lubbock around 1986, to go with my U.K. 7" import copy of same. Black Images was local college station KTXT's soul and R&B show. That Sire's promo department pitched the single there instead of to the late-night new wave show The Outer Limits is probably a big hint as to why this single stiffed.

-Stewart Mason