I don’t make any secret of the fact that I think the sun shines out of Vince Clarke’s bottom, so imagine how chuffed I was to see an advert today for a Yazoo tour.

It is billed as “Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet Reconnected”, and coincides with a 4-disc box set to be released in May. Since Yazoo only produced two albums, both when vinyl was the dominant medium and 45-minutes the average album length, wondered why four discs are necessary. A little check on the web and I found the answer on the official Yazoo website: there will be both original albums remastered in both stereo and 5.1 mixes, a disc of re-mixes and b-sides, and a DVD with promo videos from the original singles and some new interviews.

80’s Essex electro-pop is ideal for 5.1 mixes, the special editions of the Depeche Mode albums is proof of that, so I am looking forward to hearing Upstairs At Eric’s and You And Me Both in surround sound.

The last time I saw Erasure play I thought about how good it would be have Vince play a couple of the old Yazoo songs. Its a waste to have written some cracking tunes like Don’t Go, Situation and Bring Your Love Down and have them not performed at all. I even went so far as to think it would be neat to have Alf come on to sing them, but never really expected such a thing to be likely.

In retrospect this was a reunion just waiting to happen, and its good to see it not happening as part of one of those 80’s ‘just the hits’ package tours. Yazoo were always a bit experimental, with more to them than just the singles, and some of their best tunes were never hits – or even released as singles. I will really have to think about getting tickets for the Brighton show in June.