The artist formerly known as Black is back. Colin Vearncombe has just released his first new album in six years, a beautiful collection of melodic and care -worn pop called 'The Accused'. It is his first release under his own name, and follows a long break from a music industry that has rarely served him well. Vearncombe is the writer and voice behind the melancholy 'Wonderful Life', a classic 80s single that recently popped up again on a TV ad.
"It looks like I've written a song that most people in this country know, but very few of them could tell you who wrote it or sang it," says Vearncombe. "'Wonderful Life' is by far the biggest breadwinner in my catalogue, and it has given me a certain amount of financial freeedom. Ad people love to associate with success and any hit record is fair game. And when one's got a title like that then it's a sitting duck for them. I've no real idea why people love it so much, but they do. It looks like it's become one of those evergreens - it just never goes away. When I wrote it, I made the rather immature error of being sarcastic - you can't do sarcasm in pop. Irony you can do, sarcasm, no. But it didn't matter. People superimposed their own expectations of what it was about over it, and got out of it what they wanted."
'Wonderful Life' was the commercial high water mark for Black, going top 5 in Britain and charting all over the world. But after various record company hassles, and four albums whose increasing commercial acclaim were in inverse proportion to their sales, Vearncombe took a break. And, as he explains, it was a trip to Ireland that helped kick start 'The Accused'. "A couple of years ago I went to Inishboffin, where a producer friend of mine, Mike Hedges, has a cottage. And, being Ireland, I got hoodwinked into one of those sessions in a pub.
"It was terrifying, but I did it, and the next day it was like you'd given everyone a present. They would come up and chat to you and I got a bit of a taste for it. I thought 'If I can do that I can do it anywhere' because I was always very nervous of small audiences. "Five thousand, no problem - five, a big problem." 'The Accused' is out on a small independent label, but Vearncombe enthusiastically reckons it is his best yet.
"It's been recorded for about a year, but I still listen to it, and some of the songs still give me a thrill." Without the promotional muscle of a major label, his biggest problem now is getting his music heard. But he believes he has a chance, saying: "The internet is changing things beyond belief. You're no longer limited to what people have had to kiss **** to get shelf space for in the big chain stores. It begs the question, the one that everyone's trying to answer at the moment, of how you market to people. And no-one really knows yet. Record companies know that their days are numbered but if they embrace the internet too soon then they will endanger their relationship, such as it is, with the retailers. I believe Prince has apparently just had his most financially lucrative year ever - and that includes the 15 million sales in the year of Purple Rain - and this is from a supposed has been. Think about it - you have to sell maybe 25% of the volume of copies to make the same amount of money you would from a major. It gets more and more attractive. If I can get a database of 30,000 names, which should be achievable, then I can fund my next record which is always the aim for me."