Oh L'Amour by Erasure

When synthpop legend Vince Clark teamed up with newcomer Andy Bell to form Erasure, they would become one of the most enduring collaborations of the genre, and one of the most successful and iconic. It seems odd looking back at it now that their first releases from 1985 and 1986 were actually commercial failures… the album Wonderland charting low and the three singles charting low in the UK and not at all in the US. The singles did get some play in the dance clubs, and made some headway on the dance charts, however. And as Erasure later became big news, starting with The Circus in the UK, and especially with The Innocents in all regions, Erasure's back catalog became a hot item, and their club anthem "Oh L'Amour" became extremely well known, well loved, and well played. It's fair to say that it's become the iconic Erasure song, actually. For me, in the later 1980s, three or four years after it was initially released, "Oh L'Amour" became a fixture of my high school musical experience; I listened to it a lot, I danced to it at almost every dance I went to, and it seemed to become almost ubiquitous. And I still stumble across new remixes of it repeatedly; it's become a staple of the 80s scene, and quite well remembered. For that matter, Erasure seems to have been one of the synthpop bands that weathered the synthpop crash relatively well, continuing to put out reasonably successful releases for many years before the change in taste finally caught up to them.

The song was later re-released as part of a greatest hits compilation, and charted very well at that time. This remix below is actually one of those later remixes, but it's among my favorites.