The Assembly was an English synthpop project that Vince Clarke and Eric Radcliffe started in 1983. Clarke had gone from success to success with Yazoo and Depeche Mode, and Radcliffe had contributed to both of those bands as a producer and sound engineer.

The duo intended to produce a synthpop album with a different vocalist on each track. Their first collab was with Irish pop/rock singer Feargal Sharkey of The Undertones. In October of 1983, they released their lead single: “Never Never”. It went to number 4 in the UK hit parade, and charted highly in Europe and Australasia. It stayed in the British charts for nearly three months, and is now widely regarded as a synthpop classic.

The single was distributed in 7" and 12" versions, each with “Never Never” (written by Clarke) on the A-side, and an instrumental called “Stop / Start” (written by Clarke and Radcliffe) on the B-side.
There was a music video for “Never Never” as well. But the album? Sadly, it never materialised. The two had other projects and ideas in the works, and The Assembly fell by the wayside.

In addition to the creation of a synthpop hit, Clarke and Radcliffe’s collaboration also yielded Reset Records, a label that released eight more synthpop singles between 1983 and 1987. For the first two years, all of Reset’s singles were produced by Clarke and/or Radcliffe; but, in 1985 Clarke pressed reset again and started a new band, Erasure, with Andy Bell.

As things wound down at Reset, Radcliffe, too, turned his attention to Erasure. In 1987, his remixes of “The Soldier’s Return” (the Machinery mix and the Return of the Radical Radcliffe mix) were released as B-sides to “Victim of Love”, as was his Japanese mix of “If I Could”. He even teamed-up with Clarke one more time: to co-produce a remix of “Leave Me to Bleed” for The Two Ring Circus, an Erasure remix album that Mute put out the following November.

The days of this duo were coming to a close, but before Radcliffe rode into the sunset, he handed down “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (The Dangerous mix)”, a truly excellent remix of Vince Clarke’s cover of Ennio Morricone’s most famous composition. Both cover and remix debuted as B-sides to “Chains of Love” in May 1988; nine years later, Clarke brought the Morricone theme back one more time for the bridge in “Treasure” (an album track from Erasure’s 1997 album Cowboy).

As it happens, Erasure is the project where Clarke found a permanent home, and he has been collaborating with singer/lyricist Andy Bell ever since.

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