“You can change the chapter, you can change the book, but the story remains the same if you’d take a look”. So runs the chorus line from ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo, an unexpectedly prophetic lyric looking forward to the formation of Doublespeak. For here is a supergroup founded in the 2020s but rooted almost entirely in the early development of electronic music.
As supergroups go, this one is entirely logical – and in fact, the only surprise about the Orwellian Doublespeak is that it took this long for them to form. Electronic music royalty Vince Clarke (not just Yazoo, but Depeche Mode and Erasure) and Neil Arthur (Blancmange) have been good friends since the early 1980s, when making your own pop music was fast becoming a pleasure…