Before You Make A Fool Out Of Love

Erasure “Stop!”

“Stop!” is a song about being separated from the one you love, but the music isn’t even slightly melancholic in the way you’d expect with that subject matter. Vince Clarke’s arrangement is extremely bright, bubbly, and full of pep. It’s three minutes of undiluted joy and enthusiasm, with Andy Bell vowing that he and his partner will be reunited and then nothing will ever tear them apart. The energy of the song is in this defiance of circumstance, and in the anticipation of them being together again, which he takes to be a foregone conclusion. He’s basing everything on faith, which makes some contextual sense – given that this is a song by a gay artist in the late 80s, I think there’s a pretty good chance this is really about being separated by death. I’m not sure if Bell intended that – the lyrics nod more in the direction of something less morbid – but I’m sure plenty of his audience interpreted it that way in the moment.

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