All Through
The Years

This is a researched history of Erasure — the records, the tours, the charts, the story of a band now forty years into a career nobody quite expected to last this long. It is also the story of the fan community that grew up alongside them: the newsletters, the conventions, the friendships that have lasted just as long.

Running to more than 500 pages, All Through the Years moves between two registers, sometimes on the same page: sometimes writing as a historian, setting out what happened and when; sometimes writing as the person who was actually in the room.

“What I set out to write was two things at once: a proper history of the band, and an honest account of how they’ve shaped my own adult life, almost entirely by accident. Without Erasure I wouldn’t have met my wife — which means my son wouldn’t exist either. That’s not a small thing to owe a pop group.”

It doesn’t require you to know every record to matter to you. It’s a book about a group of songs, certainly — but just as much about the community, the friendships, and the ordinary accumulated life that gathered around those songs over forty years.