Erasure | Sometimes Tour, Volksbildungsheim Frankfurt
When talking to a friend to learn what he still remembered of the shows we visited together we quickly started talking about Frankfurts Volksbildungsheim and the great times we had attending shows by Erasure, Nitzer Ebb, and Front 242.
In the end, I only saw three shows at that venue, namely shows of the three aforementioned bands, and yet I would say that musically speaking the Volksbildungsheim was our ‘living room’ in the late eighties and early nineties. As mentioned before, great times!
If you ask the question, how bands like Erasure and Nitzer Ebb go together the answer is simple. For us these were part of the Mute Records family, used synthesizers, we liked their sounds & songs and after all, Vince Clark was a founding member of Depeche Mode. For us all good reasons to go and see Erasure live.
When I think about it now, Erasure was not just the band Erasure, they were (and still are) Vince Clark & Andy Bell, there was probably a reason why it was printed on the ticket like that.
The show took place in April 1987, the respective long player ‘Circus’ was released just a month prior to that. Hence the ‘Sometimes’ tour was in reality the tour promoting the ‘Circus’ album. Produced by Flood (Mark Ellis), to this day I consider this being one of their best albums.
I can’t find a setlist for the show in Frankfurt but all the setlists I did find for shows in Germany show the same songs and order. I think chances are high that the show we visited had the same setlist and that would mean from the ‘Circus’ album we heard that night ‘Safety in Numbers’ (an extract from the song ‘Spiralling’), ‘Victim of Love’, ‘It Doesn’t Have to Be’, ‘Don’t Dance’, ‘Leave Me to Bleed’, ‘If I Could’, ‘The Circus’, ‘Hideaway’, ‘Sometimes’ and ‘Spiralling’.
In sum that would have been the entire ‘Circus’ album except for ‘Sexuality’. Together with songs from their first album ‘Wonderland’, this is a very nice list of songs!
Although it doesn’t contain any information at this point in time, I’m still posting the link to the (empty) setlist on setlist.fm below, maybe one day somebody finds a copy of the setlist lying around somewhere and updates the information on the web. That would be really great, but until that day I would say that assuming the list was the same as for the other German shows is a pretty good guess.
I don’t own a tour book of the ‘Sometimes’ tour, probably none exists in the first place, at least I could not find any information about it. But that evening I picked up a flyer at the venue which should have a lasting effect on my music-listening habits. It was promoting a new single on 7″ and 12″ by a band from the Mute Records label I had not heard of before:
This would open up a whole new world of electronic music for me.
As always, I would love to hear from you. If you also saw Erasure back then in Frankfurt or maybe have any memories of the Volksbildungsheim, leave a comment and I will make an effort to respond.
By the way, to this day I’m wondering who the support act of the show was. Two guys, a singer and a guy behind the electronics, wearing a hat and smoking – if I recall correctly. Initially, I thought they must be the band advertised on the flyer, Nitzer Ebb. However, NE was still 100% Electro-Punk at the time, “That Total Age” only to be released in May 1987, a month after the Erasure show. In hindsight. that support act clearly wasn’t Electro-Punk.
Links:
Erasure
The evenings setlist on setlist.fm
Post last updated on 16. September 2021