A pop song that asks and does not shout
A bright chord sequence opens like a window in the morning, Vince Clarke’s machines already smiling, and Andy Bell comes in with a request so plain it could be missed, which is the daring of it.
A Little Respect was written by Clarke and Bell for The Innocents, recorded in 1988 and produced by Stephen Hague, the man who knew how to make a British synth duo sound like a radio record without sanding off the voice. Bell sings as if the feeling were urgent and the manners still mattered. The lyric asks for kindness in a love that is going wrong, and it asks, in the same sentences, for something larger: to be treated as a person. In 1988 that second meaning was not a press release. Bell was out. The song did not stop the track to announce it. It put the request in a chorus you could sing without a speech, which is why it reached No. 4 in Britain and the American top twenty, and why it has been sung since in rooms that needed exactly that sentence.
The arrangement is Clarke at his most generous. The bass moves, the chords lift on the chorus instead of ducking, and there is space for Bell to open the vowel on respect until it becomes the hook. Hague keeps the vocal forward and the machines clean. Nothing sulks. Erasure had already had hits. This one felt like a handshake that also happened to be a principle. Live, Bell conducts the crowd through the title as if it were both a dance move and a demand. The demand has not expired. People still shout it back at him, some because it is a tune, some because the tune said the thing.
I wrote it during the Section 28 period and I had a feeling of being fed up of all these people telling me what to do, telling me how to live my life.
(Andy Bell, interview)
The record sits in a year of house music and stadium rock and does not imitate either. It is a song, in the old sense, with a bridge and a plea and a singer who can make a high note feel like good news. Clarke, who had written Just Can’t Get Enough and Only You and then this, kept proving that leaving bands was not the same as leaving melody. Bell gave the melodies a body. Together on The Innocents they made their most complete album, and this track is the one strangers know, the one that sounds like sunshine and is, if you listen, a correction.
What remains is the scale of the ask. Not the world, not a revolution announced in the first line, only a little respect, which turns out to be enormous when it is withheld. The music refuses bitterness. That refusal is political in the way pop can be political, by making dignity danceable. Bell’s voice at the peak is not angry. It is clear. Clarke’s chords agree with him. Between the brightness and the request, the song has stayed useful, which is a rarer fate than being famous, and, for a record about how to treat someone, the right one.
