ESG - Erase You

I read about ESG long before I ever heard them.

There was a really good retrospective of them in (I think) Electra fanzine in the late 1990s, which I devoured enthusiastically but never really followed up on.

Then, one night at the Cornerhouse in about 2011, I heard a slow but insistent, stripped back drum sound and slow but plaintive vocals coming over the PA system, and I turned to my friend David Wilkinson and asked "What's that?"

"That" he replied "Is the slinky sound of ESG"

Spotify did the rest basically, and I was downloading by then, so I bought the song ('You're No Good') as a download, then spent a few years streaming Dance To The Best of ESG, which my sister got me on CD for my birthday this year.

'Erase You' is stroppier than 'You're No Good', but both of them capture that post punk/funk moment in the early 80s in New York, parallel to early hip hop.