“A Little Respect” by Erasure

"A Little Respect" was the tenth Erasure single, pulled from The Innocents, the duo's third album, in 1988, and it's the song where their machines and Andy Bell's voice meet in perfect balance. Bell and Vince Clarke wrote it as a plea to a lover for a little kindness and consideration, and they dress it in wall-to-wall synthesizers, then cut through them with the unlikely strum of an acoustic guitar. The kicker is the chorus, where Bell flies up into falsetto and the whole thing turns from pleading to soaring. Stephen Hague produced it, with Bob Kraushaar engineering, and Mute put it out.

It went to number four in the UK and number 14 in the US, their second top-20 hit in a row there, and reached number two on the American dance club chart. It has long since become one of their signature songs, reworked by a parade of remixers and even strummed as a country tune on the live album On the Road to Nashville.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.