Andy Bell in Portland: Ten Crowns, Queer Joy, and a Setlist That Time-Travels
When Andy Bell walked onstage in Portland, Oregon, it felt less like the start of a concert and more like a coronation.
The Erasure frontman is in the middle of his first-ever solo North American tour, built around his 2025 album Ten Crowns and a four-disc box set, The Crown Jewels, arriving via Crown Recordings.
Backed by producer/DJ Dave Audé on keys and electronics, Jerry Fuentes on guitar, Sarah Tomek on drums, and Chelsea King-Blank on vocals, Bell turned a chilly Portland night into a glitter-lit celebration of resilience, queer joy, and synth-pop history.
“Always” for a New Generation
For a lot of us in the room, one song carried a very specific kind of nostalgia: Erasure’s 1994 hit “Always.” Originally released on I Say I Say I Say, the track has had a strange second life thanks to Robot Unicorn Attack, the cult Adult Swim mobile game that looped “Always” as its endlessly replayable soundtrack.
That game turned a 90s synth-pop anthem into a shared inside joke for an entirely new generation. So when the opening notes of “Always” floated out over Portland, you could feel two eras colliding—original Erasure die-hards and fans who first heard the song while steering a unicorn through pixelated rainbows all singing the same chorus like they’d grown up in the same bedroom.
No rust, no irony, no distance: the song still hits as hard in 2025 as it did on cassette, CD, or a tiny phone speaker.
A Setlist That Time-Travels
Bell’s current Ten Crowns tour is essentially a living mixtape of his career. Typical nights weave new material like “Breaking Thru the Interstellar,” “Don’t Cha Know,” “Godspell,” “For Today,” “Dance for Mercy,” “Put Your Empathy on Ice,” and show-closer “Thank You” in between a stack of Erasure essentials: “Blue Savannah,” “Sometimes,” “Drama!,” “Chains of Love,” “Love to Hate You,” “Victim of Love,” “Oh l’amour,” and, of course, “A Little Respect.”
On this tour, Bell also folds in a shimmering cover of “Xanadu,” originally by Olivia Newton-John and ELO, which has quickly become a fan-favorite moment and now appears on The Crown Jewels as a studio track.
What’s striking in person is how seamlessly the new songs sit next to the classics. Ten Crowns leans into dance, gospel colors, and big melodic choruses, co-written and produced with longtime collaborator Dave Audé, with whom Bell previously scored two Billboard Dance Club #1s (“Aftermath (Here We Go)” and “True Original”).
Live, those songs don’t feel like “solo detours”—they feel like the natural next chapters of the Erasure story.
Inside The Crown Jewels
If Ten Crowns was the spark, The Crown Jewels is the full constellation. The limited-edition 4-CD box set (4,000 copies worldwide) comes in a gold-foiled box with a 50-page booklet, new sleeve notes, and candid Sean Black photography that matches Bell’s larger-than-life stage persona with something more intimate and human.
Each disc plays a different angle on the same universe:
Disc 1 – Ten Crowns Expanded
The original album plus previously unreleased tracks, including the studio version of “Xanadu.” Highlights include Debbie Harry duet “Heart’s A Liar,” BBC Radio 2-playlist favorite “Don’t Cha Know,” and the cosmic opener “Breaking Thru The Interstellar.”
Disc 2 – Ten Crowns Remixed
A full remix album, with a different remixer tackling each track. Vince Clarke’s reflective, future-leaning rework of “Dance For Mercy” is a standout—Bell himself has called it “a masterclass in synth futurism.”
Disc 3 – Ten Crowns Extended
Dave Audé stretches each song into club-length versions, doubling down on the record’s gospel-on-the-dance-floor DNA.
Disc 4 – Ten Crowns Live
Captures the current tour in full color, including “Xanadu,” and documents how these songs transform when they’re bouncing off a roomful of voices instead of studio walls.
Forty Years of Pop, Still Looking Forward
Part of what makes this moment feel so charged is the timing. Ten Crowns arrived in May 2025—ten years after Bell’s last solo record—and at a point when Erasure are gearing up to celebrate their 40th anniversary and working on a new album with Vince Clarke.
Across those four decades, Erasure have sold over 20 million albums, landed five UK Number One studio albums, and lodged songs like “Sometimes,” “A Little Respect,” and “Always” permanently into the global pop bloodstream.
This year, Bell also received a Pride ICON award at the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe 2025, honoring his visibility and impact as a queer artist who never toned himself down to make other people comfortable.
That history—fighting for joy in eras that were anything but joyful—hangs in the air when he lifts his arms and leads a room of people in a chorus about empathy, gratitude, or simple, defiant love.
Portland, Up on Its Feet
From the first synth swell to the final notes of “A Little Respect,” the Portland crowd never really sat down. The room felt multigenerational: older fans who’d followed Erasure since the Wonderland days, younger fans who met Bell through The Neon or Ten Crowns, and a surprising number who clearly discovered “Always” via a certain rainbow-soaked phone game.
By the time “Always” arrived, the venue had shifted from concert to communal karaoke. People were dancing in the aisles, strangers harmonizing on the chorus, phones in the air—not to capture the perfect Instagram clip, but because everyone wanted a souvenir of the exact moment their teenage bedroom soundtrack suddenly became real, loud, and right in front of them.
Final Thoughts
That’s the magic of this tour, and of The Crown Jewels era as a whole: it doesn’t ask you to choose between nostalgia and now. It lets you have both. The past is honored, the present is glittering, and the future—if Bell’s voice has anything to say about it—is still very much set to a four-on-the-floor beat.
For Music Coast, catching Andy Bell in Portland felt less like ticking a legend off the bucket list and more like witnessing a new chapter open in real time. Ten Crowns may be the title, but nights like this make it clear: he’s nowhere near done adding jewels.
