Alison Moyet is going back to her electronic past on her new tour, as she tells Charles Hutchinson.

ALISON Moyet harks back to her Yazoo past on her new record The Minutes, recalling her chart debut as the Alf half of the Essex electronic duo with Vince Clarke.

She follows up the May release of her first album in six years with 24 autumn shows that will again nod to her fledgling Eighties days when she plays York Barbican on Wednesday.

“This time it’s an electronic tour,” says the 52-year-old Basildon blues and soul singer and songwriter.

“The album is based around electronic music and it’ll allow me to do songs live I’ve not done in years from Yazoo and my first two solo albums. I’ve been doing Yazoo’s Don’t Go and Situation and I’ve got the chance to do more intricate songs too.”

Expect computers and screens on stage, probably two or three musicians, maybe some backing singers, predicted Alison, when she spoke to What’s On while still formulating the tour’s format for her return to York for the first time since she her Grand Opera House show on her 25 Years Revisited Tour in December 2009.

Present material from The Minutes will be as important in Wednesday’s show as her past deeds, including this week’s new single, Changeling, the latest track to be lifted from an album produced by her co-writer, Guy Sigsworth.

The songs not only have subtle parallels with her synth-pop past in Yazoo but also take in elements of high-end pop smashes, R&B, modern club sounds and electronic experimentation.

“I’ve always loved singing to electronic arrangements but it was a case of finding the right person to work with when I’m not good at networking – and luckily I was introduced to Guy,” says Alison.

“I lost heart with electronic producers in the 1980s and 1990s, but Guy is a serious musician who started out as a harpsichordist at Cambridge University, and now that technology has moved on so far and the palette is so broad, that means a lot of ‘soundscaping’ could go into making this album.”

What a contrast with Yazoo’s nascent electronics.

“When we first started, we couldn’t play chords, so they had to be suggested by the melodies,” says Alison.

Just as Yazoo were a breath of fresh air when emerging with Only You in April 1982, so The Minutes bursts rebelliously out of the pigeonhole made for female singers of a certain age. “This has turned out to be a really good time for me, because the album goes against how women in pop are represented in their 50s; how all we get asked to do is covers’ albums.

“Though I’m happy to sing other people’s songs, I wanted to write my own songs this time because I’m aware that opportunity will eventually close.”

Guy and Alison did not rush the recording process. “He did the album in his down time so we spread it over three years and there was never a time when we said we will make this ‘type’ of album,” she says.

“It allowed for truly creative ideas to come in rather than having an A&R man in my ear saying ‘Sing Etta James songs’. Do you really think I could better Etta James?!”

The Minutes also marked Alison’s move to Cooking Vinyl, the English label home to the mature likes of Billy Bragg, Counting Crows, Madness, Ron Sexsmith, The Proclaimers and Suzanne Vega. “They’re a proper, bona fide label,” says Alison. “This is a different century now when there isn’t the excess in the music industry that there was in the Eighties, but I’m lucky that I can make decisions out of the creative processes rather than having bills to think about,” she says.

The album title was chosen for its resonance. “The whole point of The Minutes is that you get to our age and you realise this ideal dream that has been spun to you as a child has gone and you feel cheated, but the truth is that we still have sublime minutes,” says Alison.

“It can be all sorts of things, like struggling with a verse for three months and then finding the right couplet, and that moment when your kids aren’t behaving like an a*** for a minute, or that great time when you go for a walk with your partner.”

Talking of walking, Yazoo have probably walked off into the sunset for the last time after their reunion tour in 2008. “Is it the end? I think so… not that I wouldn’t have done that tour, but I feel very much like I was Vince’s transformative relationship between Depeche Mode and Erasure, and his fidelity will always be with Andy [Erasure’s Andy Bell].”

• Alison Moyet plays York Barbican on Wednesday; doors open at 6.30pm for 7.45pm start. Tickets update: still available on 0844 854 2757 and at yorkbarbican.co.uk