Affable Blancmange frontman Neil Arthur is having a pinch-me moment. Not so much because he has recently re-signed to London Records after a decade as a fully independent artist but because it’s 40 years since Blancmange had their first chart hits on the label.

Yet 40 years can easily pass in a blur when you are as productive as Arthur. Blancmange’s initial purple patch, when they racked up booming synth-pop hits such as ‘Living On The Ceiling’, ‘Don’t Tell Me’ and ‘Blind Vision’, only lasted until the mid-80s when Arthur and his musical partner Stephen Luscombe chose to split amicably and accept that their ephemeral pop adventure was over, on their terms.

‘I was completely flabbergasted that “Living On The Ceiling” was a big hit,’ says Arthur. ‘When we signed to London we were pretty experimental in many respects but we were into dance music and thought “lets give it a go”. We just embraced it, had a bit of a run of it and then you go on to other things.’

For Arthur, this included a solo album and soundtrack work for documentaries. However, Blancmange’s music lingered long with their loyal fanbase and they reformed just over a decade ago at a time when many of their synth-toting peers were also discovering that classic pop music’s sell-by date was ever extendable.

They released comeback album, Blanc Burn, in 2011 but shortly afterwards Luscombe was forced to step back from the band for health reasons. Blancmange essentially became Arthur’s solo outlet, releasing a steady flow of albums, including a re-record of their debut, Happy Families, a series of instrumental records called Nil By Mouth, and the forthcoming London Records release, Private View.

‘In a way, I’m off the leash,’ he says. ‘I can just do it when I want to do it. The creative process is when I’m happiest, getting stuff off my chest, observing things, finding a way of extrapolating and making some kind of sense of it in a Blancmange world; a mixture between fact and fiction, to have that ambiguity in a lyric. If you explained everything about a song it would be like the artist standing next to the painting and telling you everything about it, so there’s nothing left for you to think about it.’

Arthur is a great advocate of simplicity (he says he only uses two of six strings on his guitar) and of letting go and moving forwards, possibly a legacy of the tight turnarounds in soundtrack work.

This has freed him up to pursue other electronica projects, including Fader with Blancmange producer Benge and Near Future with Brighton-based musician Jez Bernholz, plus a forthcoming covers collaboration with Erasure’s Vince Clarke, about which Arthur will only say ‘we’ve had a lot of fun putting that together’. Arthur also has more than enough material for further Nil By Mouth releases, and the next Blancmange album.

‘It’s lasted a lot longer second time round,’ he reflects. ‘I still keep in touch with Stephen. I send him the stuff, he has a listen and he gives me a kick up the backside. There’s a song on the last Fader album called “Serpentine”; all the songs are named after paint colours Benge was considering using while he was redecorating his house during lockdown. “Serpentine” is the story of a day I spent with Stephen swimming in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, just me and him. We had such a laugh and I thought it was worth documenting as a memory of a lovely day spent with a great old mate.’

Private View is released by London Records on Friday 30 September.