The duo will warm up with a performance September 1 at the Electric Picnic Music Festival at Stradbally Hall in Ireland. Other artists on the bill include the Beastie Boys, Jarvis Cocker, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and !!!. Ticket details and other info on the festival are available at www.electricpicnic.ie.

Vince and Andy will kick off their tour in earnest with a run through the U.K. beginning September 3 at the New Theatre in Oxford and will make 17 stops throughout England, Scotland and Wales including York (September 5), Glasgow (September 8), Manchester (September 13), Bristol (September 19) and Cardiff (September 22) before finishing up at Royal Albert Hall in London on September 25.

Tickets for all shows are currently on sale through the band’s web site or at www.LiveNation.co.uk/Erasure.

The band’s web site promises dates for the rest of Europe will be released in the near future, and singer Andy Bell told Pollstar that plans for a tour of the U.S. and Canada are “in the pipeline.”

The True Colors Tour kicks off Gay & Lesbian Pride month June 8 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas and will make stops in 15 cities around the country including Denver, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco through June. Besides Lauper and Erasure, the roster includes Deborah Harry, The Dresden Dolls, The Misshapes, host Margaret Cho and special appearances on certain dates by artists including Rufus Wainwright, Indigo Girls and Rosie O’Donnell.

The tour is the brainchild of Cyndi Lauper, who wanted to do something to give back to the Gay and Lesbian community for the love and support they have shown her throughout her career.

Light, due for release May 21 in the U.K. and May 22 in the U.S., is Erasure’s first album of new material since 2005’s Nightbird, which was the follow-up to the duo’s well-received 2003 covers album, Other People’s Songs.

Bell told Pollstar he was glad that he and Clarke didn’t stick with his original vision for Songs, which was to cover all Phil Spector recordings.

“Under the circumstances, I’m quite pleased that it didn’t turn out to be a whole album of his songs,” he said.

He said it’s possible that fans will hear other cover albums by the band in the future.

“There are so many great songs out there. I wouldn’t mind doing some kind of show-tunes or ’40s torch songs [album] – I’d like to do something like that.”

Bell also said that he and Clarke have been toying with the idea of recording an album of nursery rhymes for several years.

“Just before we did the new album, we were kind of thinking about it,” he said. “Vince was sending me ideas for songs, and we’d done probably about five tracks already. We did a narration of the ‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde, which is really sweet.

“We were just about to get some deal, and it fell through, so we kind of put it on the back burner for a while, but it’s definitely something that we’d like to do.”