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MODUS
OPERANDUM
[The
Face, February 1989. Words:
John McCready. Pictures: Anton Corbijn / Bart Everly.]
"The DJ cuts from The Beat Club's "Security" to Front 242 to Black Riot and Depeche Mode's "Strangelove". I change station and Noel's "Silent Morning", a hugely-influential Latin hip hop track, knocks me sideways. Suddenly, it is unmistakeably Depeche Mode's "Leave In Silence". The full extent of the irony starts to hit home. I think of all the desperately crap UK acid records I get through the post and start laughing."
Summary:
The celebrated
article which kicked off an era of Depeche Mode being hailed as pioneers of the
house music scene, changing the way the music industry viewed the band in the
process. The Face arranged a meeting between Depeche Mode and house DJ
Derrick May (pictured) in order to explore this proposition further. Ultimately,
it concedes that Depeche Mode did not 'detonate house', as the cover asks; but
the number of big house names nodding towards their influence - both at the time
and since - make this article required reading. [2606 words]
View pages: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5
Try
also: "Mode
Ahead" [Muzik, July 2001]
"New
Life" [DJ, 1st-14th December 2001]
"I used to play Depeche Mode as a DJ, before I even knew the name of the group - their music was very hot at that time, records like 'Strangelove'. We were influenced a lot by their sound. It's real progressive dance, and had this feeling that was sooo European: it was clean and you could dance to it."
- Kevin Saunderson, the man behind Inner City
"They've set the standard in what they do. In America they've been able to please almost everyone, from a guy like me who's a hardcore dance addict, to the stadium crowds. They're right on time, right in synch, and they can't even help it."
- Derrick May, one of the originators of Detroit techno
"I only really played one of their records, but a lot of people I've worked with were influenced by them, especially Jamie Principle. I know that Jesse Saunders was a big fan, and so was Farley (Jackmaster Funk)."
- Frankie Knuckles, DJ at the original Warehouse Club in Chicago and one of house music's founding fathers
Depeche Mode as the godfathers if house? Not quite, but in New York their early
mixes sell as rare grooves. In Detroit's premier techno club they received a
heroes' welcome. Scratch the surface of many a house(hold) name and you'll find
the Depeche influence ungrudgingly admitted. Not godfathers then, but certainly
a successful and hugely influential British pop band that's ripe for
reappraisal...
It's just after one at the best club on the planet. This is Detroit's Music Institute, an all-night and most-of-the-next-day juice bar with a sound system
designed so that recurring phrases like 'feel the music' begin to make sense. House and Techno trax weave in and out of club classics like Dinosaur L's 'Go Bang' to make up the Saturday night soundtrack. The DJ could be Derrick May except for the fact that he's just led us through the queue at the door. Perhaps, then, it's Big Fun's Kevin Saunderson or Juan Atkins, both of whom regularly direct the mix at 1315 Broadway.
With Chicago's Warehouse, where house took shape, and Larry Levan's Paradise Garage having both passed into legend, the Music Institute is now the music's flagship. Depeche Mode head straight for the bar. Having spent the previous evening with them, I know they're fond of a drink or three. Obviously not aware of the dance-till-dawn concept of the juice bar, Andrew Fletcher turns to me and announces incredulously, "No alcohol". Beginning to get the hang of things, Martin Gore calls out, "Waters all round!" The heads of the immaculately turned out young blacks around us begin to turn.
Despite the fact that we are all beginning to look like death warmed up following last night's late late warehouse rap party in New York, Depeche Mode are very quickly 'recognised'. Within minutes, Martin Gore has a tape from local Techno group Seperate Minds thrust into his hand. Had this been Schoom, The Kool Kat or the Hacienda, the group might have been blanked, laughed at, or even insulted. In Britain, Depeche Mode are a kids' group, a 'pop' group; Bros, but older. In the gun capital of America, the reaction is inevitably different. Will they get shot? Only with a camera.
"Smile, please," says a beautiful young black girl as her friends crowd around the group.
"Oh, God!" says another, "I can't believe it! This is great, Depeche Mode in Detroit... Why?"
Believe me, it's a long story.
With a career spanning seven albums, what seem like several hundred singles and over nine years, Depeche Mode, despite having almost uniquely combined creative progress with ever-increasing record sales, are second only to the combined forces of Kylie, Cliff and PWL when it comes to being subjected to the acid wit of the pop media. Pieces about the group usually consist of two-part jokes about leather skirts, one part a reference to their New Romantic teatowel-wearing period, and several gratuitous references to Basildon.
Yet in America, they are spoken about in the same reverential tones as New Order and even Kraftwerk. Frankie Knuckles won't deny owning a well-worn copy of "Just Can't Get Enough" and Todd Terry will talk about them as his favourite dance group. In America, Depeche Mode are a phenomenon, a white English 'pop' group respected on the black club scene in New York, Chicago and Detroit through records like their 1983 single "Get The Balance Right" - a $25 'Disco Classic' in Manhattan's hip Downstairs Records. And this is despite the fact that their knowledge of club culture is such that they haven't heard of most of the people who control your night-time soundtrack. Here, they remain a laughing stock thanks to a received impression of them as fools lost in the pop machine.
"We accept that we are partly responsible in creating the problem in Britain," says Andy Fletcher, the group's diplomat and all-round diamond geezer. In the hotel bar in Detroit we begin the interview proper. Depeche Mode are in America viewing the final cut of
101, their first concert movie, which was put together by legendary pop filmaker D. A. Pennebaker. A mixture of documentary and concert footage, it echoes the candid style of the director's
Don't Look Back, made during Bob Dylan's early sixties tour of the UK.
It records Depeche Mode's 101st concert held before a 60,000 crowd at the Rosebowl in Pasadena, and illustrates their obvious overground success in America. The film accompanies a new live LP set from the same concert. That job done in New York, here, in the interest of providing another view of a group whose name is always accompanied in British magazines by an italicised cynicism from an unidentified "Ed", Depeche Mode are taking a Techno holiday, their curiosity stirred after hearing some of the city's innovative new dance music. The trip also provides a way of approaching a group who are now in a position to refuse the standard tape-recorder-on-the-table trial.
Having been introduced to the group the day before, I negotiated their guilty-until-proven-innocent reticence at an Indian restaurant, where the hapless Fletcher brought a glass-fronted picture crashing to the ground by leaning where he shouldn't have. Dave Gahan, pissed as a
fart at 4.30 in the morning, pronounces me "All right", having decided before my arrival that I would be a bastard in designer shoes who wouldn't get his round in. The fact that most of the people who put The Face together look like refuse collectors seems to come as a great surprise to most people. By the time the tape recorder does make its scheduled appearance, their inbuilt suspicion is at an all-time low. At this point it's decided that there is a difference between the great British music press and me. Stories of disreputable gentlemen of the press in berets begin to flow through, aided by the tongue-loosening properties of potent bottled beers.
"When we began, we couldn't believe that anyone was interested," says Fletch. "And we did every TV show, every interview that came up. We were wrapped up as a pop group, nothing more and nothing less, and we have suffered from that image ever since." He takes time out to explain that there is nothing inherently
wrong with pop music. We agree that it has become a simple term of abuse due to the critics' common viewpoint that what is popular is therefore crap: bad logic in anyone's philosophy book. Alan Wilder - who can look as sullen as a Spurs fan on any Saturday afternoon but instead turns out to be another diamond geezer who doesn't get enough sleep - adds that the power of the pop press is such that those who like the group find themselves having to explain
why - something I'm used to. New Order, who began life as Joy Division, thereby giving music critics the opportunity to prattle on about cathedrals of sound, are seen in America as similar white dance practicians. In Britain, the respect they have overseas is more than equalled. It's an attitude which frustrates rather than puzzles the group.
The situation seems massively ironic when the full extent of Depeche Mode's American success becomes clear.