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THE
LIFE AND LOVES OF DEPECHE MODE
[I-D,
October 1993. Words: Michael
Fuchs-Gambock. Pictures: Anton Corbijn.]
" If the story of Depeche Mode is one of suburban lads growing up, it’s also the story of a singles band becoming an albums band: in commercial terms, considering albums are where the real money is, it’s a story of success. "
Summary:
Sober, intelligent and thorough article tracing the band's history through the
development of their sound and popular appeal. Martin speaks about his reaction
to musical changes within the band, especially for Songs Of Faith And Devotion.
One of the few articles not to assume that the reader knows nothing about
Depeche Mode. Balanced, quality writing. [3293 words]
View pages: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4
Try
also: "This Band
Wants Your Respect" [Rolling Stone, 12th July 1990]
"The Highs And Lows And Rise Of
Depeche Mode" [FHM, June 1993]
"Four Into One" [Drum
Media, 22nd February 1994]
Dave Gahan has reinvented himself as Michael Hutchence on Depeche Mode’s world tour…
Depeche Mode are both loved and hated, usually to extremes. They are one of Britain’s biggest pop exports, but the dedication of their fans is often matched by damnation from the press. We talked to songwriter Martin Gore about life, love, music, and why he wants the band to keep taking chances.
Dave Gahan is less than a centimetre tall. There are about 15,000 people standing between me and him, and as he launches into the chorus of I Feel You, I decide to find out if I can get close enough to see what he actually looks like in the flesh these days. After heaving through a hundred yards of black-clad shoulders, dodging the wayward flames of raised cigarette lighters, Gahan has increased in size. He’s now nearly an inch tall.
As pop stars get bigger, they tend to get smaller. Further away, that is. If this is true, judging by the indications on this mild Saturday night in Crystal Palace’s football stadium, Depeche Mode are a very large phenomenon indeed. Some 35,000 people, or ‘Devotees’ as the band’s latest T-shirts would have it, have gathered in the twilight for the first UK appearance of the Songs Of Faith And Devotion tour.
Depeche Mode have become a pop paradox: a band whose lyrics concentrate on the introverted individual, on anomie and alienation, but who attract a community of fans who mouth every memorised word in chorus.
Gahan’s bellowed exhortations of “come on!” and “make some fucking noise!” also disrupt the introspective trance that the music creates, while Gahan himself offers the incongruous spectacle of a macho-camp Rock God in leather trousers, tattoos and tresses fronting intense songs about pain and isolation.
It all comes together for the final encore. Gahan, the high priest, allows his fans to sing the last few choruses of Everything Counts acapella, ending the show in an expression of communal celebration: from alienation to togetherness.
This is all good stuff. Depeche Mode are, undoubtedly, part of a modern tradition of Great British Pop. Like other superlative white electronic pop groups – the Pet Shop Boys, New order, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Human League, The Beloved – they have never let their intellectual baggage or pretensions to artiness get in the way of a good tune or a catchy chorus. Like most of these bands, their lyrics exude a painful naivete that’s almost embarrassing in its untutored frankness. This is what has turned a lot of rock press writers off and resulted in the acres of bad reviews they’ve had in the UK over the past 13 years. But it’s this same English gawkiness that appeals to their fans: they find it endearing, they relate to it, as if the lyrics were about their lives.
And this is where Depeche win again. As with New Order, the vagueness of their songs means you can project your own personality into them, replay your feelings and fears over their soundtrack. Their lyrics are a mirror which reflects anything you want to put in front of it. Never Let Me Down, for example, with phrases like “I’m taking a ride with my best friend” and “we’re flying high, watching the world pass us by… never want to come down”, could be about taking hallucinogenic drugs. It could be about sub-dom sex. It could, however, just be about a drive in the country with a mate. It’s up to you what you want to think, and Depeche, of course, aren’t saying; they know that being too specific ruins the mystery that’s at the heart of great pop music.
Depeche Mode’s is a career mapped out in a set of beautiful pop ‘moments’ – New Life, Just Can’t Get Enough, Everything Counts, Stripped; each one a soundtrack to a memory, a snapshot of youth past. Up until 1987’s Music For The Masses, it was the singles that counted. The albums were often patchy affairs, rich in ideas and concepts, though cemented with filler. If the story of Depeche Mode is one of suburban lads growing up, it’s also the story of a singles band becoming an albums band: in commercial terms, considering albums are where the real money is, it’s a story of success. (Since their first single, Dreaming Of Me, in 1981, their fame has spread outwards through Europe and the Americas. The last album, Violator, sold over six million copies globally.)
Music For The Masses was a superb record, the one on which the sweeping orchestral arrangements that they have been developing finally gelled. Pure and electronic, the whole thing moved along like a giant, menacing juggernaut of perfectly integrated noise. Any sweetness and light had evaporated, to be replaced by this awesome, brooding thing. 1990’s Violator, their darkest hour, went further, splicing ambient interludes in between the ambiguously threatening songs (it should be noted here that Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder has recorded two excellent albums under the name Recoil – the first in 1988, years before the current ambient boom). Personal Jesus, the anthemic rock-out hit, marked the start of Depeche’s affair with the guitar riff, one which would continue on this year’s Songs Of Faith And Devotion. Faith And Devotion is perhaps their most daring record: the final step in the three-album journey from uncertainty through darkness to redemption. This time, as well as almost becoming a Rock Band, the group have employed a gospel choir, string section and Irish uillean bagpipes to further deepen their sonic textures.
“I think we started off very closed-minded, we had tunnel vision like most rock musicians have – they think that rock is the only way,” admits Martin Gore. “We believed that rock music had stagnated, and computers and electronics were the way forward for music. And gradually we’ve realised that we shouldn’t be as closed-minded as the rock musicians who don’t consider electronic music. We’re more open now, not limiting ourselves through our instrumentation.”
Songs like Condemnation and Walking In My Shoes are both melancholy and messianic, truly epic in their proportions. Gahan acts as both sinner and confessor, interpreting Gore’s lyrics with total belief, as if he’d lived them. The album also demonstrates how his voice has matured from the androgynous teenage wisp of the early ’80s to a full-bodied masculine groan.
But the step forward wasn’t taken without trepidation. Even Gore wasn’t sure about using the gospel choir at first. It was their producer, Flood, who also works with U2, who convinced him. “I was very cagey about it – we’ve been going for 13 years now and we’ve never used another musician on any of our records. I always had this theory that if you do it yourselves, it doesn’t matter if you do it badly, you do it more passionately than bringing in outside musicians, because they just come in, they get paid for the day and they do their job, but at the end of the day there’ll be more passion in it if you do it yourself.
“We got the choir in and I was just sitting at the back thinking ‘this isn’t going to work, I don’t know why we’re trying this’, I was really nervous about the whole thing. But the moment they started singing, for me, it lifted the track onto another level, it was just up there somewhere, and so then I decided I shouldn’t be so closed-minded about the whole thing.”
Depeche Mode have been clever about their career. They’ve constantly strived to avoid descending into self-parody. “With every album we push ourselves to do things differently,” insists Gore. Examples abound: the adoption of industrial noise in 1983 on Construction Time Again, when, influenced by contemporary and industrial metal-bashing groups like Einsturzende Neubaten, Test Department and SPK, they went around the streets tape-recording building site noises for use as samples. The flirtation with edge sexuality and tainted religion which started on 1984’s Some Great Reward. The recent embracing of rock guitars (perhaps prompted by harder labelmates Nitzer Ebb and the screaming tekno-metal of Ministry?).
The image overhauls and costume changes are part of it too, though the band would rather play those down. “I really think that too much emphasis is put on image and I don’t like that,” says Gore. “We wear a lot of black because we feel comfortable wearing black.” But certainly, they are now taking more control over how they are seen. They are only photographed by one man, Dutch auteur Anton Corbijn (who – again – also works for U2). He directs their videos and art-directs their record sleeves, too. It’s as if they were so pissed off at being portrayed as fools in leather skirts by the music press, they decided to grab back their image and recreate it for themselves.
“In 1981, when Speak And Spell, our first album, came out, we were 18 years old; we were young, we were naïve, we didn’t have a clue! From one day to the next, we were being thrust on TV, we were being put into the press, and at that time we thought we should do every interview that came along, and we didn’t particularly care about our image; we were just kids, y’know?” Gore confirms. “It took us a long time to get to grips with what was actually happening, how to take control of our image and the things that we put out to the world.”
In Germany, the music press has just woken up to the fact that Depeche haven’t been a teen-pop sensation for a very long time, and are suddenly treating Dave Gahan as if he was Keith Richards or some other raddled rock roué: “They’re writing these stories at the moment that Dave has AIDS or he’s dying or he’s on heavy drugs, and it’s so funny because it doesn’t actually do us any harm, it sells more records,” Gore laughs. “Anyone reading it must think ‘that sounds really interesting, I’ve got to go and buy that’!”