A few moments later, Gahan, orange juice in hand, is trying to pinpoint what it was that first made Depeche Mode attractive to the record companies. “At the time,” he says, “everybody was using electronics in a very morbid, gloomy way. Suddenly, here was this pop band that was using the stuff – these young kids who had everybody dancing, instead of standing around in gray raincoats about to commit suicide.”
After considering offers from major labels like Phonogram – “money you could never have imagined and all sorts of crazy things, like clothes allowances” – Depeche Mode signed on with Daniel Miller at the independent label Mute. (The band, which is signed to Sire Records in the U.S., has never had a manager.) In 1981, the group released its debut album, Speak and Spell, which, with some help from the dance-floor hit “Just Can’t Get Enough”, made the Top Ten in England. Shortly thereafter, Vince Clarke – then Depeche Mode’s driving force and chief songwriter – left the band to form Yazoo and, later, Erasure. Clarke claimed he was sick of touring.
“That’s what he said, but I think that’s a lot of bullshit, to be quite honest,” Gahan says. “I think he’d just taken it as far as he could. We were very successful. We were in every pop magazine. We were on the TV shows. Everything was going right for Depeche Mode. Everybody wanted to know about Depeche Mode. I think Vince suddenly lost interest in it – and he started getting letters from fans asking what kind of socks he wore.
“Martin had written a couple of songs,” Gahan continues, “and we went into the studio and recorded ‘See You’, which was our biggest hit so far. So that was it. ’Bye, Vince.” [4]
Martin Gore is sitting beside the hotel pool, reading a biography of Herman Hesse. He is shirtless, wearing long, black shorts and white knee socks. He looks much like he looks onstage these days: a blond, curly-haired answer to AC/DC’s Angus Young. “Looking back,” he is saying, “I think we should have been slightly more worried than we were. When your chief songwriter leaves the band, you should worry a bit. I suppose that’s one of the good things about being young. If we had panicked, we probably wouldn’t be here today.”
Like the other members of Depeche Mode, who are all in their late twenties, Gore is quite personable – funny, soft-spoken and without any real pretensions. Unlike the other members of the band, he plays some guitar during the live performances, has released a solo album of cover songs and, a few years back, used to go onstage in a skirt. “Martin said to me once, ‘I like to look into the mirror before I go out, and laugh and think, ‘Look what I’m getting away with tonight’,” Gahan says. “He’d wear leather trousers and then wear a skirt over the top. And then he sort of extended to just wearing a skirt. We used to sit backstage saying, ‘Martin, you can’t fucking wear that, man! You’ve got to take that off!’”
“I just thought it was quite funny,” Gore says dismissively. “I didn’t think it was going to cause such a fuss.”
Under Gore’s direction, Depeche Mode’s music became – to quote the title of an album that many of the group’s fans hold dearest – a “black celebration”. His songs, a few of which have made American radio programmers blush, have been both profane (“Blasphemous Rumours”) and kinky (“Strangelove”, “Master & Servant”). The band’s first Top Ten hit in the States, oddly enough, was the kind-spirited “People Are People”, a single from Some Great Reward.
“It was around that time that things started changing for us in America”, Gore says, at poolside. “On the tour for that album, we were totally shocked by the way fans were turning up in droves at the concerts. Suddenly, we were playing to 10,000 people. Although the concerts were selling really well, though, we still found it a struggle to actually sell records.”
Bruce Kirkland, the group’s U.S. representative, says, “New Order, the Cure, Depeche Mode – I equate these bands with the metal bands of the Seventies. They almost never had hit singles, but they were selling out stadiums. The classic joke about Iron Maiden was that they sold more T-shirts than records.”
It’s Memorial Day – the day of the Depeche Mode concert – and at the Civic Center’s merchandising stand a single fan has just spent $686. Back at the Hilton, which is across the street, Dave Gahan is talking about the band’s followers. “I’d get kids coming from all over the world,” he says of the days when his home address was common knowledge. “Germany, France, America – they’d just hang out at the end of my drive. It got to the point where I’d be chasing them down the road with my dog because they’d be singing our songs outside my house at two in the morning.”
“One of them – his name’s Sean – actually hired a private detective to follow me from the studio and discover where I lived,” Gahan continues. “I lost my rag and really shouted at him. I told him, basically to fuck off. Later I sent the guy a letter saying, ‘I apologize, but you must respect my privacy. I want to have some time with my wife and son.’ He sent back a letter saying, ‘I’m sorry I bothered you, and I won’t ever do it again.’ Then, right at the end of the letter, he said, ‘By the way, would it be possible for me to come ’round next weekend?’ I just thought, ‘Well, that’s it. It’s time to move.’”
Just before Depeche Mode’s show, some fans who have been puttering around the hotel lobby all day are asked if they would contribute to this article by writing down a few words about the band. Each agrees, takes a sheet of paper and writes quietly and without pause for close to thirty minutes. Among the subjects covered are Dave Gahan’s sideburns; Dave Gahan’s hips; the fact that “Depeche” puts on a “spectacular” live show; the fact that the band members aren’t pompous rock stars but “v. down to earth”.
One teenage boy says he has “every B side, every weirdo import, everything”. One girl says she has “loved Depeche Mode since they first came out” – unlikely, unless she was hooked on Speak and Spell at the age of seven – and returns a fairly representative essay, which reads in part: “Tonight I jumped out in front of Martin Gore and got a picture. I swear I almost fainted. He seems so complex. I would love to sit down and just discuss with Martin Gore what I interpret in his music… I feel that once I meet Martin Gore there is nothing I can’t accomplish. His touch will burn, throw me and feel me up with energy. (Razal, 16, Fort Walton Beach, Florida)”
For a band that is, as Andy Fletcher puts it, “supposed to be cold and robotic and love studios”, Depeche Mode puts on a good, old-fashioned arena show. Gahan, who wears a black studded-leather jacket and matching pants, has a pretty complete repertoire of moves: the jumping jack, the spinning top, the bump-and-grind and a sort of standing duckwalk. Several songs are accompanied by photographer Anton Corbijn’s videos, including a hilarious segment in which Martin Gore dresses as a character Corbijn refers to as “the bondage angel”. All the songs benefit from an over-the-top light show that looks a little like the last scene from Close Encounters.
The World Violation Tour includes a fairly straightforward selection of Depeche Mode songs: “Shake the Disease”, “Never Let Me Down Again”, “Stripped” and “Everything Counts”, which was a U.K hit in 1983 and was reissued last year to coincide with D.A. Pennebaker’s Depeche Mode film documentary, 101. Martin Gore, who is quite short and who is usually seen only as a shock of blond hair peeking up over a stack of keyboards, comes front and center at one point in the show to sing two solo acoustic-guitar numbers: “I Want You Now” and “Word Full of Nothing”. The band’s final encore is a guitar-driven cover of “Route 66”.
Needless to say, the crowd at the Pensacola Civic Center is in a state of pandemonium for most of the two hours that “Depeche” is onstage. Many of the songs that go over best, however, are from Violator: “Clean”, “Personal Jesus” and “Policy of Truth”, the album’s third single, which begins with a vaguely funky “Heard It Through the Grapevine”-style sequence.
In general, Violator seems to have permanently opened doors for the band in America. “Martin once said, ‘Perhaps if we called ourselves a rock band from day 1, we would have had a lot more credibility from day 1,’” says Gahan after the show. “But we’ve stuck to calling ourselves a pop band, and we’ve earned that credibility by gaining success until people couldn’t ignore us anymore.”
[1] - By 1990 this subject was not only getting tired but fast becoming outdated. I can't tell whether, by bringing it up again and refusing to let it get forgotten, they were developing chips on their shoulders, or whether they were far more savvy than they let on to the idea of cult popularity and were using the matter to stick two fingers up at the music industry.
[2] - Read about that here.
[3] - In this interview in the USA a couple of years previously, Andy put down an interviewer spectacularly for taking this kind of approach:
- "Even though a radio programmer's ear might not hear it, why are all these people following you from venue to venue in droves?"
- "Because it's really good music, that's why."
[4] - Try this article for a better picture from nearer the time of what was happening in the band.