Depeche Mode Are These Men Really Miserable? (Smash Hits, 1984)
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ARE THESE MEN REALLY MISERABLE?
Believe it or not, they aren’t. Depeche Mode still haven’t quite made the Big League but they don’t seem to mind much. They’re huge in Germany, drive rather pricey cars and still have time to go fishing. Johnny Black likes the sound of it.
“Stick that on your head,” says Dave Gahan, offering me his Walkman. “Do you like it loud?”
I nod. With an evil grin he pushes the volume level to ten and blasts me with “People Are People”, the new Depeche Mode single. I’m impressed. Their best in a long time, with more hooks than Jack Charlton’s fishing programme. But wait! Isn’t there a track on the last Paul Simon album called “Cars Are Cars”? Let’s hope it isn’t the start of “Daffs Are Daffs” by The Smiths, “Hairdryers Are Hairdryers” by Duran Duran and similar statements of the obvious from all and sundry.
While my ears are re-bored by Dave’s personal hi-fi, the band is busy demolishing a huge packet of sweets which have been sent to their Bayswater headquarters by adoring German fans. Dave sticks a Twix bar in my gob and wanders off chomping on something sweet and sickly.
They’re all looking a bit more prosperous than when I last met them, over a year ago at Dave’s mum’s house in Basildon. The clothes are in the same casual style, but look more expensive. Dave tells me that the new motorbike he was so proud of last year now sits in the garage, while he zips round in his Escort XR3. Has fame finally got to them?
“I don’t think so,” says Alan Wilder, the band’s newest member. “We just went back to a studio we haven’t used in two years and the engineer was groaning that we’re exactly the same, still telling the same dreadful jokes, Martin still stealing Fletcher’s glasses…”
“But I find better places to hide them now,” laughs Martin. For almost five years, Depeche Mode’s standard studio amusement has come from picking on Andy Fletcher, whose short-sightedness means he can barely see the audience when playing live.
“It’s not always a bad thing,” he explains. “Especially in Germany where we get some right nutters headbanging in front of the stage, but if friends come to see us and they’re waving like made, I never see them so they think I’m ignoring them.”
The latest variation on the spectacles theme involves Daniel Miller, their extremely slim producer and head of Mute Records, whose glasses look identical to Andy’s. “We swap them so when Fletcher puts them on he can’t see a thing. He gets angrier every time.” And I’d heard that this lot had matured.
As lunchtime approaches, we take to the streets in search of a “legendary local pastry” shop to find a bite to eat. En route we pass two black girls, one of whom points and stage-whispers, “Are they Depeche Mode?”
I nod vigorously. She swoons against her friend. “I’ve got to sit down,” she sighs. The group wanders on, oblivious to the fluttering hearts left in their wake.
In the pastry shop on Moscow Road, the food isn’t as good as we remembered and Alan, a vegetarian, is horrified to discover bits of chicken in what he thought was a mushroom vol-au-vent. Still recovering from the shock, he says, “I suppose we have matured a bit, the songs are a bit more serious now.”
Adjusting his now famous spectacles, Andy adds, “we virtually grew up in this business. Dave was seventeen and me and Martin was eighteen when we started. Now we’re in our twenties. We spend more time thinking about our music, our artwork and our shows whereas at first we were so excitable we just rushed into everything.”
A fairly dramatic change in Martin Gore’s lyrics was obvious on their last album, “Construction Time Again”, where he moved from dance and romance to greed, warfare and shame. The change was summed up best by the lyric of their hit, “Love In Itself”, where Dave sang Martin’s words, “Now I find that most of the time, love’s not enough in itself”.
“But I don’t agree that they are more serious topics,” Martin argues. “A love song, if it really means something to you, can be just as meaningful, just as serious.”
“People Are People” finds them still in thoughtful mood, condemning mankind’s capacity for cruelty, but they have no plans to become embroiled in benefit gigs for peace. “Things like CND,” explains Andy, “we’re not totally agreed on as a group. The others are for it, but I think there’s an argument for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. If we did a benefit, I’d like it to be for something where you could see that your money was doing some good, like a local hospital, or anti-vivisection.”
The maturity of their new lyrics is matched by an increasingly sophisticated approach to their sound. “We used to use a lot of pre-set sounds on the synths, but now we create our own by sampling natural sounds, such as running water or creaking doors, and electronically recreating them through a computer, so that you can play them on a keyboard.”
When a new sound is created, the band have to give it a name, or mixing their records would become impossibly complicated. On the new single, for example, there are such delightful sounds as Bucket Of Sick (which we won’t go into detail about) and Hank (an acoustic guitar plucked by a coin, electronically distorted and played on a synthesiser in the style of Hank B. Marvin of The Shadows).
Although the band is now virtually one of the old brigade and although their singles invariably enter the charts, Depeche Mode has never had a Top Five hit.
“We really don’t mind,” says Dave. “It gives us something to look forward to. We actually sell more records in Germany now, where the last album has done a quarter of a million, double what it did in Britain, although we got a gold album here. And we’ve never even had a Top Twenty single in Germany.”
For the moment, they’re more than content with their level of success. “We just had a meeting about America,” Dave continues “and we decided not to worry about it. If we really wanted to be incredibly wealthy, we’d be over there trying to cash in on the new British Invasion, but we don’t see the point. Our sound is too English for American radio, and we’re not prepared to change it just to have hits over there.” [1]
With ten chart entries under their belts, it would be simple to cobble together a compilation, as Madness did, to help crack the American charts, but they’ve decided not to yet.
“If we wait a little longer, we can still put together something better,” says Dave, and I begin to get the feeling that Depeche Mode will be happy to have international success when the time is right, but right now they’re reasonably well off and there’s still time to go fishing on the river Chelmer.
“Stupid hobby, really,” says Dave. “You wait five hours to catch a fish, then you catch it, then you throw it back.” I really don’t know why I bother.”
As we pay the bill, our waitress recognises Andy and asks for autographs.
“At least she knew who we were,” he grins happily, as we wander back towards Mute Records. “They usually think I’m Howard Jones.”
[review by Peter Martin]
DEPECHE MODE: People Are People (Mute) This time they’ve gone all radical with a distinctly metallic sound. But instead of jarring the nerves it tends to induce movement in bodies that normally wouldn’t be seen dead on a dancefloor. The lyrics are good too – about “getting along awfully” and not understanding hate. Makes a change from all this unrequited love business. Easily their best yet and this harder direction is bound to spawn bags of imitators.
