So could Depeche Mode .
A so-called '?quiet period'? followed the highly successful debuut, when the tree remaining members, Gahan, Gore and Fletcher, issued A Broken Frame. But 1983'?s Construction Time Again announced the arrivals of Alan Wilder and free-lance sample-innovator Gareth Jones, who later worked with industrial heavy Einsturzende Neubauten. Recalls Gahan, '?We were experimenting with sampling for the first time. We were going out on the streets, kicking things, smashing things and getting really into it. '?The album marked the sonic inventiveness that would both butress later weak efforts, such as 1986'?s Black Celebration, and push Gore'?s best compositions ('?People Are People, Master and Servant ,Clean') over the top.
Wilder flirted with wongwriting, but soon retired to the shadows of the studio, leaving those instincts to his solo proyects, under the name Recoil. Three singles packages targeted the band's growing audience around the time of the Some Great Reward sturio album (1984) 1987's Music For the Mases showed the band changing orientation, from scattered singles to coherent albums. 1989 brought Depeche Mode 101, an unusually frank tour fil documentary, directed by D.A. Pennebaker of Monterey Pop fame, and 101, a live double-album.
Violator arrived exactly a decade after the band signed with its English label, Mute, and for the first time introduced a guitar into the mix, with the lead single, "Personal Jesus," the band's hardest-driving song yet. "People still miss that," says Gore. "The main point of that song is the guitar riff. People still consider us an electronic band. And it was followed bu "Enjoy the Silence." The main riff on that, again, was guitar. Half of that song was guitar," he trails off, somewhat incredulously.
Well, you can't miss the guitar on Songs of Faith and Devotion. "Walking in My Shoes" sets a Johnny Marr nod over a hip-hop beat. "Mercy in You" rocks a la U2's "Bullet the blue Sky", no doubt thanks to flood, who assisted the Irich band's Achtung Baby sessions this new album-production credits include Nick Cave and Nine Inch Nails. And the bottleneck-riddled "I Feel You" one-ups "Personal Jesus".
>From the opening tire screech through the reousing chorus of closer "Higher Love," the album is permeated by Martin Gore agressive six - string.
"I'm convinced that we wouldn't be today if we has signed to a major label," Marin Gore states succinictly. "After the initial succes of Speak & Spell, A Broken Frame was a very quiet period for us. It didn't do nothing, but it didn't do anything astoundig, and think we would have fallen into second-album syndrome and would have been dropped bu our third album."
Signed to Sire in the U.S. Depeche Mode remains with its initial label, Mute, in England. The last of the original post-punk U.K. independents- Rough Trade (The Smiths, the Fall) and Factory (New Order, Happy Mondays) having folded in the past two years- Mute is headed by Daniel Miller who, after a stint in the Normal (best known for "Warm Leatherette," covered by Grace Jones), bult his label around industrial and synthpop bands. "It's a miracle that we were actually able to turn down all of this money that was being offered." Says Gore of their choice to sign with Mute over suitors like CBS (now Sony Music), "and it's obviously turned out in our favor. We've always had lots of freedom to do whatever we want." The Band only recently signed its first contract with Miller; says Fletcher, "It only really covers what happens if Daniel dies."
Miller has production credit on the band's early efforts, but proved as laissez-faire in the studio as he was in the office. The presence of producer flood on Depeche's Violator and now, Songs of Faith and Devotion no doubt explains the increasing coherence, the sense of sounds meshing, that eluded previous records. But the band's haphazard history is the welcome price paid for a managerfree existence: no svengali, no guru, no master, just some scraped knees up the pop-music hill. Says Fletcher, "I suppose if we'd just said, 'Ask the manager' all along, we wouldn't have actually learned as much as we have." (Integral to the Depeche Mode's satelite team, photographer Anton Corbijn [pronounced "Kor-ben"] first directed a video for the band in 1986. Known for his countless Spin covers and prevalent work with U@ and R.E.M., he now coordinates all the band's visuals. Says Fletcher of Corbijn's high profile, "It is a concern. We have to work hard with him to try and make our stuff different, because it's very easy for him to lapse." The sleeve for Songs of Faith and Devotion, the band's first studio album to feature their faces on the cover, does smack of Achtung Baby)
Gahan quotes Flood on the subject of the band's unorthodox hierarchy, "He said to me that Al is sort of the craftsman, Martin's the idea man and I am the Attitude."
Whisch leaves us with Fletcher. "Well, Andy isn't musical at all," says Gore, clearly a bit more confortable with the subject than the other members. "He has absolutely no interest inmusic. He's never bought a record to my knowledge. He's not only not interested in learning to play an instrument, he doesn't have interest in actually wanting to listen to music. So, being in a band and having no interest in music meant that he had to have interest elsewhere, so he tries to deflect all the flack of the business side away from the rest of us, and allow us to concentrate on making a record. And if decisions have to be made, he has to" -he pauses- " He'll come to us and say, 'Look, they wandt us to do this, what do you think?' And we'll have a discussion about it."
Fletcher responds to the obvious question: "Why am I in a band? It was accidental right from the begining. I was actually forced to be in the band. I played the guitar and I had a bass; it was a question of them roping me in. I was never really that interested. Even when the band got going, I was just there for the social bit of it. And all of a sudden we started to do well. It was, rather than sort of making myself into a superb muso [British slang for overly dedicated musician], I tried to go in a different direction." Asked if he ever sees Fletcher retiring from performing, Gore responds, laughing, "Maybe we shouldl set a fax machine up for him on stage."
Fletcher's non-musicality remains the second-oddest facet of Depeche Mode , the first being the fact that Martin Gore rarely sings his own songs (just twice on the new album: "One Cares, and "Judas" with middle-eastern echoes of Peter Gabriel's Last temptation of Christ score). Gahan sings everything else, having written not a single sylable of what are ofthen hihgly personal lyrics. Yes the arrengment in only unusual in pop music since the rise of the singer-songwriter. And even then there are precedents, like the Whos' Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, and Rush's Neil Peart and Geddy Lee. But with Depeche Mode, the situation is compounded by Gore's single-minded thematic agenda and deeply emotional content.
"IT is weird," admits Gahan. "It's really strange. I suppose, when I sing the songs, I feel they're mine. I really get into the words. Martin writes from experience, especially his experiences with the band. And becausewe spend a lot of time together, you'll experience it as well. So lots of times I feel really close, actually, to Martin's lyrics, and especially the last two albums, this one and Violator.
"It's either religion or sex with Martin, pretty much, or somewhere in between the two. But they're pretty close anyway, let's faceit"
True enough. Having long since dropped the subjects of society's ills ("New Dress," "Everything Counts") and overt religious criticism ("Blasphemous Rumours, " "Nothing"), Gore has focused closer with each record on interpersonal relations; themes of absolution through love and obsesive, sadomasochistic sexual longing pervade Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion. What keeps the material fresh on the new album is its infusion with gospel abnd blues, natural elements further amplified by Wilder's live drumming and the ubiquitous ringing of guitars. "I've always been fascinated by religion," Gore says, by way of agreement, "Which has come out of my songs anyway. I just haven't tried to make the music be so obviously religious before." (Ad for the album's relatively upbeat mood, Gore credits the birth of his first child, now a year and a half old.)
The gospel elecates Gore's lyrics, especially on "Get Right Me," complete with backng chorus. (Along with the "One Caress" string section and the Uilleann pipes on "Judas," this is the first time the band has commissiones outside musicians). The chain-gang-flavored "Condemnation" is the new record's best cutmarrying its most inventive sounds (Rattling chains, resonant block backing vocals) and far and away Gahan's best singing. The work compares favorably with Aretha Franklin Fan George Michael's fwe sterling pop achievements, "Freedom 90," "Iwant your sex" and "Father