Music for the Masses (1987) made the ambition plain in the title. It turned out no real hits but it affirmed that Depeche Mode's sonic goal was total domination- albeit domination that swayed with an anorexic's gait- mixed with ballads that became mixtape staples. The Best of Volume 1 gives the short shrift to Black Celebration, the 1986 album that gave the gift of a name to goth club nights around the world. The band perfected a kind of music that you could do a sort of acute gastrointestinal disorder shuffle to, as kids without a funky bone in their bodies laced up their Doc Martins and gathered in pool halls and roller rinks done up in blacklight. If the early records could sound thin and blippy, "Master and Servant" had the kind of Bonham-heavy drum machines that could reach the cheap seats in the stadiums the band clearly wanted to be playing to and would be soon enough. By the end of the 1980s, Depeche were, if not causing rioting in the streets, coming close enough: They were a legit teen phenomenon. On the other hand, they meant a hell of a lot to a hell of a lot of other people. Even though I've got the requisite fucked up emotions when it comes to the meeting of sex and religious imagery, Depeche Mode's heavy-breathing lapsed Catholicism may have meant more if they, like me, dressed like the Ramones. Leather and eyeliner were never part of my world I wore the same Chuck Taylors and black T-shirt throughout high school. Gahan's voice had deepened and so had the timbre of the synthesizers Depeche Mode would be catchy again, but they would never be upbeat. "Everything Counts", from 1983's mini-mall industrial Construction Time Again, was recorded with newest member Alan Wilder. But despite buying Joy Division albums through Columbia House, I was never a goth, and I listened to too much pop-punk and hardcore as a teenager to really lay back and wallow. Being a sensitive flower who once tried to impress a girl by pointing out how much the lead character in Sandman looked like Robert Smith, you'd think this would have been right up my alley. The remaining Depechies listened to their scary DAF records and knew that a whole generation of the sexually frustrated could relate, were it garnished with pretty Eurotrash boys with ropey arms and peroxide dye jobs and lyrics about how hard it is to be a sensitive flower. Long before he was a strung out Jack Sparrow- amazingly Googling "Dave Gahan", "Jack Sparrow" brought up not only results but Depeche Mode/dead pirate slash, proving once again that goth kids will never disappoint- this dude was Lance Bass with vinyl vests and jaunty little caps.Ĭlarke left to form Yaz and then Erasure right after Depeche scored their first major hits, the British Top 10 "Just Can't Get Enough" and its parent album Speak and Spell. By 1980, they had settled into the name they're best remembered for and the basic lineup of Clark, Fletcher, Martin Gore, and Dave Gahan on vocals.
Depeche more or less were formed in 1976 by Vince Clarke and Andrew Fletcher as No Romance in China.
Especially at the beginning, the band offered synthetic, electric hooks as pure and sugary as New Edition, something that's easy to forget with all the iron crucifixes and black-and-white videos that followed (a period which itself is not without its charms). And though the Jesus Lizard are still great and his statement was perhaps accurate as a description, it doesn't stand up as criticism. Actually, he was a douchebag who probably has throat cancer now. We thought he was hella cool because he liked the Jesus Lizard and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. When I was in the early days of high school, a time when kids in my study hall thought the riff in Collective Soul's "Shine" was, like, totally boss, Depeche Mode were dismissed as a "gay keyboard band" by a friend's cousin, a sentiment probably echoed no less than 2 million times over the past 20 years.
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