FAITH, HOPE AND DEPRAVITY

by Andrew Harrison
Select, December 1990
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This month Depeche Mode play Britain for the first time in an extraordinary year. Their four million selling 'Violator' has turned them into the biggest new British band in the world - but international stardom has its price. Are Depeche Mode becoming a digitally-sampled Spinal Tap? Select caught the World Violation tour in Germany to find out. Story by Andrew Harrison. Photos by Ed Sirrs.

DAVID Gahan is waiting for the night to fall. His band Depeche Mode have been onstage at the Dortmund Westfalenhalle for some 20 minutes now, before 17,000 feverish people in a towering sports stadium that resembles the torture chamber at the end of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.

Yet far from being dwarfed by the vast size of the venue, Depeche Mode's spartan bedroom electronics and bass imperatives have stretched out to fill the place, to subdue it and make it theirs. With 'World In My Eyes' and 'Never Let Me Down Again' the damage has been done. Now it's time for a change of pace.

As photographer/video director Anton Corbijn's monochrome images of stars and planets appear on the screens behind them, 'Waiting For The Night', the sepulchral centrepiece from their current 'Violator' LP, floods into the Westfalenhalle on a rich, black tide. It's a song of faith in oblivion, a drumless and insidious wash which surrounds Gahan's voice like the gathering darkness itself. A sharp contrast to the upbeat singles that opened the show.

For many fans, this is the side of the band that they really want to hear, the one that takes a host of half-formed teenage nihilistic fixations and replays them with Depeche Mode's characteristic veneer of detached sophistication. Yet as Gahan sings "I'm waiting for the night to fall I know that it will save us all", something peculiar takes over the young German audience.

As if experiencing a simultaneous Pavlovian response to minor chords and sonority, they hold their cigarette lighters aloft in suspension - at least five thousand of them swaying in blackness, for all the world as if this were a Barry Manilow show. "When everything's dark, it keeps us from the stark reality," intones Gahan and the lighters sway away, illuminating the fans' home-made banners. One of them declares, Martin You Are My Personal Jesus.

It's touching. They do it again later when the band perform the incomparably darker 'Black Celebration's "Let's celebrate the fact That we've seen the back Of another black day". But it sure isn't Depeche Mode. There's no doubt about it - Gahan, Martin Gore, Alan Wilder and Andrew Fletcher have come an appallingly long way since the microprogrammer days of 'The Meaning Of Love' and 'Just Can't Get Enough', when the papers laughed and said they looked like a bunch of hairdressers from a Carry On film.

These days they're totems of teenage sexual neurosis in Ray-Bans, corrupters of international youth and the only people to sell the vaunted sonic metal disco sound of the mid-'80s and still retain their credibility. Some people believe they invented house music. They have arrived, but the question is, arrived where?

A GRUBBY town wreathed in the accumulated smog and gunge of its steel industry, Dortmund is to Germany what Widnes is to England. This weekend it heads the second and third dates on the European leg of Depeche Mode's World Violation, the tour that, with the astonishing 'Violator', finds them finally and undeniably admitted to the Premier Division of international acts.

'Violator' has already shifted four million copies worldwide, and trebled Depeche Mode's usual British album sales. World Violation's two months in the USA saw the band's previous cultish appeal translate into almost two million sales of the LP, and a million of its entrancing single 'Enjoy The Silence', which was still in the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-October, six months after its release.

So quickly did Depeche Mode's American underground go overground that it even took the band by surprise.

In April they did a low-key record store promotion in Los Angeles to coincide with the albums' release, expecting maybe a couple of thousand fans to turn up. Instead some 15,000 autograph-hungry Depechlets appeared, creating frightening prospects of a crush. The band were terrified to see that the sheer weight of their fans was enough to make the store's plate glass window bend inwards. Finally, local police (who estimated the crowd at an astonishing 30,000) cleared the area.

On the other side of the Atlantic, fans snapped up tickets for the 40 European dates of World Violation while the ink was still wet, and though Depeche Mode arrive in Britain on November 19, their six British dates likewise sold out instantly. In 1990, three Depeche Modes would not be enough to sate the demand, and the band are accordingly in high spirits.

As if to match their increasing stature, Depeche Mode on the road has become much more of a rock 'n' roll affair. The band's aptitude for hard partying is no secret, but to the apparent embarrassment of British friends and colleagues from Mute Records (the independent label which has been home to Depeche Mode since their first single, 'Dreaming Of Me', in 1981), they have of late increasingly found themselves surrounded by an unwanted coterie of hangers-on, plantpots and users from foreign record companies and promotion agencies. At least one such character inveigled himself into their company on the Dortmund weekend, in search of a little reflected glory, and, polite Basildon lads that they are, Depeche Mode weren't inclined to see him off.

More than ever, the fans too have grown fanatical, staking out every hotel in town and seemingly able to smell an Englander a mile off.

This slow and unwilling gravitation towards Spinal Tapism is a quaint irony given Depeche Mode's ancient connections with the supposedly 'anti-rockist' new pop of the early '80s, and their subsequent alignment with the equally guitar-free avant garde metal noise brigade. There is even a sizeable meathead contingent 'down the front' these days, much given to chanting "Dee-pesh!" in terrace style and giving the support band Electribe 101 a hellish time.

The band has acknowledged its new status as the portable Donington of the Casio generation by dressing its roadies in an official T-shirt which reads DEPECHE FUCKIN' MODE.

Yet membership of the top flight has its privileges. Chief among them is the ability to play fast and loose with the international press. You get what you're given with Depeche Mode, and for MTV Europe that means the opportunity to film 30 seconds - 30 seconds - of the second Dortmund show. Try editing that into broadcastable shape.

Reporters get a pretty fair 45 minutes with whichever band member feels like talking. Today it's Depeche songwriter Martin Gore, a relaxed but slightly evasive man with a bleach-blond Eraserhead haircut and a preternatural golden suntan, who opens his hotel room to the world.

"Who said this life isn't glamorous?" he smiles, gesturing at the sodden cityscape outside his window. It looks like bad news.

"Dortmund on a rainy Sunday. It's so much more enjoyable playing in America cos you've got generally nicer weather and usually somewhere interesting to look at, rather than this place in the middle of a motorway - there isn't even a hotel shop.

"But it's funny really," he muses. "I've noticed that the European audiences are much more responsive than the Americans this time..."

Responsive is hardly the word. Obsessive, more like.

"Yeah, it's obviously very flattering but it's worrying too," Gore replies. "People feel that they have a very special relationship with us, particularly in America where we have...not a small following, heh heh, but certainly a cult one. We've always got our airplay from the college stations and the alternative broadcasters.

"Americans more than anyone have suffered from ten years of Toto re-runs, and I suppose we came along at the right time with a new sound. Plus they didn't have the preconceptions of us that English people, who know us from 'A Broken Frame' when all our youthfulness was on show, have.

"I think it's down to the intimacy of the music. People feel that the songs are personal to them. And though there is an element of contradiction when you play a concert like last night's, with 17,000 people going mad, that intimacy is still there. People still feel moved by it, they feel that it's theirs.

"Me and Andy did a phone-in at a Top 40 station in New York this summer, and one of the callers asked, What are you doing on this station? They don't have the right to play your music, this is a tacky station!

"They still feel that Depeche Mode is their cult thing, that the music shouldn't ever go mainstream no matter what it sounds like and no matter what we do."

THREE years ago, before 'Violator', they might have been right. Gore confesses that the band's previous studio album, 1987's 'Music For The Masses', was the end of the line for one particular kind of Depeche Mode - the one that generated pre-House iron-foundry dance music in the vein of continental experimentalists like Einsturzende Neubauten and the British metal-bashers Test Department.

The sound had been caricatured as callow pop dilettantism, but it yielded at least three pearls of singles in 'Master And Servant', ' Everything Counts' and even 'People Are People'. Depeche Mode's lyrical purview had shifted as well, from the concerns of the Just 17 problem page to, well, Skin Two. Out went unrequited love, in came "You on top and me underneath."

"We had perfected a formula by then," Gore says, "and it came to fruition on 'Music For The Masses'. But our sales had become stagnant. We'd sold exactly the same number of albums each time since 'A Broken Frame' (their second, in 1982).

"We realised that if we were going to advance, if we were going to make another record at all, then we would have to change. We needed a new approach, otherwise we wouldn't have been challenging anything."

So not only did the band leave behind its increasingly dated marriage of abrasive sampling and upfront pervery, but they also junked a whole method of working.

"In the past I'd always demo-ed the songs at home and presented them to the band in quite finished form," Gore explains. "By that stage your ideas are pretty fixed, so we had tended simply to copy the demos, to make them better.

"But this time the band asked me to keep the songs as basic as I could. Sometimes it would just be guitar and vocal, or organ and vocal. We had no preconceptions and we didn't spend any time on pre-production, whereas we'd usually spent, say, six weeks in a programming suite working things out.

"This time we took these very basic songs into the studio and tried to do it very spontaneously. For instance, 'Enjoy The Silence' began as just an organ and my voice, and Alan had this idea of giving it...well, not a House groove but a dance groove..."

('Dance' being the favourite euphemism of people who want to make House records and not get stick for it, viz everyone from Happy Mondays to the dear old Style Council. Martin is oblivious to this.)

"...And I was very wary of this at first. I thought the very nature of the song was, you know, enjoy the silence, so it ought to have a very serene atmosphere. It took me a while to get used to the idea, but as we took it further that way with the guitar riff, it really pulled together.

"There were times when it didn't work, of course. 'Policy Of Truth' we recorded several times in different directions and it just didn't work. A lot of the songs were like that. So by supposedly being more spontaneous we ended up spending more time in the studio."

'VIOLATOR' proved to be the album on which Depeche Mode began to flex muscles they didn't know they had. Compared to the spent electronic clatterings of 'Music For The Masses' it's a lush experience, a seductive alternative route to the heart of darkness that Depeche had spent the '80s seeking. Gahan's voice, often smothered by overblown percussive mayhem on previous albums, fills out songs like 'Halo' and 'Clean', which appeared on Select's first Red Tape cassette.

And perhaps for the first time, Depeche Mode sound like they're not just toying with the solipsistic alienation groove that sustained them for the past ten years, when it seemed they were merely pushing themes of sado-masochism ('Master And Servant', 'Strangelove'), infection ('Shake The Disease') and religious weirdness ('Blasphemous Rumours') to see how much chart programmers would take.

When Gahan sang "I give in to sin/Because I like to practice what I preach" on 'Strangelove', you could never quite believe him. But 'Violator' presents the real stuff, shorn of adolescent trappings at last.

'Personal Jesus' is a horrifying song of private desperation meeting messianic egotism, with Gahan as "Your own personal Jesus Someone to hear your prayer" over a mutilated Glitter Band beat. Unlike Depeche Mode's prior ingenious forays into such territory, 'World In My Eyes' and 'Enjoy The Silence' draw deceptively radio-friendly portraits of love's undercurrents of dominance and submission. And the clammy voyeurism of 'Blue Dress' owes more than a little in texture and subject matter to David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

But despite all this, despite its queasy undertones of disgust for the flesh, and despite a title that reeks of sexual threat, 'Violator' is a downright sexy artefact - all the more so for its refusal to shy away from the dark side of human sexuality.

It's vignettes of love on the edge and minds in the gutter make it strong stuff for the pop context. But Martin Gore founders when asked to pinpoint why these disturbing themes have found such a wide audience.

"I just write about things that affect me...I always have done," he protests, with some exasperation.

"I find it very unappealing to write songs that are safe, that go nowhere, that do nothing. When I sit down to write a song I don't know exactly what my intentions are. I just set out to try and capture an emotion in a song. I know that 'Clean' has a lot of holy imagery, and that intertwines with the sex theme, which are two ideas I find interesting to mix together. But I don't try to analyse things."

Yet these are songs with a very definite and sometimes very perverse, downbeat identity of their own.

"Well, I think a lot of people are taken in by the myth that our music is totally bleak and desolate. Steve Wright, whenever he plays our records, says, I hate that band, aren't they the most depressing thing that's ever happened to music? Comments like that, people get taken in by. So I try not to let the pressure get to me, and I don't think about the consequences of a song."

Come off it. You must have expected some flak for 'Personal Jesus'?

"I thought it would get more than it did, really," he replies. "It was played all over Europe, America and England with no great trouble. The only problem was with the newspaper personal column adverts, which said 'Your own personal Jesus' and gave a telephone number.

"Imagine someone about to top themselves and they see it in the paper - my last saviour, my last chance. And it's Depeche Mode. Especially if they're a Steve Wright listener."

MARTIN'S dance euphemisms aside, 'Violator' is also the album where Depeche Mode finally find out what the hi-hat button is for. For the first time, there's a strong and undisguisable House pulsebeat in evidence throughout the LP.

Yet for a couple of years pundits have been keen to stress Depeche Mode's early input into House and techno. This culminated in a fascinating piece in The Face last year, which followed the band through Detroit clubland as they met techno innovators including Rhythim Is Rhythim supremo Derrick May. May revealed that Depeche Mode's approach to sampling, and their increasing prominence in European electronic music, had given him and his contemporaries on the cutting edge of dance music plenty of ideas.

The Face, however, trailed the story on its cover with the headline, Did Depeche Mode Detonate House? They didn't, of course, and no one was claiming they did. But the implication that they were claiming credit for creating the decade's most important musical form has dogged Depeche Mode ever since.

Martin Gore is sanguine about it all.

"We've been cited a lot in recent years as being this big influence on House music," he grins. "But I really think it was in our approach rather than the sound itself. In some ways we do push boundaries in music. We've always tried to be on the so-called forefront of technology, and I suppose the way we work has been quite influential. I even think it's helped, particularly in America, to change the whole format of music.

"But I don't agree that there are a lot of House references on 'Violator' - though you might say 'World In My Eyes' has a slight techno feel. And in some ways you can't help but be influenced by House - after all, it's played everywhere you go these days."

Like at Depeche Mode concerts, for instance.

For World Violation, the band has undertaken a rolling programme of renovation on some of their back catalogue. 'Behind The Wheel', the paranoid road song from 'Music For The Masses' which they perform as an encore, now boasts a mighty House breakdown as it segues into their idiosyncratic cover of 'Route 66'. And 'Everything Counts' has been restructured techno-style to devastating effect, demonstrating Depeche Mode's growing ease with more subtle dance forms.

But, believe it or not, World Violation is first and foremost a rock 'n' roll show on a panoramic scale. Perhaps it's just the volume, or the shock of finding such solitary music in a context of size and excess, but in 1990 Depeche Mode win by simple power. It's not simply stunning - at times it's frightening.

'Personal Jesus' is a case in point. On record it snarls and spits, the perfect antithesis to the redundant pretty-boy image of Depeche Mode that still lingers in British minds.

Onstage the song becomes monstrous. For 17,000 German kids, David Gahan becomes their personal Jesus. And anyone who can stand amid that, see their arms spread wide, hear them chanting "Reach out and touch faith" in unison, and say they're not worried, is lying.

Reprinted WITHOUT PERMISSION for non-profit use only. Photos by Ed Sirrs reproduced without permission.

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