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DEPECHE
MODE: A SHORT FILM
[From the
video, EPKMUTEL5, included with The Singles 86>98 promotional box set,
PBXMUTEL5. Director: Sven Harding.]
" I just stood there for a minute and stood on this big kind of like riser, and I looked, and at that moment everybody’s arms were waving in the air. And it looked like… it sounds cheesy, but it looked like this big field of corn or whatever swaying. I just stopped. It didn’t matter that I was singing or anything, it was just happening. "
Summary:
A lively overview of the band's career as told by
the band, Alan, Daniel Miller and others who have worked closely with them since
1986. Naturally as promotional material it has to stick to the music and play
down to some extent personal matters, so don't expect it to be an all-round
history. That said, the film is full of anecdotes and remains enjoyable even in
transcript. Excellent for a purely musical introduction. [3238 words]
Try
also: Interview
With Depeche Mode [from Videos 86-98]
Note - the passages in italic are scrolling subtitles appearing onscreen at intervals.
February 1986 > Depeche Mode launch their sixth album “Black Celebration” with the single “Stripped” which reaches number 15 in the UK charts.
Dave: We’ve always tried to challenge what we do a bit, you know, push it in a different direction to where we think it should be going and usually it comes right back round to Depeche Mode, but it gives us the chance to go down different avenues with the songs that Martin writes.
Martin: For me one of the most drastic changes came with Black Celebration. From then on, all of our albums sort have a thread to them, for me, and I pretty much like everything that we’ve put out since then.
Andy: Black Celebration has got a collection of songs on there that’s absolutely fantastic. I mean, all the way through there’s classics, but none of them are really commercial, just lovely songs, great lyrics. And I think a lot of traditional, big Depeche Mode fans would say that was their favourite album.
Alan: We deliberately, between albums, tried to make it different to the previous one. We were determined not to just repeat the same album over and over again. So we were consciously trying to change our approach.
“Black Celebration” sees the studio partnership between the band, Mute Records founder Daniel Miller and producer Gareth Jones break new ground in recording techniques.
Daniel: When we first started working with Gareth, we had never experienced anything like that. He was running around, running up mike leads everywhere, putting them through - - We’d never done that kind of stuff, we never came up with the idea ourselves of like, possibly we could play something and put it through an amp, and distort it, or through a PA system; we did that a lot in Berlin, we set up a big 2k PA, and we’d run a lot of the stuff, like Question Of Time for instance, the whole track through there.
Gareth: On Black Celebration, at that stage, Depeche was still very interested in pushing the frontiers of sampled sound.
Andy: We had this theory at the time that every sound must be different, and you must never use the same sound twice. So of course, sampling was great for us.
Dave: We’d go around town to building sites, all over the place with a little microphone and a tap recorder, and anything that we could crash, smash, break or, like, hit, we would, and record it.
Gareth: We were more likely to sample an aerosol going off in the gents’ loo than we were to sample a flute or something at that time. Guitars I don’t think we were using very much.
Daniel: We recorded it in the winter of ’85 and on November 5th, which is Guy Fawkes Day, we decided we’d go off and sample some fireworks. So Gareth set up a very elaborate microphone set-up in the car park with, like four or five microphones going down a thirty, forty-yard length of tarmac. Then we got a couple of bottles with rockets – you know, firework rockets – and we fired them so that they went over the microphones so we got different – We were able to record sounds of the firework at different times of its path over the microphones. And then we sampled bits of it. That was probably the most dangerous bit of sampling we’ve ever done.
The Question Of Time video is shot by renowned photographer / director Anton Corbijn, his first for the band. Anton goes on to direct eighteen Depeche Mode videos, as well as designing album sleeves and stage sets.
Anton: Their music is quite filmic, and therefore I could make it quite epic, so I like to think that I definitely gave them a strength in imagery and also connected to their music. It became a pattern that I would do the videos and slowly I started to do also some photographs and slowly I started to do album sleeves, and became almost like a visual director for the band.
Andy: It was an exciting period, you know.
September 1987 > The “Music For The Masses” album provides a catalyst for the band’s success in America, reinforced by a mammoth American tour, which climaxes with the 101st date at the Los Angeles Rose Bowl.
Andy: Music For The Masses, the lot about – well we’d gone for it. Martin saw an album he bought called “Music For The Millions”, we thought that was quite a funny term, music for the masses. But then again it did become in the end music for the masses, because we did this big gig at the Rose Bowl which was the real highlight of our career.
Martin: I think we were shocked by our popularity in America. The first two times we’d gone there it was - - we’d got a really bad response from the press and we seemed to be defending ourselves wherever we went, and we almost gave up on America and we decided not to play there. And I don’t know if someone talked us into going back; the whole thing had just changed so much.
Andy: Imagine Americans seeing us lot play live: they’d never seen anything like it before. They’re used to seeing rock band after rock band after rock band. To see us on stage – it was something new, wasn’t it?
Martin: We’ve always placed quite a lot of importance on playing live, and I think we really helped to make people realise that electronic music was powerful and did work in a live environment. And now it’s accepted – bands like The Prodigy and so on have great live shows.
The concert is filmed by legendary American documentary film-maker D A Pennebaker, the results released both theatrically and on sell-through video as “Depeche Mode 101”, along with a live album of the same name.
Martin: The Rose Bowl concert, of course, was a really special event, but I think there’ve been loads of special events in our history, and because we were all so nervous that night due to the filming and recording of the thing plus the 75,000 people, I don’t think we enjoyed it as much as we should have done.
The climax of the concert is an emotionally-charged performance of “Everything Counts”, the live version subsequently being released as a single.
Dave: Everybody that was in that concert and was part of it felt that – that moment. And you know what? I just kinda like started blubbing on stage! You know, I mean… and I tried to cover it up and still look very macho and do my thing. But I just stood there for a minute and stood on this big kind of like riser, and I looked, and at that moment everybody’s arms were waving in the air. And it looked like… it sounds cheesy, but it looked like this big field of corn or whatever swaying. I just stopped. It didn’t matter that I was singing or anything, it was just happening. I’d say that was one of the most special moments of nearly twenty years that we’ve been together.
August 1989 > “Personal Jesus” is released six months ahead of the “Violator” album, which sees the band taking an edgier, more radical approach.
Daniel: Violator was their biggest selling album to date, it did over six million around the world, and that was the first album that Flood produced.
Flood: I’d always loved them as a band, they had a very unique style of pop which I didn’t think anyone else was touching. And at the time, I was working with a lot of bands like Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails, and I was very much into the idea that a pop band could have a bit more edge to them.
Martin: He really got us to push barriers and just do things that were totally unlike what we’d done before. He got us performing a lot more, as opposed to just programming everything.
Alan: As a starting point we wanted to just do something that was alien to us, and that meant just going into the studio and playing together, which sounds strange, but it was pretty alien to us.
Andy: We were always as a band very, very pessimistic; we always feared, I think, the worst. We always think the record’s going to do badly, going to go… you know, low chart entries, it’s not going to be played on the radio, no-one’s going to like it… So we had a song, Martin wrote this song Personal Jesus, and we loved it. It was a great song, great sound, we recorded it, Francois Kevorkian remixed it in Milan with us, and we thought, “This record is not going to get played at all.”
Martin: We thought that especially in America, it might struggle for airplay and things like that, and we were proven totally wrong.
Andy: And of course, it ended up being the top selling twelve-inch in Warner Brothers’ history.
Daniel: Enjoy The Silence, the story behind that was quite interesting. It actually started off as a ballad, and I think Alan Wilder had the idea of kinda speeding it up and turning it into more of a beat-orientated track, and he did that, and that worked really well. And then Martin added the guitar riff to it.
Dave: I remember him sitting there and playing it, and he came up with this riff, and then I sang the song and everyone was surprised that I sang it so well – including myself [laughs]. And then we spent like a week trying to make it into something: “Oh wow! I think this could be a single!” and “What about if we do this and do that,” and “Maybe we’ll have to redo the drum pattern,” and “Mart, you could play the guitar a bit better.” And in the end, of course, we come right round, like full circle, and it’s just like, “Well, it sounded really good the first day we recorded it.”
Andy: It’s the first time ever in our whole career that we’ve actually thought we’ve got a hit single. We just knew straight away.
Dave:
It just flowed – it just flowed. Everything about it was in place and it
wasn’t because we had tried that hard; it just happened. And by far they’re
the most special moments.