Shake the Disease was not only the band’s best track to date, it also featured Dave Gahan’s finest vocal to date, with his emotional rasp counterpointing Gore’s minor baroque flourishes in the chorus.
Depeche Mode’s 13th single, recorded in Berlin (at the Hansa studio where Bowie recorded Heroes) is a masterclass in emotional nuance. Still, it’s a competitive world, and its catchy pop sloganeering took it to No 6 in the UK charts.Īrriving in 1985 as a supplementary track to promote their first singles compilation, Shake the Disease proved that electronic songs could be just as moody and dynamic as their rock counterparts. Gore’s lyrics are usually heartfelt, often leading to accusations of naivety, and while Everything Counts is largely coherent in its message, “The turning point of a career / In Korea / Being insincere” must rank as one of the worst lyrics ever written. The “grabbing hands grab all they can” lyric captured the zeitgeist the juxtaposition of the main hook ringing like a till with the more exotic Chinese oboe exemplifies a clash of civilisations and, perhaps, an exhortation to choose between the worldly and the spiritual. More radio friendly was Everything Counts, a critique of greed, written as Margaret Thatcher’s first term shaded into her second. The third Depeche album, Construction Time Again, featured an assemblage of drubbed scrap metal noise, sampled and manipulated, with the track Pipeline made up entirely of field percussion from found sounds. The group also got their hands on a Fairlight synthesiser, which, although prohibitively expensive at the time, would enable them to turn their music into something more doomy and industrial. It could have been curtains when Clarke left after the first album, but the remaining members (plus Alan Wilder, initially hired for live outings) had faith in the songwriting abilities of Martin Gore. From the off, Depeche Mode were showing tremendous promise.ĭepeche Mode in 1981, when Vince Clarke (third from left) was still in the band. It tears along with clean synth lines bleeding into the red, marrying Numanoid keyboard monoliths with dispassionate Kraftwerkian sprechgesang, with an added touch of voyeuristic perviness about it. The band rerecorded it for their debut album Speak & Spell, though the Some Bizzare version is more naively charming, bolshy and brutalistic. Photographic was the standout track on the collection, and received much of the critical attention. “It was people who’d been to art school mainly, but Depeche Mode weren’t processed by that aesthetic at all.” Stevo Pearce of the Some Bizzare label had also noticed the group (as had a few majors, who had to be repulsed), and Miller licensed Depeche Mode’s first track, Photographic, to Pearce for Some Bizzare’s Futurism compilation. “They were kids, and kids weren’t doing electronic music at the time,” said Miller. Miller, who was running Mute Records, came across Depeche Mode, a quartet of teenagers – and one 20-year-old in the shape of songwriter Vince Clarke – from Basildon, Essex.
The following year, the real thing arrived. In 1980, Daniel Miller created a virtual electropop band called Silicon Teens, featuring four fictionalised teenagers whose sound derived entirely from synthesisers.
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