DEPECHE MODE Violator (1990,) produced by Depeche Mode and Flood (Mark Ellis); engineered by Francois Kevorkian.

Depeche Mode’s Violator album represents a breakthrough for electronic music into the mainstream in a way that could only happen once. It is the culmination of not only the band’s evolution and rising profile, but also that of synth pop as a genre, and British synth music’s beginnings as an underground scene – influenced by orchestrated music, punk ethos, the proliferation of highways and the isolated shared experience of driving in cars, a new affordability and accessibility of synths, the fetishisation of machines and blurring of the line between machine and human, and an enduring love affair with dystopian, weird, dark, transgressive fiction.

This quote from J.G.Ballard’s Crash goes a long way to defining what transgressive fiction is: ““We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

This questioning of reality, and finding beauty in places where beauty should not be, and life and sensuality in objects that are not alive – in the weird, in the margins, in the wastelands – this aesthetic is mirrored in British synth pop songwriting. Because I’m all about music and literature being tangled together in pop culture and the collective unconscious, let’s follow that transgressive fiction thread from 1971 to 1990.

Electronic Music in Context

The Early 1970s – Wendy Carlos & A Clockwork Orange

1971 saw the release of a film that was for many their “gateway drug” into electronic music – Stanley Kubrik’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (based on the novel by Nathan Burgess, published in 1962). The film is set in a Dystopian Britain in what was then a near-future. The soundtrack ^[1]A Clockwork Orange Soundtrack, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(soundtrack) is a mixture of popular music, orchestral recordings, and some original electronic music and version-excursions of big dramatic Baroque and Romantic orchestrated and choral music, seriously arranged for Mini Moog by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos. The works re-imagined as electronica are – the title theme is an extract from Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary’, Rossini’s iconic ‘William Tell Overture’, the 2nd movement (Shertzo) and the monumental 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the text being Frederic Schiller’s ‘Ode To Joy’, which is how this movement is often known. The lyrics ^[2]Fourth Movement, Symphony #9 Beethoven, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_(Beethoven)#Fourth_movement are complex and conflicted – lofty, nihilistic, almost profane. The film is a lewd, violent, doomed tour de force through a fictional youth culture of Droogs. While it is difficult to imagine this now, the film was incredibly controversial, it was banned in the UK, and it was not allowed to be screened in the UK until 1999.

The Opening sequence “Clockwork Orange Theme” is a serious synth arrangement of Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary

By way of comparison, here is a traditional rendition of the same composition on authentic Baroque instruments.

It’s an austere March, composed in 1695 – for a quartet of ‘Flatt Trumpets’ which could play in minor key and were “similar to sackbuts or trombones.” ^[3]Reel, James, Henry Purcell: Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, march and canzona for orchestra, Z. 860, All Music, … Continue reading Purcell is an interesting choice as he was a masterful composer of exquisite dissonances which can still sound tense, surprising and “very jazz” to our ears today. While Carlos doesn’t go down that road – using Moog synth is a radical enough new element to introduce into heritage repertoire in 1971 – the quality of the harmonic construction and the detail of the individual parts connects electronic music to heritage repertoire and serious orchestration in a very interesting relationship. The idea that Moog was “bringing back the Sackbutt” – well, while I am sure that was not on Robert Moog’s “to-do list”, there is an argument for hearing quite a lot of similarity between blatting monosynths and the timbre of monophonic early instruments.

While much of the film’s soundtrack album omitted Carlos’s score, Carlos released an album of the music in 1972 titled ‘A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos’ ^[4]A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange:_Wendy_Carlos%27s_Complete_Original_Score This release featured many of Carlos’s own original compositions in entirety, and is a highly influential electronic music album.

The film also prominently featured British Brutalist architecture – the location was the Thamesmead Estate in Bexley; other Brutalist building in the film were the Lecture Theatre at Brunel University in Uxbridge, the Chelsea Drugstore, the “New House” in Shipton-Under-Wychwood, and the “Canterbury House” tower block of flats in Borehamwood. ^[5]Bolshy Flatblock: The buildings of A Clockwork Orange, Modernism in Metroland http://www.modernism-in-metroland.co.uk/blog/bolshy-flatblock-the-buildings-of-a-clockwork-orange The architecture is important as it is this hard stark Brutalist landscape that replaced war-damaged Victorian slums, and this Dystopian Science-Fiction as reality landscape had a profound influence on the British synth musicians. The connection made in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ between transgressive fiction, the urban landscape, and electronic music powerfully captured the imagination.

“That was probably a lot of people’s first time they had heard electronic music on the score to that film. It made me forever associate classical music with people getting their heads kicked in which is kind of a bit strange.” – Richard H Kirk, Cabaret Voltaire (Synth Britannia)

1977 – Warm Leatherette & J.G.Ballard’s ‘Crash’

Skip ahead to 1977 and it is two years after Kraftwerk had toured the UK for the first time, and three years after the release of their charting album ‘Autobahn’ which established a strong connection between the sound of electronic music and those other ubiquitous machines, cars! The song featured a Minimoog, an ARP Odyssey, an EMS Synthi AKS, and prominent use of vocoder ^[6]Autobahn, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn_(album) .

Britain has an underground sythpop scene kind of floating in the broader post-punk scene around Mancheter bands like Joy Division. There was OMD, The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, and a guy in South East London named Daniel Miller. “I first got a synthesiser in 1977. I bought a secondhand Korg 700s from McHarry Music Shop in Charing Cross Road. The thing that pissed me off about punk is you had to learn three chords to be in a punk band, but if you had a synthesiser you had just to press one key with one finger. Do your best. If it’s crap maybe the synthesis will get you through” (Daniel Miller, Synth Britannia).

Miller was a fan of English author J.G.Ballard, and was particularly inspired by his novel ‘Crash’. The website Litreactor lists ‘Crash’ in their “Top 10 Transgressive Novels of All Time”. ^[7]Paul, Christophi, Lit Reactor, The Top 10 Transgressive Noovels of All Time, https://litreactor.com/columns/top-10-transgressive-novels ‘Crash’ is a Dystopian car crash fetish novel, as Miller explains, “I had just broken up with a girlfriend I was very much in love with and a friend of mine said, ‘Read this book.’ And I read it and it really had a huge – how do I not use words as puns – impact on me. It wasn’t like Science Fiction in that it was outer space and stuff, it felt like it was five minutes into the future and I loved that aspect of it that was so outrageous but so possible at the same time… [it’s] about people who have car accidents and find that their sexuality has been diverted and they’re obsessed and turned on by car crashes.”

This BBC4 Documentary from 1971 directed by Harley Cokliss with J. G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, gives a good insight into the novel’s themes for those that have not read it. “I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes out real lives and our real fantasies. If the man in the automobile is the key image of the Twentieth Century, then the car crash is the most significant trauma … are we just victims in a totally random tragedy, or does it take places with our unconscious and even conscious connivance?” (J.G.Ballard).

The result of the “impact” of ‘Crash’ on Miller is the song ‘Warm Leatherette’ by his band The Normal. “The music is supposed to be visual like driving along a highway with big buildings either side and going into a tunnel. There’s quite a lot of humour in it really, it wasn’t meant to be apocalyptic or dystopian” (Daniel Miller, Synth Britannia).

“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.” – J.G.Ballard, Crash.

The link between these two increasingly affordable machines, cars and synths, and using them to traverse literal and emotional landscapes, was echoed again and again by electronic artists. It is telling that ‘Cars’ is the best known song by Gary Numan, who is known as “the first synth pinup” and he proved that synth pop could perform just as well as guitar based music in the pop music charts ^[8]Gary Numan Full Chart History, http://www.officialcharts.com/artist/17942/gary-numan/.

Gary Numan ‘Cars’ Top of the Pops, BBC1 1979.

“Cars is about feeling safe amongst people in a car. No one can get to you in your own little bubble” (Gary Numan, Synth Britannia). Cars was released in 1979 and reached No1 in the UK charts in 1979, and in 1980 it reached No1 in Canada, and No9 in the US Billboard charts and No9 in Australia.

Early 1980s, Mute Records & Depeche Mode

As it happened, Daniel Miller also founded the first electronic indie record label in 1978 – Mute Records. “I wasn’t interested in rock music. I was only interested in electronic music. I thought that was the future of where exciting music would come from and I wanted to be a part of promoting that” (Daniel Miller, Synth Britannia).

Depeche Mode formed in 1980 in Basildon, Essex. Their first album ‘Speak & Spell’ (Mute Records, 1981) was released on 5 October, 1981. The primary songwriter on the album is Vince Clarke. The album is named after a popular hand-held computer for children released in 1979 that included a the “Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips” (TMC080 linear predictive coding speech synthesiser). ^[9]Speak and Spell [Toy], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_%26_Spell_(toy)

Within a year of realising their debut album, the band lost their songwriter, Vince Clarke who left to pursue a career in “fire and ice” electronic due Yazoo, with Alison Moyet on vocals.

Depeche Mode would quickly recover with Martin Gore stepping up to songwriting duties, although understandable still finding his feet. The next album A Broken Frame (Mute Records, 1982). The third single ‘Leave In Silence’ foreshadows the moody disquietitude that was to come in their evolution. Although classically trained pianist Alan Wilder was enlisted in 1982 as a live player for the A Broken Frame tour, he did not play on this album. A Broken Frame is considered one of Depeche Mode’s weakest albums.

The band sought to “toughen up” their sound with the next album, Construction Time Again (Mute Records, 1983) which is the first album to feature Alan Wilder working his arrangement magic. Martin Gore had seen Einstürzende Neubauten perform previous to going into the studio and the band became influenced by German industrial bands and began to get very seriously involved in making their own samples from found objects.Engineer Gareth Jones became really interested in recording room sounds, so everything on the album was basically “re-amped” to get a big sound and a real room sound. (It could be one of the reasons Depeche Mode’s third and fourth albums sound like they are over a nightclub PA in your living room, but turn to soup when played over a nightclub PA.)

The next album Black Celebration (Mute Records, 1986) was the same production team – Daniel Miller Producer, Gareth Jones engineer at Hansa Recording Studio Berlin – they had the idea to live and work together continuously, with no days off.

“Daniel Miller the record company boss and co-producer of the album had a vision too ‘live the album’ he described it as, he said, ‘right, I propose that we live the album, which means we are going to meet every day from the start of the album recording until it’s finished and we’re not going to do anything else’ and everyone thought, “Oh, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that.” I mean, it was a strong suggestion from him, he was like, What do you think of that?’ And everyone wen’t OK, that sounds about right and really wanted to do it, you know. So that’s what we did. So it made it very intense and it had enormous influence on the claustrophobic nature of the achievement.” – Engineer Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, The Dark Progression).

While the album has incredible personality and is extremely industrial and creative – the “live the album” process was the end of that production team. The stand-out single from Black Celebration is ‘stripped’ which is built around a sample of a motorcycle engine slowed down – again, the continuing electronic music connection to those other dominating machines of our cities, the automobile. The song is also extremely morbid, lyrically.

‘Stripped’ video clip, from ‘Black Celebration’ 1986.

Alan Wilder – “We used to discuss beforehand how we were going to make each album different from the last. And that became more important to us as time went on, that we weren’t just going to repeat a formula.” (Depeche Mode, The Dark Progression)

Martin Gore – “Because we’d worked on three albums with Daniel and Gareth and we just felt we needed some fresh impetus, I also thnk that Daniel had ahd enough of working with us, because Mute by that time had started to become quite a big label, on the indie scene, and he had a lot of work to do anyway so spending months in the studio with us probably wasn’t an option for him.” (Depeche Mode, The Dark Progression)

They next album Music For the Masses (Mute Records, 1987) was produced by David Bascombe who had achieved acclaim working with Tears for Fears and Peter Gabriel. It was recorded in an old theatre in Paris full of old orchestral instruments which the band used for various sounds. The big single from the album was ‘Never Let Me Down Again’, which picks up on that electronic music preoccupation with cars.

Dave Bascombe – “Classic Martin, very simple chords and melodies he just seems to nail it. Same as Personal Jesus – it’s just great songwriting. This pop simplicity with this fantastic coating around it of big weird sound. That’s the success of it. When he’s on form I think he’s one of the best songwriters around.”

Dave Bascombe ”Alan’s an incredibly talented musician, he’s obviously the most musically trained out of all of them, and I think he’s had the most patience and vision in the studio. Martin really wasn’t interested in that particular side of it. Dave would be quite involved, but obviously Dave’s focus is the singing and an overview. Alan was pretty much doing every day stuff with me just every part wuld be layered up with the two or three different sounds so it was a quite painstaking thing and Alan had a good vision for that.” (Depeche Mode, The Dark Progression)

Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses tour lived up to it’s name, and somewhere along the road they started to sell out stadiums, which was unprecedented for a synth band. The Rose Bowl final tour show in Pasedena was the biggest electronic show the world had seen – some 65,000 attendees – supported by Thomas Dolby and OMD.

Thomas Dolby – “It represented the zenith of the conquest of California and increasingly the rest of the America by DM – their sound and the tour that they did for Music for the Masses basically followed the infection of the Krock factor across North Amaerica to all the different radio formats and radio stations and I think they fed off each other each new city that they got tohad just dsort of got the bug of the Krock format – so it was very clear by the time that they got to the Rose Bowl which is the biggest gig that they’d ever done and really the biggest electronic music gig that had ever happened, it was gonna be a huge celebration, it was gonna be a kinda Woodstock for that electronic Krock sound.”  (Depeche Mode, The Dark Progression)

Following this show, the band took time off from their grind of making an album every year, so it wasn’t until 1990 that they would release the next album.

Mark Ellis – Opening the Flood-Gate

For Volator Depeche Mode decided to work With “Flood” (Mark Ellis) and for the sake of this never-ending paper getting wrapped up, I will transcribe a chunck of interview from Short Circuit [available on YouTube thanks to SonicState] to summarise Flood’s history and approach, as he is something of an enigmatic figure in audio engineering:

“I started in the really old fashioned apprenticeship. I was a runner/tea boy at Morgan Studios in 1978 and I just worked my way up to assisting, then moved studios, did more running, then engineering, then moved studio again, and then assisting then engineering, then lots of engineering then production.” [Aside Note: Mark Ellis is famously known as “Flood” because there were two tea boys at Morgan Studios, and one was nicknamed “Drought”, and the other “Flood” as he was almost too enthusiastic in his duties.]

“I think I was very lucky because I started very young, I think I’d turned 18 by a week, so that meant I’d been doing it for two years by the time I was the assistant on the mixing of New Order. So in this day and age you’d probably be lucky if you were doing that by 25 or 26, so I think that’s where things were different and also I just worked insanely. Just sold my soul to the job.”

“You sort of have an inkling that something special might be happening about ¾ of the way through [an album], because you’re in a place where you’ve never been before. Very hard thing to describe. It’s not trying to be anything. It’s not trying to be it’s past or – it’s a very strange feeling and it’s not always the case but sometimes you have a feeling that you have done something that’s monumental.”

“I think [production is] as much about how you get on personality wise with people. You always when you meet up, people have aspirations or ideals, they – for instance last editors record – they wanted to have a change of direction and they felt I was the person to do it. Once you get in the studio you can have your own ideas and suggestions to move the thing along. It’s how you get on with each other. Other than necessarily me saying, ‘Right [with my clip board] you are going to do this now, this now.”

“To be quite honest I have a really really low boredom threshold. [Long evolving dance mixes] would be [his thing] if I’d been doing short punk songs of one and a half minutes. I could really get into it. That’s the way that I think. It’s like I’m bored of all that, right, let’s do something else. So that’s how I could go from Depeche Mode, to U2, to Nine Inch Nails, to Nick Cave, to Polly Harvey, and round the houses.”

“I only get involved in the projects where people want that opinion. It’s always I have to work collaboratively. It’s never my way or the highway. Nor do I like working with bands who say we’re gonna do it this way. So, why have you employed me? So it’s like an audio game of tennis. So they think they might want to change direction. It goes over the net to me. I will suggest a couple of things I think might help them. And then that will go back to them. And they’ll go back to that. And then they’ll go OK maybe we need to follow this direction…”

“Sometimes it just creeps up and you go: wow. Wasn’t expecting this.”

“I am still a hardware man. I have to say I find software, I find it quite limiting. Not all software – it’s such a generalization – but I’m a very tactile person and sometimes I find software that’s all of an ilk, tends to have a similar type of sound. I find that hardware stuff that gives you much more flexibility – I know we’re talking really small amounts, but the fact you can have six outboard compressors all of different makes, they all do something slightly different, and you can tell.”

“What I tend to do now is I work with people who deal with the computer for me. I tend to like working as if it were a tape machine. A number of reasons, some are sonic, some are the way if you start cramming loads of plugins over everything I tend to find most computers get really taxed and you start to get into grey areas of timing feel latency – and also I think it’s lazy. I’ve come from the school where one of the engineers taught me you’ve got all your output faders in a straight line and then YOU are getting the sounds and the balance is to tape. That any time you get the tape out, you put the faders in a straight line, it sound the same. I know from a couple of friends who mix all the time, they are just going, “Oh my God! Why can’t people RECORD the sounds instead of having all this slew of plugins over everything and the different machine, it’ll have different timing – you don’t know where you stand. Just commit!”

Violator & the Early 90’s Zeitgeist of Surreal, Dark & Weird

In the past Depeche Mode’s darkness and weirdness was too dark and weird for pop audiences – they had a dedicated audience in the Goth scene.

Violator’s status as such a successful album happened in the context of a year when Surreal, Dark & Weird were really popular. Transgressive Fiction that broke taboos went from the fringes to the mainstream with a succession of high profile works in the mainstream, notably the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Bret Easton Ellis’s novel ‘American Psycho’ (1991), the film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) – dark and weird which had previously been the province of the art house and the pulp, was in the mainstream.

“Cooper’s Dream” Scene: Twin Peaks, Season 1 Episode 3: “Zen, Or The Skill To Catch A Killer”.

‘Silence of the Lambs’ Theatre Trailer (1991)

Depeche Mode’s Villator was released on the 19th of March 1990; David Lynch & Mark Frost’s Season One of Twin Peaks had screen debut starting April 8, 1990.

Violator: Track By Track

World In My Eyes – track one, single, video clip.

World In My Eyes features lush pads, beautiful reverb on both vocals, a sensual and danceable hard groove percussion and bass. Both David Gahan and Martin Gore sing, but Gahan takes the main vocals. The texture is really complex, with layer upon layer of synth parts, and then the effects on those parts adding an even richer dimension to the weave. The way it all interacts, the repetition is never quite the same. With the all the clarity of synths, it has an organic undulation, and is not mechanical sounding at all.

Sweetest Perfection – track 2

Depeche Mode Sweetest Perfection ^[10]Depeche Mode, Sweetest Perfection, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvx92CrYaRA

Sweetest Perfection is built around a shuffle synth/percussion loops, and big synth bass – there’s an organic feel to the groove, all the synth parts are played along. There’s an eerie use of cross panning. This song is quite Gothic with lush string pads and a simple guitar strummed for colour until the full groove drops in. I had to look up who sang this – Martin Gore – which I wouldn’t have picked. This is classic DM ballad of kneeling in the musical confessional, and gushing desperation and emotional clamour (which is what they do so well.) I would never wish contentment on these guys.

Sweetest Perfection Demo, from Sounds of the Universe, Depeche Mode ^[11]Sweetest Perfection Demo, from Sounds of the Universe, Depeche Mode , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSwJYtDlkhg

Personal Jesus – track 3, single, video clip.

Personal Jesus – The ambling riff driving it’s simplicity, stompy percussion, and there’s that eerie open-sounding break to the rhythm. I love how the synth oscillations are timed with the bass part to form a groove, and the breathy samples, and the reverse delay on “Reach” is just gorgeous. This is the album where Martin Gore stopped merely writing his songs on guitar and started to play guitar on an album.

Probably the most defining element on Violator is the rhythm foundation for Personal Jesus – which is Fletcher and Flood stomping (or “jumping up and down”) on what I believe is a metal door and wearing Doc Martins or some similar substantial boots. It practically ambles or strides, rhythmically. (We are no longer in the safe bubble of Gary Numan’s car where no one can touch us!) This is such a metaphor for the change of direction the band wanted, and what Flood brought to the production – unlike ‘Stripped’ which is built around a sample of a combustion engine (again cars), Ellis had the band getting away from sounding “on the grid” [even though in the 80s they would have been mostly tracked to tape, their approach was “in the box” with samplers a lot], so instead of programming, sampling, chopping, comping and looping everything, there is a lot of live playing and playful things like “jumping up and down” on a mic’d up door. Violator still has a lot of “Depeche traditionl” production techniques – lots of sampling and looping – but that the is also part of the interest, the groove created between the mechanical portions and the bolder “one take” live performances. People take this stuff for granted today with performative electronic music technology like Ableton Live pe-packinging this hybrid process, but in 1990 pretty much no one was doing it. The fine scale graduation of human playing against the mechanical precision of very skilful sampling, and the exciting loudness and impact of something like jumping up and down in boots on a metal door, makes Personal Jesus so very exciting to the ears. It’s really brilliant and innovative pop music production, and a great example of how production, arrangement and songwriting can bleed together as creative processes, and how awesome the results can be when they do chiaroscuro in the studio.

Mark Ellis gave a presentation at the Short Circuit Mute Records Festival at Roundhouse in London, and at an event called Sound Edit in 2011. There are several crowd-filmed videos of this presentation on YouTube, and I have transcribed portions of the Sound Edit vids in two parts (all are worth watching, although the audio is not great on any of them).

From Short Circuit Presents Mute Festival (2011, London) Presentation by Producer Mark Ellis AKA “Flood”:

Personal Jesus

The distinctive beat – That’s the sound of me and Fletch jumping on a piece of metal. So we did this for about an hour and a half and of course the band are sitting there thinking, ‘Come on, what are you going to do? You’re the producer. This is hardly ground breaking.’ So we spent a lot of time getting it in time jumping up and down on a piece of metal. So what we did we started to record the sound of the room, put the footsteps through speakers in the room and record those and we ended up with… which is just the sound put through the speaker into the recording room, so the band are going ‘Oh, OK. We’ve heard this before. Come on, earn your money.’ So we move on to the other major thing which was there already which I think you’ll all recognize which is [plays twanging guitar amble’ – so that’s on an acoustic guitar and we spent a long time with Martin in the studio sitting there playing it over and over and over again until we got a loop that we thought that feels pretty good. But I said, ‘Surely you can just play this all the way through. You’re a brilliant guitar player, I know you’re a synth band, but why don’t we try and do something new. ‘

Martin – ‘Nope. Not having that.’

So we sat there and we looped it and we argued about what was the best bit and they went ‘this bit’ and I went ‘hmmm… OK’ so we looped all the sections of the song on the acoustic guitar. That took pretty much the rest of the day. And then when everyone was sort of happy I just said, ‘Well, why don’t you just try and play it through once on the electric guitar, just to add a little bit of excitement to it.’

So Martin got his guitar plugged it into the first amp that was there and played it through once and it sounded fantastic and that’s what behind the acoustic guitar and then in the final mix that tended to be the lead instrument rather than the acoustic guitar that we’d spent all that time looping. So strike one to me.

Because they wanted to do it in the old fashion way that they always did which was everything programmed – very very ridged – and one of the major things that I wanted to try and bring to Depeche was the idea that you can have – not feeling – but you can have real playing with electronics, so this was the first time that we started to actually approach that. He literally did this guitar part in one take. So that was the end of the first day, so everybody went ‘OK, let’s go out, let’s go drink…’

 

‘Oh, you’ve finally done something to earn your money. So that’s the drum pattern. It took about ten minutes normally you’d expect to take three days getting drum sounds and programming it but it was very simple and then after that we then started to move onto the bass and they wanted to try loads of different ideas with stacking bass sounds, so we’d start off and they’d say, ‘Oh, we really like the sound of a Jew’s harp.’ You know, ‘doing! Doing! Doing! Doing!’ So we got a synth sound and we spent quite a lot of time trying to get a synth sounding like a Jew’s harp, because we were trying to get the idea of it being blues but done electronically, so this was the first sound but it’s not that powerful, so then Martin suggested that we try using maybe a Moog, so that’s that recognizable part of the bass sound, and then somebody said well what about maybe a cello, so there’s a cello and a real bass guitar and they are all part of the overall sound, and again Martin played a bit of the bass but we sampled it all, and everybody sort of through that sounded pretty good. So that’s how the bass was made of all four elements.

So then we came to the other major part of the song that was already there from the demo which was the – [he mimes playing a guitar slide] – rawor – which everybody thinks is a slide guitar. And I said well I always thought on the original demo it sounded like voices, somebody going –RAOWRRRR! – and they all looked at me as though I was mad. But I said if we just combine the two sounds it’d be unique, it won’t just be a slide guitar, so everybody is looking at me as though I was going mad – and I said ‘Just like somebody screaming’ and Dave finally turned around and goes, ‘what like this? RAOOOWRRRR!” I went, ‘Yes! Exactly like that!’ So Dave went, ‘Alright then, sample this then. RAAAAOOOOWWWRRRRR!’ And I went, ‘Yep, that’s perfect.’ They were looking at me as though I was mad, but that is half of the sound that you hear when you hear the finished article. Again, strike two, producer. Slowly, I’m winning.

 

So that was pretty much all we did for day two. Out we go, partying away. Then we come back in next day, we start to do the famous breath and the breath came about because we wanted to do – we were trying harmonica – actually to do the bass part – and the sound just wasn’t right – but what we did like was the sound of someone going ‘inhales quickly’ and so we got a load of [inhales quickly] from Martin and I think Alan and chopped them all together and that’s makes up the [who-ha-ho-who-ha] from trying to get a harmonica for a bass sound.

 

The other major thing that we were trying to get was this feeling of it being more loose – or played – or organic – or all those rubbish words to describe moving them into a different place. So the other major thing was the way that they approached vocals and traditionally Dave would sing loads of vocals – as do most singers – and then you comp them – sit there and select the best bits – whereas my approach is one of let’s do three or four takes and then just what has the best feeling? And then we’ll take bits that are out of time or the performance is not great from one of the other takes and the band were really unsure about doing this. But to their credit that was the one song on all of Violator that we did by Dave doing three maybe four takes and piecing it together like that, which I think is one of the best vocals on Violator. But the band they have differing opinions about it. I think it gives all the energy to the track because it feels lively and it’s not totally chopped up as a lot of their music had been in the past. I think that and the electric guitar with the acoustic guitar are the things that give the track total drive total energy not from synthesizers.

The song was also highly controversial.

Depeche Mode ran into trouble during the promotional campaign for their new single “Personal Jesus”, with some regional newspapers refusing to accept ads for the record.

Both the Aberdeen Evening News and the Nottingham Evening Post rejected classified ads which simply featured the words “Your Own Personal Jesus” followed by a phone number which, when dialled, played the song, on the grounds that they may cause offence.

In London, the Evening Standard also raised objections due to the religious content, but later relented when representatives of the band pointed out that the paper had already run similar advertisements as part of Billy Graham’s “Life” Campaign.

The new single, the group’s first new recording for two years, is released by Mute on Monday.

It was produced by Depeche Mode and Flood and recorded at Logic Studios in Milan. The B side features “Dangerous” and an acoustic mix of “Personal Jesus”. Expect more remixes of the single to be released soon. All tracks were mixed by Flood and Francois Kevorkian, best known for his work with Kraftwerk.

Depeche Mode are currently in Denmark where they are putting the finishing touches to their as yet untitled new album, which should be in the shops early in the new year.

New Musical Express, 26th August, 1989

^[12]New Music Express [NME], 26 August, 1989, Depeche Mode Media Files website, http://tiptopwebsite.com/websites/index2.php?username=depechemodefile&page=7
Halo – Track 4, single, video clip.

Halo has a much more industrial undercurrent than prior songs, referencing earlier DM efforts, with minimal but driving bass and a darkly uneasy detuned synth wail over the entire chord progression. There’s beautiful poetic painting, as Gahan sings the tender words ‘fall into my eyes’ he’s accompanied by an ascending scale in big strings. Decedent vocal harmonies placed behind the main vocal crescendo and move forward dramatically after a prolonged, controlled slow crescendo as the texture builds. Lush, dramatic string pads and/or real strings provide Gothic icing on the cake.

Halo Demo by Depeche Mode ^[13]Halo Demo by Depeche Mode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDdzX7-odoU

 

Waiting for the Night – track 5

Depeche Mode, Waiting For The Night ^[14]Depeche Mode, Waiting For The Night, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrpRzdvp5U

Waiting For The Night features a lovely little two note tap-delay pitter-patter of harmonics. (I’m sure this has been sampled by VNV Nation, who aren’t half as clever with it.) The texture is made more solid with a djembe-like bass synth, and ethereal backing vocals. The chorus features a nice synth ostinato, and a woodwind synth part that is so suggestive of the actual instrument you wonder if it’s not a real oboe. The simple layering of parts broadens out with a modulation, deepening and adding treble parts, leaving room for the vocals in the centre. Vocals sound like they might be double-tracked. There’s tasteful gated reverse delay on the guitar, and tap delay on an almost sub-sonic bass, moving to a sinuous serpentine break, then back to the original tap with a soft wash of synth oscillations – this would sound devastating on a good club PA. The ‘aaaah’ backing vocals sound androgynous, and the intervals sound almost Byzantine. There’s a huge undercurrent of darkness, but it’s not hammed-up, the musical shadows just fall naturally which makes it more powerful.

Waiting For The Night studio production sketch version, Martin Gore and David Gahan ^[15]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_prY01lZYE4

Enjoy The Silence – track 6, single, video clip.

Enjoy The Silence is possibly Depeche Mode’s most iconic song. Flood gave a presentation at the Short Circuit Mute Records Festival at Roundhouse in London, and at an event called Sound Edit in 2011. There are several crowd-filmed videos of this presentation on YouTube, and I have transcribed portions of the most complete one (all are worth watching, although the audio is not great on any of them).

From Short Circuit Presents Mute Festival (2011, London) Presentation by Producer Mark Ellis AKA “Flood”:

“In the demo Martin’s playing a little pump organ … Daniel and Alan Wilder both suggested that maybe it could be an up-tempo disco song. Martin was really unsure about this. We didn’t record it in the first session in Milan, after Milan – a lot of drinking, trying to break me – and completing Personal Jesus, we then had six weeks off and then we went to Denmark. To Puk Studios. Which is in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing to do except make music. So we got to Enjoy The Silence and and Martin was going ‘I really don’t think it wants to be a disco song.’

I’m going, ‘Martin, trust me. It’s been going well, hasn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Let’s try. Let’s experiment.’

‘I really don’t think it’s going to work.’

So Martin went off, he went to his room basically, for the first day while we were doing it. And myself and Alan sat in the studio – so how are we going to make this into a disco song?

Well, the easiest thing is to get a track that you like and copy it. So, we got a certain track and we copied it. And we started off with the drums … so we started off with the basically copying these drums which are some of them are actually lifted from the original song – I shouldn’t say that, but I just did. So and then that’s just a copy of this track – so I think Dave and Fletcher had gone home for the weekend, Martin’s sitting in his bedroom, grumpy, and me and Alan are sitting there in the studio so and I’d recently bought a big modular Rode synthesizer and I’d been playing around with it, and Alan said, ‘Oh, how does this work?’ And I said you do this and you do this. And he started playing around and said well shall we try and do a bass sound? And I said, well here’s a bass sound – here’s the sequencer – and he started fiddling around with it, and that’s how the bass line came, so that’s just a sequence on the System 700 which is a big modular synth, and he said, well can you change it, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s easy.’ So this is sounding pretty good.

But, Martin, no, not interested at all. So we said, ‘Well, OK, Martin, we do need a melody. A strong theme.’

So he said, ‘Oh, yeah, all right.’

So he comes out and on the worst sounding synthesizer with the worst sound ever he plays – plonks out theme –

Brilliant! Brilliant!

Really?

Yes! Yes! Yes! But not on that sound!

Let’s try a guitar.

‘No, I don’t want to play guitar any more. There’s far too much guitar on this record already.’

‘Just try it. Just trust me, Martin. Just trust me.’

So he sat there. ‘Well I don’t want a normal guitar sound.’

Well look, we’ve got this new FX thing, let’s put it through that.’

‘Just get a good sound.’

And he’s just so not into it. But he sits there and he plays that riff. Just two takes. And straight off. And I mean it’s not the most earth shattering guitar sound but at that moment and at that time just putting it through one processor – it was a bit of flange or chorus – made him feel comfortable, and he just played it. And then he left. He went back to his bedroom. ‘I don’t like it at all.’

‘OK Martin, just give us one more day – that’s all I’m asking – and then if you really don’t like it and everybody else thinks it’s a waste of time, then fine. We’ll do it your way.’

‘OK.’

So he went off and me and Alan carried on and we did most of the rest of the music – the strings – the choir sound – and then the strings answering it – and then Dave came back and he did the vocals and it was pretty much done in two days.

Martin – ‘I really don’t like it.’

But Daniel had also come over just about the day after we’d finished doing the basic recording, and he sat and heard the progress – Mr. Record Company coming in to check up on us and make sure that we were working – so he listened to a load of tracks and I’d done a rough mix of Enjoy The Silence which I thought was pretty good and it was the end of the second day and Daniel heard it and just went ‘Amazing! It’s gotta be a single. That’s fantastic.’

Martin ‘I really don’t like it.’

So everybody else – Dave, Fletch, Alan, Daniel – and a few other people who heard it loved the track. We go back to London after being in Denmark for six weeks and we finish off doing the brass in the middle and a couple of extra bits of vocals and we’d finished the song and Francois Kevorkian had come in, he’d mixed the whole album, and it was all great, but Martin just went ‘I really don’t like Enjoy The Silence.’

We’re looking at him, ‘You’re mad, Martin.’ But he didn’t like that version of the song at all, but to his credit he wanted it to go on the record and it did. But Daniel wasn’t happy with the mix of it. So we had to go into another studio with a completely different engineer and mixer and we sat in the studio for three days copying the rough mix that I’d done in Denmark on a cassette sitting there [pretends to push fader] no, just play the cassette with the rough mix, and that’s what the final mix is. Which is quite ironic really we could have just used the cassette.

So that shows how different the approach was to two different tracks. One was pretty much as they would have expected it and had been used to doing, and just a re-working of the demo, but the other song was totally nothing like they’d done before and it was done so quickly cause traditionally always Depeche always did a week or two weeks on a song, endlessly programming, sampling, doing little bits, but Enjoy The Silence was three days at the most to do the whole song – the bulk of the song was done in one day. For me it was very informative and a great learning experience, working with that band, because once everybody had relaxed it was a chance to try anything. There was nothing that we didn’t try on those sessions. Drumming. Full drum kits. Even had all of Depeche Mode playing as a rock band. Fletch on bass, Alan on drums, Dave singing, but Martin playing this heavy electric guitar and all of those things got used somewhere along the lines on the sessions.

Enjoy The Silence – Demo by Martin Gore. ^[16]Enjoy The Silence Demo, Martin Gore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL4epbvM8oY

 

Policy of Truth

Policy of Truth music video, Depeche Mode
^[17]Policy of Truth music video, Depeche Mode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2VBmHOYpV8

Policy Of Truth features another great bass line, kinda Motown, over which roll eerie sweeping oscillations, and an ambient industrial soundscape. There’s a gorgeous crescendo of guitar wail and saw-wave synth together. The lyrical power in this song is not in the singers righteous and confidant anger, but in vulnerability. We hear his hurt, and also his deepest self-reproach. In a brilliant musical representation of setting and psychology, the singer is buffeted and almost overwhelmed by the synths.

Blue Dress

Blue Dress features a more airy rendition of Gore’s voice. There’s a lovely change when a harp/pitz synth sound changes the groove to feel faster with subdivisions, although the metre remains the same. Texture completely opens out for vocals and guitar on ‘Cause then you’ll learn, you’ll know what makes the world turn…’, followed by cyclic loops layered many times over, each of a different length, creating a rich texture and a musical representation of ‘turning.’

Blue Dress, Depeche Mode

Hidden Track – Interlude

Interlude (hidden track following Blue Dress on Violator)

Demo of Interlude

Clean

Clean features very Gothic woodwind samples, and an entire androgynous choir of Martin Gore. Sirening oscillations blend with the woodwind and ambient crunch distorted sounds, the medieval sounding ‘choral’ group swelling with the entry of a galloping two note synth bass. This folksy cowboy lilt is reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores, an effect enhanced by pan pipe. The industrial steam-piston percussion with shifting emphasis. Rolling rumbling toms echo The Cure’s experimental drumming on Pornography.

The simple framework that Martin Gore usually writes on guitar is very well exemplified in this acoustic version of clean live in the studio.

Depeche Mode Clean acoustic studio performance

Clean, Depeche Mode
^[18]Clean music video, Depeche Mode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1mD-_DKHc0
Depeche Mode are beautiful, and on Violator they reveal themselves with honesty.  I hear this music and my heart leaps.

Demo version

Clean Demo by Depeche Mode, from Sounds of the Universe

 

Alan Wilder – Master Electronic Music Arranger

Alan Wilder is undisputed as the sampler and synth arrangement genius in Depeche Mode, who took the songs as sketched by Martin Gore and. as Thomas Dolby put it “orchestrated on synths in a really serious way”. (He also served as full kit drummer for the band from 1993, which he learned the drums for.) Alan Wilder actually used to be a Tape Operator at age 16-17 in the studio for DGM Records, he was a skilled tape editor, and he worked on albums for The Rubbettes, and he was asked to play keyboards for them (his first studio recording).

Depeche Mode made extensive use of “found sounds” – samples they created themselves – and they made full use of the capabilities of samplers of the mid-to-late 1980s to create performative sampler arrangements; this would consist of layering all the parts for a song across a number of samplers so that the song could be performed by the band. The sampling would include studio sounds such as vocal layers and instrumental samples (e.g.. Martin Gore playing e-Bow), as well as sound made electronically in the studio and rendered with studio effects such as delay and reverb, so the live performances had the integrity of the full-scale sounds used on the albums.

Alan Wilder auctioned a lot of his Depeche Mode gear online in 2011, and the four promotional videos from that auction are still online. They provide an amazing insight into the Depeche Mode’s gear as well as the history of the band. This includes the custom-made in ear monitors, multi-track tapes, and synth and sampler instrument discs.

Alan Wilder Collected 1 auction promotional film 1

This film features acetates and test pressings, as Alan Wilder was the band member who attended the acetate and test pressing review sessions.

Alan Wilder Collected 2 auction promotional film 2

The extent to which Wilder was involved in this is very well demonstrated in his “auction promotion video” for the E-mu EMAX II loaded with Depeche Mode live sound arrangement sample libraries for each song.

Gear – Synths & Samplers

Depeche Mode’s Stage Plans for their 1986 Tour list the following gear inKeyboard Magazine, October 1986.

Alan Wilder, stage right: E-mu Emulator II atop Kord DW-8000.

Martin Gore, stage centre: PPG Wave 2 atop E-Mu Emulator II.

Andy Fletcher, stage left: Sequential Prophet 2000 atop a second Prophet 2000.

Additionally, Wilder, Gore and Fletcher each play custom built percussion instruments through contact mikes, which trigger sampled sounds from an Akai sampler via a Roland Octopad.

^[19]Doerschuk, Bob, The Wilder Side of Depeche Mode, Keyboard Magazine, October 1986

E-Mu Emulator II

The E-mu Emax synths were a major part of Depeche Mode’s electronic music set-up from the mid 80s and into the early 90s, and the specs are described as follows at Vintage Synth Explorer: “The Emax features many common analog synth-type controls … tune, filter and shape the envelope or use LFO’s and chorus to liven up your samples. There’s also an on-board sequencer section. A real-time only 16-track, non-quantizable sequencer for basic scratch-pad use or simple arpeggios or patterns … The Emax II which was released in 1989 brought the Emax series up to modern specs with 16-bit sampling, 16-voice polyphony, 16 MIDI channels, stereo samples, 1MB RAM expandable to 8MB, SCSI, 8 assignable outputs and the SE’s synthesis functions”. ^[20]E-Mu Emax entry, Vintage Synth Explorer, http://www.vintagesynth.com/emu/emax.php

Emulator II “Shining Moments” clip (including Ferris Bueller’s fake coughing) and a truckload of Depeche Mode Emulator II moments

Further Viewing

Soundcheck with Alan Wilder