Pop at risk of a ban

By 1984, Depeche Mode had already entered a decisive phase of their transformation. After Vince Clarke's departure, which came right after the success of "Just Can't Get Enough," the Basildon band had gradually moved away from their early lightweight synth-pop toward colder, more industrial and introspective sounds. With "Some Great Reward," their fourth studio album, that shift would finally take definitive shape.

Recorded between late 1983 and mid-1984 at Music Works in London and Hansa Studios in West Germany, the album cemented the classic line-up of Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Andy Fletcher and Alan Wilder. The latter, thanks to his musical training, helped strengthen increasingly sophisticated arrangements, while the group experimented with Synclavier samplers, turning metallic clangs, abrasive percussion and industrial noise into central elements of their sonic vocabulary.

On 29 October 1984, Depeche Mode released "Blasphemous Rumours"/"Somebody," the third single lifted from "Some Great Reward" and the twelfth British single of their career. For the first time, the band opted for a double A-side, a choice driven above all by the fear that "Blasphemous Rumours," with its provocative religious content, might spark major controversy.

The magazine Melody Maker called it "an ideal candidate for official censorship." Even the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the British tabloid The Sun openly condemned the song. In short, the concerns weren't unfounded. Just a few months earlier, the BBC had already considered censoring "Master And Servant" for its sexual references, while the broadcaster was still dealing with the fallout from the controversy surrounding the ban on Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax."

Fearing renewed hostile reactions from the British press and conservative clergy, Mute Records decided to pair "Blasphemous Rumours" with the far more romantic, and decidedly less controversial, "Somebody" as a double A-side on the same 45.

Years later, Andy Fletcher would downplay the whole matter with a now-famous line: "I wouldn't say our songs are controversial. Sure, they cause controversy, but Martin (Gore, ed.) would say he's simply writing about life."

"Blasphemous Rumours" was one of the darkest, most corrosive lyrics Gore had written up to that point. The song tells the story of a girl who attempts suicide, survives, finds faith, and then dies in a car accident two years later. In the chorus, Gore sings: “I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing.”

The idea for the song stemmed from Gore's own experience with religion. Along with Andy Fletcher and former member Vince Clarke, he often went to church, more out of habit than conviction. Gore himself explained: "I used to go to church a lot back then, not because I really believed in it, but because there was nothing else to do on a Sunday. I found the services very hard to take seriously. The whole system was pretty convenient, but I'm not sure it was really what God had in mind. There was one part of the service in particular called the prayer list, when the preacher would quickly run through the names of the sick and the dying. Whoever was at the top of the list was basically doomed to die, yet everyone would just carry on calmly thanking God for doing his will. It struck me as such a strange thing, so ridiculous and so removed from real experience."

When Gore first played the track for Fletcher, the latter found it downright offensive. Controversy soon spread beyond the band as well. British religious authorities protested openly, and the BBC came under heavy pressure to keep the single off the airwaves.

Frontman Dave Gahan, however, tried to clarify the song's meaning in an interview with the Belgian magazine Joepie: "I'm not anti-religious at all! I only object to a certain kind of religion that was forced on me when I was young. My mother was part of the Salvation Army. So she sent me to church every Sunday until I was eighteen. My sister and I would usually go off for a bike ride and then tell our mother how lovely the sermon had been." He then added: "The song is simply saying that no one should let others force things on them. Whether it's politics or anything else doesn't matter. You have to choose for yourself what you want to do with your life. And you need the courage to take that risk."

Musically, the track showed just how far Depeche Mode were drifting from the conventions of traditional synth-pop. Years later, "Billboard" would describe "Blasphemous Rumours" as a song that brought elements of early industrial music into the mainstream, thanks to its "distinct, heavy percussion samples," anticipating by several years sonic approaches that would later become central to the work of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails.

Alongside the track, the 45 also featured "Somebody," one of Martin Gore's most unusual compositions. Sung by Gore himself and recorded in the studio completely naked, the song initially comes across as a classic romantic ballad, only to reveal, in its closing lines, one of the author's typical narrative twists: “Though things like this make me sick / in a case like this I’ll get away with it.” Gore explained the choice this way: "I simply can't write normal, conventional pop music. To me, a pleasant song is incomplete, it doesn't tell the whole story. That's why I put that twist at the end of 'Somebody,' because the song was simply too beautiful. You could say I'm cynical about love in my songs, and maybe that's true, but I think it's an interesting point of view. Otherwise you end up as bland as most chart music. Relationships also have a dark side, and that's exactly what I like to write about."

The single was released in Britain on Mute Records and in Germany on Intercord Records, in various 7" and 12" vinyl formats, including live recordings made on September 29, 1984 at the Liverpool Empire Theatre during the "Some Great Reward" tour. Separate music videos were made for both songs, directed by Clive Richardson, who was already a regular collaborator with the band at the time.

Despite the controversy — or perhaps partly because of it — "Blasphemous Rumours"/"Somebody" reached the British Top 20 and further boosted Depeche Mode's rise. The song would later appear on the 1985 charity compilation "Greenpeace – The Album," while in 2017 "Billboard" would include it among the twenty best songs of the band's career.

More than 40 years on, "Blasphemous Rumours" remains one of the boldest moments in Depeche Mode's catalogue: a direct confrontation with religious doubt and the hypocrisy of fanaticism, tackled in an era when mainstream pop almost always steered clear of such themes.

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10/05/2026