Depeche Mode

Music for the masses, made by a band that had always dodged the spotlight, styling themselves as outsiders for devotees of Blasphemous Rumours. The album that in 1987 propelled Depeche Mode towards stardom might seem like a risky move, almost blasphemous – to stay on theme – towards the small band of followers who had faithfully stuck with them since their beginnings in Basildon, all the way through the heart of the 1980s. Yet the shift that would bring Dave Gahan and co. to major success didn't arrive as a bolt from the blue, but as an evolution within continuity. And it would prove so effective as to pull off the hardest trick of all: holding together the die-hard early fanbase alongside new hordes of devotees.

Electropop liturgies

Indeed, the previous – and crucial – “Black Celebration” (1986) had already marked a first, decisive change of course for Depeche Mode, on a path that would soon take them from a cult band for electropop fetishists to filling arenas and stadiums the world over. In that pitch-black celebration of 1986 you could already spot the first signs of a transformation across almost every characteristic aspect of the Basildon group: Gahan's voice had grown darker, while retaining the charm he'd shown in certain earlier moments, the sound felt sturdier and more mature, with Gore now fully able to deploy his keyboards to create dreamlike atmospheres (the splendid title track, “Stripped”), without giving up aggressive riffs (“A Question Of Time”) or moments of tenderness (“Sometimes” and “A Question Of Lust”). From the epic crescendo of “Black Celebration” to the desolation of “New Dress”, the album offered a layered, dense sound, rooted in their early electropop but already hinting, in attitude and sonics, at stadium rock. It hardly mattered whether the guitars were there or not: even a track like “Flies On The Windscreen”, with its macabre backdrop of panting vocalizations, sounded like a genuine negative anthem, the soundtrack for nocturnal outings devoted to decadence.
What remained was that mix of the sacred and the profane with blues roots, to be shaped into new, alluring sonic forms, without losing that sense of gloom and anguish that would always accompany the Basildon outfit: a complex alchemy for new sonic liturgies, those of “Music For The Masses”.

Recorded between Paris and London and mixed in Denmark, “Music For The Masses” is at once the first Depeche Mode album in which Mute mentor Daniel Miller doesn't play a central production role, and the first in which keyboardist Alan Wilder begins to carry real weight behind the mixing desk. On the relationship with Miller, in the official making-of documentary, Martin Gore acknowledged the need for “a bit of fresh impetus”, while the producer himself spoke of “a breath of fresh air” and “a huge weight off his shoulders” in giving up day-to-day responsibilities. For production duties, the band turned to Dave Bascombe, who had recently worked as sound engineer on Tears For Fears' “Songs From The Big Chair”. The similarities between some of that record's darker moods and Depeche Mode's new liturgies for the masses are hard to miss. In the documentary, Gahan revealed: “Dave just seemed like someone we could get along with”; while the late Andy Fletcher joked: “Sometimes you need new jokes, someone to take the piss out of you a bit”. In truth, though credited as co-producer, Bascombe downplays his own role in shaping the sound, claiming he was mainly brought in as a technician rather than a creative guide, and that he enjoyed the studio's “strange” unwritten rules. It wasn't his job to question the status quo, so he simply slotted into the workflow: once Gore had written and demoed a track, it was up to Wilder and the producer/engineer to develop it in the studio.

Sessions began at Guillaume Tell, a converted Parisian cinema, which proved fruitful thanks to the availability of a range of orchestral instruments. Work continued at the Kinks' Konk Studios in London and in a mobile studio set up in an old country house in the English countryside, before wrapping up with recording and mixing at Puk Studios in Denmark (a building sadly destroyed by fire in 2020). The result was an epic, orchestral sound that heightened the melodramatic, theatrical nature of the Depeche sound: a combination of Bascombe's technical skill and Wilder's classical influences and arranging talent. Tracks were often built on hypnotic cycles that build to a sweeping climax. It's a less painterly sound than on previous records, and decidedly more sculptural, with basslines that feel carved out of marble, while the dense layering of electronic keyboards continues. Gore, however, sets the synths aside a little, loosening his electronic purism to focus on electric guitar – not by chance, the album opens with an isolated guitar riff, albeit heavily treated and triggered via sampler – while the drums assert themselves forcefully.
Lyrically, Gore explores the theme of the open road, a recurring motif evoking youthful escape and adventure, while the metaphor of driving intertwines with his fascination for power games and control. “Music For The Masses” also marks a shift in the band's aesthetic, with Anton Corbijn (future director of the Ian Curtis biopic “Control”) getting involved in videos and promotional materials.

Killer singles

A success foretold and planned down to the smallest detail, then, including the two lead singles. When the British group's sixth studio album hit stores on 28 September 1987, Depeche Mode had already carved out a significant breach in the charts thanks to a delicious double preview.
The first single, “Strangelove”, presents a Gahan already damned in his surrender to the excesses and sins of the night, driven along by frantic rhythms: an energetic four-on-the-floor synth-pop cut built for dancefloors. Released 5 months before the album, while sessions were still underway, “Strangelove” was deemed too euphoric to fit the darker style of “Music For The Masses”, so Miller crafted a slower, darker version for the LP. Even Corbijn's elegant video underwent changes: from the black-and-white Super 8 footage shot at various Parisian locations, the segments featuring two dark-clad, scantily dressed models were cut, promptly censored by MTV USA.

But it's above all the following single, “Never Let Me Down Again”, that would set the tone for the album, destined to be counted among the definitive synth-pop anthems. Emphatic, sweeping yet perfectly calibrated, with its exhilarating piano refrain building on a dense wall of sound. A grandiose orchestral climax, complete with symphonic samples inspired by Carl Orff's “Carmina Burana”, sends the track into orbit. The lyrics have been read in various ways: a hedonistic journey towards oblivion, a homoerotic experience, a simple story of friendship. Some have even suggested that the “best friend” on the “ride” could be the drugs Gahan was addicted to at the time. A track made irresistible too by a devastating snare sound, lifted from Led Zeppelin's “When The Levee Breaks”, as Bascombe himself admitted: “As a kid I'd always thought it was the most exciting drum sound in the world!”, he revealed.

A first breach in the charts, as noted. Not that dramatic, to be fair: “Strangelove” peaked at No.16 in the UK and No.76 in the US; “Never Let Me Down Again” stalled at No.22 in the UK and No.63 in the US. But it was gradually those two singles that would drive “Music For The Masses” to success. Perhaps aided by a third knockout blow released as a single, “Behind The Wheel”, which brought this dark, fatalistic sound back to the dancefloor, exploring the darker side of human relationships: another potential club anthem built on a restless, unresolved chord sequence. Wilder explained in the documentary: “It's a four-chord sequence that repeats and never changes. It reminds me of those optical-illusion staircases: you climb and never reach the top. When you go round, you're back at the bottom again... you can't stop, and that's the beauty of it, also because of the driving analogy”. Compared to the single edit, which is more concise and direct, the album version stretches out, slowly building tension and atmosphere before delivering on its promise with those relentless snare hits. The track is further enhanced by another documentary-style video from Corbijn, shot in Italy on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Piedmont, in which Gahan is left stranded on foot as a tractor drives off with his car, only to be picked up by a woman on a Vespa, whom he joins after tossing away a pair of crutches.

After three killer singles like these, the fourth single choice is instead disarming, with the delicate, sinister nursery-rhyme quality of “Little 15”, which nonetheless turns out to be essentially a reflection on lost innocence, telling the story of a fifteen-year-old grappling with the difficulties of growing up, and an adult woman, embittered by life, who warns him of the world's dangers. Any sexual undertones seem (this time) to be ruled out, although Gore would recount: “It's about a bored, middle-aged housewife looking for a new reason to live through a young boy. It doesn't have to be a sexual thing. Although this particular song is actually about a classmate of ours who really did have a relationship with a middle-aged woman when he was 15”. The track's sampled orchestral arrangement has been said to evoke an “Eleanor Rigby” for the synth-pop generation, and it is indeed a masterful demonstration of Wilder's ability to take the skeleton of a Gore composition and enrich it with his orchestral magic, drawing in this case on the minimalism of Michael Nyman.

Electronics for rock arenas

The fourth single thus represented the more reflective, introspective side of Depeche Mode, one that bears above all Gore's stamp and that has never been missing from any of their albums. Among the album's other tracks that lower the pulse to dig into the recesses of the psyche are the elegant “The Things You Said”, slow and atmospheric in its nocturnal unfolding, “To Have And To Hold”, with samples of Russian radio followed by a dark synthetic drone ahead of a minimal beat and Gahan's simple, repetitive refrain, and the less successful “I Want You Now”, a typical Gore erotic novelty track that uses moans and sighs sampled from an adult film to build its groove with a Fairlight CMI 3 that sounds a bit dated today. In the category of missed hits are the pulsing “Sacred”, a lingering tie to their early industrial-pop with sampled choirs and Gore's subversive religious imagery (“a firm believer and a warm receiver”), and the electro of “Nothing”, driven by a contagious riff and an apparent charleston beat that actually derives from a sample of a bus's pneumatic door (!).
The closing grandeur of “Pimpf” deserves a mention of its own: with its pompous operatic tones, it dangerously skirts a kitsch so extreme it would be inaccessible even to today's Muse. The Wagnerian-flavoured instrumental, with Gore's voice sampled, chopped up and reprogrammed, takes its title from a Nazi magazine for Hitlerjugend boys, a detail that clarifies its mood. A daring gamble that ultimately finds its place within the record's melodramatic climax: Bascombe compared the fervour of “Pimpf” blasting from the speakers before a Paris show to the atmosphere of a political rally.

The Depeche Mode of “Music For The Masses”, in short, are a band that thrives on contrasts and dualisms, one of which lies entirely within Gore himself. He's the one writing lyrics full of surrender to sin and purifying urges, torn between sacred love (rather scarce, in fact) and profane passions (in abundance). The other dualism, by contrast, is external: that between Gore the lyricist and Gahan the singer, but also between the former's boyish voice and the latter's deep, virile one: innocence and experience coexist in their music, as they do in every human soul.
By the back half of the 1980s, Depeche Mode had by now made their own the marriage of desolate soundscapes and danceable rhythms that had already powered certain Giorgio Moroder productions or New Order's “Blue Monday”, but they were determined to turn electronic music into a rock-arena spectacle. The peak of their populist ambition would be reached at the epic Rose Bowl concert in Pasadena, immortalised by D.A. Pennebaker in the video “101”. That very last date, in front of around 60,000 spectators, definitively cemented Depeche Mode's status in the United States as one of the leading alternative bands of the late 1980s.
“Music For The Masses”, moreover, marked Depeche Mode's first real leap forward in the US market. It reached No.35 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold roughly six months after release, a far quicker result than had been the case with “Some Great Reward” and “Black Celebration”, which were only certified years later. It was also the record with the highest number of hit singles the band had released up to that point.
Worth remembering too is the documentary “Depeche Mode: 1987-88 (Sometimes You Do Need Some New Jokes)”, an overview of the album featuring comments and interviews with those who contributed to its making: alongside the band, producer Dave Bascombe, Daniel Miller, Daryl Bamonte, Martyn Atkins (who came up with the megaphone idea for the cover), director Anton Corbijn and many others.

It would fall to the following “Violator” (1990) to complete the job, cementing Depeche Mode's new role as prophets of electropop for the masses. And to think it all began as a joke: that title was actually a sharp jab at their supposed commercial irrelevance. A joke that would quickly turn into a prophecy, propelling the former Basildon outsiders into the pantheon of world pop-rock.

(Contributions by Lorenzo Salzano)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

27/04/2026