Depeche Mode

To better understand the making of the ninth studio album released by Depeche Mode in 1997, we need to take a step back three years.

The band comes out of the “Devotional Tour” utterly wrecked — the endless trek (over a year long) that wrapped up in 1994, mounted in support of the successful “Songs Of Faith And Devotion”. The group is by now divided, broken, above all in their personal relationships. Dave Gahan, by then clouded by heroin and worn down by that grueling road life, suffers a heart attack brought on by an overdose on October 8, 1993, during the tour stop in New Orleans, and has to be resuscitated to avoid dying then and there. Martin Gore keeps drowning his anguish and personal troubles in alcohol, while Andrew Fletcher is systematically in the grip of the most crippling depression, a monster that has already been gnawing at him for a few years and that will eventually lead him to abandon his bandmates (replaced by trusted session man Daryl Bamonte) as early as the first Brazilian date of the “Exotic Tour”, a run of summer shows meant as an appendix to the “Devotional Tour”.

The one holding together the ever more shattered pieces is Alan Wilder, himself exhausted from having to carry the whole operation on his shoulders: preparing the tracks to be released on the live album documenting the tour, handling matters that had nothing to do with the artistic side — a situation that, right around that time, leads him to inform Dave by fax that once everything already scheduled was done, he would leave the band with no chance of turning back, after thirteen years full of great satisfaction.

The summer shows unfold in the worst possible way: Dave fractures two ribs clumsily hurling himself into the crowd during the last Indiana show; a few weeks after the live commitments end, Alan will unwittingly come close to losing his life when a military plane crashes just a few hundred yards from him as he's driving down a road. Martin will increasingly fall victim to epileptic seizures, and, as if that weren't enough, Dave himself, in the summer of 1995, will attempt suicide by slashing his wrists during a phone call with his mother, gripped by the deepest crisis and, naturally, set off by his reckless use of hallucinogens. Not long after, he will also divorce his second wife.

In short, the picture is horrifying, as bad as it could possibly get, and there's a strong sense in many quarters that Depeche Mode have definitively closed the book on their golden artistic run — perhaps right at the very peak of their historical moment, commercially included.

Rising from the ashes

Wilder's departure leaves Gore and Fletcher stunned above all, as they never imagined things would end this way. What's more, in a press release issued in the days following his decision to leave the band, Wilder himself doesn't hold back, laying heavy criticism on Gore and Fletcher, though without, to be fair, ever naming them outright.

Martin and Andy (Dave is of course still on the team, but his physical and mental state is far from what could be called adequate) try to hold the line, pushing back hard against all the heavy setbacks and deciding to try to carry on the Depeche Mode experience, against all odds.

In October 1995, putting their trust in producer Tim Simenon (a choice that will prove providential for their artistic fortunes), Depeche Mode go into the studio to flesh out some ideas that had taken shape in the meantime. While the instrumental sessions seem to move along fairly smoothly, the same can't be said for Dave's vocal parts. His health keeps deteriorating, and the group only manages to complete the vocal recording of a single track (the future “Sister Of Night”).

The absolute low point of Dave Gahan's total collapse — which will later become his passport to genuine renewal — comes on May 28, 1996.

Having returned to Los Angeles on Martin's advice to treat his severe drug addiction, Dave suffers yet another overdose, this time a speedball, which brings him to clinical death for a full three minutes before doctors miraculously manage to save him once again — apparently without any brain damage from oxygen deprivation: sheer, brazen luck.

This last-minute rescue finally convinces Gahan to check himself into a specialized rehab center. In later accounts, Dave will describe those days as terrible at first, but cathartic, and, from a certain point on, filled with great hope and energy — a momentum that will become the shield leading him to complete recovery and definitive rebirth, first as a man, and then as an artist. Dave's full return to the fold breathes new life into the trio.

Martin Gore, always the band's chief creative mind, finds himself, in the wake of all the chaos of the previous months, paradoxically holding an endless well of emotional material to channel through his exceptional songwriting mind. Dark, aching, reflective, almost always dwelling on states of suffering and unease that go well beyond the personal, Martin turns the page once again, writing and shaping a set of songs from which the immense hardships of these last years clearly pour out. The nice thing is that Gahan, once back from treatment, really does seem like a different person — not yet fully recovered, but in good shape, almost as if nothing had happened.

The first songs Gore writes for what will later become “Ultra” are three, and they are nothing short of emblematic of the whole project: “Useless”, “Insight” and “Sister Of Night”, which masterfully sum up the feeling running through Depeche Mode's guts at this point in time. Incidentally, these very three tracks made up the famous demo that Martin Gore presented to Tim Simenon as a promotional pitch to convince the English producer to take part in the project — and Simenon is instantly struck by it, even though what he's hearing are bare-bones, barely fleshed-out demos.

In “Useless”, one of the four singles pulled from the album and a genuine cornerstone of Depeche Mode's entire discography, there emerges — perhaps for the first time in Gore's writing — a surge of anger, a real battle between two souls who once loved each other and who now feel the equally fierce heat of the most blatant hatred, the kind that probably comes right before the moment of remorse. He, who has always preferred to deal with the most hidden malaise, the kind that's rarely let out into the open, is now the architect of the rawest, most physical pain, the kind that almost comes to blows:

Well it’s about time

It’s beginning to hurt

Time you made up your mind

Just what is it all worth

The track is dirty, filthy, raw, and this rough yet fascinating quality is the constant that will prevail throughout the entire album: the electric guitar often takes over from the electronics, another far-from-casual situation that will characterize large sections of the record.

The video, of course directed by the inseparable and extraordinary Anton Corbijn, reflects this all-consuming intensity as well as it possibly could. Dave Gahan throws himself into it as only he can, with his unmistakable voice, sharp, made even more venomous by everything that has happened to him. With his magnetic, sneering face marked by everything he's been through — someone who's seen it all since childhood — he stands in front of a camera hurling every accusation at his frightened woman (we'll see this by the end of the video), and in a brilliant piece of staging, even appears to shove and shake her.

The work brought to this track and to all the others on the tracklist by "Bomb The Bass" aka Tim Simenon, thanks to his proverbial skill in handling the rhythmic backbone of the compositions he's tackled throughout his enviable career, proved fundamental, and the blending of his input with the leaden textures and distorted patterns forged by Gore and his close collaborators gave the album a different kind of depth compared to what could be found even just in the immediately preceding works.

Production duties on seminal albums such as "Violator" and "Songs Of Faith And Devotion" had been entrusted to Mark Ellis aka Flood, who had helped create those rather dark atmospheres, mixed with pyrotechnic bursts, which proved to be the cornerstones of the huge success achieved by those two records.

With Wilder's departure, Depeche Mode also decided to make a stylistic shift, and so the choice to bring in Simenon, who had long been on the band's radar, turns out to be anything but random.

Continuing through the singles chosen to promote "Ultra", a significant share of the spotlight undeniably belongs to "Barrel Of A Gun", another track that became a cult object among the "devotees" and beyond.

Legend has it — though it sounds like a classic urban myth — that Dave Gahan, waking up after being declared clinically dead following his last speedball overdose, uttered the phrase "Do you mean this horny creep", which are exactly the opening lines of "Barrel Of A Gun". True or not, it's undeniable that Martin Gore absorbed all these thoroughly harrowing experiences into every microscopic cell of his body.

Seen from an outside perspective, "Barrel Of A Gun" comes across as the desperate cry of someone who feels they've reached their limit, who has known what it means to hit rock bottom, despair, the end — to paraphrase the song's title — someone who has had the barrel of a gun pointed straight at their temple, and here too the direct references to Dave's past are even more explicit. The music accompanying so much frustration is no less intense: a driving, tense rhythm, with Gahan singing imperiously in a voice slightly treated with effects, at times hoarse, making everything, if possible, even more infectious and unsettling.

The track drove "Ultra" to the top of the British charts, for the second time after "Songs Of Faith And Devotion" ("Violator" stalled at number 2), probably also thanks to that very human sense of identification that takes hold when listeners notice that certain sung and played emotions match real, lived experience — even more so when that experience involves such absolute hardship.

The underworld described in "Barrel Of A Gun", however, is nothing compared to what unfolds in "Home", a track that, more than most, has entered the absolute pantheon of Depeche Mode evergreens and has been a fixture of every live show by the band ever since. "Home" comes from somewhere deep in Martin's mind and heart, and perhaps for that very reason he insists on singing it himself, because all these words, all the emotions described, he lived through firsthand. A life of mistakes, of doubts, of moments when he didn't know who his true points of reference were, where his soul as a man — before that of an artist — fragile and gripped by the most terrible fears, was meant to land; it's precisely in these lines that everything is resolved, that everything begins to make sense, where Martin senses what the meaning of life might be:

Here is a song/ From the wrong side of town/ Where I’m bound To the ground/ By the loneliest sound/  That pounds from within/ And is pinning me down

And then salvation:

And I thank you/ For bringing me here/ For showing me home/ For singing these tears/ Finally I’ve found/ That I belong here

It has never been made clear who or what Gore meant to represent with the word "Home", but it's crystal clear that it is a place, a person, that left a profound and positive mark on him, leading him toward a serenity that seems, by now, definitive.

The intimate, at times orchestral arrangement, with its guitar soaring majestically, still delivers unmistakable chills with every listen, perhaps never matched again with quite the same result.

The final single, though certainly not for lack of merit, is “It’s No Good”, another pillar not just of “Ultra”. There’s no denying this is a track that tries to put the pieces back in their proper place. From the very intro and the melodic structure, it feels like reliving the glories of the more traditional Depeche Mode. In “It’s No Good”, that dark patina shaping the whole record is set aside for a moment, replaced by a more engaging appeal in which we can already glimpse the sounds that would go on to define the following album, “Exciter”. The musical world was changing, trip-hop and dancefloor electronica were moving from small club rooms to huge crowds, and Depeche Mode and Tim Simenon sensed it, which is why “It’s No Good” takes on the role of standard-bearer for this evolutionary process. It's no coincidence that this artistic shift toward clubbing sounds prompted, in the following months, a welcome raiding of the tracks on “Ultra” by some of the most important deejays and producers in electronic music, who set about crafting some extraordinary remixes: Kruder & Dorfmeister, Dj Shadow, Underworld, Air, Mad Professor, who literally turned inside out tracks like “Useless”, “Home”, “Barrel Of A Gun”, to name just a few, devising new arrangements and new horizons toward which to launch all this bounty.

We’ve lingered on the purely musical side, with a brief general digression, but certainly not because the lyrics Gore wrote for “It’s No good” are negligible — far from it:

Don’t say you want me/ Don’t say you need me/ Don’t say you love me/ It’s understood/ Don’t say you’re happy/ Out there without me/ I know you can’t be/ ’Cause it’s no good

Here the message doesn’t seem necessarily aimed at someone in particular — or rather, at some particular woman — but rather at anyone who thinks that without a point of reference one can’t steer one's own life toward fulfilling, productive goals. A decidedly wise Gore (and here we return to what was said about “Home”) opens the door to new horizons in his personal creative process.

With the promotional singles out of the way, we can sketch a first assessment, admittedly a rough one, which, at least for whoever is writing these lines, leads to the conclusion that the money spent on this record can already be considered an excellent investment.

The interesting thing is that the other seven tracks (bonus tracks aside) that round out the list are anything but secondary, and, to varying degrees, deserve to carve out an authoritative space within the record.

Passing quickly over the two instrumentals “Uselink” and “Jazz Thieves”, which play a role that goes beyond the classic filler between one track and the next, thanks to some tasty harmonic choices that dress up the rather restless mood running through the record, we come to tracks like “The Love Thieves”, a dark ballad best listened to in the dark, with a couple of scented candles — spiced rather than sweet, perhaps — ready to caress the mind that, eyes closed, lets itself be lulled by Gahan’s warm voice:

Love needs it’s martyrs/ Needs it’s sacrifices/ They live for your beauty/ And pay for their vices/ Love will be the death of/ My lonely soul brothers/ But their spirit shall live on in/ The hearts of all lovers

A piece of poetry aimed at an imaginary category — though maybe not so imaginary after all — that of the so-called thieves of feeling, who try to annihilate the emotions of whoever their latest victim is, robbed of their own feelings yet undeterred in fighting off anyone who, through lies or other shady schemes, tries to seize one of the cornerstones of living beings' existence.

Another passage to experience with total absorption is “Sister Of Night”, though built on more penetrating instrumental dynamics, blending vigorous six-string surges with polished electronic vibrations that a flawless, double-breasted Gahan clearly relishes, delivering one of the most heartfelt and evocative chapters on the record. It’s right here that the existential disaster hits rock bottom, a point from which there no longer seems to be any way back up:

Sister of night/ When the hunger descends/ And your body’s a fire/ An inferno that never ends

Who is this “sister of night”? None other than the one invoked to escape the dark, the shadows that swallow every pain, snuffing it out not by resolving it — because for someone convinced they have no other cards left to play for their own salvation, there is no way back to the light: a desperate cry.

A track, as mentioned at the outset, among the first Gore wrote for the occasion, and therefore particularly telling of the wreckage — still quite fresh at the time — left behind by everything that had marked the disastrous “Devotional Tour”.

It's probably no accident that after “Sister Of Night” the sequence gives us “Freestate”, another moment that makes emotional intensity its weapon of choice, a track that connects almost physiologically to the one before it, which portrayed that emaciated hand trying to claw its way out of the mud in search of a handhold able to raise a body still sunk in anguish and by now rendered virtually inert.

“Freestate” is exactly the next chapter in the series, the one of regeneration:

Let yourself go/ Let your feelings show/ Picking up the conversation/ Deep in your imagination/ Tune into the lonely voices/ Talking of their only choices

And then:

Step out of your cage/ And onto the stage/ It’s time to start/ Playing your part/ Freedom awaits/ Open the gates/ Open your mind/ Freedom’s a state

These are all-too-clear words from someone who has lived through the presence of the most tar-black darkness firsthand, yet is fully aware that, with great self-sacrifice, resurrection and redemption can rise from nothing. Although the difficulties can't be resolved in the blink of an eye, and the scars will remain callused and visible - perhaps forever - the torn, still-bleeding wounds are, with these strong grounds for growth, destined to heal completely.

Another piece written and performed directly by Martin Gore is "The Bottom Line", another of the album's more introverted chapters, one that forgoes the orchestral surges of "Home" and instead lets the electronic framework - never too intrusive, in truth - settle beneath lyrics that Gore himself seems, without much doubt, to be addressing to Dave, retracing some of the worst moments the latter had recently gone through:

Like a cat dragged in from the rain/ Who goes straight back out and do it all over again/ I’ll be back for more/ Something that is out of our hands/ Something we will never understand

The cat that keeps going out even though it's raining outside, dragged along by a negative force that pushes it into actions it already knows to be harmful and dangerous to itself - the cat, precisely the nickname doctors gave Gahan after yet another rescue from death, the animal that, proverbially, has many lives (nine or seven, depending on the culture) - but which now risks having used up all the bonus lives it had left.

The record closes with "Insight", and it's an exit particularly dense with meaning. Where throughout the album the focus has mainly been pain, hardship, a sense of disorientation, even death, here Gahan delivers a heartfelt, velvety interpretation of lyrics that, almost surprisingly, call for wisdom, illumination, an inward spiritual journey in search of that strength which life holds even in its darkest moments:

Wisdom of ages/ Rush over me/ Heighten my senses/ Enlighten me/ Lead me on, eternally

And then:

And the spirit of love/ Is rising within me/ Talking to you now/ Telling you clearly/ The fire still burns/ I’m talking to you now/ The fire still burns/ Whatever you do now/ The world still turns

The melodic structure of the chorus recalls classic Depeche Mode tracks ("Walking In My Shoes"), a kind of passing of the torch for what the Basildon trio would go on to offer in the near future.

In this excursus through the labyrinths of "Ultra", it's worth mentioning two further tracks that emerged from the same sessions, which, only a few months after the studio album's release, went on to enrich the compilation "The Singles '86-'98".

To allow Gahan to continue and complete his physical and psychological recovery, "Ultra" wasn't accompanied by the usual run of promotional shows (save for a couple of occasional happenings) - something that, after everything that happened during and after the "Devotional Tour", was the last thing Gore, Gahan and Fletcher wanted to do. The release of the aforementioned compilation, however, gave new momentum to a genuine live promotion, scheduled, in fact, over just four months.

The Greatest Hits features one unreleased track, "Only When I Lose Myself", along with its respective B-side, "Surrender", which was only released on the single that accompanied the Best Of's rollout. Within the scope of this deep dive into "Ultra", both tracks prove particularly telling, each for different reasons, serving as a juicy addendum to an already gargantuan feast - and it's no coincidence that both were included on the deluxe edition released in 2007.

"Only When I Lose Myself" more or less revisits the stylistic blueprint already tested on "Insight" or "The Love Thieves", with a glossy performance from Gahan describing how salvific comfort can be found in another person, through approaches that are even carnal, especially when one's own essence appears drained of any will to react:

It’s only when I lose myself with someone else/ That I find myself, I find myself

A tangible reflection, probably among the most genuine Gore has ever written, given that he has always approached his relationship with feelings in a rather naive way. The Arabic-tinged sequences that separate the refrain from the verse heighten the composition's extreme elegance, one that would surely have ranked near the very top of any imaginary league table of the tracks on "Ultra".

Also not to be underestimated is "Surrender", as mentioned above relegated to the B-side of the lead track, but probably one of the finest examples among Depeche Mode's so-called secondary tracks - if not, indeed, the finest of all. It's an angular track, marked by contradictory electronic textures that throw out refined flashes, frequently overwhelmed by sonic quirks from various sources, raising the tension of a piece that could serve, both musically and lyrically, as a litmus test for the general essence of Depeche Mode. I recall reading somewhere, in the years immediately following its release - and it's a view I fully share - that the lyrics contain many words that would, sooner or later, find their way systematically into songs written by Gore and co.: rapture, fate, holy, passion, flaming, among others, are telling terms, not exactly conventional, but ones that mark out Depeche Mode's entire career.

The best Italian dictionaries define the term "ultra" as an ancient prefix from Late Latin, an era in which the rigid written language began to be infused with expressions from more modern speech, giving rise to new forms of expression. Its technical use has always been to precede an adjective or noun, reinforcing situations that go beyond, past a limit, that overstep a set boundary - and Depeche Mode couldn't have found a more fitting title for what, more than any other of their works, embodies the arduous, tenacious overcoming of every obstacle, every personal and collective difficulty; simply reaching the hard-won milestone of the album's release already represented the essence of having pushed further than every massive rift that emerged along the rocky road, and the final outcome - let's be clear right away - is the exact opposite of what one might imagine from something born out of disintegration, abandonment, and utter chaos.

"Ultra" is an album that started out rather quietly - and it couldn't have been otherwise, given the circumstances - but one that has gradually become one of the most significant in the English group's entire catalogue, so much so that it's often cited outright as a source of inspiration by numerous artists. Every time I find myself diving back in (and it happens often) to the music and content offered by these songs, more than any others drawn from Depeche Mode's golden catalogue, memories resurface - not necessarily tied to that period - along with new readings, unfamiliar harmonic scents, but the one thing that always stays the same is the powerful emotion they stir.

Listening to "Ultra" can't be separated from knowing everything that happened to the band and its individual members, both before and during the making of the project. Only with this in mind can the album be truly understood - a demanding condition that doesn't come around often, an extraordinary situation, much like the ninth studio full-length by Depeche Mode, a band that has too often been dismissed with excessive simplicity, perhaps because of the colossal hits that brought them fortune and success - but it's records like this one that risk completely overturning any such shallow impression.

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16/02/2026