35 YEARS ON FROM ITS RELEASE, WE REVISIT THE MODE’S GAME CHANGER – AN ADVENTUROUS, HEDONISTIC DRIVE INTO UNCHARTERED TERRITORY THAT BROUGHT THEM BOTH CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL ACCLAIM
FELIX ROWE
CLASSIC ALBUM
There’s only so long you can play the ‘outsiders’ card. Depeche Mode have built a career on it. Despite shifting 100 million records and filling stadiums the world over, they still to this day have never won a Grammy. Yet having finally scrambled their way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 (third time lucky), the pretence is over. Depeche Mode are now firmly embedded in the establishment.
Back in 1987, however, when they called their sixth album Music For The Masses, they were still very much the oddball underdogs. Rather than a pompous display of arrogance, it was a barbed in-joke at their supposed commercial paucity (breaking news: Depeche Mode do gags). But it turns out the joke was on them: Music For The Masses became the self-fulfilling prophecy that propelled them into the big league Stateside, filling cavernous venues and inducing levels of adulation that would baffle commentators on home soil.
Arguably the best was yet to come – see 1990’s Violator – but Music For The Masses was the point where critical acclaim and commercial success finally intersected. Everyone knows the back story: initially dismissed as lightweight upstarts, Depeche quickly rebounded to the other extreme, exploring increasingly darker terrain, experimental industrial sounds and kinky imagery. There was no shortage of cracking singles throughout. But, really, were they going to be booked to perform Master And Servant on Saturday Superstore?
Their wish to be taken seriously was granted with 1986’s Black Celebration, which garnered cult acclaim and set the template for a new breed of doom-laden alternative rock (see Nine Inch Nails). But on Music For The Masses, the darkness, experimentalism and pop sensibility coalesced into a winning formula that both brought the acclaim the band craved and put bums on seats. Found sounds remained a fundamental part of the creative process. Crucially, though, they were kept in check within the greater whole.
FRESH IMPETUS
Music For The Masses was the group’s first album without Mute Records mentor Daniel Miller playing a central role in its production: a mutual decision to hit the refresh button, with Miller increasingly busy on his label’s wider roster. In the official making-of documentary, Martin Gore acknowledged the need for “some fresh impetus”, while Miller noted it was a “breath of fresh air” and “a huge weight off my shoulders” to relinquish day-to-
