Depeche Mode - Music For The Masses

Music for the Masses is considered a landmark album for Depeche Mode, noted for its dark, atmospheric, and arena-ready synth-pop with a grittier, more industrial sound than previous work, and it solidified the band's transformation into a critically acclaimed, popular "band". The album features popular tracks like the anthemic "Never Let Me Down Again" and the hook-laden "Strangelove," and showcases Dave Gahan's evolving vocal performance and Martin Gore's signature lyrical depth, resulting in an album that is seen as a crucial bridge to their later international success. Music for the Masses is considered a pivotal album in Depeche Mode's career, a crucial step that captured everything that made the band unique and set the stage for the international success of Violator. The album's blend of dark themes, experimental sounds, and strong pop sensibilities proved to be a winning formula, bringing the band greater acclaim and larger audiences.

Review by Felix Rowe

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.

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-day responsibilities.Various producers were mooted, with the band gravitating towards Dave Bascombe, who had recently engineered Tears For Fears’ seminal Songs From The Big Chair.There’s more than a passing resemblance between the moody atmospherics conjured on Tears For Fears’ Shout and Depeche Mode’s anthems for the dispossessed. Or, as Bascombe himself self-effacingly put it: “reverb”.

In the official making-of documentary, Dave Gahan explains: “Dave [Bascombe] just seemed like someone we could get on with”, while the sadly missed Andy Fletcher quipped: “Sometimes, you do need some new jokes, someone else to take the piss out of.”In a revealing interview from 2020 with YouTuber Vaughn George, Bascombe shared in-depth insights into the recording process.While credited as co-producer, Bascombe plays down his own considerable contribution to shaping the sound, suggesting he was principally employed to engineer, rather than to steer the creative direction.By now, Depeche Mode were a well-established unit with a specific way of working.In the Vaughn interview, Bascombe speaks of being amused by the “weird” unspoken rules in the set-up. It wasn’t his brief, he said, to challenge the status quo, and instead he assimilated himself into the workflow.Much has been said about Depeche Mode’s division of labour. Once Gore had written and demoed a song, it was left largely to keyboardist Alan Wilder and the producer/engineer to flesh it out in the studio.

As George put it: “Martin was the architect and Alan the engineer.” Generally, Gore would only interject (through the intermediary Fletch) if he didn’t like something.In Bascombe’s view, most of the band were bored by the nitty-gritty, meticulous nature of programming and the production process.The natural musician and studio whizz, Alan Wilder, however, positively thrived in it. “Someone has to be steering the ship,” explained Bascombe, “and that was definitely Alan’s baby… Alan had the vision.”Sessions began at Guillaume Tell, a converted Paris cinema, which proved fruitful owing to the range of orchestral instruments knocking about.

Depeche spent the first few days wondering about banging objects to make percussive sounds – an established ritual to build up a bank of samples for later use.Work continued at Konk, The Kinks’ London studio, before finishing up the recording and mixing at Puk studios in Denmark (the building was sadly gutted by fire in 2020).Like so many electro pioneers, Depeche Mode straddled that curious space between the obligatory ‘no guitars’ rule and a love of stomping glam rock. That influence starts to come to the fore on Music For The Masses.Tellingly, the record kicks off with an isolated guitar riff, albeit heavily processed and triggered by a sampler. Come album six, Depeche were prepared to let their electro-purism slide, a recognition that one can only get so far with synths and samples alone.

Whether a sign of growing maturity, or just Gore’s boredom with synths, they no longer let a principle get in the way of progression.Gore’s guitar work is never flashy – it’s the antithesis of the widdly theatrics that dominated hair metal at that point. His simple, repetitive riffs just sit on a groove, adding another textural element and human grit into the mix.Behind The Wheel, for instance, is subtly enhanced by a few simple twangs from his Gretsch. These tentative steps laid the groundwork for a more dominant presence on later favourites – from Personal Jesus to I Feel You.

Elsewhere, the Mode continued their quest to source only the finest sounds. Never Let Me Down Again’s earth-shattering snare was lifted from Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks.“As a kid I’d always thought that’s the most fantastically exciting drum sound in the world!” Bascombe explained to Vaughn George.Bonham’s gargantuan beat has since become one of the most sampled recordings in history, though Depeche’s producer was one of the very first to repurpose it (pipped, of course, by the Beastie Boys’ Rhymin & Stealin).Martin’s voice was sampled, chopped up and reprogrammed to great effect on cuts including Behind The Wheel and grandiose closer, Pimpf.A notable development of Music For The Masses is its epic, orchestral sound, enhancing the melodramatic, theatrical nature of the music – a combination of Bascombe’s engineering nous and Wilder’s classical influence and arranging qualities. The songs are typically structured around hypnotic cycles that build to a rousing climax.Lyrically, Gore explores the open road, a recurring motif that evokes a sense of youthful escapism and adventure, while the driving metaphor plays into his fascination with sordid powerplay and who is in control.

Always a source of speculation, the ambiguity of Gore’s lyrics is heightened when filtered through Gahan’s unflinching baritone, delivered straight without a knowing wink.To what extent is Gore condoning or condemning the acts of debauchery and depravity he describes? Is it perhaps another Gore in-joke: what are the filthiest words he can plant into his mate’s mouth?As interviews attest, Depeche Mode have a cheeky side lurking beneath the veneer of doom. Bascombe had imagined they would be as intense as their output, though he found the opposite to be true, remembering the fun as much as the recording, and highlighting a certain kitsch-ness to the tracks they worked on.Despite Andy Fletcher’s bookish appearance, it was he that apparently led the charge for nights out clubbing.

Gore had conceived the album title in advance of the sessions, providing a neat hook for the record’s visual aesthetic.Cover art designer Martyn Atkins devised the idea of large-coned public address speakers broadcasting their message into open abandoned spaces. This is our grand statement, but is anyone listening? As it happens, quite a lot of people were.The groundwork had been laid through US college radio support and Anton Corbijn’s stark but humanising monochrome videos enjoyed regular rotation on MTV. They ended up playing for the masses, culminating in a huge show to 60,000 fans at the Pasadena Rosebowl, supported by fellow Brit pathfinders OMD, Thomas Dolby and Wire.

The frenzied reaction Stateside could only be described as akin to Beatlemania. OMD’s Andy McCluskey has looked backed hilariously at that three-month tour, including the gentle rivalry between the bands which extended to spirited cricket matches featuring the crew on days off.Europe was equally enraptured. Bascombe compares the fervour of Pimpf blaring out of the announcement speakers opening a show in Paris as being like attending a political rally.

Depeche Mode had reached a new summit – though in hindsight, it set them up for the greater fall.In the ensuing years, things would unravel with various mental health struggles, communication tested to its limits, Wilder’s 1995 departure and Gahan’s infamous brush with death a year later.But putting aside the numerous challenges that lay ahead, Music For The Masses is a showcase of the definitive Mode line-up, on top form and playing to their strengths – not least, Wilder’s significant contribution to arranging and production. Though regularly praised by fans, Wilder is very much the unsung hero of Depeche in wider perception, and Music For The Masses provides all the proof anyone would need of his skills. Flanked by two classic Mode studio albums: Black Celebration from 1986 and Violator four years later, it deserves a place beside them as one of the band’s finest, most consistent and fully-realised collections. 

Ripped to MP3

1 - Never Let Me Down Again

2 - The Things You Said

3 - Strangelove

4 - Sacred

5 - Little 15

6 - Behind the Wheel

7 - I Want You Now

8 - To Have and to Hold

9 - Nothing

10 - Pimpf

11 - Agent Orange

12 - Never Let Me Down Again (Aggro Mix)

13 - To Have and to Hold (Spanish Taster)

14 - Pleasure, Little Treasure (Glitter Mix)