My band of the year (apparently)
Music and writing have always fed into each other: music makes me want to write, writing inspires me to delve deeper into the music I love.
One of the highlights of 2024 was the chance to see Depeche Mode on their Memento Mori tour. The stunning show inspired an article for Pennyblackmusic.co.uk
I’m sharing an excerpt. You can read the full piece here:
Growing up, my siblings and I weren’t supposed to listen to ‘secular’ music. Fundamentalist Protestants, of which my mother was one, believed that rock and pop were literally the Devil’s music. This led to outlandish familial tussles: my mother stole my brother’s cassettes; my brother stole them back. What I didn’t understand then – aged eight or nine – is what I don’t understand now: how anyone could miss (or seeing, fail to be intrigued by) the spiritual vein at the heart of Depeche Mode’s songbook.
“I’ve never been religious in a conventional sense… other than going to church for a year or two when I was 17 or 18 because I had nothing better to do,” Martin Gore told journalist Richard Plunkett in a 1994 interview. “I would go along from a pretty atheist point of view and just watch… I found the whole thing fascinating, because it is very bizarre.”
Perhaps some of Gore’s creative output reaches lyrical conclusions at odds with fundamentalism, but he can hardly be accused of ignoring, belittling or shying away from questions of belief. Far from irreligious, many of the band’s most memorable records fall squarely in the long tradition of mortals wrestling with the divine. Which – if one is going to engage with religion at all – seems a far more interesting and honest starting point than the mindless dogmatism that dogged my youth.
For over 40 years, Depeche Mode has celebrated the sublime, and the flesh. Here are 10 of Gore, Gahan and company’s finest moments of faith and devotion.
1. ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ Some Great Reward (1984)
As a techno nerd, the first thing that always grabs me about ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ is its magnificent futurism. To think: when I was toddling, Depeche Mode was releasing records whose sonic offspring would ignite dance floors in London and Ibiza 20 years later. Compounding this musical daring are lyrics that tackle the Gordian knot that fundamentalism has never been able to untangle: if God is loving and merciful, why so much suffering?
In the light of the world we know, Gore’s wry conclusion – “God’s got a sick sense of humour” -– seems wholly reasonable.
2. ‘Sacred’ Music for the Masses (1987)
‘A lot of my songs are about love, sex and religion’, Gore has said. ‘Often about all three at the same time’. He might have been alluding to ‘Sacred’, which borrows sanctified lexis – missionary, believer, devout, eternal glory – in the service of ambiguous ends. When Gahan sings, ‘I’ll go down on my knees/When I see beauty’ the next act might be prayer, but I doubt it. ‘Love and sex’ – Gore said – ‘that’s what I tend to find faith in’.
3. ‘Personal Jesus’ Violator (1990)
One chapter of my work-in-progress memoir is devoted to ‘Personal Jesus’ – a song whose spiritual overtones are so naked one almost has to look away. I wrote:
“For some reason, when I hear ‘Personal Jesus’ my mind’s eye supplies Gahan in a scarlet cloak and crown trudging through the snow in the ‘Enjoy the Silence’ video, a result, I suspect, of the two cuts being in constant-to-the-point-of-interchangeable rotation on MTV and VH1 in the mid ‘90s.
Can you blame ‘em? From swaggering opening guitar chords to rubber-ball percussion to cathedral-sized refrain, ‘Personal Jesus’ is so perfect a record it seems to have been conjured by a superior alien intelligence. Plus it delivered chewy ambiguities: was the allusion to ‘flesh… on the telephone’ a reference to phone sex? Was it straight-up mocking religion, or low-key endorsing it? Who was going to make whom a believer?”
4. ‘Policy of Truth’ Violator (1990)
Despite a collective lack of a sense of humour, the church folk I grew up around embodied a fine, if unwitting, irony. The Biblical injunction not to ‘bear false witness against thy neighbour’ (Exodus 20:16) got flattened into ‘don’t lie’ which was then weaponised against us kids who tried to retain a scrap of privacy or agency. Yet the grown-ups lied about whatever took their fancy, in the name of ‘protecting’ us.
‘Policy of Truth’, though not overtly preoccupied with religion, has always read as a warning about the inevitable hypocrisy of people who prioritise ideology over humanity.
5. ‘Judas’ Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993)
History’s worst dinner guest is a popular rock’n’roll reference point (see also U2 ‘Until the End of the World’, Lady Gaga ‘Judas’, etc.) After all, what could be more subversive, more rebellious, than the absolute rejection of righteousness embodied in the infamous kiss?
True to form, Depeche Mode play ‘Judas’ as a tale of misplaced passion. Even truer to form, it isn’t clear whose. Is the admonition ‘Open yourself for me/Risk your health for me/If you want my love’ directed at Judas, by Jesus? Or is Judas speaking? Does the chanted refrain “If you want my love” hold the promise of salvation for a man, or a demigod’s damnation?
Read on: Pennyblackmusic