Basildon synthesizer legends Depeche Mode dealt with social awareness earlier than you would think. The tougher, industrial-clanged third LP Construction Time Again marked a creative leap forward for the group, along with principal songwriter Martin Gore’s thematic obsessions with guilt, pain, and plenty of sex. On their biggest hit, ‘Everything Counts’, they tackled the 1980s’ ‘greed is good’ mantra.
From then on, mordant tabloid juxtapositions on the crunchy ‘New Dress’ or God’s terrible sense of humour on ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ appear occasionally.
Spirit (2017) culminated a problematic political failure analysis. Depeche Mode quickly voiced their disapproval after white supremacist Richard Spencer in jest called them “the official band of the alt-right” outside that year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “What’s dangerous about someone like Richard Spencer is, first of all, he’s a c*nt—and he’s a very educated one, and that’s the scariest kind,” frontman Dave Gahan told Billboard.
He continued, “I think over the years there’s been a number of times when things of ours have been misinterpreted—either our imagery, or something where people are not quite reading between the lines.”
Spirit’s Karl Marx beards on lead single “Where’s the Revolution”‘s Anton Corbijn-directed video and explicit lyrical attacks on climate killing capitalism and regressive social decline on “The Worst Crime” and “Going Backwards” stemmed from the band’s dissatisfaction with the political failure causing the world to fall apart and a need to clarify their values.
Later in Depeche Mode’s creative process, Gahan’s songwriting confidence grows. After a succession of solo albums in the 2000s, Gahan wrote three of Playing the Angel’s compositions, including ‘Suffer Well’. Gahan’s third single, featured on roughly half of Spirit’s songs, including their first ‘Gore-Gahan’ piece, was his most confident.
In ‘Cover Me’, Gahan adds Soulsavers digital blues to the gloomy, evocative introspection on cosmic dissatisfaction: “It’s about a person who travels to another planet only to find that, much to his dismay, it’s exactly the same as Earth,” he told Rolling Stone. It’s a different planet but the same. He can’t escape himself. He must act to change things.”
Gahan dressed as an astronaut navigates the lonely urbane streets of an unfamiliar planet, swapping ‘Enjoy the Silence’s crown and deckchair for a spacesuit in a similar contemplative trawl through our lonely blue rock when keyboard programmer Matrixcman’s sequencers pulse in. The song’s concluding call to arms is well realized as Gahan observes Earth from his lonely spaceship. The late-Depeche tune ‘Cover Me’ brings a new conceptual approach to Mode’s songbook that only Gahan could deliver.