Shaky ground: When an accountant gave Depeche Mode three years to live
In an alternate timeline, Basildon’s most famous cultural export, Depeche Mode, are preparing to take the stage at the Let’s Rock 1980s retro festival, held at Bristol’s Ashton Court Estate.
Compèred by Pat Sharp and slotted between The Thompson Twins and Billy Ocean, they face a 50-something crowd armed with Tuborgs and a nostalgic thirst for synth-pop. The audience politely tolerates their newer material and forgotten singles like ‘See You’ and ‘New Life’, before erupting into tipsy mass boogying when the unmistakable opening of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’’.
To be fair to Let’s Rock, some excellent acts have played, including The Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Marc Almond, but it’s a curious fate that’s befallen many of the original synth-poppers, unfairly trapped in the ‘retro’ tag and playing festivals and ‘day jolly’ events wholly removed from their original, futurist mystique. If you were to bet on any band conquering the world long after new wave’s impact on the charts, Depeche Mode would have been the last horse to instil any confidence.
Terrible TV spots, frontman Dave Gahan’s awkward dance moves, and the departure of principal songwriter Vince Clarke—who left to form Yazoo and later Erasure—just as the band had released their biggest single yet. Depeche Mode faced no shortage of challenges early on. They weren’t even at the forefront of the ‘Second British Invasion’ that stormed MTV in the early 1980s, driven by UK directors hungry for creative promo clips. Nor were they making the most groundbreaking electronic music of the time—OMD was crafting cerebral, ambitious pop with Architecture & Morality, while Soft Cell captured the raw youth experience of Thatcher’s Britain with sharper social critique.
Their shelf life was grimly anticipated by the group’s bookkeeper, who saw no reason why Depeche Mode would last any longer than plenty of other pop acts that had their 15 minutes. Speaking to The National in 2009, founding member and de-facto ‘media person’ Andy Fletcher expressed the collective surprise they were still going into the mid-1980s: “We were a boy band, basically. We were kids. When we first started our accountant did a tax plan for us to last three years, and we’ve outlasted that by ten times now. He was only going by what happens to most groups.”
Soldiering on after Clarke’s departure in 1981 and rejecting one of his penned songs as a leaving gesture, the band’s dark horse Martin Gore cut his teeth on the ‘difficult second album’ as the now trio’s principal songwriter, releasing the patchy A Broken Frame before recruiting Alan Wilder for added arrangements and complex melodies.
This new marriage of lyrical confidence and growing pop proficiency, plus soaking up West Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten’s industrial racket exposed to them by engineer Gareth Jones, brought a fresh sonic assault to Gore’s mordantly sensual and highly personal songwriting, proving a hit with scores of goth-adjacent alternative kids.
Just as the States were starting to take notice off the back of their fan-favourite LP Black Celebration, the final essential ingredient to their cracking of America was the sorely needed visual identity defined by longtime collaborator Anton Corbijn. Handling virtually all photography and music videos along with album and touring artwork, Depeche Mode’s tougher and more dramatic musical evolution was matched by Corbijn’s bold creative vision, perfect for MTV America, who had never grown up with the band’s awkward infancy.
Reaching the heights of their creative and commercial peak in the 1990s and still standing as one of the world’s biggest names, Depeche Mode is perhaps the best example of defying all the odds in popular music.
