The synth-pop album that changed Billy Gibbons’ life: “That’s alchemy!”
For the uninitiated, electronic music and ZZ Top may not appear easy bedfellows.
Hailing from Texas’ hard blues scene at the tail-end of the 1960s, the Houston trio cut a string of acclaimed boogie rock records that authentically dwelled in the dive bars and truck stops of the American south, capturing ditch instrumentals and strutting guitar attacks laced with their blue-collar lyricism and healthy dollops of innuendo.
It proved a hit, with 1973’s Tres Hombres shooting up the Billboard 200 charts off the back of the immensely popular ‘La Grange’ lead single.
Guitarist and primary frontman Billy Gibbons always held a healthy embrace of music’s myriad flavours and an appreciation of artistry wherever it may rear its head. While purists scoffed at the UK synth-pop explosion on the cusp of chart takeover, Gibbons fell in love with the exciting new wave vistas the developing keyboard technology had unveiled.
Performing on BBC’s seminal The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980, ZZ Top shared the studio with Liverpool’s Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, candidly revealing their influence on the trio’s creative trajectory across the decade.
From 1981’s El Loco, synths and drum machines found their way into ZZ Top’s sound, pushing their blues jams toward a tauter and more pop-friendly direction. Add some flashy videos and spinning guitar props, and 1983’s follow-up Eliminator thrust Gibbons and co to the fore of the MTV age, coating their Texan rock with a shimmering spark of keyboard gloss that pulled in a whole new fanbase enamoured with monster hits ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’ and ‘Sharp Dressed Man’.
Years later, when discussing the albums that changed his life, Gibbons held one particular synthpop outfit in seriously high praise. Sitting among entries from The 13th Floor Elevators, The Rolling Stones, and BB King was Basildon’s finest Depeche Mode, with 1984’s Some Great Reward selected as one of his essential records.
“It’s the home of ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘People are People’,” he told Classic Rock in 2017, adding, “I am constantly impressed with how they meld a bleak worldview with synch and turn it all into great pop music. That’s alchemy!”
Some Great Reward was a pivotal album for Depeche Mode, sonically moving away from their sprightly, polyphonic infancy toward a darker and more arresting electronic affront, with the aid of the emerging sampler and emulator developments at their disposal. This enabled them to record metallic clangs and factory rumbles for their nascent industrial explorations.
Catching them live around the time, Gibbons was impressed with what he perceived as a bluesy foundation amid their onstage machines, and sought to introduce himself to the new pop sensations backstage.
“I had to meet these guys,” he recalled to Rolling Stone in 2015. “They were surprised—’What brings you here?’ I said, ‘Man, the heaviness’. We became friends. Martin Gore was a guitar player trapped behind the synthesisers. He was like, ‘Man, let’s talk guitar’.”
Gore’s penchant for Americana would only grow across the decade, closing the 1980s during their mammoth Music for the Masses tour, covering the R&B ‘Route 66’ classic and injecting some country twang to the fan favourite B-side ‘Pleasure, Little Treasure’. Jump to 2013, and Gibbons, along with longtime ZZ Top producer and collaborator Joe Hardy, eagerly got their mitts on Delta Machine’s ‘Soothe My Soul’ for a bluesy remix.
“He’s a very polite, very kind, very genuine southern gent,” Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan once revealed, noting, “I think he just enjoys being around other musicians and seeing how their world works.”
