The 10 best Depeche Mode B-sides
Basildon’s greatest electronic export is the ultimate success story. Doggedly ploughing on through the loss of their original principal songwriter, shaking off the early awkward TV spots, and fighting an onslaught of savage UK critical attacks that took years to stop scoffing and take them seriously, Depeche Mode went from strength to strength across the 1980s. They sold out stadiums in America and continental Europe while their contemporaries were biting the dust or creatively floundering following synthpop’s aftermath.
The band’s secret weapon was Martin Gore. Ever the dark horse, his step up to principal songwriting duties shifted the band’s trajectory from former lyricist Vince Clarke’s effervescent pop stylings to much darker, introspective subject matter, influencing the dramatic storm clouds that sonically hovered over their industrial clamoured shift from 1986’s Black Celebration.
Depeche Mode yielded copious amounts of excellent work from their respective album sessions, some of which found their way as curios across the years, collating late studio offcuts as bonus supplements to special editions of recent albums. With remixes overwhelmingly the priority with recent singles, fantastic cuts like ‘Ghost’ or ‘Happens All the Time’ never actually saw life as B-sides; perhaps these bonus tracks deserve a list of their own?
Great bands have great B-sides, and Depeche Mode are no exception. Across their glorious output before the remixes truly took over in the 2010s, the synth stalwarts boasted a collection of non-album gems that confidently run shoulder-to-shoulder with their attached single. Here we explore ten of their best.
10 best Depeche Mode B-sides
‘Ice Machine’
An unusually chilly cut from the future Erasure songwriter, the B-side to their first single, 1981’s ‘Dreaming of Me’, ‘Ice Machine’ soldiers into stirringly glacial stings of evocative drama.
Exploring faded memories and their mysterious presence in the darkroom, and “shouts of the boys in the factory,” the band’s Essex hometown’s post-industrial malaise hovers all around this wearily ruminative synthpop traversal.
‘Fools’
Following Wilder’s recruitment in 1982, his classically trained expertise brought a sophisticated heft to their subsequent arrangements, opening the door to intrepid sonics of 1983’s Construction Time Again.
Recorded at John Foxx’s The Garden studios, the band’s eager embrace of the emerging sampler technology made possible with the Synclavier II yielded the flip to ‘Love, in Itself’, one of the handful of tracks Wilder gifted the group. Byouant yet bristling with an abrasive snap, ‘Fools’ infectious hook rings in your ears far longer than its A-side.
‘In Your Memory’
One of the most chaotic exercises in their entire output, Alan Wilder was let loose on the samplers, and with extra help from the E-mu Emulator and the sonic wielding of a metal pipe for its beefy, percussive thunder, was born a classic B-side.
Offering a deeply disquieting counter to ‘People Are People’s’ glossy thump, ‘In Your Memory’s’ only flaw is the nagging feeling that there should have been more Wilder songs following his brief but fruitful songwriting spell.
‘Fly on the Windscreen’
By 1985, Gore was seriously coming into his own, and the moody, leather-clad spectacle that came to define the band had been cemented in preparation for their 1986 gloom pop offering, Black Celebration. Whoever’s idea it was, the band went with releasing the bang average ‘It’s Called a Heart’ for their ’85 singles compilation, a cut so behind their creative ambitions that Wilder looks positively fed up in its cornfield music video.
A mordant skulker detailing Gore’s existential musings on love and death, recorded at Berlin’s legendary Hansa studios, ‘Fly on the Windscreen’s’ eerie grooves were the real taster for what was to come—a sooty slice of acidic pop that was so good they included its ‘Final’ version on the next record.
‘Pleasure, Little Treasure’
1987 was the year they broke into America, and Music for the Masses and its accompanying tour— captured on DA Pennebaker’s film, 101—eagerly landed on the States’ country and rock foundations, setting the stage for guitars that would dominate the 1990s. They even yielded a tongue-in-cheek cover of Bobby Troup’s ‘Route 66’.
Brimming with confidence and explosive zest, the B-side to ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ was described by Andy Fletcher as a “good old rock ‘n’ roll song”, and he wasn’t wrong. ‘Pleasure, Little Treasure‘ is charged with the whirlwind energy of a band on the road who know they’ve finally made it.
‘Dangerous’
By 1990, even the UK’s most committed naysayers couldn’t resist Violator’s effortless, alternative pop cool. Still standing as their defining moment, their seventh LP hit a pitch-perfect balance of electronic music and organic accessibility that found the rock purists swept up in Depeche Mode’s new guitar-smattered synth strut.
Whetting the appetites with 1989’s monster ‘Personal Jesus’, its flip ‘Dangerous’ exudes no less hooky ingenuity than any of Violator‘s nine masterstroke cuts, with frontman Dave Gahan crooning Gore’s lyrical trepidations of fraught seduction with masterful ease.
‘My Joy’
In one of the greatest creative U-turns in music, Depeche Mode jumped deeper into alternative rock territory with Wilder behind a drum kit and the group encountering the novel experience of jamming in a studio together for 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion.
Messianic, ecclesiastical, and possessed with divine bombast, Gahan’s new wave-turned-rock god transformation found another perfect foil in ‘Walking in My Shoes’ B-side. String stabs and reversed drums wrestle in ‘My Joy’s cavernous soup, along with Wilder’s studious mixing to craft one of the band’s most stirring pieces.
‘Surrender’
The Depeche Mode story nearly ended before Ultra‘s drop in 1997. Following the band’s near implosion with Wilder’s departure in 1995 and Gahan’s gnawing heroin habit, it was a miracle their ninth LP ever materialised. The sound of the party well and truly over, Ultra wanders in the wake of Songs of Faith and Devotion, hungover with fragile, brittle electronics and gritty country twang illustrating a fatigue that refuses to turn to defeat.
Recorded during the Ultra sessions but seeing its release as the B-side to The Singles ’86–’98‘s promo ‘Only When I Lose Myself’, ‘Surrender’ subsumes Gore’s characteristic world of succumbed temptation, charged with organ fog and hazy slide guitar. In fact, Gore later stated in a 2005 interview that it was the band’s most underrated song.
‘Free’
After 2001’s experiments with Exciter‘s delicate, digital arrangements, ’05’s Playing the Angel brought back the analogue synths and the sound of a band renewed with fire in their middle-aged belly. Crunchy, phat, and oozing attitude, their 11th effort heralded the ‘back to basics’ production collaboration with Ben Hillier.
Easily gripping enough to have stood confidently on Playing the Angel‘s tracklist, ‘Precious’ B-side ‘Free’ propulsively rushes with tech-ravaged passion, capturing Gore’s masochistic lyrical frisson between pain and its decadent wallow as starkly as ‘Master and Servant’ 21 years before.
‘All That’s Mine’
Furthering Gore’s sonic reach towards southern blues and modular electro, 2013’s Delta Machine tapped into Violator‘s guitar strum equilibrium with the band’s growing rack of synths, for an album that flexed a band still full of ideas and furtive, creative energy.
Proving to be their last legitimate B-sides as the remixes took hold, ‘Heaven’s’ flip-side ‘All That’s Mine’ sits as another welcome Gahan composition from his latter songwriting offerings. It explores clarity and redemption with as much poetic gift as Gore’s late-life, lyrical musings.
