Today at 3pm NZ time
Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I’m joined by the endlessly knowledgeable Leon from Adelaide (South Australia) to take on one of the most influential bands Britain has ever produced: Depeche Mode. Their story begins in Basildon, Essex, at the turn of the 1980s, where a group of school friends — Vince Clarke, Martin Gore and Andrew “Fletch” Fletcher — started making music, before a young Dave Gahan, overheard singing Bowie’s “Heroes,” completed the line-up. Named after a French fashion magazine (Dépêche mode — roughly “fashion dispatch”), they began as bright synth-pop upstarts and grew, album by album, into the dark, sensual, stadium-filling pioneers of electronic music we know today — a band who took the humble synthesizer and made it sound like sin and salvation at once.
Because Leon wanted the full sweep, this episode carries a little extra history — right back to how a single OMD B-side first set Vince Clarke on the path to synthesizers. His five picks are really five different Depeche Modes: “Photographic,” from the 1981 Vince Clarke-penned debut Speak & Spell (and the band’s very first recording); “My Secret Garden” from 1982’s A Broken Frame, the moment Martin Gore took over the songwriting and Leon’s favourite Depeche Mode song of all; the imperial “Behind the Wheel” from 1987’s Music for the Masses, the album version with that irresistible bassline; “Precious” from 2005’s Playing the Angel, a tender letter Martin wrote to his children during his divorce; and “People Are Good” from 2023’s Memento Mori, the band’s first record as a duo after the loss of Fletch. From synth-pop debut to elegiac farewell — forty-plus years in five songs. Tune in and let Leon be your guide.
Tracklist
- Depeche Mode — Photographic — Speak and Spell (Deluxe)
- Depeche Mode — My Secret Garden — A Broken Frame (Deluxe)
- Depeche Mode — Behind the Wheel — Music for the Masses (Deluxe)
- Depeche Mode — Precious — Playing the Angel (Deluxe)
- Depeche Mode — People Are Good — Memento Mori
