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One song that stood out from the early demos was ‘Personal Jesus’, which saw them break free of their synth-led sound and put down a raunchy blues guitar riff and slide guitars over a glam rock dance stomp. This afforded them greater creative freedom in the studio with classically-trained Wilder working on sounds and arrangements and Flood offering up the technical expertise on the analogue equipment. So, for Violator, they stopped all that and declared: “If you wanna use guitars, use guitars.” You can hear something very similar on the “Harmonium” version on my playlist.ĭevotee – A collage of some of my own Depeche Mode postcards I would have bought from The Oasis in Birmingham in the 1990s.Īndy Fletcher later explained the group had previously lived by restrictive rules in the studio where they would not use the same sound twice and guitars weren’t really used. On ‘Music for the Masses’, Gore had, as per usual, presented the rest of the group with demos of his songs that were almost finished, leaving the band the more simple task of polishing up the songs and adding their own vocals or synth parts.Īhead of Violator though, Alan Wilder – widely recognised as the ‘producer’ within Depeche Mode – and co-producer Flood asked Gore to present his demos in the rawest format possible with just vocals accompanied by either guitar or organ so they could develop the tracks almost from scratch.įor example, ‘Enjoy The Silence’ started life as a slower song with just Martin singing over a simple organ chord sequence. Hiring Flood and engineer Francois Kevorkian, Depeche Mode tore up the rule book on their regular working methods and headed to Milan. Studio whizz Alan Wilder had produced work for Toni Halliday from Curve while industrial favourites Nitzer Ebb were working with soon-to-be Depeche producer Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis. In between albums, Martin Gore had branched out on a successful solo EP of six cover versions called ‘Counterfeit’. While the title of the LP ‘Music for the Masses’ was intended to be self-deprecating, it had, ironically, been the album that finally brokered large scale international success and set them on the path to ‘Violator’. My copy of Depeche Mode’s ‘Violator’ vinyl, bought the day it came out on 19th March 1990, with sleeve design by Area and photography by Anton Corbijn.ĭepeche Mode were rightly brimming with confidence after the global success of their ‘Music of the Masses tour’ that preceded the recording of ‘Violator’. I had become “one of the devout” (that’s a line from the Depeche Mode track “Sacred” for you ‘non-believers’!), and so too had my two brothers – it’s a bond we still share, decades later. It was rarely out of the VHS player at my parents’ house.
#Depeche mode album violator movie
The live album and film ‘101’ – a road movie which builds up to the bands 101st and final show of their ‘Music for the Masses’ tour in front of 60,000 fans at Pasadena Rose Bowl, filmed by the legendary D.A. Having borrowed ‘The Singles 81-85’ cassette off a girlfriend I was hooked on ‘the Mode’ and so I taped all Depeche’s albums off her, excitedly exploring their impressive back catalogue up to that point, which was circa 1988.
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The epic musical journey of lead singer Dave Gahan, chief songwriter Martin Gore (keyboards, vocals and guitars), Alan Wilder (keyboards, piano and backing vocals) and Andy Fletcher (keyboards and backing vocals), was a joy to witness, and we were lucky to have grown up alongside it. I feel eternally fortunate to have grown up at a time to witness Depeche Mode graduate from the teeny pop of ‘See You’, through the teenage angst of ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ and, eventually, into the stadium rock gods they seemed always destined to be with ‘I Feel You’. James Iles explains why the seventh studio album by Depeche Mode remains not just his favourite by the legendary synth-rockers, but also his favourite LP of all time. IT was the perfect album, released at the perfect time, and it propelled Depeche Mode to the higher planes of pop music success, putting them on a par with contemporaries like U2 and REM, except ‘the Mode’ achieved it using synthesizers and samplers.Ĭelebrating its 30th anniversary this year, ‘Violator’ was the major breakthrough in both the commercial fortunes and critical acclaim of one of my favourite bands, who are frequently misunderstood and criminally underrated.