DEPECHE MODE

It's the late '70s. Vince Clarke, Marty Gore, Dave Gahan, and Andy Fletcher are young blokes from Essex, England. They love Bowie, Ultravox, American Soul music, and a fairly new band, The Cure. They pick up some instruments, and learn to play them (kind of), and start a band. They play out in local schools, which leads to gigs at local clubs, and this leads to their first studio-quality record, Speak & Spell, in 1981.

Speak & Spell was successful within a few months, and the band released five more albums in 1980's. This first album was a big hit in the U.K., but was all but ignored in the U.S., save for some minor airplay of the singles, "Just Can't Get Enough", "Dreaming of Me", and "What's Your Name." When the band began writing songs for their next album, Clarke was not feeling the darker, moodier direction the new songs were heading in, and left. Alan Wilder was then hired to play keyboards, and Martin Gore took over principle songwriting duties, and that's the line-up that stuck until 1995.

The decade of the '80s proceeded, and so did Depeche Mode, releasing the albums A Broken Frame (1982), Construction Time Again (1983), Some Great Reward (1984), Black Celebration (1985), and Music For the Masses (1987).  They released over twenty singles which made it into the U.K. Top Forty, and seven of those songs also made it onto the U.S. charts, most notably, "People Are People", "Master and Servant", "Strangelove", "Never Let Me Down Again", "Behind the Wheel", and their biggest American hit of the '80s, "Personal Jesus". Not surprisingly, all of these small and medium-sized hits paved the way for the album that made Depeche Mode international superstars: Violator.

Since Violator was released in early 1990, I won't go into detail about it here, but I will say that it sold around five million copies worldwide, spent a year and half on the charts, and spawned four hit singles: "Personal Jesus" (#28), "Enjoy the Silence" (#8), "Policy of Truth" (#15) and "World in My Eyes" (#52).

I love all who love me. Those who search will surely find me. - Proverbs 8:17