Le Topic de Depeche Mode

[Monsieur Vilak]

[Super Shogun]

[Monsieur Vilak]

The band made the seemingly suicidal decision to be supported by Primal Scream,

Like moths to a flame, the battered Mode returned to the US with a stripped-down, less costly version of Devotional for one for the road: a final string of thirty-four arena and auditorium dates. Martin Gore was to call them “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

For these shows, the band made the seemingly suicidal decision to be supported by Primal Scream, then the most visibly chemically driven band in Britain. Gahan was the driving force behind this move. “I’d picked the Scream because I’d heard that they liked to party,” he said. “I really liked their record [Screamadelica] and it sounded like we’d be a good combination.”
“Dave thought it would be great to have someone in a similar condition to him on the road,” Wilder wryly confirmed. “He literally spent more time with them than with us. He would go and stand on the side of the stage and watch them play every night.”

Gahan got into the habit of all-night jamming and partying sessions with the new arrivals. Primal Scream’s antics included onstage fights and arrests for public nudity and drunkenness. In New York on June 16, Select journalist Andrew Perry joined the circus. At a pre-show backstage gathering, Gahan was “shovelling cocaine up his nose at an alarming rate” when he beckoned Perry over. After talking to him briefly, he yelled at the writer that he would “curse him,” bit him on the neck, and stormed out of the room. “I assumed he was completely out of it,” Perry, not unreasonably, later told Q. “But then, on stage, he was together and professional.”

Gittins, Ian. Depeche Mode: Faith and Devotion

[Super Shogun]

Cette tournée fut le début de la fin. On parle beaucoup de Gahan mais les autres valaient pas mieux. Gore a fait une crise de manque en pleine réunion pro en 94, il est tombé raide par terre...

[Monsieur Vilak]

Oui, et Fletch qui était chez fous, l'aurait mieux fait de jamais en sortir celui-là...

[Super Shogun]

Review issue du magazine "Rock" de décembre 1982.

[Monsieur Vilak]

Merci je pique!

[Monsieur Vilak]

Will Mowat interviewed the band while recording "In Your Memory" for Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music magazine, issued April 1984. Alan Wilder explains the recording process of the song. Will writes:

I wrote this song using a Jupiter 8 and Drumulator recorded onto the Teac Portastudio. The bass riff was hand-played because sequencers waste so much time on demos. Then came the melody line and other little bits. By the time I've finished all the instrumentation I've usually got the lyrics and then the song is put to the band." Where this writing differs from perhaps more conventional writing is that chord changes are far less important than you would have thought: the use of sound changes takes their place to produce atmosphere, and the attention is on lyrics, melody and sound. This particular song was accepted as the 'B'-side to People are People, and so the next stage was the recording.

Alan reprogrammed the Drumulator with the exact pattern he wanted, although they no longer use the Drumulator's sounds; the Roland MC4 microcomposer, which was the composition tool of Danny's before the Synclavier came along, was then linked to the drum computer, and the MC4's sync tone was then recorded onto the 24-track at exactly the right speed. After that, all operations were synched off tape via the MC4: first the drumulator's individual sounds triggered specific sampled drums in the Synclavier: the snare was recorded at Hansa in Berlin, their favourite recording spot; the bassdrum is a sampled composite of a metal pipe being struck followed by the natural decay of an acoustic bassdrum, and so on.

Then Alan played the bass riff on the Jupiter by hand(!) into the Synclavier, in time with the drums; the computer quantised Alan's playing to pulse time, and the notes were then used to trigger that mainstay of Depeche's sound down the years, the ARP 2600. After that came triggered sequences on the ARP via the ARP analogue sequencer, hand-played Emulator choirs, random synthesised 'bells' in the Synclavier. Oh yes, and David Gahan's vocals, of course!

[Super Shogun]

J'ai toujours bien aimé cette chanson. Même la version longue.

[Monsieur Vilak]

Alan Wilder: “It [Black Celebration] was a difficult record to make. Things were strained — too much time spent in close proximity to the same people, as well as overstaying our welcome in Berlin. And it signalled the end of a co-production relationship between the group, Dan Miller and Gareth Jones — although, I should add, not a falling out. Things did get silly, though. Band members would disappear while Dan spent up to three days getting a bass drum sound — which still sounded shit!

“Dan and I had grown as friends and musical associates, as well as developing a mutual understanding of the territory we felt Depeche Mode should be exploring. For example, our affiliation had been enhanced by spending long hours finishing off the previous LP, Some Great Reward, when everyone else had cleared off on their holidays. With Black Celebration we also ran well over our deadline, but it was perhaps when too many voices were brought into the equation that problems seemed to arise.

Gareth Jones sympathised with Wilder to a degree: “Mixing Black Celebration was not easy. Daniel and I were obsessing about the mixes — we would get a mix up, work on it, everyone would be fairly happy, then we would tear it down again because we felt we weren’t hitting the spot, and this became very frustrating for the band. I remember Alan had to have a word with us, and pull us into line! Even at the end of the mixing we were playing the mixes out into Hansa’s huge Studio 2 through my Yamaha 1000Ms [speakers] and recording them in search of that special vibe. Hopefully, we finally caught a vibe. It’s a very special record, in my opinion.”

Jonathan Miller. Stripped.

[Monsieur Vilak]

Alan Wilder:

“After the initial recording at Music Works, we returned to Hansa to mix the (Some Great Reward) album, but ended up getting horribly behind schedule. As a result, myself, Dan and Gareth completed the album alone because the other three band members had all booked their summer holidays and didn’t want to cancel them. I foresaw the fact that we were going to go over deadline and held off arranging one myself because I didn’t want to miss out on the whole mixing process...."

-A Biography

[Super Shogun]

J'avais déjà lu cette histoire de vacances. Incroyable... Comme dans tous les groupes, équipes ou bureaux, y'en a un qui bosse, et tous les autres se branlent...

[Monsieur Vilak]

[Monsieur Vilak]

Elegy, mars/avril 2000

[Super Shogun]

Pas très bon Liquid... Bloodline reste ce qu'il a fait de mieux je crois.