He now wore long hair, lived his childhood rocker dream twelve years into his career, loved “Moonage Daydream” and Jane’s Addiction, but Dave Gahan also knew that his change had to be carefully sold to the fans. As he sang, he had pure thoughts – they were not immature: “If you see purity as immaturity / Well, it’s no surprise / For kindness, you substitute blindness / Please open your eyes”. Open your eyes folks – this is Depeche Mode 1993.
Gahan wanted to push the accompanying song, “Condemnation,” as a pre-release single for “Songs Of Faith And Devotion,” which would have been a revolution for the band. The song was gospel and marched ceremoniously, carried forward.
When the 30-year-old marched into the studio at the start of recording, the others were left breathless. Gahan sported long hair and a beard, and his move to Los Angeles and hanging out on the Sunset Strip had an impact. The Brit had absorbed the sounds of the West Coast that found their way there from Seattle. The only thing Gahan hasn’t given up yet is the white jeans.
The new image for Depeche Mode was not inconvenient. Martin Gore constantly developed the band further, from “Black Celebration” in 1986 onwards the four celebrated a kind of biker image, poppers in a rock’n’roll look, wore wayfarers and were adorned by petticoat girls. “Violator” from 1990 had the first brutal record title and was created under the influence of party drugs. The “more guitars” thing, plus Alan Wilder on drums, was the next step for Gore.
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Only with “Condemnation” as the first new sign of life did the band’s thinker veto it. With “I Feel You” as a pre-release, Depeche Mode then continued the triumph of their energetic pieces – “Never Let me Down Again”, “Personal Jesus”. The simple blues guitar, whose monotonous playing almost seemed like masturbation, received the most congenial interaction between the two musicians in the chorus with Gahan’s spit “By and By” and Gore’s “Ah, Ahh, Ahhh!” background vocals, hands down.
Gores in particular illustrated a glorious feeling: like setting to music a chest full of gold slowly opening (it’s a shame that he never reproduced this choral voice in live versions of “I Feel You”). In Anton Corbijn’s black-and-white video, Depeche Mode marched through rubble, an empty rocking chair shook as if by magic, and “Krull” actress Lysette Anthony charmed the camera. “I Feel You” was the birth of Dave Gahan as a shaman, as he still plays the role today. And for the first time he completely forgot that he was singing someone else’s lyrics.
In the liner notes of the 2006 Songs Of Faith And Devotion reissue, producer Flood complained that there wasn’t enough time for polish. But for the listeners the record sounded perfect. Just what Flood and Alan Wilder got out of the gore demo of “I Feel You” (released years later). The soul of the piece can be seen in the rough version, but the sound was reminiscent of the narrow sketches of the “Sounds Of The Universe” demos from 2009, which sounded little better in the finished production.
The strings of “One Caress” still demonstrated the orchestral volume on the album that the arrangements from the successor “Ultra” from 1997 onwards lacked. Tim Simenon, who set up “Ultra”, used the Bristol sound in “Home”, where violinists sound like they are playing the keyboard.
“Songs Of Faith and Devotion” was more rock than synthpop, a triumph of course, although even more so with audiences (number one in the US and UK) than with critics. Dave Gahan, now a heroin junkie, drove his colleagues on the world tour to the point of a nervous breakdown.
Alan Wilder left the band in 1995, and the musicians would not release such a significant album until today. Perhaps Wilder was not the third, but the second most important member of Depeche Mode.
This eighth studio album was released on March 22, 1993. The four singles, “I Feel You”, “Walking In My Shoes”, “Condemnation” and “In Your Room”, were in the safe, established album song positions one, two, three and six. Everyone was ready for the big surprise.