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Depeche Mode about the album's songs
"Something To Do"
Alan Wilder: "It's always difficult to choose the songs you're going to play in concert. There are a lot of things to consider. Generally, we make a list of suggestions and then we talk for hours. We do not necessarily keep the songs that we prefer. We take the ones that go well together, that form a coherent whole and that will keep the audience in suspense for an hour and a half. Given this notion, we can afford to slip in a track like "Something To Do" which people may not necessarily know, but which does not break the rhythm of the concert."
"Lie To Me"
Martin Gore: "Lie To Me: I don't know if we made the best version of that that we possibly could have done, but I quite like that as a song." "It was just one of the first tracks that had this chord change that I've used over the years - overused, over the years." "'Lie To Me' isn't an anti-love song... it's about a situation of paranoia which anybody could find themselves in."
"People Are People"
Martin Gore: "Although it's a song about racism, that's just one example of people not getting on. It's about all sorts of differences between people." "The bass drum at the beginning was just an acoustic bass drum sampled into a Synclavier then we added a piece of metal to that – just a sampled anvil type sound – to give it a slight click and make it sound a bit different. That's the beauty of the Synclavier, you can edit sounds together to make what we call combination sounds. The main synth sound is the actual 'synth' sound on the Synclavier, that's the one that plays the bass riff. But the bass sound is a combination sound too with part of it being an acoustic guitar plucked with a coin, which sounds very interesting when the two sounds are sequenced together. I took a stereo Walkman when I was going on a plane from England to somewhere. I originally brought it along to take the takeoff but while the air hostess was doing her safety speech at the start of the flight I decided I'd take that as well. But as she was telling everyone to 'Check the instruction cards under your seat,' the door flew open and all this air rushed in which made a real noise and everyone laughed. Anyway I looped the end of what she was saying and the laughter so it goes, '…tion cards ha ha ha ha …tion cards ha ha ha ha,' which sounds funny but I used it in conjunction with a choir sound and it added a really nice texture to the bridge on People." "2009. God, that was such a long time ago - 1984 or something like that. I really don't remember what was going through my head at the time. The whole process is mysterious to me. But nevertheless it was good that we recorded this song, because it brought us to a newer, bigger level. It was our first big hit in America and also here in Germany. Or our first number one, I think. I really don't appreciate the song anymore nowadays, but without it, we might not have been around as a band right now."
Andy Fletcher: "We thought it was a good song. Now, we're not too keen on it. It's probably... It's our biggest hit that we don't play." "This is one of our biggest hits, but we had a long discussion before deciding if we were going to play it on tour. Martin and I were against it. Martin cannot stand this song now. He finds it too commercial, not subtle enough. I think that, next time, it will not be on the setlist."
Dave Gahan: "This was the first song of ours that made a dent, really, into popular radio. We were using all these tape loops to create rhythms and the technology was quite advanced, but it wasn't anything like it is today, the things that you can do. It's not one of Martin's particular favorites, this one, and I don’t think we've done it live since the mid '80s. It's quite literal, very poppy, all major chords — something Martin doesn't like so much these days (laughs). But the song really propelled us into a new cosmos at that particular time. The song became a no. 1 hit in a lot of countries in Europe, and it allowed us to then go off and create the music that we wanted to create."
Alan Wilder: "There's very little playing going on in People Are People, virtually everything is sampled into the Synclavier. With the guitar sounds we altered them slightly once they were in the Synclavier because you sample in one note and then you can alter the length and dynamic of every note in the sequence for the guitar part so it will give expression, but it will still be completely in time. You can justify all the rhythms, you see, so that you can have articulation but it’s all in time. There's a Synclavier harp sound in the verses, and an ARP sequencer playing very fast in the chorus and there's some Emulator sounds that we used for adding a few frills here and there. We got a lot of people singing the high, 'It's a lot,' and then a low, 'Like life.' The choir sound on People, again, we used a combination sound of different choir sounds on different synths and then put them slightly out of time with each other. Like we took one sound from the Synclavier, one from the PPG and one was on the Emulator. The three throaty clunks at the end of each chorus was a combination sound. First of all we sampled Martin going, 'Unk Unk Unk,' with his throat then we added a bell sound and a timpani to give it depth. We only took those down a tone and it was unrecognisable as someone going, 'Unk', with their throat." "When we do a single like this People Are People we mix for radio rather than for hi-fi. Daniel Miller bought a little gadget which we're evaluating called the Ear Opener — it's supposed to reproduce exactly the compression and re-equalization you have on radio. So we constantly cross-reference what we hear in the Control Room with what comes out of this little modified transistor radio: previously we were finding that our mixes weren't spunding all that great on medium-wave; one thing we've learned is that you have to go way over the top with ambiance and reverb to get the same effect on radio as you would hear on a hi-Fi system — that's why Hansa is so good, 'cos you can pass your most computer-like sounds through amps and even huge PA stacks in their large, halls, mike them up, gate them to hell and come up with the most incredible and powerful sounds. That's how we did People Are People: I suppose you could call it Controlled Dirt."
"Somebody"
Alan Wilder: "It was probably the first of what you'd call an acoustic performed track on an album. In fact, Martin sang it naked. It was his call. (laughs) I turned the piano away as I was playing, but yeah, we recorded it live, just him and me, in the big studio 2 hall, and he stripped off for that one."
Martin Gore: "'Somebody' is pretty much a straightforward 'I love you' song if you like, certainly not an anti-love song. The song is based on a sort of Jonathan Richman back-to-basics theory. It's performed all together – it just needed three takes, mainly to get the sound okay – and really uses the bare essentials. In fact I sang it completely naked in the cellar of the studio which we use for ambiance, and the others sent the female tape op downstairs while I was doing it to 'check the connections'."
Dave Gahan: "We sent Steffi down there, who's the girl taper in Germany, to check out some wires, and Martin, not knowing she was coming down and us knowing that Martin has stripped off, and then we heard a little shriek when she got down there, and Martin going "Eh, eh, sorry, eh..."
"Master And Servant"
Martin Gore: "It's not as drastic as you might think. It's about domination and exploitation in life, but it uses sex. It's about the power that people employ in work, love, hate... and in sex. We just used the sexual angle to portray it." "It's not as drastic as you might think. It's about domination and exploitation in life, but it uses sex. It's about the power that people employ in work, love, hate... and in sex. We just used the sexual angle to portray it."
Alan Wilder: "We spent a lot of time on that track. Not just recording it - it was quite complicated - but also when we came to mixing, I think we spent, like, 7 days on the mix." "Though 'Master And Servant' proved another success for Depeche Mode, it is somewhat surprising considering the unfortunate incidents that dogged the recording. Released at the same time as Frankie Goes To Hollywood's massive hit, 'Relax', the aim was to emulate the same "fat, round bass sound". So desperate were the studio team to achieve this that "we went completely up our arses and ended up with exactly the opposite, topping it all off at the end of a 7 day mix by leaving out a small detail....the snare drum."
"If You Want"
Alan Wilder: "We were doing this combination with Martin doing his Indian voice combined with a bassoon type sound."
"Blasphemous Rumours"
Andy Fletcher: "The song 'Blasphemous Rumours' stems from our experiences then. There was a prayer list of people who were sick in some way and you'd pray for the person on top of that list until they died. When Martin first played me 'Blasphemous Rumours' I was quite offended. I can see why people would dislike it. It certainly verges on the offensive." "When we went to America we thought we’d get a lot of the same stick for this record that we’d get over in Europe but we didn't. We got a lot of letters slagging it."
Alan Wilder: "We sampled some concrete being hit for what turned out to be the snare sound. All that entailed was us hitting a big lump of concrete with a sampling hammer. The engineer / producer we use, Gareth Jones, has got this brilliant little recorder called a Stellavox which we use with two stereo mikes and it's as good as any standard 30ips reel-to-reel but this is very small and therefore very portable. So we just took the Stellavox out into the middle of this big, ambient space and miked up the ground and hit it with a big metal hammer. The sound was… like concrete being hit. I can't really put it any other way."
Martin Gore: "'Blasphemous Rumours' was mainly inspired from the early days of the band or even before the band got started, when Andy and Vince were regular churchgoers, and I just used to go along because they were my friends. I just thought it was quite interesting. I was never a practicing Christian, although they were. And when you're not involved in it, I think you really notice the hypocrisy and just the funny side to things. One thing I often quoted is this thing called the "prayer list": every week they would sit and pray for people who were seriously ill, and you could guarantee that most of them, the majority of the people who they prayed for, would die. But they took that as, like, being very, very positive, that was "God's will" and "They've gone to somewhere better". And it's just, when you're not part of it, it just seems very ridiculous, very funny. I know a lot of people out there are not gonna agree with me."
"In Your Memory"
Martin Gore: "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!"
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