"We wanted to go somewhere else, it was time to try something different." "The idea of going to another country really appealed to us." "We always liked Germany." "West Berlin was an enclosed space but it was full of interesting people." "We wanted to record an album in a place that was alive, not a place that was dead, like London." "Coupled with the fact we'd been on the road a lot, travelled around more, there was a slight different feeling to the recording." "I think people were aware of the stories that people go to Berlin and make great records, or even artists go to Berlin and make great art." "You don't realise until you actually go to Berlin, certainly around that time, how creative and exciting and just weird the place was." "The Wall was still up." "Things you'd never thought of." "You read about it, but when you went you thought" ""This is actually real, it is a quite a grey, spooky place."" "It's not Blade Runner continuously, but it was raining when I went." "We all worked in the same place and stayed in the same place." "We tended to go out together." "It was just crazy here." "We were still very young." "We were treated not as cool as everyone else." "The idea of going to Hansa Studios, where Bowie had worked, and Iggy Pop, that Martin and I were certainly big fans of, it was..." "I mean, it was..." "We really had like a gang mentality then as well." "It was us against the world." "The scene in Berlin was very intimate because we were surrounded by the wall." "West Berliners were only a small group, everyone knew each other." "Also, at night, in the clubs, there were more or less the same people." "So, at that time, Berlin was a really special, fun place." "It suited very much, the fact they were having big success in Germany." "Martin had a German girlfriend and was talking German quite fluently." "The whole thing seemed to fit quite well." "Berlin at that time was a very strange place." "There was a very special atmosphere." "I think if we'd recorded that album in London it would have turned out similar." "We were getting into a bit of systems music at the time, a bit of Steve Reich." "I'd been into it for years." "The guys were getting into it." "Alan was getting into the Philip Glass thing." "There was a little bit of that knocking around in the background." "It was supposed to be tougher." "We didn't want to be wimpy." "We wanted to make powerful, strong records with a lot of atmosphere." "I was working with Einstürzende Neubauten at that time in Berlin, who were one of the archetypal metal-bashing bands." "Not to trivialise what they do." "I'm a big fan of the lyrics as well, and the guys in general." "But a lot of what they were doing was taking found objects and striking them, and making found objects into musical instruments with contact microphones." "This is something on Construction Time without knowing Einstürzende Neubauten." "I met Neubauten again in Berlin and I'd already made Halber Mensch with them when we came to Some Great Reward." "In my life there was a massive..." "I introduced Neubauten to sequencers and sampling." "I was able to bring some of the work I'd done with Neubauten to highlight some sounds, melodies and textures of the Depeche work." "So there was a big crossover." "Technology was moving really fast, and we used it." "The idea of creating a new sound you hadn't heard before was much more interesting to us." "And it was the atmosphere that that sound created which would be the template for the direction the song would go in." "Daniel bought a Synclavier, which opened up new avenues." "And the sampling was so much better." "We weren't trying to be trendy or clever." "We were just literally picking things up that were around us saying "Let's sample that"." "And when you do that you tend to come up with hitting metallic objects cos they seem to be all around you." "Before you know it you're in the kitchen sampling knives and forks and scissors, and stuff like that." "OK, we've got this vague idea at the moment which was used on the demo." "We've got this vague idea from the demo." "We've got this pebble, which we got from the mud." "Anyway, the idea is to roll the pebble on this bit of metal here, the window frame." "Thus making this sort of sound." "The idea is to take that sequence and to make an interesting rhythm out of it." "And to sequence it all through the song so people dance." "You're playing them back off the Synclavier, are you?" "We recorded them and we're playing them back to see what they're like." "That was quite haunting." "The whole thing about recording with Depeche was to push it." "The songs were already strong, and it was trying to put them into a really interesting, unusual, original musical kind of picture." "It was trying to move forward." "Gareth was good at pushing that." "Gareth was always a bit more than just an engineer." "So full of ideas." "More than just sitting there just miking up a drum kit saying "Off you go, play, and I'll record you"." "He would have more radical ideas." "Hansa studio is four floors of studio and we were in the top, fourth floor." "Studio two had the great big recording space." "Gareth wanted to set up a PA system and we had tie lines going down from studio four to two." "We would send our sounds through this 2K PA at ridiculous audio levels." "The acoustics of People Are People and the sound of the beats and the big fills is the sound of the rooms, the beats getting thrown around Hansa Studio." "Three floors down for the bass drum." "Snare drum one floor over." "Toms in another room over there." "The whole building was shaking." "It was quite a big-sounding record." "The biggest in that sense." "The biggest that we'd ever made." "It seemed it had something going for it." "It was taking social and political subject matter and making it quite poppy and commercial." "Everyone just thought, that is amazing, as a piece of mid-'80s pop." "I'm not saying it's Martin's best song." "But for what it was supposed to be at that time it was amazing." "I think he really hit the spot with that one." "That's one of the good things about that video, for me." "That kind of industrial edge that the battleship gives it." "It reflects, to me, in a decent way what we were trying to do with the sound as we were making the record." "We just basically pressed play and ran it." "Everybody sang along." "It just seemed like it sounded great even before we'd recorded it properly." "It was a good song." "Now we're not too keen on it." "It's probably our biggest hit that we don't play." "Yeah, it overtook us somehow." "We knew that it's going to be very strong." "Cos again it's very easy." "The track is very easy, the rhythm is fantastic, the melody, everybody can sing along." "The word play, "people are people", was immediately understood by Germans." "This was part of the reason why its huge success was possible." "People Are People was a record that as soon as we went to radio it was an instant addition to everyone's programme." "People Are People hit a tone with the public." "It addressed racism, sexism and acceptance of one another." "It was something that also appealed to the mainstream pop radio programmers at that time, too." "It kind of took us by surprise that it went so big." "Monumental thing, People Are People was an absolute smash hit." "Want me to do an interview?" " Trying to play at the same time." " Play a riff into the sequencer." "I'm not very good at this one." "Lie To Me." "I don't know if we did the best versión of that we could have done." "I quite like that as a song." "Lie To Me was one of the strongest songs Martin had written up to that point." "It just had a great feeling to it." "It was one of the first tracks that had this chord change that I've used over the years." "Overused over the years." "Lie To Me was one we played for a long time live that I always liked." "Simple and direct." "We toyed with the idea of bringing it back on this tour." "Alan got a lot more involved in the production with Some Great Reward." "I think that was a big turning point." "Often, Alan would sit in the studio with Daniel and Gareth till two or three in the morning." "We'd be off at some bar or some club somewhere." " What we doing?" " Trying to get the click in synch." "Yet again." "He was really into it." "He didn't get bored." "He was happy to sit around listening and twiddling, getting sounds right." "He was definitely, in terms of being in the studio, focusing in the studio on an overall basis, Alan was definitely in there." "My strength is really a sort of orchestrator and sound manipulator, if you like." "Finding ways to get the best out of what's there, rather than come up with the original ideas, the initial song ideas." "So I decided best leave that to Martin, he's good at it." "He's much more prolific." "There were a lot of stories about how Somebody was recorded." "Might well have been that Dave tried it and it didn't work out." "There's bound to be a couple of songs that Martin writes where it works better with his voice." "It was really down to two things." "We thought they suited Martin's voice more." "Or if they were of more of a personal nature, like Somebody." "It was probably the first what you call acoustic performed track on an album." "In fact, Martin sang it naked." "It was his call." "I turned the piano the other way as I was playing it." "We recorded it live, just him and me, in the big studio two hall." "And he stripped off for that one." "We had a few takes of it on different tracks." "They were out of synch." "So we played all the takes and faded one into the other." "So they all drifted in and out." "We had these massive tape loops going all round the studio of traffic noise and things, which we'd recorded in Berlin." "That looks pretty good." "It was experimental." "We tried things and had no idea if they'd work." "I don't know how Martin feels about it in retrospect, but it's a great song." "I think we just twisted it sonically in a different way by doing that." "As usual, we were running late in the schedule." "The band, certainly Dave, Martin and Fletch, had booked holidays and it was getting very nervous, getting very tense, cos the album wasn't finished and the holiday period was coming up." "A few words, please, about the production so far." "We haven't got time." "Basically, we've had it." "Basically, I don't think we'll ever finish this." "It's over." "Let's go home." "We can't go on holiday." "I want a holiday!" "I'm going crazy." "It was like "We've got to go on holiday." "See you in a couple of weeks." "Bye."" "Kind of thing." "The others went off on holiday and we finished the record." "That's about the size of it." "What's the date?" "It's the 12th of August." "The lads have gone off on holiday." "They've been away about five days now and in the meantime we've completely had to go back in time." "We've recorded just about every part of the song in good time." "Another funny thing that's happened is that Martin's..." "According to a Telex which they've sent us, Martin's lost his baggage, which went to first New York and then Johannesburg." "So that's his karma for pissing off during the mixing." "And, yeah, you bastard." "The monster of the album, there's always one monster of the album, in terms of getting it finished, is Master And Servant." "It was a bit of a reaction after the success of People Are People." ""It's all getting too poppy, Dan." "We've got to be careful."" "Which was good, which was correct, you know." "We did make a conscious effort to make..." "We felt the next single had to be a lot harder and different again." "We spent a long time on that track." "Not just recording it." "It was quite complicated." "Also, when we came to mix it, I think we spent seven days on the mix." "I think we were mixing it for some ridiculous amount of time." "I feel a bit strange." "I don't think I can go on." "I want to go on, but I don't think I can." "I remember being up all night with Gareth on the last night." "Editing the tapes, and tape all over the room." "We left in the morning to go to the airport." "There'd been this huge snow storm overnight." "It was really freezing." "It was 7.00am. I'd been up for three days." "Cos everything was late I hadn't played it to anybody." "I arranged for them to come to the mastering room." "We listened through and as the last chorus came in something weird happened, we realised the snare drum was missing." "We spent ten days mixing this track." "It was so complicated." "We were so burnt by the end of it we hadn't noticed we'd muted out the snare drum." "We sat around for about five minutes and said" ""What we going to do?" "Shall we remix it?"" "Everybody said "No, nobody will notice."" "Now Martin was living in Berlin and we were going to leather clubs, staying out late and getting a bit pervy." "Master And Servant, if you like, was like a pop interpretation of that, with the whip noises and the screaming and the pretty girl in the video." "It was all a bit, you know, edgy." "A bit edgy in a witty kind of pop way." "Hi." "I never get uncool." "I always stay calm." "Especially when I'm surrounded by such nice people." "Come on, baby." "We've got what you might call a close working relationship." " But we don't want to go into that now." " Play it again, Gareth." "You play it, Dave." "It was an important moment because the band felt they could do a song like People Are People and a song like Master And Servant and take the fans with them." "Personally, I had no qualms about any of the words." "And, to be honest, how they might be received commercially also was of no interest to me really." "The idea of being subversive is quite appealing." "There's a degree of that in Master And Servant and Blasphemous Rumours and the fact you can get away with anything if you give it a good tune." "There was a lot of worry about Blasphemous Rumours, because Fletch and Mart were Sunday school goers when they were young." "It was quite a strong religious background in their upbringing." "But at that time, Blasphemous Rumours seemed like an attack on the church." "The song's about God letting us down." "That's the theme." "Something bad happens." "Everyone has it at some stage in their faith or life where something bad happens and you think "If there's a God, why did he let this bad thing happen to my friend, or to me, or half the world?"" "By that time we were getting pretty confident with what we wanted to do." "And Neal was given the tall order of trying to actually convince people at Radio One." "The problem came with Blasphemous Rumours." "That was a very difficult record." "And there were a lot of people who felt that lyrically, and just the very title of it, that the record shouldn't be on the radio." "We did struggle with radio play and certain people objected to playing it, and they made their feelings very strongly known." "Alternatively, over in the States, it got played." "Stations on Long Island, WDRE, started to play us, underground, alternative stations." "In 1982 we almost wrote off America." "We thought that we would never be popular in America." "And when we went back in 1985, we suddenly had become this cult phenomenon." "We were playing to 15,000 people a night." "American radio was changing, big time." "We were seen as one of the stalwarts of this new scene that was happening." "If you wanted your records to sell and for people to know you you had to go out there and work." "MTV was still in a semi-formative stage." "The only way to get out there was to go and tour." "America in 1985, does that still count as Some Great Reward?" "Yes, it was long ago." "Mr Silver, a few words?" "Completely sold out." "Do you think..." " Outrageous." " And wait for Europe." "The kids that were in the audience were phoning the radio stations saying "Why aren't you playing Depeche Mode?"" "There was this demand-led phenomenon that meant the top 40 stations who had ignored the band's last album were having to acknowledge the current one." "By that time I actually thought that they were very much an individual voice." "Martin certainly felt that he had to say things." "I think he was saying them for a lot of people." "With Some Great Reward I think that they kept their pop fans and their pop sensibilities in the public eye and on radio, but that's when they really started getting back a certain coolness to them that they had in the very early days." "I don't think they were thought of as a teeny band anymore." "I think people understood they couldn't be dismissed as such." "They were coming of an age." "We felt that it was tougher and we'd made it more interesting, more unusual." "Those three albums leading on to Black Celebration was part of a real natural progressión, isn't it, of a band developing."