My favorite picture of Martin Gore is found in Wikipedia. It was taken right around the time, 1986, the band he co-founded in 1980, Depeche Mode, released its masterpiece, Black Celebration. In the picture, which was taken in sunny Los Angeles, Gore looks like he is from a planet where "the sun don't ever shine." His world is nothing but a dark city. Its street lights flicker and buzz like an insect caught in an electric swatter, its alleys, gutters, and windows are always as cold as the distant stars; the rain there is toxic, and fumes satanically rise from machines that "never stop the action."
Gore's bleached hair and eyelashes, his sun-starved skin and lips, the studded leather straps and jacket—Los Angeles must have marveled at him in the way a person on a horse marvels at a flying saucer.
Black Celebration begins Depeche Modes' descent to its most commercially successful and pop-friendly album, Violator, which was released almost 10 years after the band's first album, Speak and Spell, and first hit, "Just Can't Get Enough." The key to Violator's mood is, of course, "Enjoy the Silence." The track doesn't look to the future but, instead, bids farewell to a decade of music that was political ("Everything Counts"), pervy ("It's Just A Question of Time"), ironic ("Get the Balance Right"), and cinematic ("Behind the Wheel"). Indeed, Black Celebration is a movie. It's set in the world Gore wore on that sunny LA day.
Depeche Mode perform at Climate Pledge Arena on Sunday, November 26, 7 pm.
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