This is a new occasional meta-feature here at According to Doyle where I write about the process of writing these rankings.
At some point in the near future, I will be ranking the singles of Depeche Mode and this will inevitably raise the questions in my mind “what constitutes Depeche Mode.” Let me lay you my challenge here.
At the dawn of Depeche Mode, the band’s principal creative force was Vince Clarke – he wrote the songs. When Clarke left in 1981, Martin Gore became sort of the visionary leader (though new member Alan Wilder became the “musical director”).
Here is where things start (but don’t stop) getting tricky. Vince Clarke’s next few bands – The Assembly (featuring Feargal Sharkey), Yazoo (Yaz in the U.S.A. featuring Alison Moyet) and Erasure (with Andy Bell) – demonstrate a clear and direct evolution from Clarke’s Depeche Mode songs. Both the songwriting and the keyboard work is distinctly Clarke’s throughout his career.
I think we can agree that The Assembly (who only released one single – “Never Never”) sounds more like a Vince Clarke creation than either Sharkey’s previous band The Undertones (“Teenage Kicks”) or his solo work (“A Good Heart”). Similarly, if you were to contrast Yazoo (“Don’t Go”) with even Moyet’s early solo work (“Invisible”), the involvement of Clarke in the former track is immediately obvious. On the other and, line up a Clarke era Depeche Mode single (“Dreaming of Me”) with that Assembly track, that Yazoo track and this early Erasure track (“Who Needs Love Like That”), you can hear that same person created all of this music. On the other hand, if you listen to even the first post-Clarke Depeche Mode single (“See You”), you can hear that their music is already moving towards the moodier tone it will take in future years.
So, do I remove the Clarke singles from consideration as I rank Depeche Mode simply because the principal sonwriter left? Well, no, I continued ranking The Pogues‘ tracks even when Shane MacGowan either didn’t write a song or later when he’d been kicked from the band. So maybe I should group all of Clarke’s post-Depeche Mode work with the Depeche Mode singles to make one massive list of everything that evolved from Depeche Mode? Equally absurd.
Then there’s Depeche Mode’s post-Clarke history. Both Martin L Gore and Dave Gahan released solo records – check out Gore’s “Compulsion” (very Depeche Mode) and Gahan’s “Tomorrow” (very Depeche Mode). And then there’s the whole issue of Alan Wilder whose musical direction through 1995 clearly shaped the band’s sound but whose solo work as Recoil (“Drifting” – 1997) moved in a fairly different direction from contempraneous Depeche Mode (“Barrel Of A Gun”). Should the long-term songwriter and visionary’s solo work be including in a ranking of Depeche Mode singles? The frontman’s solo work? The music director’s? Writing about The Cure, I included his work with Cult Hero and The Glove because The Cure was always essentially Robert Smith and anyone he was in the room with at the time, but I don’t know that the solo work of any of these three should be on this list. I also don’t know that it shouldn’t be.
So, what configuration of band members, exactly constitutes Depeche Mode? Is the name nothing more than a marketing label because they’ll shift more units and sell more tickets under that monicker than as solo artists? Is there some sort of binding group philosophy that makes one song by Vince Clarke or Martin Gore a Depeche Mode song but another song a Yazoo or a solo tune? What exactly am I ranking if not a continuous artistic evolution – so shouldn’t I follow Vince Clarke as a songwriter and not any one single band that he was part of? Or is the post-Clarke Depeche Mode somehow essentially the same band even though they stopped creating the same kind of music after he left?
I mean, this is all absurd, but it is also the sort of stuff I pain over as I work on ranking the work of various artists. Right now I’m working on The Clash and both their post-Combat Rock album, Cut the Crap and Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite album This Is Big Audio Dynamite could be heard as extensions of the direction they were headed on that last descent Clash album – but I have separated out the work of the two bands. Or, jeez, all of Damon Albarn’s projects (Blue, Gorillaz, The Good The Bad and The Queen, etc) are extensions of his song writing.
So yeah, Depeche Mode will be coming up in the next six months, but I’m not happy about it.