The Alternative Number Ones: Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Funny thing about mass-market alternative rock in the pre-grunge era: It really didn't have to rock at all. Modern rock airwaves were full of guitars, but those guitars only rarely indulged in blazing power-chord heroics. More often, those guitars were employed as textures -- machines that could jangle, fizz, groan, sputter, or sigh on command. Sometimes, the guitars were just a barely-there accessory. This was the peak era of sallow Brits emoting over blippy sequencers and sad-trombone synthesizer bits, and Depeche Mode were the absolute undisputed kings of that shit.

When Billboard first introduced the Modern Rock chart in 1988, the magazine cited the tremendous success of Depeche Mode as one of its reasons. For decades now, Depeche Mode's synthetic glacial brood has been part of the generally accepted mainstream-rock language; it's hard to imagine a band like Linkin Park or Imagine Dragons being able to function without the DM example. In their day, though, Depeche Mode were time-traveling soldiers from a sensitively debauched future. Nobody knew what to do with them.

By and large, the American rock critics of the '80s regarded Depeche Mode with some combination of suspicion, disdain, and bemusement. When you picture the scene, you can understand the confusion on some level. Abroad, Depeche Mode were teen-idol pop stars with vaguely transgressive tendencies. In the US, Depeche Mode were the objects of a rapturous cult, saviors of the sensitive kids who had to find each other to form their tribe. (It's probably only a slight exaggeration to say that goth culture in the US got it start as an extension of Depeche Mode and Cure fandoms.)

Here they were: These pouting, expressionless pretty boys, intoning dour square-peg poetry over bleeping Atari disco and, in the process, capturing the collective heart of angst-ridden teenage America. Depeche Mode got no love in the music press or on college radio, but they commanded a vast tribe anyway. (I was too young to see this happening in real time, but something similar happened in the '90s with Nine Inch Nails, another band that would've been unthinkable without Depeche Mode's example.)

In contemporaneous press around Depeche Mode, the appeal of the band's live act seems to be the greatest source of bafflement. After all, these guys were not playing traditional rock instruments. They were simply pushing buttons, and yet they packed thousands of screaming kids into hockey arenas. Depeche Mode were six albums deep into their career when they filled the Pasadena Rose Bowl with 60,000 fans in 1988. D.A. Pennebaker, legendary documentarian of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, turned that show into a concert film called 101, and the resulting live album (also called 101) went gold. This threw America's rock critics for a loop, but Depeche Mode were really just starting to reach their peak.

The members of Depeche Mode could've thought of themselves as a rock 'n' roll band. They trafficked in big gestures, communal singalongs, and vaguely rebellious stances. They wore leather jackets and interesting haircuts. They harbored the same Elvis fascinations as every other British punk and new wave band. As the '90s wore on, they got into more outwardly stereotypical rock 'n' roll accessories: long hair, snakeskin boots, heroin addictions. When they made their 1990 masterpiece Violator, Depeche Mode perfected a sound that relied on artfully layered pings and hums and moans. They turned synthpop into arena-rock, and that evolution gave them their biggest American pop hit ever.

It's remarkable that Depeche Mode remained relevant for as long as they did -- that they kept growing and evolving and expanding at a point where most of their peers had shuffle off to wait for the inevitable '80s nostalgia-package tours. Depeche Mode were part of the synthpop wave that produced early-MTV stars like the Human League and Duran Duran, but those acts had their golden eras and then flamed out. Depeche Mode stayed off to the side, speaking to their cult and finding their footing. It served them well.

Depeche Mode slowly came together in the Essex town of Basildon in the late '70s. In various combinations, Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, and Andy Fletcher played in a few post-punk bands together as teenagers. In 1980, Clarke heard a local juvenile delinquent named Dave Gahan singing David Bowie's "Heroes" and recruited him to join the group. At that point, Clarke, Gore, and Fletcher all played in a band called Composition Of Sound. Gahan became their new lead singer and renamed them Depeche Mode, taking the name from a French fashion magazine.

Early on, Vince Clarke wrote nearly all of Depeche Mode's songs, and those songs were jauntily beepy post-disco synthpop. This is not a complaint. I love that shit. The members of Depeche Mode tried to play their demos for various British label people, and they've said that they got interest from a bunch of major labels. But they ended up signing with Mute Records, a new indie that their fellow synthpopper Daniel Miller started in 1978. Calling himself the Normal, Miller released "Warm Leatherette" and "TVOD," two classics of arch, hissing, hostile keyboard music. Once he had his label up and running, Miller signed fellow electronic experimentalists like DAF, Silicon Teens, and Fad Gadget. He approached Depeche Mode after catching a London show. Now, decades later, Depeche Mode are still on Mute Records.

Depeche Mode released their debut single "Dreaming Of Me" in 1981. It's a conceptual meditation about watching yourself on a movie screen, but it's also catchy as hell, which wasn't true of most of the stuff coming out on Mute. "Dreaming Of Me" hit the lower levels of the British singles chart, and Depeche Mode's even-catchier follow-up "New Life" went all the way up to #11 and got the group an appearance on Top Of The Pops. After that came "Just Can't Get Enough," an absolutely immortal new wave banger that became their first top-10 UK hit. Most days, "Just Can't Get Enough" is still my favorite Depeche Mode track.

Depeche Mode's 1981 debut album Speak & Spell did well in the UK and Europe, but it barely caused a ripple in the US. Shortly after its release, Vince Clarke left the band, which by rights should've spelled their doom. Clarke went onto a huge career crafting synthpop bangers. He founded the shortlived duo Yaz with singer Alison Moyet, and they made the indestructible jams "Only You," "Don't Go," and "Situation" before breaking up. From there, Clarke and singer Andy Bell formed Erasure, a duo that's stuck around for decades and made plenty of great songs of their own. I had to mention that duo. If I hadn't, it would've been Erasure erasure. (Erasure's highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1991's "Chorus," peaked at #4. It's an 8.)

Without Vince Clarke, Depeche Mode kept going. Martin Gore stepped in and became the group's main songwriter, and they added Alan Wilder, first as a touring keyboardist and then as a full member. Amazingly, the lineup changes didn't hurt their momentum. 1982's "See You," the first single that Depeche Mode released without Vince Clarke, went all the way to #6 in the UK, becoming their biggest hit yet. (It sounds a lot like a Vince Clarke song, which probably helped.) Depeche Mode kept their pace up, releasing their first four albums in four years and gradually getting into more expensive equipment and darker sounds and lyrical ideas. Eventually, America took notice.

"People Are People," the lead single from 1984's Some Great Reward, is the song that broke Depeche Mode in the US. It's an anthem that must've sounded deeply futuristic at the time. Depeche Mode built the track from a cutting-edge array of samples and sequencers, using industrial music techniques to make a swooning pop song about how people should really, you know, treat each other better. The lyrics are grade-school pablum, but Dave Gahan delivers them with total conviction. "People Are People" was a hit all over the world. In the US, it became Depeche Mode's first Hot 100 hit, peaking at #13. The single went gold. Some Great Reward also had "Master And Servant," an undisguised S&M jam that became a minor Hot 100 hit. The LP went platinum.

Suddenly, Depeche Mode had two American radio records with way-out club beats and nebulously edgy lyrics, and that was enough to turn them into pop stars. Sire, the band's American label, put together a quickie greatest-hits album called People Are People, which went gold. A year later, the label also dropped Catching Up With Depeche Mode, another greatest-hits album with a lot of the same songs, and that one went platinum. Certain Depeche Mode fans would keep buying the same repackaged songs, again and again, a bit like BTS fans today.

Depeche Mode kept cranking out new music, and they grew into their heavier, broodier persona. Dave Gahan didn't write most of Depeche Mode's songs, but he figured out how to carry himself like some unholy combination of Jim Morrison and George Michael. The group started making grainy art-film videos with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who later made movies like Control and The American. (I once interviewed Corbijn and a bunch of other big-deal music-video directors when their Directors Label DVDs were coming out. Corbijn was very quiet.) 1986's Black Celebration and 1987's Music For The Masses have tons of bangers but no huge crossover hits. Still, Black Celebration went gold and Music For The Masses platinum. Then came the Rose Bowl show and the 101 movie. At this point, Depeche Mode were an undeniable cult phenomenon. (The live 101 version of Depeche Mode's 1983 track "Everything Counts" was their first hit on the new Modern Rock chart; it peaked at #18.)

The members of Depeche Mode figured out their process and their roles in the band long before they made their 1990 album Violator. For that record, the band decided to switch things up. Rather than having Martin Gore come up with complete demos for all of the songs ahead of time, they went off to Milan with a set of half-finished tracks. They had a couple of great collaborators.

Mark Ellis, the producer known as Flood, was (and is) an expert at building entire worlds out of layered sound. Flood started out as an engineer for synthpoppers like New Order and Ministry, back when Ministry were still synthpoppers. Flood also worked on U2's 1987 blockbuster The Joshua Tree. As a producer, he started out with noisy experimentalists like Cabaret Voltaire and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. He also worked with former Depeche Mode guy Vince Clarke, producing Erasure's 1987 commercial breakthrough The Circus, and he co-produced a then-unknown Nine Inch Nails' 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine. (Trent Reznor, incidentally, has said that he started writing Pretty Hate Machine immediately after catching Depeche Mode's Black Celebration tour in Ohio.) We'll see a lot of Flood's work in this column.

Depeche Mode also brought in the French-born producer François Kevorkian to mix almost every track on Violator. Kevorkian cut his teeth in the New York disco world, DJing at legendary clubs like Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage. When disco shifted into house and techno, Kevorkian was part of that, too. He remixed dance-friendly tracks like Yaz's "Situation" into full-on floor-monsters. (Weirdly, "Enjoy The Silence" is the one Violator track that Kevorkian didn't mix.) If you were trying to make an arty, sonically arresting dance-rock record, then you couldn't possibly hope for two better collaborators than Flood and François Kevorkian.

Violator is an absolute motherfucker of a record -- one of those blessed albums that works both as a complete artistic statement and a readymade greatest-hits collection. Today, Violator is a canonical work, but it wasn't exactly received that way at the time. American critics didn't vote Violator into the top 40 of the Pazz & Jop critics' poll. In a Rolling Stone review, my former boss Chuck Eddy was outright dismissive: "Teens too old or too kinky for New Kids On The Block apparently find David Gahan’s quavering moan sexy, but on Violator he sometimes comes off as slimy and self-involved."

With all respect to Eddy -- one of the all-time great rock writers, and I'm not just saying that because he hired me at the Village Voice -- that's exactly the point. Depeche Mode made pop music, and their version of pop was given dimension by sleaze and self-loathing, as conveyed both in Martin Gore's lyrics and in the way Dave Gahan inhabited those lyrics. The darkness and the shimmer are inextricable -- something that Depeche Mode share with the Weeknd, another star who almost certainly learned a lot from Depeche Mode's example.

Depeche Mode led off Violator with the album's surliest, sleaziest number. First single "Personal Jesus" is a slavering quasi-blues shuffle with lyrics supposedly inspired by Priscilla Presley's relationship to Elvis. It's got a big, nasty guitar riff, and part of its power is the way the guitar doesn't sound much like a guitar. (In the SPIN Alternative Record Guide, Rob Sheffield's got a great line: "Violator uses the electric guitar as a quaint sound effect, the way a guitar band might use a mandolin or accordion.") "Personal Jesus" has lived many lives since its 1989 release. When the song came out, it was a hit, but not an overwhelming one -- #28 on the Hot 100, #3 on Modern Rock Songs. (It's a 9.)

The biggest hit from Violator turned out to be the second single. When Martin Gore first wrote "Enjoy The Silence," he meant for the song to work as a simple, stripped-back ballad, with nothing but voice and harmonium. Alan Wilder told Gore that the song had hit potential and that they should put an actual beat behind it. Gore resisted the idea at first, but he eventually came around. Wilder and Flood also told Gore that the song could use some guitar, so he added the ghostly, ringing riff. Once the members of Depeche Mode figured out what "Enjoy The Silence" could be, the track was done in a few days.

I think that tension is key to the appeal of "Enjoy The Silence." It's not hard to imagine the song as the ballad that Martin Gore envisioned. It's slow and halting and vulnerable. But the squirming electronics -- in there for nakedly commercial reasons -- add so much force and grandeur to the track. In its final form, "Enjoy The Silence" sounds deep and dark, morose and predatory, reflective and physical. Its dichotomies have dichotomies.

I'd just like to say one thing about silence really quick: Fuck silence. I never enjoy silence. I refuse. The solitude of my own thoughts? Get that shit out of here. No use for it. I can handle silence in the five minutes before I fall asleep. The rest of the time, it makes me want to crawl out of my own skin. But the silence of "Enjoy The Silence" isn't actual silence. It's the absence of words. More specifically, it's the absence of romantic labels.

On "Enjoy The Silence," the real enemies are words. Dave Gahan breathlessly intones, "Words, like violence, break the silence/ Come crashing in, into my little world." They're painful to him. They pierce right through him. They're very unnecessary, meaningless, forgettable, so trivial. They can only do harm. Words are the enemies of feelings. All Gahan's narrator ever wanted, all he ever needed, is here in his arms.

It's possible that "Enjoy The Silence" is some big philosophical treatise on the barriers between language and meaning -- the distance between sign and signifier. (Martin Gore De Saussure over here.) But if I can extrapolate a little, I think we're in "More Than Words" territory. The song's narrator is in some kind of physical arrangement with someone -- someone who he calls, creepily, "oh my little girl" -- and he doesn't want to put a label on it. So in extremely Extreme fashion, he makes up a whole worldview about how you ruin things when you assign words to them.

I find "More Than Words" to be a disgusting fucking song, and I don't have that problem with "Enjoy The Silence." I think it's a tonal thing. Gary Cherone is all fake-cuddly predatory sentimentality, pretending to be romantic when he's really just trying to get his dick wet. Dave Gahan never gives off that vibe. He's in that Leonard Cohen zone, where deep-thinker and horny-bastard vibes are inextricable from one another. (The sonorous voice helps.) I never get the sense that Gahan is pretending to be something that he's not. Instead, he oozes wounded, debonair menace. To put a very unnecessary word on it, he just sounds sexy. That matters.

The music is sexy, too. On "Enjoy The Silence," the various arrayed synthesizers and sequencers and drum machines actually sound, at least a little bit, like they're fucking -- halting, gasping, breathing heavily. It's almost all electronic, but there's a sense of squishy physical rhythm to all of it -- the soft pulse of the kickdrum, the splat of the snare, the shuddering choral keyboard tone, the squiggling bassline, the baritone reverberations of that one lone guitar. These sounds have all been beautifully arranged to create a full environment. If you listen to "Enjoy The Silence" while high, you can spend entire minutes fixating on one tiny little detail, like the swooshing zaps behind the chorus or the way everything but the drums drops out every so often.

If Martin Gore got his way, if "Enjoy The Silence" came out as a simple and unadorned ballad, it would probably still be a pretty good song, but it definitely wouldn't be a great one. There are vocal hooks on "Enjoy The Silence," and Dave Gahan knows how to sell the tiny pauses and hesitations: "They can only do [slight beat] harm." But the real power of "Enjoy The Silence" is its whole doom-disco atmosphere -- the way it demands that you figure out ways to dance and sulk at the same time.

"Enjoy The Silence" couldn't possibly sound less like the blippy, sunny, charming synthpop of Depeche Mode's early days. It doesn't really sound like any of Depeche Mode's former early-'80s synthpop peers, either. The track has the depth and darkness of the industrial dance acts that Depeche Mode admired, but those guys didn't write hooks like that. Instead, I think of "Enjoy The Silence" as a keyboard-heavy take on the immersive gloom that the Cure made with Disintegration. Like the Cure, Depeche Mode were at their peak, coming up with rich and dark and heavy and textured sounds that sounded like fantasy worlds for sad kids. It's just that Depeche Mode didn't use guitars to achieve that effect -- or, more accurately, they only used guitars for ornamentation.

Anton Corbijn's "Enjoy The Silence" video is pretty boring, but it's also probably the defining image of Depeche Mode. Corbijn films Dave Gahan, in a crown and a ridiculous royal robe, tromping by himself through various different remote and picturesque European locations -- Scottish highlands, Swiss Alps, the Portuguese coast -- with a beach chair under his arm. It's supposedly inspired by The Little Prince, with Gahan as a lonely king, surveying all his beautiful nothingness. We also get black-and-white shots of Depeche Mode in a photo studio somewhere, looking cool as fuck. In flashes, the different band members disappear, leaving Gahan standing all alone. Is that deep? I don't know. I get antsy when I watch it, but the images linger with me.

"Enjoy The Silence" was a moment of cresting momentum for Depeche Mode. The single came out right before the Violator album. On the eve of the LP's release date, Depeche Mode did an in-store signing at the Wherehouse, the big Los Angeles record store. LA is America's most goth city, so fans mobbed the signing. Something like 20,000 people showed up -- enough that the band's handlers had to pull them away from the store after less than an hour. Fans responded by rioting -- a moment of full-bore mania that must've felt surreal for a band of pasty British synth-ghouls.

The moment of "Enjoy The Silence" turned out to be the peak of Depeche Mode's real-deal American pop stardom. The "Enjoy The Silence" single went gold and crossed all the way over to pop radio. Three months after the song topped the Modern Rock chart, it reached #8 on the Hot 100, becoming the biggest mainstream hit of Depeche Mode's entire career. When they toured America that summer, Depeche Mode played stadiums in more than one major city -- as in, not just in LA. Violator emerged as the biggest and best album Depeche Mode ever made, and we're not done talking about it yet. Depeche Mode will return to this column soon.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: There are so many "Enjoy The Silence" covers that it's frankly ridiculous. People from all across the spectrum have tried their hand at the song, from Susan Boyle to Lacuna Coil. That list also includes Kelly Clarkson, Jars Of Clay, Nada Surf, Failure, Breaking Benjamin, Keane, former French first lady Carla Bruni, and the Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie at the same damn time. This could easily be one of those Bonus Beats sections that runs five deep, but Scott says that the page crashes if I put too many YouTube embeds in, so I'm allowing myself one "Enjoy The Silence" cover to stand in for the entire field. Here's the stripped-back version that Tori Amos released on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls:

(Tori Amos will eventually appear in this column.)

THE NUMBER TWOS: The House Of Love's dazed, passive-aggressive fuck-you-please-come-back dream-rocker "I Don't Know Why I Love You" peaked at #2 behind "Enjoy The Silence." It's a 9.

THE 10S: The Stone Roses' whirling, swirling, implausibly funky lysergic shrug-strut "Fools Gold" peaked at #5 behind "Enjoy The Silence." I'm no clown, I won't back down, I don't need you to tell me that it's a 10.