The Alternative Number Ones: Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You”

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.

At some point in the early '90s, Depeche Mode became a rock 'n' roll band. This was a slow evolution in retrospect. It probably started when Vince Clarke left the group in 1981. Clarke wrote the shiny-blippy synthpop jams on the first Depeche Mode album. When he was gone, Martin Gore took over as lead songwriter and gradually moved the group in a twinkly-broody direction. Depeche Mode got bigger as their music got darker. They played arenas, then stadiums. They started putting guitars in their music more and more often. Even as all that was happening, the world continued to regard them as a synthpop act. So when Depeche Mode came roaring back with the revved-up blues-boogie "I Feel You" in 1993, people were pretty surprised.

Maybe people shouldn't have been surprised. Depeche Mode reached their critical and commercial apex with 1990's Violator, a no-shit classic that might work as the platonic-ideal fusion of gothed-out synthpop and arena rock. Violator went triple platinum in the US; it sent two songs to #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and one into the top 10 of the Hot 100, the real chart. They were about as big as an alternative rock band could get in 1990, but then that math changed over the next few years. Like their fellow '80s overlords U2, Depeche Mode realized that they needed to evolve to meet the moment. Depeche Mode evolved messily, but they still evolved.

People must've been legitimately shocked when they got a look at the new Dave Gahan. When Depeche Mode got done touring behind Violator, the band's preening frontman moved to Los Angeles and went through some major life changes. He divorced his first wife and married his second. His estranged father died. He got heavily into heroin, and that addiction would come very, very close to killing him in the years ahead. He also got into heavy, bombastic American alt-rock bands like Jane's Addiction and Soundgarden. When Depeche Mode dropped the video for "I Feel You," the lead single from their Violator follow-up Songs Of Faith And Devotion, Dave Gahan basically sounded the same, but he looked like a completely different guy: long hair, chinstrap beard, bad chest tattoos. Now that I think about it, the new-look Dave Gahan might've accidentally invented Russell Brand.

Maybe this was the smart move. Maybe the other synthpop singers of the '80s would've had bigger careers if they'd given themselves biker-chic makeovers in the early '90s. I'm trying to picture how that would look, and my brain cannot process the prompts. Imagine the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant swigging Jack Daniels. Picture the Human League's Phil Oakey in a leather vest and some tiny rectangular sunglasses. Duran Duran had a huge '90s comeback with "Ordinary World," but would they be bigger today if that song had a mechanized ZZ Top riff? We'll never know. But Depeche Mode tried it, and they basically pulled it off. It almost ended the band, but they're still touring arenas today, and that makeover probably had something to do with their longevity.

After the triumphant Violator album cycle died down, Depeche Mode took some time off. They needed it. Dave Gahan's personal life was already a flaming wreck. Gahan's bandmate Andy Fletcher told Details, "I think he just felt that performing was the only thing he could do right. He was very emotional with all of us. I personally tended to steer clear of him." In 1991, Depeche Mode added one song, the pretty dirge "Death's Door," to Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World soundtrack, and that was it for a while.

Gahan moved to LA and remade himself as a rocker dude during Depeche Mode's little vacation. When the band got back together to make a new record, Gahan wanted to go for a heavier rock sound -- a big ask when you're not the guy who writes the songs in your band. His bandmates weren't necessarily on board. Gahan told Details, "A lot of the time, it was hard for them to even be in the same room as me."

But Depeche Mode were already using plenty of guitars when they made Violator. They were also sick of being regarded as a synthpop act. The lead single from Violator was "Personal Jesus," a sex-as-religion snarl-slither built on a sequencer-driven glam-rock shuffle and a titanic blues-rock riff. Gahan wore a cowboy hat in the video. ("Personal Jesus peaked at #3. It's a 9.) When Songs Of Faith And Devotion came out, Martin Gore told Pulse, "The main point of ['Personal Jesus'] is the guitar riff. People still consider us an electronic band. And it was followed by 'Enjoy The Silence.' The main riff on that, again, was guitar. Half of that song was guitar."

With "I Feel You," Depeche Mode leaned into everything that they'd done on "Personal Jesus," cranking up the guitar until it became impossible to miss. It seems like a pretty simple idea, but it wasn't easy for them to reach that point. The band recorded Songs Of Faith And Devotion with Flood, their Violator collaborator. In between those two albums, Flood worked on U2's Achtung Baby. U2 had a hard time making that album, but it came together when they got together in a rented house with a built-in home studio. Flood suggested that Depeche Mode try something similar. They gave it a shot, and it did not go well.

There are a lot of parallels between Achtung Baby and Songs Of Faith And Devotion, two albums from blockbuster-level '80s bands who had to rethink their approach in a new decade. U2 did it with industrial beats and postmodern flash. Depeche Mode were already into industrial beats and postmodern flash, so they had to try something else. Ultimately, they steered into a lot of the same blues, soul, and gospel influences that led U2 astray on Rattle And Hum. But the bigger difference, I think, is that U2 messed around with sleazy stadium-rock hijinks as a self-aware costume on Achtung Baby. For Depeche Mode, that stuff wasn't a costume. They were into real-deal self-destruction. They lived it.

The Depeche Mode guys spent months living together in a rented Madrid villa where they'd built a studio. That sounds nice, but it was apparently not nice. They were constantly at each other's throats, and their attempts to jam didn't lead anywhere. Everything took forever. Alan Wilder tried playing drums for almost the first time, since the band wanted to capture the sense of a live band in a room. But rather than just using his drums, they sampled them and sequenced them, using them to build tracks. Wilder told Sound On Sound, "We're applying the technology to a performance to make sure that you get all the dynamics of a human performance, all those slight timing changes that make something feel human." That sounds like a pain in the ass!

Early recording sessions were a disaster, so Depeche Mode tried again in Hamburg, this time abandoning the idea of living together while recording. It worked better, but the band members didn't feel any more charitable toward one another. Alan Wilder later claimed that he decided to leave Depeche Mode during the Songs Of Faith And Devotion sessions, though he stayed with the band for a few more years. Bit by bit, though, the record came together. In its final form, Songs Of Faith And Devotion feels like an evolution of the grand-scale moping of Violator, but that moping comes to encompass stuff like gospel choirs and bluesy pianos. I can't imagine that the world was really fiending for Depeche Mode's rootsy move, but that's what we got.

"I Feel You" is the opening track from Songs Of Faith And Devotion, and it's also the lead single. That means that it's the statement-piece, the announcement of how things will be different this time. You can hear that right in the opening seconds -- a digital brakes-squealing screech-noise giving way to a guitar riff that sounds like something a bar-rock band might play if all the members of that bar-rock band were giant robots. Every sound on "I Feel You" is electronically enhanced and painstakingly warped, but it all exists to service an ultra-basic quasi-blues vamp. The song feels like it exists at the exact midpoint between early Nine Inch Nails and late Rolling Stones, and that is a weird place to be.

On paper, "I Feel You" is a love song. Martin Gore wrote it, as he wrote every track on Songs Of Faith And Devotion. Gore doesn't like to talk too much about what goes into the lyrics that he writes, but he almost always hands those lyrics over to Dave Gahan to sing, so there's a tangled interpersonal thing going on there. As in: Maybe this is how Gore feels, or maybe it's his interpretation of whatever Gahan is going through. My probably-incorrect read on "I Feel You" is that it's Gore's song for Gahan to sing to his new wife. She's taken him there and back, through oblivion, and now this is the morning of their love. But that's not really how Gahan sings it.

In the aforementioned Details feature, Andy Fletcher, the late Depeche Mode member who was basically just their manager, mentions that Martin Gore became a father before writing Songs Of Faith And Devotion and that his new songs were "a bit more emotional and less pervy." But apparently, nobody told Dave Gahan. "I Feel You" seems to exist as an excuse for Gahan to fully dive into the Jim Morrison Lizard King routine. He wails and howls and testifies, and you can practically hear him humping the air in the studio. When he sings about someone helping him through a troubled place, he makes that troubled place sound like a fun place to be. He clamps down on the word "Babylon" with particular relish.

There's something kind of fun about the way "I Feel You" smashes tired old rock clichés into layered, expensive electronic production. The song goes on way too long, but it's got lots of fun little details in the mix -- clanks and whirrs and gasping-choir synth-patches. It sounds huge. I can imagine hearing "I Feel You" on big club speakers while drunk and being swept away to a greasier reality. But I can't get past the song's goofball fuck-rock pageantry. It sounds like it was made by people who own snakeskin boots and top hats. I don't have any real problem with that conceptually, but it's not what I want from a Depeche Mode record. If I'm like, "Hmm, maybe Martin Gore is in a Stevie Ray Vaughan phase," then something is probably wrong.

I'm a little too young to remember how it must've felt when the world got a look at the video for "I Feel You." Back then, a band could really just disappear between album cycles, so it must've been a shock when Dave Gahan showed up with his manicured beard and his designer shades, doing his very best to project non-dorky horny sleaze all over the screen. The band's old collaborator Anton Corbijn directed the clip, shooting Gahan in grainy black-and-white like an early-'90s perfume commercial. Gahan often gets extreme close-ups, and so does Martin Gore's big, white hollowbody guitar. But the most memorable parts of the clip are the ones where Gahan and a really hot lady are getting ready to fuck.

I had to look up the really hot lady. She's Lysette Anthony, a British actress whose two most prominent credits are Woody Allen's domestic dramedy Husbands And Wives and the famously cheesy '80s fantasy joint Krull. That's a varied resume! I think I've seen both of those movies, but I don't remember her in either of them. Around the same time that she was in the "I Feel You" video, she also appeared in Look Who's Talking Now, and I don't remember her in that one, either. But I remember her making eyes at the camera and dissolving into shadow in the "I Feel You" video. I probably didn't see the clip more than once when I was a kid, but her presence is the kind of thing that sticks with you. Beavis and Butt-Head appreciated it, too.

In the moment, "I Feel You" did what Depeche Mode wanted it to do. The song lorded all over the Modern Rock chart, and it also crossed over to the Hot 100, reaching #37. The single went gold, back when singles had to sell actual physical copies to go gold. In the UK, "I Feel You" was a top-10 pop hit. Songs Of Faith And Devotion came out in March 1993, and it debuted at #1 on both the US and UK album charts. It's still the band's only #1 album in America.

In retrospect, I think the success of "I Feel You" is more interesting than the song itself. The song is whatever -- a distant echo of the far-superior "Personal Jesus." But we're also talking about a very early example of a long-established '80s band looking directly at the challenge of grunge and coming up with an answer. That answer was a variation on a sound that they'd already started to explore, but it still represented a shift, a page being turned.

This column isn't quite out of the era when America's alt-rock radio programmers were stuck on the synthy music coming out of the UK. But Depeche Mode, arguably the most successful purveyors of synthy British music, recognized that they faced a new challenge, and they adjusted and responded. Much like many of their younger grunge peers, Depeche Mode made their 1993 record while going through some serious shit in full view of the public eye, and it didn't hurt them commercially. With "I Feel You," Depeche Mode kept their hold over American alternative radio. We'll see them in this column again soon.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: There are lots of "I Feel You" covers out there -- Johnny Marr, Apollo 440, an endless Placebo version -- but I don't think that most of them do anything interesting with the song. Instead, then, let's go with the faithful but also charmingly ridiculous take on "I Feel You" that the Polish thrash metal band Vader released in 1995: