the time of their fourth LP, Some Great Reward, Depeche Mode had defied all the odds and was confidently going from strength to strength. Losing their principal songwriter, Vince Clarke, right after their biggest hit yet, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’, the Basildon synthpop group displayed all their awkward teething and creative maturing process post-Speak & Spell to a stubbornly hostile UK music press refusing to take them seriously.
Speaking to Melody Maker in response to ‘Leave in Silence’, Paul Weller made the blunt remark, “Heard more melody coming out of Kenny Wheeler’s arsehole”.
He was wrong of course. The moody skulk of A Broken Frame‘s lead single was the first flash of Martin Gore’s songwriting chops, pointing the band in a darker and more introspective direction and its razor minimalism a welcome slice of abrasion on the record’s otherwise patchy quality (synth-reggae anyone? ‘Satellite’).
Recruiting Alan Wilder for some classically trained bolster to their arrangements and cementing their ‘classic line-up’, Depeche Mode toughened their sound with the emerging Synclavier sampling technology, manipulating all manner of metallic scrape and clang on the industrial-coated Construction Time Again.
Alongside their evolving sonic sophistication was Gore’s lyrical reach for plumbing deeper depths of human drama, reaching its most mordant on the cynical barb toward organised religion on the sacrilegious closer to Some Great Reward. Released as a double A-side in 1984 with the syrupy ‘Somebody’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ follows the grim journey of a young girl who finds God after a suicide attempt, only to be killed by a car crash two years later. “I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing,” Gore muses acerbically.
This landed the band in hot water with the UK’s stuffy church authorities, and the BBC was pressured to pull the single from airing on the radio. “Conservative attitude, uh?, that radio of ours. I’m, by the way, not anti-religious at all! I only oppose a certain kind of religion that was forced upon me when I was young. My mother was in the Salvation Army. So she sent me to the church every Sunday till my 18th birthday. Together with my sister, we usually went for a ride with the bike and told mom afterwards how lovely the homily was,” frontman Dave Gahan told Belgian pop magazine Joepie that year.
He added: “The song only wants to say that no one should let someone force anything upon him. Whether it’s politics or something else, that doesn’t matter. You have to choose for yourself what you wanna do with your life. And dare to take risks. That’s what Depeche Mode did too and everything turned out quite good for us, didn’t it?”
It turned out more than just good, making no dent in the album’s chart success and whetting the appetites for the fan-favourite Black Celebration that awaited, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ was another landmark single for Depeche Mode, a bold confrontation of wavering faith and spiritual disillusionment few in the 1980s pop climate had dared tread.
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