Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  I enjoyed the direction “Love My Way” took the band. We wanted cellos—I’d listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring—we wanted horns; we were using more keyboard-y sounds, and we looked for a producer who would be good at that kind of thing. Todd Rundgren came to mind because he had just done Deface the Music, sounding like the Beatles, and I thought, He’s using those instruments. He knows what he’s doing.

  When we went to work with Todd, “Love My Way” wasn’t the song you hear today. He said, “This song could be a great song, Richard, if you try and be less aggressive with it.” The idea of singing had been anathema to me. Then he came up with the idea of using Flo and Eddie. Even though I liked Marc Bolan and T. Rex [to whom Flo and Eddie lent their trademark harmonies], I didn’t know whether I loved the idea of these backup singers on the song. But [Rundgren] said, “If you don’t like them, we’ll take them off, I promise.” So we recorded it with Flo and Eddie, and it sounded great.

  I loved [working with Rundgren]. It’s funny, because Andy Partridge apparently hated it. He came up to me in a coffee shop in New York and said, “How was your experience with Todd then?” Andy Partridge thought he was overcontrolling, but Todd consulted us every step of the way. He said, “What kind of sound do you want? Imagine for a minute you’re playing in a room: What kind of room do you want it to be? A club? A theater?” We decided on a theater. We wanted it to be intimate and warm, of a certain size but not overblown. We’ve always been a band that pulls people in. You won’t see me stomping up and down saying, “Can you hear me at the back?!” and “Hello, Chattanooga! It’s great to be here!” The amount of words I will say to an audience during a tour is a page of a notebook, and they would mostly be “Thank you.” I don’t like talking much between songs. It’s a degree of shyness and a degree of not seeing the point in saying any of those things. I don’t feel the need to go, “Are you having a good time, fill in the name of the city.” I first noticed a difference [in the Furs’ core fan base] when “Love My Way” became a radio hit in America on the West Coast. We did an in-store in Seattle, and the place was absolutely mobbed. We had to go out the back entrance and get in this car, and it was like being in the Beatles. Up until then we hadn’t really experienced that. It was more like being in a pop band rather than the rock band we’d been in before. There were a lot more girls down at the front of the stage. You have to be careful of that kind of popularity. We had had a very cool type of popularity, and “Love My Way” threatened that to a degree.

  I was a big Dylan fan until art school. That’s where I discovered the Velvet Underground, Bowie, and Roxy Music. [The Epsom School of Art and Design in Surrey, England] was a very old-fashioned type of art school—quite academic. In the last years, I got into Warhol and doing prints. Two years later, I was working in a screen-printing place doing prints of my own, and punk rock came along with the Sex Pistols. I got to see them at the 100 Club [in London]. The place was packed, even though punk hadn’t quite caught on at that point. I formed a band and started to print the posters for the shows we were doing. I don’t know how I ended up being the singer—probably because it was my big idea to form a band. [Our first gig] was at somebody’s party in Leatherhead. We just decided we were going to play. We played about two songs, then everybody left and shut the door. They were hippies—they didn’t know what was happening.

  Eventually we were playing clubs [in London] like the Roxy, the Africa Centre, the Lyceum, Music Machine. Early on, our music was jaded and angry. It was the mood in England around that time: Margaret Thatcher, garbage strikes, the IRA bombing in Guildford, my hometown. It was an easy time to be jaded in. I used that feeling but didn’t use the obvious political words. I always found obvious political songs don’t ever seem to work. I was more into the poetry of lyric writing. I was inspired by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and certainly Bob Dylan.

  For the first album [1980’s Psychedelic Furs], we worked with [producer] Steve Lillywhite. Steve had done the first Banshees record. He said that he would like to record us not using very many tricks, just make it sound how an amazing live show would sound. It was recorded very quickly—a lot of it was live—and I think the whole thing might have been done in a week or 10 days. I loved it!

  While we were writing songs for the second album [1981’s Talk Talk Talk], we improved as songwriters. “Pretty in Pink” just came to me, and I built the song around what that phrase conjured up. I always thought “Pretty in Pink” was a song about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks she’s very clever for doing it and feels very desired, but people are laughing at her behind her back. I don’t think the movie Pretty in Pink did us any favors. It made light of and put a different spin on a song that actually had more to say than what the movie did. It’s certainly less fluffy.

  The story I heard [about how the song came to be the title of and theme song for the 1986 film] was that Molly Ringwald went up to John Hughes and said, “You’ve got to listen to this song. You’ve got to write something about this.” Hughes [supposedly] loved it and went on to write the movie. The original version came out in 1981. It was a fairly well-known song, but in a college-radio situation. We rerecorded it for the movie. It was our idea. The record company was perfectly willing to go with the original version, which we should have. The original is better. It’s not radically different, but I don’t think it has the same rawness as the original.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  “Love My Way,” a cover favorite for artists as disparate as Live and Korn, was the first in a U.S. hit parade that also included “Heaven,” “The Ghost in You,” the rerecorded “Pretty in Pink,” and “Heartbreak Beat.” In 1992 Butler and brother/fellow Fur Tim started Love Spit Love, which recorded a popular rendition of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” (see this page) for the film The Craft. It was later repurposed as the theme for a TV show with a similar hot-young-witches approach, Charmed. The Furs re-formed in 2000 and continue to tour. Meanwhile, Butler has also returned to his first love, painting, with his 2013 ahatfulofrain show at a Chelsea gallery in Manhattan earning rave reviews, like this one: “Unlike the Ronnie Woods and Bob Dylans of the music-to-art crossover world, Butler actually has real talent for creating captivating artwork.”

  BUTLER: We’d made [the Furs’ fifth album, 1987’s] Midnight to Midnight, which I absolutely hated. We were very dry of ideas and under a great deal of pressure from the record company and ourselves. We were recording in Europe. It was a hellish adventure just to get it done. I felt it was a really subpar album that really didn’t have that much direction to it, and that took a lot of the wind out of my sails as far as belief in the direction that we were going in. After that, we’d made a couple of records [1989’s Book of Days and 1991’s World Outside] that were consciously very uncommercial to redress the balance to some degree, but then I felt I’d needed a break.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Love Songs with Ice In Their Veins 1. “I’m in Love with a German Film Star,” The Passions 2. “Love Shadow,” Fashion 3. “Another Girl, Another Planet,” The Only Ones 4. “The Last Beat of My Heart,” Siouxsie and the Banshees 5. “You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart,” Eurythmics

  “NEW LIFE”

  n their earliest incarnations, the synth-pop stars of the eighties lived in a bleak, oppressive, futuristic netherworld where emotions were forbidden and humanity was a faintly flickering memory. Gary Numan, the Human League, OMD, Ultravox, Soft Cell, the Normal—none of them were having much fun. But there was one group of electronic artists who were not crushed under the heel of robot overlords, who were not afraid of being assimilated into a giant hive mind, who were, if anything, uncomplicated and optimistic: Depeche Mode. Vince Clarke’s Depeche Mode. Where their contemporaries shuddered in fear and lurked in the shadows like a doomed platoon of Winston Smiths, Depeche Mode were cheerful, wholesome boys, happy to have hatched an escape route out of the unpromising environs of Basildon, England. Depeche’s s
ingle “New Life” was innocent, awkward, and eager to please. Their other Clarke-penned hits, “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “Dreaming of Me,” gleamed with confidence and charm. But exhilarating as it was, this iteration had a limited shelf life. Clarke chose to stay positive and, for the remaining members of the group, his departure signaled the end of the innocence.

  JB: The bald musician Moby wrote a witty and affectionate afterword for this book in which he—spoiler alert!—describes the music and artists of the new wave era under discussion as not alluding to “anything even remotely sexual.” Being an argumentative sort, I took issue with that blanket dismissal, and my prime example was latter-day Depeche Mode and their S&M leanings. He replied to the effect that all the Mode really wanted was to cuddle. In retrospect, I think he’s right, and that’s why I’ve always found them a little bit laughable. No matter how much Martin L. Gore bares his diseased soul, no matter how dank and deviant their material, no matter how brooding and perverse Dave Gahan gets, I never quite got past my initial perception of them as clean-cut, obedient purveyors of chirpy electro-pop. The “Personal Jesus” video—the one where they’re supposed to be snarling, smoldering gunslingers getting ready to drop their gun belts and do damage to the employees of a frontier cathouse? They looked more like pale, malnourished, middle-management types heading off to a sales conference. They may see themselves as debauched outlaws with insatiable appetites for the forbidden, but for me, Depeche Mode will always be the sound of the suburbs.

  LM: If Duran Duran were my first crush and the Smiths wrote the soundtrack of my soul, then Depeche Mode provided the playlist for my sex life—or at least the one I’d imagined myself having. “Master and Servant.” “A Question of Lust.” “Strangelove.” “In Your Room.” But I wouldn’t even have an imaginary sex life if it weren’t for Vince Clarke. He built the foundation on which the mighty edifice of Depeche would flourish. A few months back, I bumped into Gahan at my Manhattan hair salon, where the smock-clad singer was about to have his grays covered before Depeche’s upcoming international arena tour, and he and I reflected on how far they’ve come. Decades on, the band is the biggest electronic music act of all time. They’re still making new music that sends albums up the charts, and still an influence on contemporary musicians and dance culture. They might not be the same band Clarke started all those years ago, but if it wasn’t for him, Gahan might be the proud proprietor of a nice little upholstery business in Basildon.

  VINCE CLARKE: “New Life” was the first song that was played on the radio, and the first one that went into the charts in the U.K. That was a game changer. The first time we heard it on the radio, we were all in Danny’s [Mute Records founder Daniel Miller’s] car. It was the band, Daniel driving, and the synths in the back. We were going to get a train to Newcastle, where we were to do one of the first TV shows we’d ever done, a Saturday-morning kids show, and it just came on the radio. I think it was Radio 1, which is the most important radio station in the U.K. It was a great feeling.

  Around the same time, we did our first appearance on Top of the Pops. The charts would be released on Sunday, and we got the call from Daniel that night saying we’d be on. We’d all grown up on Top of the Pops. I was 19 and wasn’t living with my mum at the time. We had fallen out. But I decided to go round to her house and tell her. I don’t think she believed me.

  We lived in Basildon.* Basildon is a town that was built after the Second World War to house all the people who were bombed out of the East End of London, so it was a new town. It was built in the fifties, and it was built so quickly that they didn’t bother to build anything kids could do—it was just housing. When I moved there, there was no grass, no gardens—there was just mud. You spent a lot of time being bored. There was no TV. So we started a band.

  When Depeche Mode started, when it was just me and [Andy] Fletcher, we were playing guitars. The band that really influenced us the most, that we wanted to be, was the Cure. We’d play their first album, [1979’s] Three Imaginary Boys. It’s incredibly minimal. There were only three players on it. There was hardly any overdub, I think, just a single voice. We felt that we could do that sound because Fletch played guitar and I had a drum machine. We weren’t really interested in synths until Martin, who was a friend of Fletch’s from school, bought a synthesizer and decided to join the band. Martin joined two bands, actually: my band and my best friend’s band. That caused a bit of a rift. Martin was hedging his bets. Anyway, when Martin chose the synth, we were super impressed. It seemed to be really easy to play, unlike guitar. It wasn’t expensive, particularly because you didn’t have to buy an expensive amp. We never could afford amps for our guitars, so we all bought synths.

  * ALISON MOYET: The Depeche boys, Fletcher and Martin, and I were in the same class. Perry Bamonte, who was in the Cure, was there as well. They were from the right side of the street in our town: They were all studious, they did their homework, they had blazers and briefcases when the rest of us had plastic bags. I remember being bemused when they got together with Dave Gahan. He was one of the punks who was in Southend College with me. We were mates, and he was a bit more lairy [British slang for aggressive, confrontational; master rather than servant].

  Synth music was really homemade. I don’t think punk was as liberating as people make it out to be. They still needed to know how to play instruments. Synth music is more accessible ’cause you don’t have to learn your three chords. On our first album [1981’s Speak & Spell], no one played anything. It was all done on sequencers.

  The synths gave us credibility. All the cool, alternative records—the ones that weren’t charting—were all done with people messing about with synths: “T.V.O.D.”/”Warm Leatherette” by the Normal, the first Silicon Teens album. They were breaking new ground. Those songs were an influence on “New Life” and “Just Can’t Get Enough.” Obviously there was Gary Numan too, but we didn’t want to sound like Gary Numan because he was a sellout. You know what it’s like when you’re younger: Anyone who succeeds is no longer credible. Whereas, we thought the first two Human League albums were amazing records [in part because] they were commercially unsuccessful. Of course, way before any of that was Kraftwerk, but the thing that changed in the eighties was that people used synthesizers to make pop records rather than concept records. I’m a fan of Kraftwerk, but I’m more of a fan of people like OMD, because I like emotional records. Music affects me, changes my insides—it really does. The thing that really turned me on to synths was “Almost,” the B-side to OMD’s “Electricity.” That was when I connected synthesizers with folk music. I’d realized that I wanted to play guitar when I heard Simon and Garfunkel singing on the soundtrack for The Graduate. That’s what made me realize the power of songwriting. The next day I bought the songbook and learned how to play every song. Suddenly, music wasn’t just a bunch of people doing it on TV—you could do it yourself.

  We’d started a band, but we didn’t really have aspirations to make a record. We had aspirations to play in the pub, and it went from there. Eventually we were playing a pub in London, and we met Daniel, and he offered for us to make a single. That was probably the happiest day of my life. If we had made that single and I died, I would have died in heaven.

  MIXTAPE: 5 Favorite Synth Songs of Vince Clarke (in no particular order) 1. “Always,” OMD 2. “Dreams of Leaving,” The Human League 3. “Cars,” Gary Numan 4. “Warm Leatherette,” The Normal 5. “Back to Nature,” Fad Gadget

  The first time we met Daniel, though, he didn’t want to sign us. We had made a demo, and because Dave and I were both unemployed at the time, or Dave was in college, which is the same thing, really—I’m kidding—we got dressed in our best futurist clothes and got the train down to London. I think Dave had on leather trousers. He was studying fashion in college. (Our name was his idea; it was from a magazine he was reading.) Maybe mum had made me something—my mum was a seamstress. So we went to all these companies: Island, Virgin, all those people. In those days you cou
ld actually knock on the door, go into the office, and play them a cassette. When we went to the Rough Trade office, they said, “It’s not really our cup of tea, but this bloke might be interested,” and there was Daniel. And Daniel said no. Then we supported Fad Gadget at a gig in East London, and Daniel was there again. There were two guys who wanted us: Daniel and this guy Stevo, who used to manage Soft Cell. Stevo said, “If you sign with me, I’ll get you on the next Ultravox tour.” Daniel says, “We never sign anything, but I’m offering for you to make a single.” We decided in about five minutes to go with Daniel and Mute. We knew the records he had made: both the Silicon Teens and the Normal. We knew his label because of Fad Gadget.

  “The synths gave us credibility. All the cool, alternative records… were all done with people messing about with synths.”

  The first track we recorded with Daniel was “Photographic.” It was for an album called Some Bizarre, a compilation record [from Stevo], which was a fantastic record. Then we did the single, which was “Dreaming of Me.” Because that did fairly well, Daniel said, “Let’s make an album.”

  “Just Can’t Get Enough” I had written ages ago. We were performing it for a long time before we met Daniel. It was written on guitar. We could do harmonies because Martin is quite a good singer. That made us a little more interesting for Daniel. It’s certainly gotten more exposure [than other songs on the first album] because of commercials, and because Depeche has been performing it for years and years in concert.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Clarke departed Depeche after only one album. After a shaky start, Martin Gore grew into one of the era’s most celebrated songwriters and oversaw his group’s metamorphosis into Depressed Mode, the black-celebrating dance-floor juggernaut that’s moved more than 100 million records. Clarke went on to form Yaz with Alison Moyet (see this page), then the Assembly, which produced one single. In 1985 Clarke finally found a permanent situation with singer Andy Bell: 30 years and 30 hit U.K. singles later, Erasure are still a functioning duo. In 2012, Clarke reunited with Gore as VCMG and made the instrumental techno record Ssss.