Violator: Stadium Weird

So apparently ‘Violator’ is 20 years old. I’ve never found much that was ‘sexy’ about it; I think when Americans say they find it sexy they mean something else, or they’re confusing the album with the people who made it (I’m not going to argue with that - if I could look like Dave Gahan when I’m his age, and he basically killed himself once…)

Depeche Mode’s ‘Violator’ was the second album I ever bought (on cassette – the first was Queen’s ‘The Miracle’.) It was an album that did all it could to weave itself into the fabric of my life at an age (12) in a place (Italy, where I was staying with relatives) and in circumstances (my first proper holiday away from home) that undoubtedly made me highly impressionable. As with holidays that followed, I was shuttled around between my mum’s four brothers and would spend a little time with each. While staying with the second youngest (or third oldest) uncle, my routine would involve him taking me to the condominium he worked in and having a swim in the pool there while he went to the office. Then, at lunchtime, he would take me back home again. Early in the day I would be the only person at the pool apart from the lifeguard who took me under his wing, and into his confidence, from the first morning. He was in love with the boss’s daughter, he said. The boss was my uncle, of course, and the daughter in question was the elder of my two cousins. He asked for a favour: could I give her a message from him? It was very important that I delivered it only to her, in private – no-one else could hear it. What was the message? This was exciting, I was being entrusted with something very important. What he wanted me to say to my cousin was “enjoy the silence.” She would know what it meant.

I was determined to help, and to execute the task properly. Back at my uncle’s flat, before lunch that day, I took my cousin to one side and whispered the message to her. She smiled and thanked me, but didn’t say much more. After lunch, she announced that she was going out with ‘someone’. My Aunt, giggling, said we should go to the balcony and watch her leave. I had recently been diagnosed as being short-sighted but didn’t have my glasses to hand, so all I could see as we peered at my cousin from the fourth floor was that she was getting into a car with a man. I immediately felt sorry for the lifeguard, nursing this passion for my cousin while she was going out with someone else. It seemed unfair of my cousin to be interested in someone else when the lifeguard was so likeable.

It didn’t take long for me to find out that the man with the car was the lifeguard. ‘Enjoy the Silence’ was their song. They had played a game with me; I was a little disturbed at having been so gullible but I didn’t mind that much. As the go-between, I’d been given privileged access to a more interesting and still somewhat mysterious adult world.

‘Policy of Truth’ was the video of the week on Videomusic during that time, which was the first Depeche Mode song I was genuinely aware of (although of course I would have heard earlier songs). I hadn’t actually heard ‘Enjoy the Silence’ at that point (a fact that only served to increase its mystique). ‘Policy of Truth’ intrigued me.

Marin L Gore has had a fair amount of stick for clunky rhyming and the naïvety (or faux- naivety) of many of his lyrics. Some of his lines do have sing-song-y gracelessness and moon-in-june rhyming schemes, it’s true. (one famous example: “Promises me I’m as safe as houses/as long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers.” - part of the problem with lines like that is Dave Gahan’s delivery and the music’s air of seriousness – as a T-Rex lyric it might be taken differently). But that naivety has be taken in the context of what was a genuine attempt, coming out of the post-punk era, to try to look at human relationships with fresh eyes and find new and better ways of living together. That impulse underlies even the largely maligned (in the UK) likes of ‘The Meaning of Love’ and ‘People Are People’. The insights aren’t always particularly insightful, but on the likes of ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Lie To Me’ (“lie to me/like they do it in the factory”), DM succeed in depicting the inter-personal and the political as being two sides of the same coin. They obviously weren’t alone in that but, as Simon Reynolds pointed out in ‘Rip It Up…’, they were the ones to take these ideas (as well as ‘industrial’ approaches to music making, sampling themselves bashing bits of metal and so on) to the largest audience.

By the time of ‘Violator’, Depeche Mode was a somewhat different animal though, the most overtly political phase of their career was over, and the American stadium phase was just peaking. The lyrical concerns were becoming more metaphysical (or vaguer, you might say, more open to whatever you might want to project onto them) but ‘Policy of Truth’ is one of the songs to still work on that personal/political level (just the use of the word ‘policy’ for starters). As a 12 year old I remember being drawn to it because that’s an age where you’re starting to be aware of the hypocrisy of adults but you’re still told by parents, teachers (and priests – raised a Catholic, I was) that lying is wrong. So to hear a song that pointedly delivered the opposite message was something of a revelation. The fact that it didn’t give you all the details made it more fascinating – what could the person being addressed in the song possibly have done to make lying preferable to telling the truth, for the consequences to be so bad.

“It used to be so civilised/you will always wonder how/it could have been if you’d only lied.”

And to cap off the intrigue, I remember it also occurred to me to wonder what was at stake for the person delivering the advice – “hide what you have to hide/tell what you have to tell.” What was his relationship to the addressee? Was this the voice of bitter experience – had he been in a similar situation? Since he was someone advocating not telling the truth, could he himself be trusted?

Again, this seemed like an insight into the stranger, darker world of adult feelings and relationships – simultaneously attractive and unsettling, a description which also applies to ‘Violator’ as a whole. It’s weird enough just through being such an anomaly: the band’s one great album. It was their seventh album and yet there’s little indication even on its predecessor, the solid but largely dull ‘Music for the Masses’ (that nevertheless accompanied their big US breakthrough) that the quality would improve so sharply, and the fall-off afterwards is fairly steep.

The difference, aside from it being Gore’s most consistent batch of songs, is in the details and the textures, courtesy largely of Alan Wilder (a listen to Recoil albums like ‘Bloodline’ supports that) and the production team that included Flood, François Kevorkian and Daniel Miller. In places, the textures are as smooth and blankly suggestive as the monoliths in 2001, on ‘World in My Eyes’ and ‘Clean’ for example (which is another candidate for ‘precursor to the BBC News music’ along with Leftfield’s ‘Song of Life’). The sticky, three-note electro riff that basically constitutes the chorus of ‘World in My Eyes’ dominates the song, which was a hit single, with its oddness, an oddness that is as much about the sound itself – which I sometimes think is a flashback to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’ (!) – as the notes (it's a sound that was echoed in Roisin Murphy's excellent 'Overpowered'). It’s an oddness that just a notch below that of the irrecuperably odd equivalent part in Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’, or those staccato ‘pips’ at the end of the chorus of ‘Open Your Heart’, or the ‘chorus’ of ‘On My Radio’ – where the hook is partly the wrongness itself. The main riff from ‘Policy of Truth’ is similar in that respect, with its tape-warp decay that recalls another Human League song, ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’.





Elsewhere, though, and this is Alan Wilder’s speciality, there’s a clammy, bio-mechanical feel (that often puts me in mind of Aliens… all that ‘matter’ in the places where they’ve nested that is the product of something sentient, but not human), as with the techno-organic throb of ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Blue Dress’ or the passage between ‘Blue Dress’ and ‘Clean’ where harmonious moaning is offset by unsettling noises that in my mind’s eye could the sounds made by ant mandibles, amplified and treated, and the equally insectoid, rising and falling electronic signals that you could imagine coming from robot crickets. Elsewhere, voices are processed to sound less human – there’s that cyborg “sometimes” on ‘Clean’ and the post-tracheotomy utterance “crucified” between ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Policy of Truth’. And then there are all those uses of human breath (or emulated human breath) as part of a percussive or rhythmic loop, fused with scrap metal samples and drum machine hits, which is a recurring motif in Depeche Mode’s recordings up to ‘Violator’ (cf: the outro for ‘Master and Servant’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’). It’s in the breakdown in ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Halo’ (the ‘hoo-hoo-hoos’ in the intro loop), the breathing in the “and when I squinted…” section of ‘Waiting for the Night’ that feels so close it almost leaves a little condensed moisture in your ears.

Whether by accident or design, David Gahan does little to humanise the songs he sings on, that deal almost exclusively in abstracts, archetypes and metaphors (Gore brings a more torch-y feel to his turns). By this point the baritone has got stronger and a little richer, but it’s still fairly inflexible, he’s not getting all throaty and choked liked on the pumped-up follow up ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’, which brings in the gospel choirs and the ‘soul’ and has almost none of the strange power of its predecessor. Frequently on ‘Violator’ Gahan sounds like a disinterested deity trying on human ‘feelings’ for size, turning them over in his hands in a bid to understand what they do, what they’re for. At the very least, this helps to elevate ‘World in My Eyes’ above the level of a corny “why don’t we make a little room in my BMW?”-style come-on.

Apart from ‘Policy of Truth’ I haven’t given much space yet to Gore’s song writing. The overly worn themes of devotion, obsession, redemption etc are crystallised rather than ossified. At least four songs – ‘Sweetest Perfection’, ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Clean’ work as drug metaphors, but obviously ‘drugs’ can stand in for a lot of other things. There a magnificent chord changes in ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Halo’, and ‘Blue Dress’ is a lovely Euro-ballad (again, it’s the sonics that take the song into stranger territory.)

On ‘Halo’, he casts Gahan in a role that could, as with ‘Policy of Truth’, be taken as satanic, a tempter – “all love’s luxuries are here for you and me” he tells the guilt-shackled addressee – but the mood is more tragic-heroic. I’d say it was humanist except its protagonist appears to accept that there’s a higher justice and that retribution will come: “when the walls come tumbling in/though we may deserve it/it will be worth it”. But it’s certainly on the side of the fallen; again, for a boy with a Catholic education, this was (and remains) a provocative idea.

‘Halo’ is a sympathetic performance, but for the most part, I agree with people who find there’s a coldness, an emptiness at the core of Depeche Mode. I’ve seen ‘Violator’ referred to as a synth pop ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (Pink Floyd also = soulless) – I can see that, it’s definitely very hi-fi friendly, and there are some very Floydian passages, like the section linking ‘Enjoy the Silence’ to ‘Policy of Truth’, although a couple of moments remind me more of the beginning of ‘Meddle’ actually – with the bass sound going to ‘Clean’ and the organ stab ending up on ‘Waiting for the Night’.





However, this lack of a mushy human centre, of ‘soul’, as some people might call it, only adds to the unnerving effect of the music on ‘Violator’ because its surfaces are undoubtedly suggestive, but what of? Even ‘Enjoy the Silence’ is moving less for the subject matter than for its poise and uncanny architectural perfection, its flawless design demonstrating an abstract intelligence beyond that in evidence in the actual lyrics. It’s that sense of a beyond-human guiding intelligence at work, transcending the individual talents involved, that marks out ‘Violator’ from the rest of Depeche Mode’s work, and also as a truly weird (and stadium-sized weird at that, before U2 copped the move with ‘Achtung Baby’) artefact. I know that it made an Extreme-loving friend of mine that I lent it to uncomfortable – I still remember him trying to articulate what it was about it that had that effect on him. As a 12 year old I thought this secret knowledge, this alien logic, was proper to the world of adults, but I know better now.