There's an issue from Tape Op magazine from 2015 (I don't have the mag handy to identify specific month) featuring interviews with Gareth Jones and Daniel Miller, amongst others of that era. Lots f talk of recording Depeche Mode. I found a copy of the magazine at my dad's recently and brought it home with me. Not sure how easy to find old Tape Op issues online, but if you can track it down, this issue gives good insight into what went into the albums back when.
Thanks for this! I love these kinds of finds. I did a quick search and it is the Nov-Dev 2015 issue, and back issues can be purchased and downloaded as .pdfs so I will definitely give it a read. I wasn't even aware of this magazine. Both of those guys contributed hugely to the sound of Depeche Mode (and Erasure)
It's a great magazine - and subscriptions (in the US, at least) are FREE! The publisher, John Botch, was the first guy to stick me in a proper studio and the early days of the magazine were cranked out down the hall from the main room we recorded in.
I was mainly a fan of the very first DM stuff - I had Speak and Spell and a 12" EP. The really poppy material was as far as I went, but I was working at a dance club (in the same building that became Tape Op HQ years later) and "People Are People" was THE song on any given night. People in the lounge would put out the clove cigs and race back to the dance floor for it!
"People Are People" was one of those songs that when it hit the mainstream airwaves, I didn't know who DM was and I wasn't heavily smitten by that particular track. I was into car stereo gear at the time, and ended up buying the "Some Great Reward" cassette simply because I bought anything that sounded good (from a production standpoint) on the Alpine system I had installed in my car. I always liked listening to tracks not only for the overall vibe but for the detail within, which is why having a decent custom car stereo was important to me at the time -- it revealed both synthesis approach and production technique at the same time. Anyway, purchase of that cassette and repetitive listening led to me discovering tracks like "Stories of Old" and "Blasphemous Rumours", and then realizing the combination of depth, originality, and raw talent this band had... I then started accumulating their other works.
As I kept peeling back the wrapper on their older works (Speak and Spell, A Broken Frame, Construction Time Again), I would play them for friends to hear whenever we rode around in my car. What still amazes me to this day is that just about every one of my close friends ended up becoming huge DM fans. There was something infectious about their music.
I can remember back in the pre-napster days when "record stores" existed. I was already into software development at the time but the average American didn't even own a computer... very different times and mainstream access to the Internet was non existent. Friends and I used to frequent one record store in particular which was large with a "social vibe" (it was meant to be kind of a gathering place in addition to a place to buy music)... The clerks would play pretty much anything you asked them to even if it meant tearing the wrapper off a CD they had not yet played. Sometimes we would go in there and first thing ask them to play a few lesser-known tracks from a DM CD, and what amazed me is that it almost always changed the vibe. More than once I saw some reaction from someone else in the store, in some cases walking up to the clerk and asking who that band is, etc. DM just always had a way of reaching people and inciting some reaction. Maybe sometimes the reaction is an emotion the listener didn't particularly want to deal with, but in some cases it made them say "hey.... who just woke up that part of me that I wasn't ready for?". I think this ability they've always had is probably why I have so much respect for them.
I personally never considered any of their music depressing or dark, but I know a lot of people do. The same is true for The Cure... the first time I had a highschool friend listen to a tape I gave him of The Cure, he said "I instantly wanted to slash my wrists, but at the same time could not put it down". lol..
I don't know I guess I see music as an expression of emotion, and the more intensely emotion is expressed the more it's going to strike me as a piece of work where the artist invested themselves? Maybe?
But I do know that when I first started buying my own synths in the mid-late 80s, doing cheesy covers of DM tracks was literally one of the first things I did, and for that reason they have been a massive musical influence on me.