Depeche Mode Interviews

1984-12-05 Popfit, NDR1, Hannover, Germany

Interviewer: Welcome Martin!

Martin: Thank you.

Interviewer: Do you like Hannover?

Martin Gore: I really like the town, the city, I always find something to do there, it's very pleasant us, and apart from that, my girlfriend lives there, so it's a combination of things. 

 Interviewer: Your joint sound collage depends on synthesizers and computers. This is mainly a cold technique. Is this way of working with music enough for the songwriter?

Martin: We're not musicians, really. Well, there's Alan, he's actually a very good piano player. He actually had piano lessons. But the rest of us have sort of had sort of "technical difficulties", if you like, when it comes to actually playing instruments. But we just got the ideas and we program computers to actually carry out those ideas for us. 

Interviewer: Depeche Mode's latest big hit, Master & Servant, describes violence, oppressors and oppressed in a society. The lyrics, however, appear to have a second meaning. From where did Martin get the idea?

Martin: If you wanna know where I first got the idea, it's when I was reading a newspaper before about a man who was named "the Notthinghill murderer". He would take these young gays to his flat and murder them. And it sort of struck me - this game, I found it very interesting - he used to play this game, "master and servant" with them.

Interviewer: For songs like Blasphemous Rumours, Depeche Mode uses sound collages. The idea is not exactly new: Pink Floyd and the Beatles have been working with similar effects for 15 years now. What is the difference?

Martin: The sort of things that Pink Floyd and the Beatles were doing is different. They couldn't do what we're doing now in their heydays. But now we can actually sample and put them on a keyboard and actually play the melodies with these sounds. In their day, it was probably recording these sounds and shoving them as they were on a record.