GOING U.P.!
ULTRAPOP THAT IS. DEPECHE MODE INVITE STEVE TAYLOR TO
BASILDON FOR A SHORT COURSE IN ONE U.P.MANSHIP
"WHEN
SIMON Bates introduces us on Top Of The Pops," Depeche Mode's singer
David Gahan is saying on the afternoon before their television debut,"
he makes a special point
about us coming from Basildon--why?" "Because nothing good ever
comes out of here?" suggests one of Gahan's three synthesizer playing
colleagues, Martin Gore. We all ponder for
a minute or two, perched up here in a tacky plastic-lined pubabovethe concrete
shopping mall. Silence. Next question.
Basildon deserves special mention as one of those sprawling new-ish towns
built to house London's `overspill' population in the post-war period. Like
Basingstoke, it stands in some people's eyes as a cliche, for soul-less suburban
development around a boring--the
word is `alienating'--centre where the entertainment is hard to find. The
very stuff of Plays
For Today. The very stuff, you might be forgiven for thinking, of classic
Urban Synthesizer
Gloom. Well, here's the surprise; not that Depeche Mode come from somewhere
like
Basildon, but the fact that they play frothy adolescent pop--with a tinge
of moodiness, sure,
but nothing that would qualify them for the Throbbing Gristle award for making
the listener
feel more suicidal than ever before. Depeche Mode have a little joke about
it. Vince Clark calls the other camp of synthesizer bands "B&I",
standing for "bleak and industrial." David Gahan, swaggering and
laughing more than usual after a pint and a half of lunchtime lager, gets
the slogan wrong: "We're P&U", he proclaims. Everyone looks
baffled. "You know," says Gahan," pop and up."
Vince puts him right. "The phrase is U.P. and it stands for Ultrapop!".
They have every reason to be cheerful right now, having achieved the enviable
exposure of a Top Of The Pops slot--with an independent label single, mind--and
having become one of the subjects of a forthcoming "Twentieth Century
Box" on London Weekend Television within only a year of first playing
together.
WITHIN THE last few months they've all given up whatever stopped them being
Depeche
Mode full-time. Gahan was politely asked to leave college, where he was studying
shop
window dressing; Clark's fellow synthesizer players Martin Gore and Andrew
Fletcher gave
up their jobs as bank clerk and insurance clerk. Vince -- "I'm a Vince
Clark"-- with least to lose, signed off the dole. With a cheap and portable
stage set-up they now survive solely on income from gigs--a fact which they're
justly proud of. "We've got no transport costs really," explains
Gahan, "All our gear goes in the car. We don't employ any roadies. So
if we get paid _250 for a gig and _50 goes on hiring the PA, we can come out
of it with a reasonable amount each. Everything about us is independent,
even the promotion for the new record we hired ourselves. "Dreaming Of
Me", Depeche Mode's last single on the Mute label, reached number fifty-
seven in the singles charts and number one in the independent singles. "We're
going to be The Beatles of the indies," crows Fletcher in a fit of bravado.
This is all a long way from the scene less than a year ago when Gahan remembers
he stood
outside the venue for their first performance as a four-piece, Nicholas School
where Fletcher
and Gore had been pupils. "You spent half an hour outside trying to calm
down," says
Fletcher. "You had about ten cans of lager." All Gahan can remember
is repeatedly saying to
himself, "I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it." The three
instrumentalists were old hands at this, having played all of two gigs as
a trio of bass and two synths--once at Scamps in Southend and another at "Deb
Danahay's party". Vince isn't going to let anyone ask a fool question
like "What were they like?" "They weren't even minor successes,"
he says. Andrew puts Vince's assessment in context: "The crowd didn't
react so Vince lost his temper with them--plugs were kicked out." "There
were a lot of fourteen-year-olds," adds Martin," who'd never seen
a synth before, so they
were fiddling with the knobs going `What does this do?'." Not that the
three of them had been introduced to the synthesizer that long before. Vince
and Andrew had their musical baptism in a gospel folk duo which played the
local churches and youth clubs; Martin, who still goes to Methodist church
once a month, was the guitarist in a middle-of-the-road West Coast orientated
band which played "nice songs." So, though they were too young to
be early 1970s glitter kids and readily admit to not having been diehard punks,
they were all musically involved enough to be touched by crucial
innovations. As Clark says," You appreciate things much more when they're
past." Gahan
describes the band's tastes as running "from folk to P.I.L.". "Punk,"
says Clark," wasn't all
good, but the enthusiasm..." Fletcher takes up the thread: "We've
always liked groups like Roxy and people like Bowie who kept their respectability."
"Electronic music," says Vince," connected the two, Roxy and
punk." We liked groups that used synthesizers--OMD, Human League, Gary
Numan--that
was what we were listening to at the time we got together. And," he concludes
with a grin,"
synthesizers are very easy to get a good sound on." WITH THE arrival
of Gahan, who they heard crooning Bowie's "Heroes" at a jam session
with another band, their distinctive style began to shape up and audiences
reacted accordingly. Gahan recalls their four-piece debut at the Top Alex,
a Southend pub that's normally an R&B stronghold: "We went down really
well--they were banging their heads to our pop." Circulating an early
demo tape got them a valuable few gigs, mostly at the Bridge House In London's
Canning Town--"Terry, the promoter there, was the only bloke who believed
in us then"--and at Crocs in nearby Rayleigh. "We must have played
at Crocs fifteen times," says Fletcher. "and that gave us a lot
of encouragement; we weren't really nervous any more."
"Speak for yourself," bounces back Gahan.
Crocs was also the place where their audience first started dressing up in
frills and makeup,
though now Gahan says that's toned down: "Everyone's not trying so hard
to be different
from one another, it's smarter." The band have swapped their cute Romanticism
for macho
leathers at the moment, though Gahan says it's not a policy decision, they
just go for "anything that
looks good." The Bridge House, meanwhile, set them on the path for Top
Of The Pops. They met Daniel Miller, the unassuming proprietor of Mute Records
and an aficionado of electronic pop there
and were eventually invited to do a one-off single. After doing the dispiriting
rounds of the
major labels, Miller was "the first one we could trust; he said that
if either party didn't like
the other, we'd call it a day."
The imminent success of "New Life" and the fact that the formerly
indifferent majors have
suddenly started "finding" Depeche Mode's demo tape and `phone number
is a great confidence booster for both the band and Miller. "All the
majors told him he wasn't going to make it and he's proved them wrong,"
says Gahan. "And as for us, so far things have just happened--and at
this rate we're happy to just let them keep happening."