38. Depeche Mode - Everything Counts (Mute)

4 weeks at number one from w/e 13th August 1983

“With someone like Crass, all you can get drawn in by is the lyrics and that’s it… the music is so hard that a lot of people won’t go near it. But with ‘Everything Counts’ they’ll give it a chance and then they’ll hear the lyric” – Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode talking to X Moore, NME 17th September 1983.

The crisis continues. Crass may have vacated the number one spot, heaving the doors open and drunkenly chanting as they left, but the broader British malaise continued; the problem of what being left-wing meant in a society where Thatcherism and the harder edges of capitalism were portrayed as the only answer. You would have expected Crass to have something to say on the matter but Depeche Mode? Politics didn’t really seem to be their thing.

There had been hints of it on “A Broken Frame”, of course, but only in an obvious, non-committal way. Their sinister anti-Hitler Youth deep cut “Shouldn’t Have Done That” didn’t say anything new beyond “Fascism is a bad idea”; something even a Daily Telegraph reader could have got on board with (back in those days at least. Who knows now?) At the time, too, the sleeve offered little, the image of a peasant woman with a scythe being only the barest of hints.

In 1983, their third album “Construction Time Again” emerged with the cover art showing a man swinging a large hammer over his head while standing high on a mountainside, backed by an antiseptic mouthwash sky. It looked like something from a political propaganda poster, an idealised, romanticised view of the European working man. A few critics and fans were quick to spot something else – what if the scythe on the sleeve for “A Broken Frame” could also be interpreted as a sickle? What were they trying to tell us?

While Depeche Mode didn’t design their own sleeves, “Construction Time Again” wasn’t shy about the band’s left-leaning political ideas. It was an album I bought as a teenager and instantly fell in love with, because it expressed its ideas so starkly and simply, echoing my own emerging thoughts without clouding the messaging with doubts or ifs and buts. These days, some of it feels naive and the album has toppled in my estimations as a result – at its most preachy, there’s a thin line between the broad socialism they present on tracks like “Pipeline” (“Taking from the greedy, giving to the needy”) and “Shame” (“Do you ever get that feeling when the guilt begins to hurt/ seeing all the children wallowing in dirt”) and Michael Jackson at his most pious.

The key difference here, the artistically (rather than lyrically) revolutionary aspect, is that Depeche, influenced by the industrial music scene sprouting around them, introduced a digitally sampled crashing and clattering to the simple sentiments, not new in itself, but certainly a fresh idea in a pop context – its release date even beats ZTT’s debut record, The Art of Noise’s “Into Battle EP”, by some margin.

The record’s uneasy, irate mood was influenced by Martin Gore’s world opening up beyond the confines of South East Essex. Having travelled to Thailand and witnessed crippling poverty, then returning home again to comfort, he became struck by the concept of a world shrinking thanks to the availability of technology and air travel, but failing to ‘eradicate its problems’ despite the glaring obviousness of the disparity between wealth and poverty. The excuses of ignorance and television’s distancing effect could not longer be leant on if the problem was right there, literally in front of most of us, and also very literally begging and appealing to our better nature.

“Everything Counts” is so central to the album’s theme that it appears twice – once in full, at the end of Side One, then again as a brief, muted reprise at the end of Side Two, nudging us in the ribs gently. Its initial appearance is far from subtle. It begins with a grinding, panning, metallic effect, like the work of a panel beater echoing around a mountain valley, then adds large, cinematic, sombre notes and a wailing, unearthly Shawm noise created by a synthesiser. Within barely twenty seconds, the track has managed to enter into conflict with itself; modernity versus ancient art, progress against tradition.

30. Southern Death Cult - Fatman (SItuation Two)

Five weeks at number from w/e 8th January 1983.

Back in the mid-nineties I was complaining to a person “inside” the music business about a local band I loved who hadn’t been signed yet. To me their future seemed a no-brainer – they had the image, the songs and were astonishing live. Where was the roadblock? Did they just have rotten management?

The knowing insider gave me a withering look and broke it down very simply, barely pausing for thought; it seemed little reflection was required.

“Dave, you have to understand, there’s absolutely no stability in that band. You’re right, two of the members are turning out good songs, but they go through drummers and bass players like I lose socks. They stop, they start, they freeze again, sometimes for months. No major label is going to look at that situation and not see a huge problem; they want a solid, fixed group of individuals they can develop, work with and promote. They want to know that if they put the money in tomorrow, they’re going to still have a band to work with in two year’s time”.

He was right, of course (probably, although I’m sure there have been random exceptions). I know even less about the workings of the early 21st Century music biz, but part of me wonders if this rule would still apply today; presumably any label wishing to invest in such a group would whittle them down to a core duo and hire a few waged musicians to work and tour with them on the side. The idea of a “group identity” seems to have become less essential now. Back in the nineties, though, and certainly in the eighties, it mattered.

In a similar fashion, as we’ve journeyed through the NME Indie Charts of the last two years, we’ve come across a number of fragile units swelling with promise who quickly imploded, and we may have found ourselves baffled as to how they landed on labels like Rough Trade or Mute. The answer may very well lie in their own internal struggles – did Theatre Of Hate, for example, really want to press up their own records, or were there just some extremely serious problems within their own ranks which made them an undesirable business prospect?

Of all the bands we’ve brushed past or will meet in future, Southern Death Cult are the most extreme example of this phenomenon. “Moya” twinned with “Fatman” (although the NME Chart only lists “Fatman”) was the only single they put out before splitting. It was a monstrous fringe hit, popping up on numerous indie compilations from that day to this, and it soundtracked many nights out for a particular youth cult, and acted as the kind of foundation enormous careers are usually built on.

Hold that thought, though, because while Southern Death Cult disintegrated before they could release any other new material (besides some odds, sods and session tracks album their label were quick to put out), their lead singer Ian Astbury formed the similarly named Death Cult with the similarly volatile Theatre of Hate’s Billy Duffy, who eventually became The Cult of whom little more needs to be said. Astbury clearly knew which side his onions were cooked on and wasn’t going to throw the b(r)and name into rock’s great compost bin.

Despite his involvement, Southern Death Cult were a hugely different group in terms of both line-up and style, as “Fatman” clearly demonstrates. Astbury’s vocal stylings are already fully developed here, and his deliberately strained, strangulated war cries dominate “Fatman” as much as they do “She Sells Sanctuary”, cutting through the clutter beneath them to act as a guiding laser point.

What’s going on beneath is enormous and feels like every single idea the group had that month. Drums clatter, guitars borrow their stylings from both Dick Dale and Billy Duffy – he may not be working with Astbury yet, but you can feel the ground being prepared – and the tune rolls and stumbles in an organised heap towards its conclusion. There is no obvious chorus here, just a cascade of possible hooks thundering by while the drummer rattles straight and orderly patterns behind the conflicting ideas.

I’ve owned “Fatman” on a compilation for years now and never quite taken to it, but listening to it afresh again, it’s immediately striking how influential it was. You can certainly hear the template for the first iteration of The Stone Roses here from their “Garage Flower” days, but Astbury and co have a sense of measure and control the Baby Roses never quite managed. Perhaps more importantly than that, this is also unapologetic Goth Rock; Astbury has often insisted that his joking reference to Visigoths in relation to friend and associate Andi Sex Gang created the name of an entire subcult and genre.