Depeche Mode ended the 80s as one of the most successful bands of that decade, but everything was about to ramp up significantly. Their seventh album Violator, released in March 1990, would make them global superstars, a record that sold millions upon millions of copies and spawned some of the Basildon group’s most enduring hits. It was the sound of a band at their majestic peak. “Violator is a perfect 10,” their late keyboardist Andy “Fletch” Fletcher told me when I interviewed them back in 2017. “It’s a perfect 10 record.”
Fletch wasn’t wrong, and their masterpiece of an album was preceded with a single equally as flawless. It is 35 years in early February since the release of Enjoy The Silence, a song that hasn’t aged a jot in the intervening three and a half decades, an anthem that melded their minor-chord mournfulness with the euphoria of house music and soaring synth lines, a trailblazing electro-rock all-timer.
And yet, for long periods of its creation, the band’s chief songwriter Martin Gore was sulking in the corner because he didn’t like it. Gore had originally brought the song in as a stark, haunted ballad, the demo of which you can hear below:
This was how Gore envisioned the song playing out, an idea that was turned on its head when the band had a pre-production meeting and Gore’s bandmate Alan Wilder suggested they turn add a disco beat and turn it into a thumping dance banger. “I was really averse to that at first,” Gore recalled to BONG in 1998. “I thought, ‘The song is called Enjoy The Silence’, it’s supposed to be about serenity and serenity doesn’t go with the disco beat’.”
The task was put in the hands of their new producer Flood, who now had to convince the band’s chief creative officer that this was an approach worth exploring. “I said, ‘Why don’t we just copy the rhythm of an old disco classic so we started off doing that,” Flood explained in a talk at Short Circuit Festival in 2011. “Martin was dubious about the whole idea, so it was a bit like, ‘Come on then, prove it to me’. But that was good because what that did was add a real tension, an edge that’s an undercurrent to the whole thing, that’s something that becomes the art side of things, being aware that that is happening and trying to make it a situation that’s creative rather than necessarily being everyone having a massive fight where nothing gets done.”
The foundations of Enjoy The Silence was set with that dance beat and a trembling synth bassline that Wilder and Flood had worked up on the huge new modular synth system that the producer had brought into the sessions. But, remembered Flood, it required something to elevate it all and the surly Gore would need to get involved. “I was like, ‘Martin, give us a melody’ and he was like, ‘Do I have to?’. He goes to a keyboard and starts plinking and plonking away, the worst sound in the world, but to Alan Wilder’s credit, after Martin was playing around for ages, he went, ‘Stop, that’s brilliant, but you’re not playing it on that’.”
It was Flood who came up with the idea for Gore to try and replicate the hook on a guitar, something that would result in one of the band’s most iconic and indelible hooks. But Gore was still not sold. “He went, I don’t want to do that, we’re a synth band,” Flood said, convincing him to give it a go and, after what he called “half a day” of going through guitar sounds finally arriving at the right one. “Suddenly, everyone was engaged,” said the producer.
Hearing what the song was becoming, Gore’s resistance dissipated, and then some. “It was the only time in the studio where we thought we had a hit single,” he confessed. Looking back on the making of the track in 2019, he offered up an apology. “I was dead against it and then it started making a bit more sense to me… I’d like to take this moment to apologise to Flood and Alan.”
Who knows how the success of Violator might have played out if Enjoy The Silence had been recorded as the stripped-down hymnal that Gore was after. It became their highest-charting single to date in the US, whipping up an anticipatory frenzy that resulted in the infamous LA riot after the band’s appearance at a record store what shut down due to overcrowding. Speaking to this writer in 2017, Gore pinpointed that event as a breakthrough moment for Depeche Mode.
“We felt like we were hitting our heads against the wall in America,” he stated. “All of our albums from Some Great Reward to Music For The Masses seemed to do the same and we expected Violator to do the same thing. I think we were fortunate in a way that the warehouse records signing thing we did in Los Angeles turned into a riot, which made us national news. I think that was the thing that tipped us over the edge there, all these people in rural areas, places we’d never been, were seeing us on the news and thinking, ‘Who is this band? Maybe I’ll check them out.’”
In Enjoy The Silence, they had a singalong as lofty as their new status. Watch its iconic, Anton Corbijn-directed video below:
