IAN WADE
As with any split or upset in a band’s lineup, Depeche Mode were seemingly at the point of no return after their Devotional Tour in 1995. With Dave, Andy and Martin all dealing with their individual issues of stress, depression and addiction, Alan Wilder had decided to quit to focus on his own well-being – and, most of all, his own band, Recoil.
The roots of Recoil go back further than that. In 1986 Mute founder Daniel Miller had heard some of Wilder’s demos that he had made on a four-track cassette. Markedly different from the sort of thing that Depeche Mode had been making, it was still rooted in the world of synthesisers and sampling yet was angled more towards the experimental side of things. A first album of these demos collected together and named 1 + 2 was released to little fanfare not long after the Mode had released Black Celebration. Primitive they may have been, but the demos shone a little light into what Wilder had brought to the band since he joined in 1982.