FROM GAUCHE POP FRIPPERIES TO STARK, GRAINY ARTHOUSE IMAGININGS, DEPECHE MODE HAVE DRAWN UPON SOME SERIOUS TALENT TO HELP EMBODY THEIR MUSIC. THE MODE WORLD MAY HAVE BEGUN IN ESSEX, BUT IT WAS HEADING SOMEWHERE VERY STRANGE INDEED…

IAN WADE

The videography of Depeche Mode can be best summarised as being in two phases: there’s the first five years of slightly edgy but mainly goofy basic pop promos… and then there’s meeting Anton Corbijn.

Back in 1981, when the band released their first single Dreaming Of Me, there wasn’t any real need for an ‘official’ video. The promo-as-artstatement was very much in its infancy, and budgets weren’t there for Mute Records to take such matters seriously enough. Even when the next single New Life broke through and became the band’s first chart hit, the only footage that exists of them performing it – like the giddy teenagers they actually were – is from Top Of The Pops. Back then, one could argue that if you were already being beamed into millions of homes, there was little point.

EARLY YEARS

By the time of Just Can’t Get Enough the feeling that TV appearances would do had drastically changed, and the first director/Mode visual relationship emerged with Clive Richardson, then primarily best known for Adam & The Ants’ romp Kings Of The Wild Frontier and a string of Siouxsie and the Banshees videos. For the occasion Depeche Mode donned Muir caps, harnesses, leather jackets and Ray-Bans to add a frisson of cool to perhaps the cheeriest number Richardson had dealt with yet. There were even some leopardskin-clad, big-haired foxstresses dancing around them to give an edgy-yetfun air to the performance, although halfway through things lighten up with the band and friends clad in more relaxed clothing, enjoying cocktails.

By the next – and first Vince-less – single, See You, director Julien Temple, then quite a name after his first feature The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, repositioned the reduced-lineup band more in a Smash Hits-type pin-up affair, with Dave wandering around a supermarket and eventually buying a copy of See You from the lady who keeps popping up in his photobooth pics – and Martin and Andy as shop assistants. Temple himself makes an appearance towards the end in an edit suite, piecing together the footage. Temple would also direct the nonemore 1982 The Meaning Of Love and Leave In Silence, but subsequent video anthologies have occasionally left this period out completely. “You can pretty much lump all the Julian Temple videos into one collective disaster,” muttered Alan Wilder, who had made his debut in The Meaning Of Love.