Three Depeche Mode Needledrops and One Viral Hit

From Gossip Girl to Cocaine Bear, movies and TV just can't get enough of Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode is a pop band, not a rock band. That being said, their version of pop — dark, cold, and soul-scraping — aligned more with the goth sensibilities of the time than peak MTV pop. They started out as part of the UK new wave that went away from the anti-corporate ideas of Sex Pistols and the like, but soon their vision of synthesized pop music from Construction Time Again on would make the cold, removed demo of “Don’t You Want Me” sound positively cute. After the departure of Vince Clarke, Alan Wilder joining, and Martin Gore taking over songwriting duties, the Basildon, Essex outfit found its footing. Gore’s keyboards (and, later, guitar) were matched with Alan Wilder’s penchant for instrumentation, Andy Fletcher’s keyboards, and were given shape and melancholia with Dave Gahan’s booming vocals. That classic line-up lived for almost a decade until Wilder left in 1995.

Between Construction Time Again and Violator, Depeche Mode made like the kind of pop music where you instantly know why it cannot ever rule the world, except, for a brief moment, when Violator matched the world’s ideas of what pop music should be. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for this kind of fucked-up pop music, in which obsession is tantamount to love and being in your head is the default mode of walking into the world. (And, probably, drugs.) As such, they have been needle dropped over the years on a variety of shows, from Gossip Girl all the way to Cocaine Bear. Three songs in particular pop up most often. And, hilariously, enough, one immortal pop single that new generations rightfully rediscover if the “Viral Hits Deutschland” Spotify playlist is anything to go by. Is this our outlet for a need of darkness, the acknowledgement things are uniquely fucked up? Maybe. It could be… if the most needle-dropped song wasn’t their bright moment of light.

Just Can’t Get Enough

from Speak & Spell, 1981

Their second most-streamed (on Spotify) and easily most-needledropped song, “Just Can’t Get Enough” only shares one thing in common with the rest of Depeche Mode: Dave Gahan singing on it. A pre-Martin Gore song — this one, like all songs of the debut record Speak & Spell, is penned by Vincent Clarke — “Just Can’t Get Enough” feels like the MTV-fueled Billboard number one that never was, with its springy synths, quaint keyboards, peppy attitude, and the whole group singing the main conceit of this song: “I just can’t get enough, I just can’t get enough”. Easy to see why Cocaine Bear makes use of this one, then, as the bear rips another person apart. Lyrically, it details an almost comical exaggeration of infatuation: the idea of walking down the street, holding hands, and meeting up becoming an addiction. The lover becomes an angel, a rainbow, a light, and you just can’t get enough. It’s the type of featherlight pop song that is enjoyable enough on shuffle, easily distillable for a soundtrack, and unmemorable enough to really stand out when a film is running in the background. It’s also got so little to do with what else Depeche Mode would go on to do musically whilst also, funnily enough, keep in line with everything else thematically: the idea of love as something transcendent and almost oppressive.

That debut performance on Live Swap Shop is quite the adorable sight. The suits. The lack of guitars. Vince Clarke on it. Dave Gahan never looking at the camera, except sometimes, and it always seems like an accident. I just can’t get enough.

Never Let Me Down Again

from Music for the Masses, 1987

Depeche Mode hit something of a stride starting with Black Celebration, where their music went even darker and more introverted than the previous Construction Time Again. But Music for the Masses — a title that was intended as a tongue-in-cheek joke, since the band figured it was “nothing” like music for the actual masses in 1987 — went even darker somehow, escaping the oppressive city to the open field, where everything was even more bleak. With the processed guitars and the drums setting the scene, and the piano lending it something of a melancholy touch, Gahan’s vocals sweep over it all, sounding bored, wired, and frightened all at once. The lyrics are about nothing — something about a ride with a best friend, who may also be a lover, or drugs — which means that they’re also about everything, about this mood that Depeche Mode are so incredible at: the moment just before devastation hits. And on “Never Let Me Down Again”, it sounds gargantuan with that finale of horns and choirs joining in to the ride with the best friend. What really seals the deal is Martin Gore at the very end, acting as a counter to Gahan, floating over all of it not unlike how disassociation feels.

“Never Let Me Down Again”’s first line alone probably helped its appearance on HBO smash hit The Last Of Us, on which Ellie and her father must survive in a post-apocalyptic world with zombies. She is, indeed, taking a ride with her best friend. In its needle drop, the pianos kick in just as the thunder reveals a collapsed building overgrown with ivy. Another recent approach was by Sam Levinson’s show Euphoria, on which in its second season “Never Let Me Down Again” was used for a montage where the lyrics are somewhat taken literally (and homoerotically), while striking the mood of turmoil all the same.

Personal Jesus

first single of Violator, 1990

Reach out and touch faith. To hear Martin Gore sing this on the acoustic version, all hushed, you get the sense that the faith isn’t embodied by himself. “Flesh and bone by the telephone” — that is what he’s trying to reach, so he can preach the message and make the listener a believer. He’s merely a messenger to an intimate faith as opposed to the grand scale of both cult and religion. And though all this may play out on the phone, the simple guitar grounds it to real emotions, and the sensations tied into it. The bluesy guitar emulates the type of Americana that non-Americans collectively imagine: one of desert and sparseness, in which the anonymous metropolitan life is unthinkable. Jesus, here, isn’t a vague figure that is uninterested in the metropolitan bustle. He is a man, and he is right there for you. Your priest is on the landline, a visible, tangible thing.

That hushed reverence is not the song that became the single. The final version of “Personal Jesus”, their third most streamed song on Spotify, David Gahan’s majestic baritone sweeps over the topline in a way Gore could never go to. Gahan is not the messenger, he is the personal Jesus. And he’s right there, on the phone, as a digital being who will be put into the test. The benchmark of all the confessions does not faze him, nor the skittish beats flittering about on top of the guitar line. This Jesus is metropolitan: so big, so forgiving, that the act of forgiveness is tantamount to rapture — culminating to the masterful bridge, with its pumping breaths (itself gloriously related to the coda of an earlier single, “Master and Servant”, of 1984’s Some Great Reward — and aren’t we all Servants to a faceless God?) Like another one of Gore’s songs on Violator that went from intimate to gargantuan, the hook is both in the monster chorus and the topline that is repeated over and over. It isn’t all that surprising, then, to see this one be picked up as a needle drop — it’s not as popular as Enjoy The Silence. One currently on Youtube shorts with 2,4 million streams is a faked edit of Jodie Foster dancing to it on 1988 movie The Accused, and a genuine one from last year happens in the opening episode of Netflix show Russian Doll’s second season. To the ears of 2023, even the current version of “Personal Jesus” manages to sound quaint, almost analogue, to the rest of our lives. The Stargate remix tries to digitize matters, but loses all of its reach and retains none of its faith as a result. The Internet has no God for us.

Enjoy the Silence

second single of Violator, 1990

Speaking of “not the song that became the single”: imagine you working with a track that is a somber little affair, just you and the harmonium organ, a haunted piece of music about the violence of words that ends with the title: “Enjoy the silence…” followed by silence. It’s practically gothic. Like many of Gore’s songs at the time (and later into the 90s), “Enjoy the Silence” feels withdrawn and dark without reveling in it, as though the darkness was simply a necessary byproduct; and to hear him sing it with that quivering vocal tone of his, that feeling of a nervous breakdown that makes so many Depeche Mode songs great shines through in a stunning clarity. The silence isn’t just something to be enjoyed — it’s a need, one that Gore spends a lot of time writing its opposite about. After a betrayal of vows, and pain and pleasure (intense feelings!) hidden behind words, he tells his little girl that all that is wanted and needed is… here… in his arms. Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s drugs.

So here is this gothic song that you made and then you hear what producer Flood and your bandmate Alan Wilder did to it — a dance tune. (This is, essentially, the real-life version of the ”Can y’all watch this [creepy haunted song] while I go out for a smoke” meme.) Paradoxically enough, it absolutely complements what the song is trying to get at: the absence of words bringing joy and peace. The guitar lick — a last-minute addition from Gore — is nothing short of iconic, capturing the gothic feeling of the original demo whilst also being the catchiest part of the song. Meanwhile, the dance elements — the springy beat, the synths slicing the air like lightsabers, and the horns at the end — give the song a cold feeling, but without ever going outright icy. In a beautiful reinterpretation by Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, the instrumental passages that seem taken outright from a Meteora session, crash down with fervor and seem to underscore how violent words can really get.

And, of course, Gahan’s voice: booming with majesty (with a beautiful assist from Gore in the chorus), intoning with a gentleness and patience as he speaks of the broken vows. Written down like this, the song seems ripe with contradictions — in the first place, that title doesn’t exactly fit this busy and loud a song. But not only does this add to the enduring legacy of the song, it also speaks, in a roundabout way, to its origins. Its defiant royalty is only exacerbated in the music video by Anton Corbijn, on which Dave Gahan — who felt like an idiot doing so — wanders in a robe and a crown through quasi-technicolor landscapes with a foldable chair. He only ever lip syncs the line “Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm” and, for four minutes, he seems correct in a way only a law in nature is. The music video is so iconic that Coldplay frontman Chris Martin wanted to replicate it for “Viva la Vida” and donned the same crown and cape in London. But as grandiose as both songs are, “Viva La Vida”’s muted palette ensures that it’s nowhere near as royal as “Enjoy the Silence” was.

"In Germany they are still the little darlings (a little to their chagrin) of kiddie pop TV, in America they are a prosperous cult along the lines of The Cure and New Order. In Britain they are good old Depeche Mode, leather-skirted disco oddballs…” says NME in its February 17, 1990 issue of Depeche Mode. That was before Violator came out, and “Enjoy the Silence” in particular changed the game — to this day, with a distance, their most streamed song. “Are the boys happy?” the piece asks at the end. And they were… at the time, anyway. For such a dark song and bleak mood that Violator conjures, I think you can hear the joy in “Enjoy the Silence”, too.