The last time Vince Clarke and Martin Gore made a record together was 1981’s Speak & Spell, the debut album by Depeche Mode. In an unprecedented move, Clarke, then the principal songwriter, announced that he was leaving that August, just as the band were taking off, for reasons that have never been fully explained. Instead of derailing their careers, however, it spurred both of them on to incredible heights: Gore assumed writing duties for the Mode, helping to make them a stadium attraction around the world, while Clarke formed Yazoo, the Assembly and, most successful of all, Erasure.
Since the split, the pair have enjoyed a combined total of nearly 90 UK hit singles and more than 30 charting albums, all for the Mute label, but fans of the electronic-music pioneers were left wondering what a further collaboration might have produced. Well, now they know. This week sees the release of Ssss, credited to VCMG, an album of sleek, hard techno that was put together between late 2010 and spring 2011 in the most modern of ways — via email, from Gore’s home in Santa Barbara and Clarke’s place in Maine.
It’s a long way from Basildon, Essex, where Depeche Mode formed in 1980. When the duo meet in the foyer of the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, where they have come to do promotion for the VCMG project, they greet each other warmly, but it is still only the third or fourth time they have seen each other since Clarke’s departure from Depeche, and that includes the recording of Ssss.
“It was all done over the internet,” explains Clarke, who emailed Gore out of the blue in 2010, asking whether he was interested in collaborating on a techno album, with “no pressure and no timeline”. “It was fun to do, and stress-free,” Gore says of a process that saw them making adjustments to tracks, editing or altering the arrangements, by sending files back and forth.
“We had no meetings to say ‘What shall we do?’, or about whether this track should sound like this or that,” Clarke adds. “I never knew what was coming from Martin and he never knew what was coming from me.”
Advertisement
According to Gore, he and Clarke have met on two occasions since finishing the album, the first being the Short Circuit Presents Mute festival in May 2011. And since 1981? “Not many times,” Gore says.
“We’ve come across each other,” Clarke adds vaguely. Did they keep an eye on each other’s careers in the interim? “From a distance,” Gore replies. “I wasn’t constantly ringing up Daniel [Miller, the Mute boss], going, ‘How are Erasure doing? I want to know!’” Not to be outdone, Clarke is cutting, albeit with a dollop of wryness. “I wasn’t downloading the latest Depeche remix,” he says, to nervous laughter from Gore. Have they noticed internet forums excitedly speculating that this is the start of a full-scale reunion, with Clarke at last returning to the fold? Both categorically deny it.
So what did happen three decades ago? Clarke is taciturn on the subject. At one point, he claims it was the result of a foot injury that saw one of his toes amputated following an accident, leaving him unable to stand on stage for long periods. With his usual poker face, it seems plausible, but he finally cracks and admits he’s joking. Some have suggested that he left Depeche because he disliked the trappings of stardom and the on-tour excess. Truth or myth? “What, that I did it [misbehave]?” he says, misunderstanding the question. “No, that’s a myth.” “We were all good boys,” Gore agrees.
Not for long they weren’t. By the mid-1990s, Depeche Mode were fully fledged, leather-clad rock’n’roll animals, having embraced degeneracy to the hilt. In a way, their bacchanalian adventures afforded them rock cachet where previously they had been regarded as lightweights. Gore finds this hysterical, but doesn’t totally agree: “That wasn’t what turned it around for us. There was a swing around 1986-87. Before that, especially in America, you’d go into an interview and you could tell the journalist hated your music. They’d been brought up on a diet of Bruce Springsteen and Kiss — you know, manly stuff.” Yet Gore — as far from the traditional conception of “manly” as you can get, with his leather miniskirts and nail varnish — does concede that the Mode’s epic hedonism “may have helped to get electronic music taken more seriously”.
Ironically, although Clarke has the stern countenance of someone about to unleash something forbidding, his songs for Yazoo and Erasure were largely chirpy and upbeat, albeit with a tinge of melancholy. Gore’s writing, meanwhile, took Depeche down all sorts of dark alleys, their harsher forays inspiring “industrial rock” bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. Clarke is dismissive of the idea that either he or Gore has been influential. “The music hasn’t been changed by the work we’ve done, but it has been changed by the technology,” he says. “That’s made a huge difference. Most of the synths that cost me thousands, you can now buy on an iPad.” Gore jokes that his contribution to pop has been a pervasive “moroseness”.
Advertisement
Still, there is nothing morose, or indeed dour, about them as they discuss Ssss. “I thought it would be interesting to do,” Clarke says, “because, unlike Martin, I knew nothing about techno.” It’s a curious thing to declare, considering that, in a way, he has been making techno — or at least techno-pop — for more than 30 years. He means “techno” in the strict sense of throbbing instrumental dance music, linear in pattern and low on melody. “Techno,” he explains, “is based on sounds and grooves, whereas the stuff Martin and I normally do is around songs.”
It’s to their credit that they they’ve made Ssss feel less like an airless academic exercise than an album that has been road-tested in the kind of underground clubs Gore used to frequent when he lived in East Germany in the mid- to late 1980s. So when was the last time Gore, a divorced dad of three, or Clarke, married with children in New England, went to a techno club? They both laugh. “I’ve been to clubs like that — I lived in Berlin in the hardcore years, before the wall came down,” Gore says, giving the impression that his clubbing days are now few and far between. As for Clarke, he did his background listening on Beatport, a dance website. “The last time I went to a club like that?” he ponders, then pauses. “Probably about 1992.”
Ssss is out now on Mute