Depeche Mode’s ‘Some Great Reward’ turns 42 on 24 September
Mute Records released Depeche Mode’s “Some Great Reward” on 24 September 1984, recorded in London and West Berlin. The nine-track album turns 42 this year.
Depeche Mode, the English electronic band from Basildon, Essex, released “Some Great Reward” on 24 September 1984 through Mute Records. The album turns 42 this year. It was the band’s fourth studio album, and it reached number 5 on the UK Albums Chart and number 3 in West Germany.
Most of the record was made in West Berlin. Sessions began at London’s Music Works studio and moved to Hansa Mischraum, where the band also mixed the album. Daniel Miller produced it with Depeche Mode and Gareth Jones, who had engineered the previous record and was promoted to co-producer here. The band carried over the sampling approach it had started on Depeche Mode’s ‘Construction Time Again’, building rhythms from struck metal and concrete rather than drum machines alone. Martin Gore wrote eight of the nine songs; Alan Wilder contributed “If You Want”, the last song he wrote for a Depeche Mode album. Dave Gahan sang lead throughout, with Gore taking the vocal on “Somebody”, recorded live with Wilder on piano.
The nine-track album runs “Something to Do”, “Lie to Me”, “People Are People”, “It Doesn’t Matter”, “Stories of Old”, “Somebody”, “Master and Servant”, “If You Want” and “Blasphemous Rumours”. Mute had issued “People Are People” as the lead single on 12 March 1984, six months ahead of the album, followed by “Master and Servant” on 20 August 1984 and the “Blasphemous Rumours” / “Somebody” double A-side on 29 October 1984. Both later singles drew objections over their sexual and religious subject matter, and some radio stations declined to play “Master and Servant”.
Brian Griffin photographed the sleeve at Round Oak Steelworks near Stourbridge, continuing the industrial imagery he and designer Martin Atkyns had used on the previous cover. The album title is a line from “Lie to Me”.
The Some Great Reward Tour opened three days after release and ran to the end of July 1985, taking the band through the UK, Europe, North America and two shows behind the Iron Curtain, in Budapest on 23 July and Warsaw on 30 July 1985. The 14 December 1984 concert in Hamburg was filmed and issued as the band’s first live video, “The World We Live In and Live in Hamburg”.
About Depeche Mode
Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, Dave Gahan and Andy Fletcher formed Depeche Mode in Basildon, Essex, in 1980, taking their name from a French fashion magazine. The band signed to Daniel Miller’s independent label Mute Records and released the synth-pop debut “Speak & Spell” in 1981. Clarke left after that album to form Yazoo with Alison Moyet, and Gore became the band’s main songwriter. Depeche Mode continued as a trio for “A Broken Frame” (1982), then expanded to a four-piece when Alan Wilder joined for “Construction Time Again” (1983), the album that brought sampled industrial sounds and Gareth Jones into the band’s productions.
“Some Great Reward” extended that partnership and gave the band its first US chart single, “People Are People”, which reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 after a delayed run there. Mute followed the album with the compilation “The Singles 81>85” in October 1985, then “Black Celebration” (1986), “Music for the Masses” (1987) and “Violator” (1990), which produced “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence”. Wilder left in 1995 after “Songs of Faith and Devotion” (1993), and the remaining trio released “Ultra” (1997), “Exciter” (2001), “Playing the Angel” (2005), “Sounds of the Universe” (2009), “Delta Machine” (2013) and “Spirit” (2017). Fletcher died in May 2022. Gahan and Gore released “Memento Mori” as a duo in 2023 and toured behind it, documenting the Mexico City dates in the concert film “M”. Forty-two years on, “Some Great Reward” remains the point at which the Berlin sessions, the sampling and the leather-and-steel visual language settled into the form the band carried through the rest of the decade.
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