Depeche Mode Violator at 34 - Our Geek This Week

Depeche Mode VIOLATOR at 34

Today is the 34th anniversary of the release of the Depeche Mode album Violator. What follows is a Frankenstein-esque patching together of various writings and posts that I have made about the most important album in my life.

So, let’s start at the beginning, meander around a bit, and see where it takes us, eh?

Depeche Mode released the single “Personal Jesus” in the summer of 1989, and that is when I first discovered them. True, I recalled liking their song “People are People” in 1984, when I was 10, but “Personal Jesus” spoke to me in a way that no other music had done by that point in my life. I paid $6 for the CD single and listened to it incessantly. About eight months later they released their first album of the 90s, Violator.

But let’s rewind just a second.

That Christmas of 89 my best friend Matt received their album 101 on double-cassette tape as a gift from his older sister Jen. With my love for “Personal Jesus” I asked to borrow it to listen to that “old” song “People are People.” I would fast forward to that track, listen, rewind, then listen again.

Sometimes I would forget to rewind and the following songs would play. They attached themself to me, and before long I was listening to the entire live album over and over, sharing favorite tracks with my other friends. Matt became curious and asked for his tapes back, which I returned.

At this point it had become a full-on obsession.

Yeah, I liked that one song from when I was 10, and liked the entire 101 album, but “Personal Jesus” was the track that ignited the flames of my fandom.

The first time I heard the song it blew my mind. Electronic boops and beeps with a guitar? Wow!

Just WOW!

The video was tangentially salacious in my teen mind, the title and lyrics edging against blasphemy enough to cause friction across my Catholic upbringing. It was sinful and delicious.

I ate it up.

I just could not get enough. (Yes, I went there.)

I listened all the time.

I discovered what a B-side was and listened to “Dangerous” in-between repeated sessions of going through the various remixes of “Personal Jesus.”

This was when I decided that holy shit, “THIS IS MY BAND, THIS IS MY MUSIC.”

Maybe that’s something that only really happens when you’re a teen and you’re on your journey of self-discovery and self-identity, but I’m so happy that this is the song, the band, and the album, that caused such to happen for me.

I counted the days until the March 19, 1990 release of their new album, Violator. I distinctly remember buying the album on CD for $18.99 in Record Town, a chain music shop located in the now gone North Kent Mall. Then, with my meager funds, I began purchasing their entire back catalog, but that’s not this story.

This was just a few years before the internet was everywhere, so other than “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy The Silence” (released in February as a single) I hadn’t heard any of the other tracks.

(Can you imagine that? Other than singles selected for radioplay not knowing what an album sounded like before you purchased it? We lived in some wild times back then!)

I remember running home to listen to that album on my Sony Discman because we didn’t have a car with a CD player at that time and the Discman was the only CD player that I owned. Did I skip right to “Personal Jesus?” I honestly could not tell you, those memories are lost to time, but I know that I soaked up that album in its entirety. I remember thinking that “World In My Eyes” was fine, but I really liked “Sweetest Perfection.” After that was “Personal Jesus,” which I have already said too many words. “Halo” was an early favorite of mine, especially when using headphones. There’s this electronic percussion sound in that song that to this day reminds of hitting the ice on a frozen lake hard with a large stick or piece of metal. The way that sound reverberated through the water and the ice, echoing as it did so is distinct, and it sounded like the band had faithfully recreated that sound on “Halo.”

I fully admit that I did not absolutely love “Waiting for the Night” the first and maybe even 100th time I listened to it. I won’t say that I skipped it every time I listened to the album, but of the tracks it was the one I did skip the most. That is, at least until I saw Depeche Mode live, which I’ll get to shortly.

(Yes, another aside: the band performed “Waiting for the Night” during this tour as a duet, as they had done back in 1990, and again, this is my preferred version of it: Dave and Martin singing it live, together. Now when I hear this track it transports me back to 1990, and now, to last Spring and Fall.)

For many people, not necessarily hardcore Depeche Mode fans, “Enjoy The Silence” is their favorite Depeche Mode song, or at least, the one they most likely know just because it is the song that charted the best in the US for the band. I love it as well, and three decades on I still love it, but in case it wasn’t clear, my heart will always belong to “Personal Jesus.”

One thing I loved about the album version of “Enjoy The Silence” is that it just doesn’t end. It segues into a small piece of instrumental music, a track that some of the more intense fans, like myself, know to be called “Interlude 2 (Crucified).” It’s probably why I prefer the album version of the song because I recall lying in bed listening on my headphones as the interlude played and suddenly strikes into “Policy of Truth.” It doesn’t fade into the latter, the next song just starts, and rather abruptly, enough to make me jump the first several times I heard it.

And of course, “Policy of Truth”, is as the kids no longer say but I do because I think it’s funny to purposefully try to sound like I’m out of touch, still a banger.

“Blue Dress” was the new Martin ballad that I knew that I needed in my life. Followed by another interlude, technically “Interlude #3,” separating “Blue Dress” from “Clean,” though this one is not abrupt, but rather flows into the next one quite nicely. I always found it odd that they made a video for that song for their Strange Too video collection even though the track is not a single. If you ever want to watch Martin make out with a French model for a few minutes, well then you are in luck!

Ironic that this is the song that ends this album as it is well documented that in the next few years Dave would struggle with his heroin addiction; I wonder if this song holds greater importance now.

A few weeks later my friend, Michael Ring, and I got up early to wait in line at was Hudson’s, now Macy’s, in Grand Rapids, as it was one of the few TicketMaster vendors in the area back in 1990. Another nostalgic thought, do you remember when you actually had to go to a TicketMaster location to buy tickets?

We got there way too early and yet were not close to the front of the line. We stood there, sheltered teenagers as we listened to the 20-somethings in line talk about how some of them never went to sleep the night before, another how a friend of theirs clearly under the influence kept stumbling around a party they were at looking into his front jacket pocket for a hit of acid (that he had apparently already taken). We bought tickets for ourselves, but also our friend Matt (the same one from above), his girlfriend at the the time Marlene (Marre), and his older sister Jen, who at 18 was to be our “chaperone” to “Detroit” for the show.

On July 28, 1990, at 16 years old my parents let me, Ringo (technically a “Michael” like many males, being Gen X and all), Marre, Matt, and Jen, drive to Pine Knob Music Theater in “Detroit” (really, Clarkston) to see Depeche Mode perform.

That album was everything to me and helped shape the teenager I was, which informed the young man and later the adult that I became and who I am now. It’s not hyperbole to say that Depeche Mode and their album Violator made me who I am today.

This is my band, this is my music.

Yes, they are. It is.

I’ve been devoted ever since.

Cheers to 34!

Parts of this were reworked from an August 19, 2019 & September 28, 2020 Facebook post, which was also edited and posted on this site as “Depeche John”