Spirit March
By Tom Lanham
photo by Michelle Greco
A
t 56, Depeche Mode bandleader
Martin Gore no longer feels the
need to pull any lyrical punches.
So he gets right to the prickly, political
point on the band’s latest Spirit set, starting
with its clickety-clacking rhetorical ques-
tion of a lead single “Where’s the
Revolution,” with a grim societal accusa-
tion intoned in unusually ominous fashion
by frontman Dave Gahan: “You’ve been
kept down/ You’ve been pushed ‘round/
You’ve been lied to/ You’ve been fed
truths/ Who’s making your decisions?”
And the album – in scathing indictments of
our corrupt, fossil-fuel-favoring, technolo-
gy-dependent, extinction-bound culture –
just gets angrier from there, in “Fail,”
“Scum,” “Poorman,” “The Worst Crime,”
and the drone-warfare-damning “Going
Backwards,” which posits that “We can
track it on a satellite/ See it all in black and
white/ Watch men die in real time/ We
have nothing inside.”
Gore didn’t set out to pen a set of turbu-
lent protest songs that throb with the dark
zeitgeist pulse of our post-Brexit-and-
Russian-influenced-Trump-election times.
It all arose from an instinctive gut feeling
he had two years ago that something had
gone wrong with humanity. Something
horribly, perhaps irreversibly wrong.
When he began composing the Spirit mate-
rial at the end of 2015, none of these star-
tling global U-turns had happened yet, he
recalls. There were serious forebodings, to
be sure. “The Syrian crisis was going on,
which obviously led to the refugee crisis,
the Russians had invaded Crimea, and
there was a war going on in the Ukraine,”
he sighs, in uncomfortably 20/20 hind-
sight. “It just seemed like we were getting
into bad situations everywhere you
looked. And there was that whole spate of
police shootings in America – black people
getting shot – so maybe I was feeling par-
ticularly sensitive or something. But I
could feel something in the air that did not
feel good.”
Gore also had the unusual vantage
point of being a British expatriate who
now resides in Santa Barbara, California.
Gahan lives in New York, but keyboardist
Andy Fletcher has remained in London,
where his favorite non-touring activity is
going down to his local pub every night
and – having been kept up to date on
world affairs by the less-biased coverage of
BBC News – discussing political frustra-
tions with his good mates. “That’s his
thing, and I suppose once you’re a few
pints in, those discussions get very lively,”
Gore says of his childhood chum, who first
formed Composition of Sound with him
back in 1980, before adding Gahan (who
changed their name to Depeche Mode) and
releasing their frothy synth-pop debut
Speak & Spell a year later. Whereas in
America, he adds, “I do get into discus-
sions with people, but they’re not quite as
lively. But I have a 14-month-old and a six-
week-old at the moment (with second wife
Kerrilee Kaski; he has three kids with first
wife Suzanne Boisvert), and the song
“Eternal” on the new album I wrote for
Johnnie Lee, my 14-month-old daughter,
reflecting the EPA and climate change and
stuff. And it was kind of serious, but
almost meant to be a black comedy, as
well, when it mentions the ‘black cloud ris-
ing’.” Considering the giant miasma of
pollution hovering over China, and the
current arms-proliferation posturing of
North Korea, he sighs with parental cha-
grin. “But unfortunately, right now we’re
22 illinoisentertainer.com august 2017
in the middle of that. I mean, I’m not old
enough to reme