Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward [LEGACY RECORDINGS]

Why you'll love it

This remastered reissue comes in a gatefold jacket. Some Great Reward reached No. 5 in the UK, and "People Are People" gave the band their first big American hit, reaching No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.

This edition

• Remastered
• Gatefold jacket

About the album

There's a story from these sessions about a building site next door, with the band hitting skips and concrete in the studio while workmen demolished a wall outside, until nobody could tell which noise was which. That's Some Great Reward in a nutshell: Depeche Mode turning the clatter of the industrial world into pop songs.

They started in London at Music Works and finished at Hansa in West Berlin, the studio where Bowie and Iggy Pop had worked, with Daniel Miller and the newly promoted Gareth Jones producing. Alan Wilder sampled everything he could hit, Martin Gore wrote nearly the whole record, and the band traded their earlier sweetness for leather and atmosphere. "People Are People" clangs like a factory floor, "Master and Servant" whips along, "Somebody" is a quiet Gore ballad, and "Blasphemous Rumours" closes on a heavy, gorgeous chorus.

It went top three in West Germany and spent 42 weeks on the US chart, and the tour gave us The World We Live In and Live in Hamburg. Somewhere in Berlin there's presumably still a builder who never got a credit.

Also at Kops: more Depeche Mode on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Mute / Columbia (cat# 19802887891), a reissue of the 1984 album.