Depeche Mode by Gassian

DEPECHE MODE Gassian

With their air of kids who haven't even left high school, their Huey, Dewey and Louie caps and their tattoos of sailors on a spree, these modern young people with the look of Soho bondage hairdressers convey a homoeroticism mixing in the sweat of the television spotlights leather and bare skin on repetitive electronic music with childish melodies, played on synthesizers placed on feet as if they were mutant toys.

Claude Gassian photographed them from 1982, as soon as their fame went beyond the English charts. Four, then three, when after abandoning the minimalist lightness of their beginnings and digesting the departure of their initial leader, Vince Clarke, who left to found Yazoo with Alison Moyet (then The Assembly, and finally Erasure) to become a real industrial rock group integrating even the blues and having conquered America, amazed by this very foreign music, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan (and Andy Fletcher) made Depeche Mode a real, dangerous group.

They then tackle the fundamental subjects of rock - sex, religion, salvation, alienation, domination - to the point of seeing their "Personal Jesus" covered by Johnny Cash - pushing integration to the point of finding themselves on the verge of giving up at the dawn of the millennium, Gahan destroyed by heroin like the authentic cursed rockstar and now tattooed like a Californian biker that he has become. Without ever denying their initial vocation as a pop band churning out hit after hit, from the refrains on drum machines and samples inspired by Kraftwerk of "Just Can't Enough" and "People Are People" to the gothic and S/M citadels of "Master and Servant" and "Shake The Disease", these Singles 81-85 chronicle the first phase of the evolution of one of the most improbable behemoths of English rock, who recorded his DVD One Night In Paris at Bercy in 2001. Yves Bigot