An ornamental swan wrapped in cellophane. A worker knocking down a mountain in Switzerland. A collective farmer in a field. A marriage in the lights of a Midlands factory. An imposing building covered in banners with a foreground of tulips. These are the images that defined the image of Depeche Mode through their first five album covers. All shot by the legendary photographer, Brian Griffin, they represented the band on the shelves of record shops, in the collections of fans, and in the music press. There were critics who (unfairly) thought the group’s pop lightweight, but their cover art was decidedly serious.
It was fine art, at a time when many record covers showed a band’s latest hairstyles. Griffin’s image for A Broken Frame – the album released into the gloom of 1982 after the departure of Vince Clarke – was selected by Life magazine to front its collection, The World’s Best Photographs (1980-1990). Daniel Miller had resolved to give the band the best resources he could, when he took on producing them for his Mute Records imprint, and his choice of Griffin gave them visuals as distinctive and iconic as their music.
Speak & Spell cover art by Brian Griffin
Griffin came to Miller’s attention because his agent had an office above Mute’s. At the time, Griffin’s work was prominent in record shops, featuring on releases from Iggy Pop, Echo & The Bunnymen, Ian Dury, Simple Minds, and Elvis Costello. The commission to create an image for Depeche Mode’s first album, Speak & Spell, led to an abstract but striking image of a plastic-wrapped swan that has come to be interpreted, with hindsight, as a commentary on consumer capitalism. Griffin’s working class politics were given fuller reign with the next two albums, which featured the sickle (A Broken Frame) and hammer (Construction Time Again) as core elements of the cover photos. That led to an excited journalist at Melody Maker trying to get Dave Gahan to come out as a fellow traveller, when he was more interested in Kerrang! than the Communist Manifesto.
There have been other sources of confusion between the band and Griffin’s artwork. In 1982, some said that the peasant on the cover of A Broken Frame was a man – perhaps even Daniel Miller in Slavic farmer’s drag. In 1984, rumours circulated that the cover of Some Great Reward showed Alan Wilder getting married. Both were wrong. The hunger for information about the band, and the need to interpret the images in light of its evolution, led to pre-internet speculation fuelled by the multiple layers of meaning in Griffin’s work.
Depeche Mode promotional shot by Brian Griffin
There is a chance to set the record straight with the release of MODE, Griffin’s latest book. With a preface from Gareth Jones, an interview with Griffin that explores all of his work for the band, and an essay by Roger Butler that tells the story of the video for “Only When I Lose Myself,” it is the definitive history of a relationship that helped to define the image of the band.
Backed by fans of Depeche Mode and Griffin through a Kickstarter campaign, and with energy provided by DM-interpreter Vaughn George, MODE is designed by the same team who created Griffin’s biographical work, Black Country Dada. It collects previously unseen images from his shoots for the records and promotional materials, showing Griffin’s striking style. It also includes pictures of artefacts from the archives, which give Depeche Mode fans more of the context of the work. Photographers will be awed by the technical skills and creative techniques used by Griffin. Fans of the band will be enveloped in the experience of working with the band and label. It is an exquisite and badly-needed window into a period when one of the world’s most important bands was finding its voice and commercial success.
It also led to the reorganisation of DAF as the duo of Görl and Delgado. After Die Kleinen…, they clinched a contract with Virgin Records and forged a new, minimal sound. The rest of the band were out, and Miller was told only after the deal was done. It was a messy affair, but it led to a series of albums that set new templates for European electronic music. With only a sequencer, basic synths, a drum kit, and Delgado’s voice, DAF crafted a distinctive sound with songs that cut open the belly of punk. Görl’s drums and electronics steered a path between icy anthems and intimate tracks, avoiding the traps of both 4/4 dance music and pub rock, while Delgado purred and shouted slogans and sensual promises with equal intensity.
The I Start Counting duo were famed for their connections to London’s Spitalfields Market. The circle is completed, then, with the news that Mute Artists will be releasing two, limited edition, cassettes of demos from 1985 and 1986 at the 10th Anniversary Independent Label Market this weekend.
Before you break the plastic seal around Electronic Improvisations Vol. 1, you are already back in the 1970s. The golden age of modular music saw sleeves that imparted important information about the sound and artist. They might have featured signposts in the form of waveforms or patches. The records were as often found in libraries than in shops, because they were clearly made by intellectuals who worked as engineers as much as musicians. The sleeves told a story of earnest modernity, just by their layout grid, but they also explained the method.
Thomas Leer and Robert Rental accidentally made one of the most compelling and influential albums of the 1970s. While disco and punk faded around them, they locked themselves in an apartment in Battersea with some rudimentary equipment supplied by Throbbing Gristle and gave birth to The Bridge.
The history of The Bridge and the paths of both artists were displayed at the recent exhibition, From The Port To The Bridge, in Greenock. Organised by Simon Dell (right), it captured an enormous amount of detail that had been obscured by Rental’s retirement from public music activity. With care and precision, it laid out the creative flare that burned when Leer and Rental came together, as well as Rental’s notorious live collaboration with Daniel Miller of Mute Records.
The pair moved around, starting families and playing punk in Edinburgh, before finding themselves in London. Inspired to make their own singles, they pooled their resources so that Leer could make “Private Planes/International” and Rental could record “ACC/Paralysis.” Part of the DIY revolution that saw the early electronic music from The Normal and Human League emerging around the same time, the singles from Leer and Rental hinted at the gritty, alternative sounds that they would bring to The Bridge.
Following the tour, Throbbing Gristle re-entered the picture. The Industrial Records label, started to release their own music, had already issued a single from Monte Cazazza, and the “very friendly” quartet were looking for other artists to get involved with. A signing ceremony was organised at a Soho restaurant, just like they imagined major labels would do, and arrangements were made for an album to be recorded.
Rental was asked by Daniel Miller to record a single for his fledgling Mute Records imprint. “Double Heart/On Location” was recorded at Blackwing Studios, where Miller had first set up his equipment for Silicon Teens, and it involved Leer and the DAF drummer, Robert Goerl. Recorded by Miller with Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer, “Double Heart” was Rental’s last studio project. The pressure of recording with others and the technical challenges of getting the sound he wanted frustrated Rental, and he invested in making his own studio in Battersea. Although he produced music for The Comic Strip’s A Fistful of Traveller’s Cheques, his perfectionism got in the way of releasing additional material, and there were no further public recordings before his premature death in 2000.