Interview: VCMG

Depeche Mode founding members Martin Gore and Vince Clarke have made an album together for the first time in over three decades. In this situation, the clichés usually write themselves. Thirty years is a long time in pop music, but two of synth pop’s chief gunslingers have got back on the saddle to ride again after three decades apart  — you know, that kind of thing. But the reality of VCMG is so divorced from mystery or romance that to even attempt such frothing would be silly. The making of SSSS, the pair’s album of minimal techno with a cheeky swagger, was a simple, even perfunctory affair. The band name is an acronym of the pair’s initials and the whole thing was made via email — no personal meetings, no phone, no Skype, no instant messenger.

They haven’t even discussed the record since. “We met at the Mute festival last May [Short Circuit at the Roundhouse, London],” says Martin, “and we didn’t really talk about it then. We just talked about our kids.”

But this isn’t a depressing tale of two pop stars who have grown apart. It’s just that they never really knew each other in the first place.

“[The early days of Depeche Mode] was a really brief time and, to be honest, we didn’t work as much then as we do these days,” says Martin. “We didn’t go off on year-long tours. Before the band got successful we used to rehearse once a week and do a couple of dates up north or something. I didn’t really know Vince very well until I actually joined the band. That was March 1980 and he told us he was leaving in something like August ’81, even though he stayed on to do a tour after [first album] Speak & Spell.”

Martin saw a darker Depeche Mode grow into a global phenomenon — in the Balkans, they are The Beatles — and Vince presided over two of the greatest pop song machines that the UK has ever produced in Yazoo and Erasure. Today, Martin lives in Santa Barbara, California, whereas Vince lives in Maine in North East USA. “People ask me lots of questions about Vince and I really don’t know the answers,” Martin explains. “Over the last 30 years I haven’t seen him that much — I don’t know him very well as a person. But you can tell by looking at his studio… he’s about the only person I have a small bit of synth envy for.”

Vince had thought about a techno project for some time. He started making the record himself but felt it would be more interesting to share ideas with someone. “Martin is as interested in electronic music as I am so he seemed like the right person to approach. I knew he had done a bit of DJing and we both have similar studio setups, so from a practical point of view it made sense.”

Vince, steeled by Dutch courage, finally contacted Martin. “After drinking six beers, I composed an email,” he explains. “I think he was genuinely surprised to hear from me.”

“He asked me if I was interested in making a techno album and collaborating — no pressure, no timeline,” says Martin, later. “If Vince had sent me the email now, it just wouldn’t have worked out as I have been writing songs for the band and we are about to go into the studio, but I actually got the email when I had a good bit of downtime in front of me and it just seemed like something fun to do — something different. When you commit to something like this you don’t really know how it’s gonna go. You could get two tracks in and think, ‘What have I done?’ But I really felt from the first track that Vince sent me it was interesting and fun. It felt like we were on to something.”

It started off with Vince sending Martin germs of ideas. “We were very open about the process,” says Martin. “I started by taking out bits I didn’t particularly like that he sent me, adding bits to it and sending it back to him, then he’d take out bits that he didn’t like that I’d put in and send it back to me. There were usually three or four versions of the track before we were both happy. And after a while I started coming up with ideas that I would send to him as well.”

This way of working resulted in a certain meticulousness that is evident throughout. You can hear the craft as teeming sounds are scattered around a constant, grinding pulse. “It built up very organically, which is why the tracks sound as cohesive as they do,” says Vince. “I was most conscious of trying to build up emotion by building up the sound picture. We were both trying to use sounds we’d never used before in unique ways.”

The album explores darker sonic territory than Vince has been involved with for some time. There are moments when you can picture hearing it at 3am in the corner of a club surrounded by a sea of stern, gurning faces.

“There’s nothing better than watching people dancing to your own music,” says Vince. “My problem is I’m in bed by nine o’clock so I’ll never see it.”

Yet the throwaway nature of song titles such as ‘Skip This Track’ and ‘Spock’, the album’s title SSSS and the snake-clad cover inspired by Vince’s love of hissing sounds (the record’s hallmark) all betray the priority to keep things light-hearted and accessible. “There was no intention of making a deliberately dark or a deliberately happy album. We just wanted to make a great sounding record,” says Vince.

‘Spock’

Vince started listening to techno a couple of years ago, via the dance music website Beatport. “I’d never taken an interest in techno music at all but I was just completely blown away by the way the people were using synthesisers. I had always relied on chord changes to bring emotions into songs. I realised with the techno stuff you can build up a track, go up and up and up and up, and then sink into nothing. It was really exciting that there wouldn’t be a lyric in it — that’s what got me intrigued.”

It stands to reason: famously, Vince Clarke has never really got lyrics. “I’m just not very good at writing lyrics,” he concedes. “I just start repeating myself.”

“Vince was more interested in the flow of the words and rhymes than in the meaning,” Martin said in an interview after he’d walked out on the band in March 1982. “I care a lot about what I’m saying. If I had a good tune and I didn’t like the lyrics, I’d drop the song.”

Vince’s decision to leave the band was viewed as an obscure move at the time, creating the press myth of Vince The Enigma — an image that has endured. “When he left he actually went and told [Andy] Fletcher he was leaving the band as he was a good friend of his from a very young age,” says Martin today. “He went and told Dave [Gahan] that he was leaving the band. But he didn’t actually tell me; I heard it from the others!”

Andy Fletcher once commented how the Mode were seen as “wimps on synths” in their hometown of Basildon, Essex back in the early days. “We were doing something completely different,” remembers Martin. “It was the height of the futurist days. Our clothes and our make-up definitely made us stand out, so you were asking for trouble really.”

Yet today Basildon is spoken about with an auspicious tone by Mode fans around the world. Amateur footage of fan pilgrimages to the street where Dave Gahan grew up is posted on YouTube. Visiting Americans receive puzzled faces from locals when they enquire about a monument to the band.

“Mention Basildon to Southenders and they’ll die of shame before admitting that they’ve set foot in the town,” wrote Iain Sinclair in London Orbital, one man’s account of his walk around the M25. It might sound harsh, but it goes some way to explaining how people from Essex and many Basildonians themselves feel about the town that was built in the late 1940s as part of the New Towns Act. (When I mention that I am from Southend, Vince instinctively replies, “Well, you’re all right then.”)

“My family moved to Basildon from South Woodford when I was five,” says Vince. “There was absolutely nothing to do. When I was a kid there was just one Indian restaurant and one Chinese — there was no cinema, no nothing. Somebody asked me earlier why there were so many people from Basildon into music. I think that was the reason. If I hadn’t joined the band, I’d still be working at the yoghurt factory.”

Martin is now off to concentrate on Depeche Mode, who return to the studio in a couple of months. “The good thing about doing VCMG was that it was fun and completely different,” he says. “But now it is good to actually get back to writing songs. It made me crave writing words again.”

Will VCMG return?

“There’s been some talk of doing some DJing together but no definitive plans,” says Vince.

So is that it?

“It depends on our schedules,” says Martin.

“It definitely was fun to do,” says Vince. “It was really enjoyable, so why not?”

VCMG, then. A diversion for two global synthpop superstars. A bit of a laugh. A Basildon reunion. Job done.

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