THEY MIGHT HAVE been signed to the same label as Nick Cave, but in the musical world of the mid ’80s Depeche Mode were clearly aligned with the pop positivists — those who would analyse the clichés and conventions of our behaviour with a view to creating new relations between people. And like their philosophical forebears, Depeche Mode were fearless in their quest to expose dogma and nonsense to the cold hard light of reason, even if it led them — as it had Newton — perilously close to Blasphemy. On side two of their 1984 album, Some Great Reward, Gahan tries to unravel the greatest mystery of all: why, if God is good, do bad things happen to good people?
Girl of 18
Fell in love with everything
Found new life in Jesus Christ
Hit by a car
Ended up
On a life support machine.1
Gahan and Gore wrote ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ after noticing something odd about the church services they’d attended. At the end, the priest would read out a list of those in the congregation suffering from serious illness, ‘and the one at the top always died. But still everyone went right ahead thanking God for carrying out his will. It just seemed so strange.’2 The conclusion was inescapable. In the song’s insanely catchy chorus, Gahan sings:
I don’t want to start any Blasphemous rumours
But I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find him laughing.3
Gahan’s accusations were so bitter, and the song struck such a chord, that eventually, God’s representatives on earth were moved to speak up in his defence. A priest from Depeche Mode’s home town of Basildon spoke to the press, saying, ‘If we can say God so loved the world that He sent His only son…if he did that, he cannot have a sick sense of humour.’4 Which is all very well, but Depeche Mode’s questions still nag. Why create us with the capacity for happiness and deny it? Why bring us into the world and then visit us with every kind of horror? Here Gahan, as Nick Cave would later put it, calls upon the author to explain.