Written by In the latter months of 1985, Depeche Mode entered the studio to work on their fifth album determined to emerge from it a different band. At that point, the quartet, as they then were, were still considered a lightweight teenybopper band – this despite the fact that their previous record contained the BDSM-themed 1984 single Master & Servant. For some, the idea of the band as the fresh-faced Essex teens who’d made Just Can’t Get Enough was immovable.
Black Celebration, as their fifth record would come to be called, changed everything. It was, frontman Dave Gahan explained to Smash Hits at the time, “an attempt to get away from the softness of contemporary pop.”
“When we first presented a couple of the songs from Black Celebration to the radio plugger Neil Ferris, their faces were fun to see,” Gahan told this writer in 2017. “It was like, ‘Where’s the song for radio?!’. We’d realised that was not our thing. It was more important to us making a body of work.”
But this new approach did not mean Depeche Mode were dispatching with chief songwriter Gore’s indelible way with a hook. Instead, everything was delivered with more power and depth, something designed to last longer than that week’s run through the Top 40. At the centre of this bold reworking of their sound is Stripped.
Not for no reason is this loop-heavy, gripping anthem, a song that pretty much helped to invent industrial electronic-rock, placed slap bang in the centre of Black Celebration. It was at the core of what Depeche Mode were trying to turn to, and the song that was the genesis of everything they became after.
There’s a lot going on under the bonnet here, quite literally – the song begins with a sample of Gahan’s posh new sportscar revving its engine. Those teenybopper years had obviously paid off. “Sampling was very new,” Gahan recalled in 1998. “We used to run all over town looking for interesting things to turn into a rhythmical element of the song. That’s my Porsche 911 starting at the beginning… That’s long since gone.”
It wasn’t the only thing that went into Stripped’s big sampling pot, with the chug of a motorbike pitch-shifted and used as the track’s rhythm and the whoosh of fireworks also figuring in the song’s cut-and-shut sonic make-up.
The inclusion of fireworks, it emerged, was down to the fact that the band were in the studio in London recording on 5 November. “It was rockets that we were doing,” explained co-producer Daniel Miller, also the band’s label boss and career-long mentor. “We thought, ‘If we angled them at a fairly low angle, we could set up a series of microphones and we would still be able to pick up the sound as it travelled along. We set up a sort of bottle at a very narrow angle and had five microphones 15 feet apart.”
But it wasn’t just the experimental method that made Stripped so special – if that were the case, it would just be a glorified science project. The song was also an absolute gem, with a stirring melody line delivered by a career-best (to that point) vocal from Gahan. He was entering his showman phase, beginning to realise his potential as as vocalist who could hold arenas in the palm of his hand. “It feels powerful to sing,” Gahan said in 1985. “The chorus is rousing and mob-like, which I can get off on.”
Funnily enough, for all its envelope-pushing production techniques, Stripped’s lyrics were actually about the complete opposite. “The idea of Stripped is to get away from technology and civilisation for a day and get back to basics in the country,” the band’s late, great Andrew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher explained at the time – Fletch was always better at explaining the songs than Gore, the man who actually wrote them. “It’s about two people stripping down to their bare emotions.”
If the band wanted to get away from the immediate gratification of the pop landscape, then they got their wish. Stripped was not a huge hit, entering the UK charts at respectable 15 but not even released in the US, where their label opted to release throwaway B-Side But Not Tonight as the lead track instead.
But both viewed from a distance and in the context of the album that followed a month later, it marks a pivotal moment in the history of Depeche Mode. “Since Black Celebration, we’ve started getting things right,” Gore reflected in 1998. “Stripped is one of the best atmospheres we’ve ever captured.”
Stripped concocted a gothic, epic sonic world that connected on a huge scale, influencing a new generation of artists to embrace their dark side. Rammstein would cover the song in 1998, the track figuring in live sets regularly throughout their history, whilst it also lit a spark in the mind of a young Trent Reznor, who went to see them as they embarked on a US tour in support of Black Celebration in 1986.
“I’ve thought about that night a lot over the years,” he wrote in 2017. “The music, the energy, the audience, the connection… it was spiritual and truly magic. I left that show grateful, humbled, energized, focused, and in awe of how powerful and transformative music can be… and I started writing what would eventually become Pretty Hate Machine.”
Depeche Mode went into the studio to make Stripped with the idea that this would be the song that would change their world. It did that and, as it happens, it changed everyone else’s too.
