Some Great Reward is the fourth studio album by the English electronic band Depeche Mode, released on 24 September 1984 by Mute Records. The album peaked at number five in the United Kingdom and number 51 in the United States, and was supported by the Some Great Reward Tour. This also saw the band using samplers, much like they did in their previous studio album Construction Time Again (1983).
The album was Depeche Mode's most successful to date in Europe, hitting number 5 on the album charts in the UK, and number 3 in West Germany. In the US it hit number 54 and spent 42 weeks on the charts. The album was supported by the Some Great Reward Tour, which ran from September 1984 through July 1985, during which the band filmed the live home video The World We Live In and Live in Hamburg, which was released in Europe, North America and Japan.
This was the first album where they achieved chart success in the US with the single "People Are People" which reached No. 13 on the charts in mid-1985 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was a Top 20 hit in Canada. It was also the first album that peaked at a higher position on a chart that was not from the band's home country as it peaked at No. 1 in Germany. Singles "Master and Servant" and "Blasphemous Rumours", which was released as a double A-side with "Somebody", both also charted in Europe. Depeche Mode followed Some Great Reward with the compilation album The Singles 81→85 in October 1985. A companion compilation home video, Some Great Videos, was named after Some Great Reward.
Background and recording The band had released their previous album, Construction Time Again, in August 1983, and followed up with a supporting tour that lasted through early 1984. The band went into the studio around Christmas 1983 to begin recording tracks for Some Great Reward while still on tour. Mixing of Construction Time Again had taken the band to Hansa Studios in West Berlin, where the band had embraced the city's all-night partying atmosphere. Songwriter Martin Gore, who had recently left his long-term girlfriend in London and started a new relationship with West German Christina Friedrich, found himself taking advantage of Berlin's S&M clubs and nightlife, and started cross-dressing. In a 1984 interview, Gore claimed that "sexual barriers are silly. My girlfriend and I swap clothes, make-up, anything – so what?" Singer Dave Gahan explained to a journalist that "Martin's [Gore] just being the way he always wanted to be. He missed out on his teens, missed out on just going out, seeing different girls every night and getting drunk all the time. He's living that now. It's not a bad thing – everybody should go through that phase!" Overall, Gahan remembered that the band had a great vibe during this time, saying "We really had like a gang mentality then as well. It was us against the world." Like Gore, Gareth Jones, who was now one of the album's producers after being the sound engineer on their previous album, had relocated to Berlin and was living with his new German girlfriend. Said Jones, "I felt that my contribution was worth a production credit and when I asked Daniel [Miller] and the band, they agreed - luckily for me! My role didn't change that much, however; we were all pulling together in the service of the songs and our quest for new sonic panoramas." During their time in Berlin, the band befriended West German artist Annette Humpe, formerly of the band Ideal, and Gore would later play keyboards on two songs from her 1985 album Humpe.
The band's recent album and single reviews had been positive, and they were upbeat on the new material they were recording, with Gore saying "We just want to produce a really fine album which will hopefully establish us as a major act." Jones said that the band wanted to "evolve", shed their "wimpy" sound, and "make powerful, strong records with a lot of atmosphere."
The band also worked to improve their public image, and started to be photographed on stage and in the press wearing black leather inspired by their time in West Berlin; Gore started wearing fetish leather harnesses in photoshoots. Gahan said "A lot of people still think we're teeny-wimps," and Gore agreed, saying a few years later that "we had such a terrible image, very sickly. Even I thought we were wimps."
In April 1984, the band's official newsletter reported that "all or at least most of" the songs intended for the album had been written, and they were looking to record their new material starting in mid-May. Depeche Mode originally planned to record Some Great Reward at Music Works studios in London before going back to West Berlin to Hansa Studios to mix and master the album, as they had done for Construction Time Again. Singer Gahan said "we wanted to definitely go somewhere else ... the idea of going to another country [to record the album] really appealed to us." The band also liked Hansa, knowing that David Bowie and Iggy Pop had recorded some of their albums there, and preferred the energy of West Berlin to the "dead" energy of London. However, when the month of recording time that they had set aside at Music Works Studio in London expired, they moved to West Berlin to complete the recording sessions at Hansa; as a result, "most of" the album was recorded at Hansa.
As they had done on their previous album, the band used a heavy amount of sampling on Some Great Reward. The band attempted to sample a live drummer in the studio, an endeavor which resulted in very few usable sounds, but did have success sampling "industrial" sounds such as the sound of striking concrete with a hammer. Said Gore, one day there was construction next door to the studio, and the band would "have the track running with us hitting skips and concrete, and they'd be next door tearing a wall down and we couldn't tell which was which! It was very confusing at times." Alan Wilder, keen to avoid "factory preset and Drumulator syndrome", would typically process voices and sounds through his synthesiser, infuse it with additional effects, and then further modify it via the E-mu Emulator or Synclavier. The band brought in a drummer to sample him playing various drum sounds, and later hit the band up with a large bill, with Wilder saying that "he agreed to be sampled literally just hitting one drum, once at a time. Anyway, we sampled all his drums once, maybe twice. ... he gave us this bill for about 50 different sessions, plus a consultation fee. It was enormous, and the stupid thing was that most of the sounds weren't good; we only used about two for maybe two seconds each on a couple of songs."
One song that was started at the London sessions was "People Are People". Gore partly drew on his own experiences of being taunted on the streets of his hometown Basildon because of his appearance for the lyrical content of the song. Although started in London, "People Are People" was finished at Hansa, where Wilder said that most of the song was sampled into their Synclavier, making the song one of the band's first almost entirely-programmed tracks. Gore's exposure to the hedonistic culture in West Germany led him to write songs on taboo subjects, including the S&M-focused "Master and Servant" and the religiously-themed "Blasphemous Rumours", both of which caused mild controversies when they were later released as singles. "Blasphemous Rumours" was inspired by Gore's early experience at church in England, where he witnessed hypocrisy instead of faith. Fellow bandmate Andy Fletcher, also a lapsed churchgoer, said "I can see why people would dislike it ["Blasphemous Rumours"]. It certainly verges on the offensive." Gore sang "Somebody", which he wrote for Friedrich, nude in the studio. Recorded live, with just Wilder on the piano and Gore on vocals, Wilder called it "the first acoustic-performed track" that Depeche Mode had recorded. Album track "Lie to Me", which "[bemoaned] the diminished role of truth in the world", was one of the band's favorite tracks, although Gore expressed regret that the album version wasn't maybe as good as it could have been. Wilder wrote two songs during the sessions, "In Your Memory", the B-side to the "People Are People" single, and "If You Want", which was the last song he wrote for a Depeche Mode album, although two years later he co-wrote a few songs that ended up as B-sides to singles from their follow-up album, Black Celebration.
During recording downtime, the band recorded an all-covers album called Toast Hawaii, named after Andy Fletcher's favourite snack from Hansa's cafeteria, though this album has never been released. During the course of recording, Gahan spent some time with a vocal coach, where he practiced singing scales and breathing control.
On 3 February 1984, the band played a one-off live show at Birmingham Odeon for the BBC TV show Oxford Road Show. In the midst of recording their new album, and despite "People Are People"'s imminent release as a single, the band's 40-minute set for the show included no songs from Some Great Reward.
In March, the band took a break from recording the album to play a handful of final shows on the Construction Time Again Tour in Eastern Europe, Italy and Spain, and as the band returned to the studio, Mute Records released "People Are People" as the band's next single. "People Are People", bolstered by its use in a West German ad campaign for the 1984 Summer Olympics, went to number 1 in West Germany, representing the band's first chart-topping single. At the time, however, the single failed to make a dent in the US charts. "People Are People" took "social and political subject matter and [made] it quite poppy and commercial," although by 2006, the band's view of the song soured, with Fletcher calling it "our biggest hit that we don't play [live anymore]".
With their popularity rising, Depeche Mode were invited to play a one off-show with Elton John in June 1984 in Ludwigshafen, West Germany to 40,000 fans.
In July 1984, having returned to recording at Hansa, the band's US label Sire Records released their first compilation album, People Are People, when Construction Time Again failed to chart in the US.
In August, Mute released "Master and Servant" as their next single as Miller, Jones and Wilder finished mixing the rest of the album, while Fletcher, Gore and Gahan each took a brief holiday, as none of them had interest in the production side of recording. Wilder held off on arranging his own vacation, saying "I foresaw the fact that we were going to go over deadline and held off arranging one [holiday] myself because I didn't want to miss out on the whole mixing process." Gore recalled that the album was a "turning point" for Wilder's role in the band: "Alan would often sit in the studio with Daniel [Miller] and Gareth [Jones] till two or three in the morning" while the rest of the band was out at a club. In order to maintain better control of his songs, Gore created his own publishing company, Grabbing Hands. The sexual lyrical nature of "Master and Servant" caused a mild controversy, and some radio stations refused to play it. The band performed "Master and Servant" on the BBC's Top of the Pops when it rose in the charts.
Album cover Cover design was done by Martin Atkyns and photography by Brian Griffin, with a look described as "industrial chic". The photograph was taken at Round Oak Steelworks near Stourbridge, where Griffin had worked. Both Atkyns and Griffin were responsible for Depeche Mode's previous album cover, Construction Time Again and Griffin had taken the photographs for all of Depeche Mode's album covers to this point. On the back of the cover, the lyric "The world we live in and life in general", taken from "Somebody" was included.
Title Like the previous album, which took its name from a lyrical fragment from an album track, the title Some Great Reward was a partial lyric from the album track "Lie to Me".
Release and promotion