The Emigration Playlist - 64 years of songs: #15 Never Let Me Down - Depeche Mode (1987)

And so we come to this.

Cathedral-sized, anthemic and the type of song to play at a rally. A song that when you hear it live, and I have, twice, you understand a little of how Hitler got all those hands in the air back in the day and the mass feeling he was trying to create. And when you wonder it, a part of you watches the other part inside that's joining in, just lost in connection with 20,000 others for that moment, transported to a communal space of delirium and shared human meaning and joy and you think what the hell is happening to me I hope Dave Gahan isn't Hitler but Oh My God this is a peak moment of life, right here right now in this fucking arena.

Luckily for me, it wasn't Hitler on the stage. It was Depeche Mode - as someone once said, 'the most famous non-famous band in the world'. But frankly, it all scares me a bit. If the Austrian watercolorist had opened one of his gigs with Martin Gore on stage sawing out that signature riff on his Gibson Firebird*, if he'd sampled John Bonham's drums from When the Levee Breaks (just stop right here are reflect on that), locked them into a metronomic rhythm that just won't let you go as Christian Eigner pounded his kit with heavy duty sticks and two bass drums, then who knows what I would have done. Frankly it doesn't bear thinking about.

The scale of this song. On top of that massive percussion you've got a clockwork keyboard part dancing around almost like some kind of musical box (keyboards carry this part on stage, though the original was - incredibly - heavily sampled woodwind with stacks of reverb). Then there's Dave Gahan's baritone, more a monotone chant, more pleading than singing, then joined by Gore's harmonies creating that absolutely Depeche Mode vocal. And a choir turns up, massive and Wagnerian - well in fact it's not Wagner but actually pinched from Carl Orff and Carmina Buruna, ffs. Depeche Mode never suffered from a lack of ambition.

The lyric? It's come to be understood to be a song about drugs, drink, about getting blitzed, about losing the self. It explains what that's like by making you feel intoxicated in the moment - certainly live, in one of the massive stadia which it, and the band, can effortlessly fill. You don't need to be wasted to hear Never Let Me Down Again - it will waste you. There a tension of the pull towards an other-worldly blackout, and a warning against it. You somehow know that the song's ability to do this to you has revealed in you something that's both scary and wonderful...and you go there anyway.

If you haven't seen the live version of this song, check the video below. Put your headphones on, turn the lights off, and watch the crowd (especially from 5 minutes in) as much as the band. Be there. I remember being there like yesterday.

Never Let Me Down Again is on the list because it remains the single most awe-inspiring song I have ever been lucky enough to see played live. 

And I have loved Depeche Mode from the start, when these clean-cut Essex boys turned up on Top of the Pops, played Just Can't Get Enough and I thought 'Wow, what is this??' Never Let Me Down Again first appeared on (the entirely appropriately named) Music for the Masses in 1987, which is why it's beaten some very strong competition** to show up for this year. But for me it became the song it now is with the bands massive stadium gigs from the mid 1990s onwards. It's the song they often close the show with - watch the video and you'll see why. 

I guess we just have to grateful that Dave Gahan and Martin Gore didn't go into politics? There again, if Zack Polanski played the drums like that, I'd definitely buy a ticket.

Until next time...

* For the geeks out there, yes I know that he mostly plays a Gretsch but in the video here (from the 2009 Tour of the Universe it's a Gibson Firebird). 

**It beat I still haven't found what I am looking for by U2 (a song I recall howling out drunk, very late in an Oxford club, with my first wife before we were married), Sinead O'Connor's defiant and wonderful Mandinka, the heartbreakingly melancholy of Kings Cross by The Pet Shop Boys which, with its strangely prescient lyrics, always makes me think of the terrible fire in the tube station there that year. Bloody hell, it even beat True Faith by New Order, a song that would be in my top five for its video, if this whole project was about videos, and the utterly beautiful Paradise from Black's album Wonderful Life. Depeche Mode beat all of them, and love all the rest as I do, it wasn't really even close.

*****

Readying myself for emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html