In fact, if you didn't know any better, listened to anything off CTA, and then this track, you'd think several years had passed in the band's timeline. is a routine slab of gloom in which God is given a severe ticking off."īlasphemous Rumours - First off, this is a beautiful piece of music, probably the best on the album. Like a number of DM singles, there's a bad review of it in the sleeve art of Singles 81-85 where Neil Tennant, then of Smash Hits, said " 'Blasphemous Rumours'. Here's an interesting Melody Maker interview around the time of the single release : Depeche Mode Press File : I think this might be the only Depeche Mode single that doesn't come in a multitude of remixes, actually. I'd give this a 3.5/5, it's pretty good but not my favourite DM single. It was played about 250 times between 19, but hasn't been played since the end of the Music For The Masses tour in 1988. The song became a staple of live shows from release for the rest of the decade. Q: "What is your favourite song from ‘Some Great Reward’? ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ and ‘Something To Do’" So we just took the Stellavox out into the middle of this big, ambient space and miked up the ground and hit it with a big metal hammer. The engineer / producer we use, Gareth Jones, has got this brilliant little recorder called a Stellavox which we use with two stereo mikes and it's as good as any standard 30ips reel-to-reel but this is very small and therefore very portable. All that entailed was us hitting a big lump of concrete with a sampling hammer. In International Musician magazine, Alan said " We sampled some concrete being hit for what turned out to be the snare sound.
Whilst acts like Nitzer Ebb and DAF and Front 242 were still small, and Nine Inch Nails weren't even a speck in Trent Reznors eye, the band were using 'found sounds' from building sites and industry to populate the track with an urban, mechanical sound. The band were also starting to use some of the building blocks of what was to become industrial music in their recording techniques. We did get response from Christian associations saying that they understood what we were trying to say." In the same interview Dave said : "I think the problem arose because it had the word 'Blasphemous' in the title, so the record itself must be, whereas it´s just the thoughts of one man looking for some kind of a reason in the goings on in the world. When Martin first played me 'Blasphemous Rumours' I was quite offended. In May 1985 speaking to Number 1 magazine, Andy said " There was a prayer list of people who were sick in some way and you'd pray for the person on top of that list until they died. I'll get the knives out for his increasing redundancy in future years. I know a lot of people out there are not gonna agree with me."Īndy certainly seemed quite reluctant to record the song at some point, though Andy's musical input was starting to diminish at this point. And it's just, when you're not part of it, it just seems very ridiculous, very funny. But they took that as, like, being very, very positive, that was "God's will" and "They've gone to somewhere better". One thing I often quoted is this thing called the "prayer list": every week they would sit and pray for people who were seriously ill, and you could guarantee that most of them, the majority of the people who they prayed for, would die. And when you're not involved in it, I think you really notice the hypocrisy and just the funny side to things. I was never a practicing Christian, although they were. Talking about the song, Martin said in 1986 : " Andy and Vince were regular churchgoers, and I just used to go along because they were my friends. I would think it was then sampled and reproduced from either the Emulator or Synclavier."). (When asked about it, Alan said " I can't really remember exactly - you are asking me about a sound made about 14 years ago! It sounds like it was a piece of speech put through a modular synth (possibly some other effects) and distorted. The last two minutes of the LP mix are an instrumental, minimal reprise of the song that repeats some of the instrumentation from Something To Do. Musically it's a classic state of tension/release with a coiled and precise verse that speeds up into a catchy chorus. Probably the most controversial song the band had released to this point, it's a fairly epic 6 minutes track with the main body of the track being a relatively straightforward ballad with some openly blasphemous lyrics. Last track on the album, and last single (in a double A side configuration with Somebody) is Blasphemous Rumours.
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