Episode
Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Depeche Mode
- Podcast
- New Zealand Net Radio
- Published
- Aug 12, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3660
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.nznetradio.net.nz/podcast/#ep-86
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Summary
Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I’m joined by the endlessly knowledgeable Leon from Adelaide (South Australia) to take on one of the most influential bands Britain has ever produced: Depeche Mode. Their story begins in Basildon, Essex, at the turn of the 1980s, where a group of school friends — Vince Clarke, Martin Gore and Andrew “Fletch” Fletcher — started making music, before a young Dave Gahan, overheard singing Bowie’s “Heroes,” completed the line-up. Named after a French fashion magazine (Dépêche mode — roughly “fashion dispatch”), they began as bright synth-pop upstarts and grew, album by album, into the dark, sensual, stadium-filling pioneers of electronic music we know today — a band who took the humble synthesizer and made it sound like sin and salvation at once. Because Leon wanted the full sweep, this episode carries a little extra history — right back to how a single OMD B-side first set Vince Clarke on the path to synthesizers. His five picks are really five different Depeche Modes: “Photographic,” from the 1981 Vince Clarke-penned debut Speak & Spell (and the band’s very first recording); “My Secret Garden” from 1982’s A Broken Frame, the moment Martin Gore took over the songwriting and Leon’s favourite Depeche Mode song of all; the imperial “Behind the Wheel” from 1987’s Music for the Masses, the album version with that irresistible bassline; “Precious” from 2005’s Playing the Angel, a tender letter Martin wrote to his children during his divorce; and “People Are Good” from 2023’s Memento Mori, the band’s first record as a duo after the loss of Fletch. From synth-pop debut to elegiac farewell — forty-plus years in five songs. Tune in and let Leon be your guide. 12 August 2026