Music for the Masses

Miller stepped back from the studio after the tension of the Black Celebration sessions, and Jones was not involved either. The band hired David Bascombe, who had been a recording engineer on Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer and Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair. In practice Bascombe worked more as an engineer, and Alan Wilder was described as the person steering the ship. Martin Gore wrote demos at his home in London, and the band re-recorded them with better sound and Dave Gahan's vocals.

They started around September 1986 at Studio Guillaume Tell, just outside Paris, a converted theatre where they sampled a grand piano and old orchestral bass drums and timpani. After six weeks they shot the video for Strangelove and moved to Konk in London. They then mixed the album at Puk Recording Studios in Denmark, where Miller joined for the final mix. The band kept their rules of no presets, no hi-hats and no chords except those assembled from separate monophonic parts, and each sample was meant to be original and used once, though almost every rule was broken at least once. It was their first album recorded entirely digitally.

Songs

Never Let Me Down Again opens the album. Strangelove was the first single, and Wilder found its single mix cluttered, so the album version was remixed using one of Miller's Puk remixes as a guide. Wilder arranged Little 15 after the band saw the film A Zed & Two Noughts, taking his cue from Michael Nyman's score. On I Want You Now an accordion was played with its keys open to give a breathing sound. The closer, Pimpf, was meant as a B-side to Strangelove and became the last track after the band liked Bascombe's mix. Wilder said he had been listening to a lot of Philip Glass.

Title, cover and release

The title began as a joke. Fletcher said everyone was telling the band to make more commercial music, and Gore called the title a joke on how uncommercial the album was. The cover shows a megaphone set in an unlikely landscape, an idea Wilder credited to Martyn Atkins, who drove to the Peak District to photograph it. The album came out on 28 September 1987 and reached number 10 in the UK, number 35 in the US and number 2 in West Germany. It was certified platinum in the US in February 1991 and is estimated to have sold more than 5.5 million copies worldwide.

The tour ended with a sold-out show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on 18 June 1988, filmed for 101. The band also played East Berlin on 7 March 1988. Contemporary reviews were mixed. NME's Jane Solanas singled out Never Let Me Down Again, and Mojo's Danny Eccleston later called the album "their first rock'n'roll album, in a way". Pitchfork's review of the reissue said the Depeche Mode of this album brought together a rabid audience of trendy coastal kids and middle-American teens. It appears in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and at number 75 on Slant Magazine's list of the best albums of the 1980s.