Shame

Shame is the sixth track on Construction Time Again, Depeche Mode's third album, released by Mute on August 22, 1983 as STUMM 13. Martin Gore wrote it, and Dave Gahan and Gore sing it. It was never a single, and it has no chart position of its own. The original is 3:51 and the 2007 Collectors Edition lists 3:52; MusicBrainz also lists a 5.1 mix at 3:50.

Daniel Miller and Depeche Mode produced the album, with Gareth Jones engineering. It was recorded in mid-1983 at The Garden, John Foxx's studio in London, and mixed in July 1983 at Hansa in West Berlin; the fan wiki dmlive gives the mastering as by Christian Stegmaier. The players across the album are Andy Fletcher, Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Alan Wilder; per-track instrument credits for Shame were not found.

What the song is about

No direct statement from Gore about Shame turned up. For the album as a whole, he told the NME in September 1983 about the trip to Thailand behind it: all the hotels there were full of business people who treated people as if they were nothing, and what he hated about big companies was that people just did not seem to matter. Those words are about the album's origin and were not tied to this song by Gore. The fan wiki notes that handwritten lyrics attributed to Gahan suggest a working title of Stupid.

According to the same fan wiki, the song has been performed 125 times in all, including a version at Hammersmith on October 8, 1983, with live recordings from Milan on March 6, 1984, Basel on November 30, 1984 and Hamburg on December 14, 1984. The Basel version is on the 1986 single A Question of Lust, on X2 and on Black Celebration: The 12" Singles. Gore reportedly played flute during Shame on the 1983 to 1984 tour, a detail seen only in a search summary. The upload on hypersongs is the auto-generated Depeche Mode - Topic audio of the album recording.