Some Great Reward 30

30 years ago today, the 4th Depeche Mode album, Some Great Reward was released. I don’t think it was considered a musical milestone at the time, and even today it’s not necessarily seen as a crucial point in their career, but looking back, it was probably the point where they stepped up a level after the initial success of their previous works.

The first single from the album, People Are People – released 6 months earlier – quickly became their biggest hit at the time, and their first ever chart-topper, spending 3 weeks at the #1 spot in West Germany. It’s also their highest charting single in the UK to this day, peaking at #4, which was matched by Barrel Of A Gun in 1997 and by Precious in 2005, but People Are People spent 5 weeks in the Top 10. Lest we forget, it also became their first hit in North America in March 1985 when the tour reached that continent, peaking at #13 on the Billboard 200 (quite an achievement for a band largely ignored by the regular radio stations, only bettered by Enjoy The Silence later) and it reached the Top 20 in Canada as well. The band’s not too fond of the song though – they stopped playing it during the Music For The Masses Tour, when it was still their biggest hit – but I still think it’s really special, and though I’m aware that commercial success is not the best indicator of quality, the fact that it was pretty much everywhere noticeably more successful than anything else they did around that time is worth noting.

Continuing on the subject of firsts, the album was their first one to have two UK Top 10 singles (Master And Servant peaked at #9), it was the first to include a “big” Martin-ballad (Somebody), which was also their first mostly acoustic song, it was their first album to be certified gold in the US, though it took more than two years to sell half a million copies there. The tour also saw them occasionally in very large, 10 000+ capacity venues, their first time at the Bercy in Paris and at Irvine Meadows in California for example. Also, they added a few dates in Eastern Europe at the very end of the tour in the summer of ’85, which wasn’t a common practice at the time to say the least, but it was important for them to go practically everywhere where they had an audience wanting to see them live.

Regardless of all these great achievements, they weren’t seen as proper big stars, judging from their absence from both Band Aid in December ’84 and Live Aid in July ’85, but they may have been used to being ignored by then, and I’m sure they didn’t lose sleep over those things.

To sum up in a way so awkward that could match the fashion and haircuts of the time, at the end of the day Some Great Reward came our way 30 years ago in the shape of this album, still enjoyable to this day.