‘Twas about time I came back to the backbone of this site: Depeche Mode. As part of the series of rereleases of their 12″ singles, they just put the boxes for “Black Celebration” and “Music For The Masses” out late last month. I was traveling, so I had to wait two weeks to finally get to savour them.

Let us get the elephant out of the room first. The mystery surrounding the singles taken from their first compilation: “Shake the Disease” and “It’s Called a Heart”. Specially the first one is a fan favorite. No one really knows why the band skipped them or where, when or even if they will be released. We were all being led to believe these rereleases would follow their remaster series from 2006/2007 where they were added as bonus tracks on the “Black Celebration” DVD. The band knows their fan base. I don’t believe for a second they don’t plan on releasing them at some point. But the label is also keeping it a secret. Even the David Bowie rereleases get some kind of statement when there’s a glitch in the matrix. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Starting with “Black Celebration”, this is the album that was the turning point for the band. From poppy melodies to “depressed mode”. You just can’t listen to “Stripped” and not imagine the reaction from the studio crew when they first played the final cut of the song. In fact, you can have that experience yourself if you happen to be in Berlin and book a tour of the legendary Hansa Studios. Depending on the availability of the mixing desk room, he can play this song through their speakers.

As a nice touch, they made one extra 12″ that didn’t exist – at least not in the UK – out of their first cassette single, a limited edition of “A Question of Lust”, the second single with Martin Gore on lead vocals. The booklet that came with the original single now became the inner sleeve. It was issued on vinyl in Germany in the 80′ (there’s even a colored edition that can be worth 3 digits), so maybe this 12″ is worth the entire box alone.

And the box finishes with the two 12″ singles for “A Question of Time”, which was originally released already by the end of the tour. You can read a very thorough story about it on David McElroy’s blog (aptly called “Almost Predictable. Almost). Highly recommended!

Less than one year later they were releasing the first single from their following album. Except the album was still far from being finished. “Strangelove” was a huge hit on the other side of the Atlantic. Back then the Brazilian charts used to follow whatever made an impact on the American charts. Depeche Mode had made a small dent in Brazil with “Just Can’t Get Enough”, but slowly fell under the furniture of their local label. It all changed because of “Strangelove”. The local division of Warner Music took over, reissued their entire back catalog and the song was an instant hit. I was 5 years old at the time and I still remember it playing on the radio. For many fans, this is their favorite DM song, or at least the one that got them into the fandom. But the band was not so fond of the 7″ version and remixed the song for the album, based on the Blind Mix of the song. I’m a fan of several remixes of this song: the Maxi Mix, the Blind Mix and the Pain Mix. The latter even made  its way into a soap opera soundtrack. The ultimate achievement an international artist could have at the time in Brazil. They’re all in this box. The instrumental B-sides “Pimpf” (or its alternate version “Fmnip”) and “Agent Orange” are very experimental. I quite love both. My mother did not. She said “Pimpf” caused her nausea and agony and I was not allowed to play it loud whenever she was nearby. It still is a challenging song to anyone’s ears. DM fans, however, loved it. The band used it at the intro for their shows of the “Music For The Masses tour”. It even has its own video. Would you dare watch it all the way through?

However, I don’t remember the following singles getting the same attention in Brazil. I do know the label tried to push them to the radios. They issued promos and everything. Because of a catchy cigarette ad on television that had a bluesy version of “Route 66” at the time, and because the label realized that DM also had their own cover version of the song, they put it as a bonus track on their reissue of “The Singles 81-85”, which in fact was just called “The Singles”, without the 81-85 part since DM’s cover version was officially released in 1988. You’ll find plenty remixes of “Route 66” in this box set. My favorite is the onde done by The Beatmasters. It’s 100% americana, just like the song itself.

Let me just skip to the final odd single: “Little 15”. Even the catalog number for this is different from the rest. Just “12Little15”, instead of the usual “Bong” numbers. There was a rumor this single was “only released in France” which is not true. It had a UK release, along several other European ones. It was the band that was not so keen in releasing it as a single, but went along with it. I agree it has null commercial potential, but a video was made and the most beautiful B-side of a 12″ is hidden here: Stjarna, which means “star” in Icelandic (and has cognates in other north germanic languages, such as Stjärna in Swedish). It is followed by another very odd song with also zero commercial appeal to the average DM fandom: Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Sonata Nº 14 In C#M “Moonlight Sonata”“. Rumor has it the band secretly recorded Alan just practicing this on the piano without telling him. As a way of excusing themselves, the song is rightfully credited on the liner notes like this: “performed by Alan Wilder”. Still, it’s the experimentation that is the secret of their success. That’s whyI love this single, both A and B sides.

You can order these and the previous 12″ box sets here. This is a limited run. You won’t find them on retail stores a couple of years from now.

Daniel Cassus in front of the Olimpiastadion in Berlin

I found the original picture that I chose as my profile picture for the takeover. This was moments before the Delta Machine Tour show in the summer of 2013.

I wasn’t living in Berlin yet. That was 2 months later. I had travelled to Europe to compensate for all the tours I’d missed. I planned to see the boys in Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris, where I’d watch the show from the front of stage area.

Back to the story of the picture. I was walking from the subway station to the stadium and, as I passed by the parking lot in front of the stadium, I asked a stranger that was also walking behind me to take a picture. Glad a few filters made it look much better for my instagram which you can see here (yes, I had to scroll down my instagram feed until 2013 to find it). Probably today I would have tweaked it in a better way. But, as they say, “lights on, switch on”.

I was just thinking the other day I’ve been a fan for 20 years now. I’d pin point my turning point sometime in January, 1999. I had seen the “Only When I Lose Myself” video and the 1998 Cologne show on MTV Latin to death. MTV Brazil was always late in comparison with its Spanish speaking sister – and coincidence or not, Dicken Schrader used to work for MTV Latin and VH1 at the time. Just in case you’ve arrived here out of nowhere, Dicken (and his kids) were “Day 3” on the Facebook Takeover, right after me.

There was no blue print of the takeover, so I decided to ramble about those 18 years of Depeche Mode in my life, how listening to “The Singles 86>98” on the road non-stop brainwashed me into a devotee. Well, Moby’s “Play” and Erasure’s “Pop! The first 20 hits” also helped carve Mute’s space in my musical taste.

I also misread the email with the instructions about the word count of each post. I ended up having to cut some 80% of what I wrote. I have the originals saved here, but I’ll give it some thought if I should publish them or not. In the meantime, here is my second post.

Is this thing on?… Testing, 1, 2, 3. Testing.

Ok (thumbs up), all good.

Well, where do I start?

Some of you may know me, some may not; some may know me personally, some only virtually (although I do promise that I do exist and I’m not a robot, according to all my CAPTCHA tests so far). Well, either way, you at least know my name ‘cause it’s written on this page, on the URL that bears my name and even written on my profile picture of Facebook (a social media that used to exist in the early 21st century and had almost engulfed the entire internet, in case you’re reading this in the distant future 10 years from now). But I will leave introductions for later because the story is more importante than the storyteller, even though the storyteller is part of it.

Back to my question from the first paragraph, I guess I can start with an email I got on the evening of Mar 16th, 2017. Yes, two years ago. It was a breathtaking message I wasn’t expecting to receive at all. In fact, I nearly left to read it the next day, because I wasn’t on my computer all day and I set up my devices to not notify me of emails all the time, but only when I open the mail app. Except for the computer. It was already early evening when I went to check something which I don’t even remember what it was anymore (it was not porn, I swear). The email notification showed up and once I started reading the first lines of that email, my heart started beating faster. I had to read it a zillion times because some strong catch words would draw my entire attention and I couldn’t finish reading it properly. It was like speed reading, except I couldn’t focus on the entire message only on the words: DEPECHE MODE, GUEST OF THE BAND, ALBUM LAUNCH CONCERT, FAN TAKEOVER.

Once I was on tranquilizers, I started to read it calmly. For privacy and contractual reasons, I won’t copy-paste the email, nor name anyone else other than those who agreed being mentioned here and the celebrities involved.

Since today marks the 2nd anniversary of when my Facebook Takeover took place and I became a takeoveree (thank you, Jenna, for the great name), I decided to launch this website which will go into some details, backstage stories, a lot about what happened since then and a few surprises that were even more breathtaking than just the takeover itself. Hang on tight because I’m about to take you on a trip.

And in case you’re wondering, this was my very first post during my takeover.