Violator is the seventh studio album by the English electronic band Depeche Mode, released on 19 March 1990 by Mute Records internationally and by Sire and Reprise Records in the United States. It was produced by the band and Mark Ellis, professionally known as Flood. Tracks for the album were recorded in Milan, Gjerlev, and London, where the album was mixed by François Kevorkian.
Accompanied by the singles "Personal Jesus", "Enjoy the Silence", "Policy of Truth" and "World in My Eyes", the album propelled the band into international stardom. Violator reached number two on the UK Albums Chart and became the band's first album to chart inside the top 10 of the Billboard 200, peaking at number seven. The album was supported by the World Violation Tour.
As of 2006, the album was estimated to have sold over 7.5 million copies worldwide, making it Depeche Mode's best-selling album. Many previous producers, engineers and staff who have worked with Depeche Mode over the years have named Violator as their favorite Depeche Mode record. It has been included on several lists of the greatest albums of the 1990s, and of all time.
Background Depeche Mode supported their previous album, Music for the Masses (1987), with the Music for the Masses Tour, which ran from late 1987 through mid-1988, and was documented on the live album 101, released in March 1989. Both Music for the Masses and 101 were successful and regarded as instrumental in propelling Depeche Mode into mainstream success in the United States, which up until that point had eluded them.
Music for the Masses had marked a turning point in both the band's sound and visual identity, with band member Alan Wilder's production influencing the music and Anton Corbijn's involvement in most of the accompanying music videos and promotional materials.
During a break after the Music for the Masses Tour had completed, band members Wilder and Martin Gore pursued their own solo projects, with Wilder releasing his Recoil project's album Hydrology (1988), and Gore releasing his debut solo recording, Counterfeit EP (1989).
Recording Selecting a co-producer In early 1989, Mute label owner and former co-producer with the band Daniel Miller suggested that the band reach out to Mark Ellis, known as "Flood", to help with their new material's production. Flood had some history with Depeche Mode, having remixed the B-side to their single "Shake the Disease" (1986) and producing Vince Clarke's Erasure band's two recent albums, Wonderland (1986) and The Circus (1987). Said Miller, "Flood is technically very good, very musical, and very open. He's not one of these: 'This is the way it has to be'. It’s more like: 'How can we do it differently?' He was in sync with the band's mentality – and my own." Gore and singer Dave Gahan both agreed that they wanted to work with a producer who would push them to produce their best music. Said Gahan, "We had reached a point [after Music for the Masses] where we couldn't go any further in that direction [of making music]. We knew we had to change our way of working. We had to go away and rethink everything." Said Wilder, "This scruffy, bespectacled, rather unlikely looking bloke rolled up, raided the fridge a couple of times, slouched down on the sofa, pontificated for a bit and thus – a new production team was born."
Pre-production and demos After agreeing to work with Flood, Wilder met with him in London for some brief pre-production work. Said Wilder, "Usually we begin the making of a record by having extensive pre-production meetings where we decide what the record will actually sound like, then go into a programming studio. This time we decided to keep all pre-production to a minimum." After three weeks in London, the entire band flew to Milan, Italy, for a seven-week session at Logic Studios.
The band had asked Martin Gore, their main songwriter, to bring in simpler, less complete demos to give the band an opportunity to more fully collaborate and work in the studio. Said band member Andy Fletcher, "Over the years Martin's studio at home got progressively better and better so the demos he was producing and giving to us were very good quality. ... We were basically re-recording Martin's demos with better sounds, better production and Dave's [Gahan's] vocals." Gore agreed, saying "Over the last five years I think we'd perfected a formula; my demos, a month in a programming studio, etc. etc. We decided that our first record of the '90s ought to be different."
Logic Studios
The time at Logic Studios was, according to Flood, when "everybody was feeling each other out, because they wanted to try working in a different way. The idea was to work hard and party hard and we all enjoyed ourselves to the full." Flood and Wilder worked well together, with Wilder appreciating Flood's ability to work with a sampler or a synthesiser to help with small details, and see the big picture when it came to their music." Depeche Mode were looking for a harder sound, and Flood had worked with both U2 and Erasure previously, saying "I'd been working with synth and rock bands. I'd felt that there was a way that the two forms of music could actually work together. In a way, Depeche [Mode] were the perfect band to work with that idea and methodology." With co-producer Flood, Wilder began a complementary working relationship, with Flood able to provide the technical know-how and Wilder working on the arrangements and song textures. "That's how we made the group work at that time", said Wilder, "by accepting that we all had different roles and not actually all trying to do the same thing. So we ended up with this unwritten agreement in the band, where we'd all throw together a few ideas at the beginning of a track. Then [Fletcher and Gore] would go away, and they'd come back after we'd worked on it for a while to give an opinion." Fletcher appreciated that Flood pushed the band to discard the rules that they'd been carrying for a few albums, saying Flood "said all our preconceived ideas were basically a lot of shit, and if you wanna use a guitar, you use a guitar." Gahan said that the band used more guitar on songs from this album than they had on any previous album, saying "musically, we'll take things the hard way round. ... If there's a certain part that lends itself to a guitar, we won't necessarily use a guitar for the sake of it. We'll try to find something else and we'll possibly come back to the guitar anyway. Picking up the guitar and playing it is the easy way out for us a lot of the time."
Although the band didn't get much recording done in Milan, the process did help the band and Flood coalesce around their new sound and working style. One track produced out of these sessions was from one of Gore's demos called "Personal Jesus". True to his word, Gore kept his demo very simple, just a beat and a melody played on his acoustic guitar. In the studio, Wilder and Flood sent the rest of the band away most of the time while they worked on the song. Said Wilder, "In the earlier years, everybody would be there [in the studio] with the result often being lots of chat and mucking around with little actual work being achieved. As time went on, we all realised that less people in the control room equaled more work done." Miller later suggested that this was the beginning of cracks in the band, with Wilder often irritated at other members of the band, who would wander into the control room with unwanted feedback before wandering off again. For the song, the band continued their tradition of building new samples for their music, recording people jumping on road cases for the 'stomping' sound used in the song.
Wilder noticed that Gahan was showing some increasingly unstable behavior during their time in Milan as Gahan's dabbling with drugs became more pronounced. Said Wilder, "I think Dave [Gahan] was increasingly living in his own world. The most unsettling thing was that his drug use adversely affected his personality, either through enhanced aggression or the loss of his greatest asset: his sense of humour. I think I [first] noticed it during the recording of Violator in Milan ... I remember, for no reason, he deliberately picked a fight with about ten locals just walking down the street. I was petrified, expecting to be knifed at any point, but somehow he always got away with that sort of behavior." Gahan would later say "It's no secret I've been drinking and using drugs for a long time – probably since I was about 12; popping a couple of my mum's phenobarbitones every now and then; hash; amphetamines; coke came along. Alcohol was always there, hand in hand with drugs." Gahan's drug use worsened in 1990, and by the end of 1990 he was regularly using heroin.
The band chose to release "Personal Jesus" as a single, with Flood saying it was partially chosen because "it stood out head and shoulders as a perfect track to say 'Here's Depeche Mode, but not as you know them.'" "Personal Jesus" was released on 29 August, 1989. The band loved the song, but was worried that it might struggle for airplay, given its lyrical content. Two of Depeche Mode's previous singles, "Master and Servant" and "Blasphemous Rumours", had caused controversies when some radio stations and refused to play them. Their fears were unfounded, however, and "Personal Jesus" went on to become Mute's best selling 12" single of all time up to that point, surpassing releases by artists such as Prince and Madonna. The single's success garnered the band an invitation to play the song on BBC's Top of the Pops. On the strength of the single's performance, its B-side, "Dangerous", charted at number 13 on the US Modern Rock Tracks Chart itself. After their seven weeks in Milan, Depeche Mode moved to Puk Recording Studios in Denmark, where they had mixed their album Music for the Masses, to record the rest of their new material.
Puk Studios
Sessions at Puk started in the middle of 1989, and by the end of August of that year, most of the rest of the album's tracks had been recorded there in sessions that Wilder later called "prolific". However, Fletcher was diagnosed with a form of depression stemming from the death of his sister a few years earlier, and as a result was absent for treatment for most of the sessions in Denmark.
The first track the band worked on at Puk was "World in My Eyes", although it was started during the Milan sessions at Logic Studios. Flood remembered that he wasn't happy with the track as it was initially made, and had mentioned that to Wilder and Gahan. The next morning, Gore and Fletcher came in to the studio and said the same thing; at that point they realised they had to start over, so Wilder and Flood spent half a day "just jamming out ideas". The track's bass line and melody came out of those sessions, and by the time the rest of the band returned, the track had completely changed. Flood said that after he and Wilder played the band the new version, the rest of the band looked a bit shocked. Gore later said that Wilder had been a great influence on the band, but "Flood in tandem with Wilder was a great team." Gore called the track "World in My Eyes" a very positive song: "It's saying that love and sex and pleasure are positive things." Worked on at both Logic and Puk, the track was ultimately finished in London during the sessions at The Church Studios.
The second track the band recorded at Puk was "Policy of Truth". They started with Gore's demo and started to riff, with Flood explaining that "we got the guitar riff together and the way the drums were programmed," and that this track, alongside "World in My Eyes", marked a shift in the band's attitude about how they'd approach their songs.
The song "Blue Dress", which Gore called "pervy", is simply about "watching a girl dress and realising that this is 'what makes the world turn.'"