depeche mode | "here is the house" | black celebration | 1986
with teenage angst and anger came teenage depression and romanticism. my therapist through high school was music and the first sounds sympathetic to my melancholy that i latched onto came from depeche mode.
now if there is anyone out there reading this, you may be thinking, “waaaaiiit a minute. he said he was into the obscure alternative stuff. depeche mode was an 80s staple.” but if you’re thinking that you must have grown up west of denver or been in college in the 80s. in high school in upstate new york, if you liked a band with a french name that used mostly “synthesizers” you were either artistically disturbed or gay, and most likely both. either way, high school peers would not be comfortable with your presence and dm was certainly not a staple. ignorant of dm’s popularity in europe and california and japan, we few and isolated new york fans felt so superior to our van halen loving peers.
stephanie workman was my first girlfriend when i was 12. her older brother (are you seeing a pattern?) was into depeche mode. therefore she was. therefore i should have been too. but at 12 i was still rockin’ out to dire straits and believing kasey kasum’s wicked lies.
but by the time i turned 14 i had matured considerably and was practically post-graduate in my tastes. i asked steph to hook me up with that band with a french name that she made me listen to on a dc temple trip when we were “going out.” my tastes had matured and a musical romance was born that would last until i left high school.
