A Broken Frame
A Broken Frame is the second studio album recorded by the English electronic music band Depeche Mode, working as a trio, and released on 27 September 1982 by Mute Records. The album was written entirely by Martin Gore and was recorded as a trio after the departure of Vince Clarke, who had left in December 1981 and formed Yazoo with singer Alison Moyet. Alan Wilder was hired in Clarke's place, initially as a touring musician only. Consequently, he was not involved with the recording of A Broken Frame, but was promoted to official band membership in October 1982, the month after the album's release.
The album reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart and was promoted by the singles "See You", "The Meaning of Love" and "Leave in Silence", all three of which reached the top 20 of the UK singles charts.
Background
Depeche Mode had released their first album Speak & Spell in October 1981 and after the subsequent tour was completed in early December, founding member Vince Clarke left the band. That same month, the remaining members of Depeche Mode, Martin Gore, Andrew Fletcher and Dave Gahan, went back to Blackwing Studios to record a new song, as they felt the pressure to continue the band after a string of successful singles, despite having lost its main songwriter. In addition, all three had quit their jobs or university, and none of them wanted to return to their old lives. Rather than write a new song immediately, they re-arranged and recorded a song Gore had written as a teenager called "See You". Producer Daniel Miller remembered that Gore's demo for the song was "very basic, just a melody on a Casio synth and Martin tapping the beat with his foot." This was in contrast to how Vince Clarke had a strong musical vision and direction during the Speak & Spell sessions, but the shortcomings of the demo were overcome by the band's enthusiasm and energy. A PPG Wave 2 synthesizer, purchased by Gore from his royalties, was used by the band for the first time in recording the song. Released on 29 January 1982 in the UK, "See You" went on to reach number 6 on the UK charts. To support the song, Depeche Mode embarked on the See You Tour, with shows in the UK, Europe and the US from January to May 1982. In January 1982, the band were already talking to the press about making a new album, with an article in Best magazine saying the new album would "be different. More mature. More personal. They want to talk about serious things. About life, death, and society. They want to be taken seriously."Hiring Alan Wilder
Although the band were initially hesitant to replace Clarke, their heavy tour commitments forced them to relent to pressure from their producer Daniel Miller, and to find a musician to play the tour, the band put an advertisement in the music magazine Melody Maker stating "Synth / Vocals needed for electronic pop group with UK & International commitments – must be under 21." Despite being 22 years old, musician Alan Wilder was hired as a result. The band needed someone who could play well, as Fletcher had said in an interview the previous year, "None of us play piano.... You'd have to go into it seriously, and we haven't got the time." Gahan recalled later that "we auditioned at Blackwing, and all these strange and wonderful characters showed up. And they were all dressed up to the nines, but couldn't play. And Alan came along and could play anything." Wilder, who had trained as a classical musician and was able to play flute, piano and brass instruments, admitted he didn't know much about electronic music when he auditioned, but he knew who Depeche Mode were before he decided to go and try out for the part. At the audition, he found that he could play along with the band immediately and easily, and since he was desperate for a job, he was happy to join. Wilder found Gahan, Fletcher and Gore to be very shy and, to avoid confrontation, the trio often asked Miller to deliver news, be it good or bad. Initially hired as a touring musician and paid a weekly wage, Wilder's first show with Depeche Mode was a warm-up gig at Croc's in Rayleigh, England, on 20 January 1982. Fans seemed to accept Wilder's place within the touring band quickly. Anne Swindell, Gore's girlfriend, noticed that fans were screaming Wilder's name at shows within the first month of him joining, saying "I'm glad they're screaming for Alan . It makes him feel more a part of it." Within a month, the band, without Wilder, returned to Blackwing Studios to record another song Gore had written when he was younger, "The Meaning of Love". As a way of explaining Wilder's exclusion from the sessions, Fletcher said in interviews that "at the moment he is a live session man. He just plays live for us, not in the studio, but that might change." Said Gahan, "I don't think it's right really, not yet, it's just like someone jumping in after you've been together for two years. And if he came in the studio now it would be hard for him to fit in." Released on 26 April 1982, "The Meaning of Love" reached number 12 on the UK charts.Recording
In July 1982, the trio went into the studio to begin work on more songs for their second album, A Broken Frame. Wilder, who had now been touring with the band for 6 months, had hoped to be a part of the album's recording, but as he was a paid touring musician, he was not invited to join. Said Wilder, "I'd done my bit and I thought I warranted involvement. I had something to contribute. They said no . The problem was that they had something to prove to themselves. The three of them didn't want the press to say they'd just roped in a musician to make things easier after Vince left. I was pretty upset, and there was ill-feeling from me about that." The band had delivered two pop songs already, "See You" and "The Meaning of Love", because they felt that's what was expected of them after their previous album. The first new song written for the album was "Leave in Silence", a darker and more experimental track than the previous songs. In an interview released in late August 1982, Gahan said "we've done eight tracks now and we're in the middle of the ninth with one more to go," adding "whereas the stuff on the last album was Euro macho dance music really, beaty synthesizer music, this album's a lot weightier." Said Gore, the new material is "getting away from dance music. It's not that you can't dance to it – it's just that the charts are getting too dance orientated. Our publishers advise us to write dance hits. In America they tell us we won't have a hit if we don't do a dance number, because the only way they can break a record through there is through the discos." Gore felt pressure as the band's sole songwriter, as he had only contributed two tracks to their previous album, one of which was an instrumental. In addition, the band saw the Vince Clarke's band Yazoo was having chart success with the singles from their album Upstairs at Eric's, "Only You", "Don't Go" and "Situation", all of which were released while Depeche Mode were in the studio working on A Broken Frame.Due to the mix of newly-written and re-arranged older songs like the first two singles, the sound of the album was described as "varied", with some "sugary pop songs" like "A Photograph of You" and some more "mature" recordings, like "The Sun & the Rainfall". Miller later recalled that "most of" the songs on A Broken Frame were older songs that Gore had written when he was younger. Gore later said that the band were "finding their feet" during this time as the track list was a collection of songs he had written in his teens combined with the new material he wrote in the studio in 1982. Of his writing, Gore said "I write about anything really, whatever it is I just exaggerate it."
Blackwing Studios had upgraded their recording booth to a 16-track desk, which allowed the songs of A Broken Frame to be recorded more traditionally than the "live" technique used for Speak & Spell. During the recording sessions, the band tried to incorporate sampled sounds into their music for the first time: for the sound of boots marching in "Shouldn't Have Done That", they recruited the band Blancmange, who were recording at the same studio, to march in front of microphones. Depeche Mode would continue sampling "found" sounds on their subsequent albums as well. Miller recalled that the process of production was quite different from the previous album, saying "It was almost like a blank sheet of paper, the songs were recorded in a different way because Vince had a very specific idea of what the song was going to end up sounding like, and Martin didn't really have that. It was more like, 'Here's the words, here's the melody. Let's figure it out.' Miller also believed that "some of the more experimental elements of the band came out in A Broken Frame, which I enjoyed. They were making pop records, but they, especially Martin, were into experimental music and that started to feed into tracks like 'Monument'." Explaining how the band used their synthesisers to get the drum tracks, Gore said "we've always used an ARP 2600 for the bass drum because we've never found a drum machine with a powerful enough bass drum sound. We run it through the sequencer. We like the snare sound on our Roland TR-808. Our Korg KR-55 also has quite a good snare."
Miller also said that the instrumental track "Nothing to Fear" gained its title from Gore, who was "reading some weird book during the making of the record, a book of prophecies or something and he looked up his birthdate and it said, 'Nothing to fear.' So that actually ended up being a track title, and it made him very optimistic about the future."