Tune of the Week: Depeche meets Sherwood

Hello and welcome to a new weekly feature on the site: the Tune of the Week. Here we will be focusing on some influences on the Spacey King sound as well as some good, clean fun.

This week we shine a light on a bit of an oddity from the Depeche Mode catalog. By the time “Master and Servant” came out in May of 1984 Depeche had racked up seven top 20 singles in the UK. With this success came more product, including bonus 12”s for singles. In this case they decided to take a chance and recruited UK reggae pioneer and studio wizard Adrian Sherwood to not only provide a hardcore remix for “Master and Servant”, but also this demented take on their previous smash “People Are People”.

“People Are People” is an incredibly dense production, with over two dozen layers of samples and sounds. Sherwood takes a few of these a intersperses them with sound experiments he had been conjuring for contemporary African Head Charge productions. Not only does this predict his subsequent industrial productions for the likes of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but also predates the 90s remix culture wherein artists such as Aphex Twin and Brian Eno would almost completely ignore the original material and provide a much more abstract interpretation of a song.

BOP BOP BOP!