Depeche Mode ended the 80s as one of the most successful bands of that decade, but everything was about to ramp up significantly. Their seventh album Violator, released in March 1990, would make them global superstars, a record that sold millions upon millions of copies and spawned some of the Basildon group’s most enduring hits. It was the sound of a band at their majestic peak. “Violator is a perfect 10,” their late keyboardist Andy “Fletch” Fletcher told me when I interviewed them back in 2017. “It’s a perfect 10 record.”
Fletch wasn’t wrong, and their masterpiece of an album was preceded with a single equally as flawless. It is 35 years in early February since the release of Enjoy The Silence, a song that hasn’t aged a jot in the intervening three and a half decades, an anthem that melded their minor-chord mournfulness with the euphoria of house music and soaring synth lines, a trailblazing electro-rock all-timer.
