Halo: The Story Behind Depeche Mode's Classic Album Violator

Product Information

Written by uber-fans Kevin May and David McElroy, with Halo we find ourselves shadowing the band in the studio, on an intense, pivotal worldwide tour and on the sets of arty Super 8 vignettes. It was difficult having the patience to accept the music industry operates at much slower level than other industries I’m used to writing about! I then had a very serious mountain biking accident, which completely knocked my physical and mental energy levels for about a year.

The blog focusses on Depeche Mode and is especially known for The Global Spirit Tour Project which saw David publish a fan-written review of all 130 concerts on Depeche Mode’s 2017/18 Global Spirit Tour, three of which were written by his co-author, Kevin.The event was broadcast live on KROQ with Richard Blade interviewing the band before the doors opened at 9pm.

So when you’re asking people to recollect something that happened in a studio in Milan in 1989, you shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t remember! Recorded in England, Denmark and Italy between May and September 1989, Depeche Mode’s seventh studio album ‘Violator’ was a landmark record beloved by fans and universally regarded as the band’s creative highpoint. This period in the band's history also found them forging a deeply trusted and influential partnership with photographer and designer Anton Corbijn, often viewed as the fifth member of Depeche Mode at this time. The trick to any new book or review about an acclaimed body of work from the past is to uncover previously untold stories.

While reading this fragment, I was simultaneously browsing Mute A Visual Document From 1978 -> Tomorrow (pp. If not for this album, probably I wouldn’t dive deep into the in depeche MODE’s music as much as it happened after 1989. The band would rarely conduct interviews as a four-piece, primarily to save time rather than (at this stage) because they'd fallen out with one another. We are hoping to release translated versions in a number of languages in addition to the English language version. The status of those shows fell into legend as a result of no officially sanctioned concert footage ever being released.

And I think Flood and Alan Wilder in particular wanted to push that idea forward, so they introduced real instruments. Produced by the band with the influential studio guru Flood and mixed by the legendary François Kevorkian, ‘Violator’ is viewed as a hugely groundbreaking body of work by countless musicians and DJs, such was its progressive synthesis of electronic, rock, dance and pop music. On one hand many of the arrangements were fantastic – Everything Counts or Never Let Me Down Again, on the other hand so many songs got the arrangements that didn’t work properly, like Enjoy the Silence (at least didn’t age well). I think the ‘World Violation’ has gained its legendary status simply because people don’t have a decent visual recording of it. People have very sketchy memories and that is not because they are being loyal or they’re nervous about revealing something, it’s because at the end of that day, it is something that happened 25 years ago… a quarter of a century!

Jim Trenton was present too with a Request Video camera crew and their footage shows just how frantic events became as the evening proceeded.