Black Celebration

Black Celebration
Depeche Mode studio album
Publication (s)	March 17, 1986
admission	November 1985 - January 1986
Label (s)	Mute Records
Genre (s)	Electro Wave , Dark Wave , New Wave , Synth Pop
Title (number)	11 (LP)
running time	41:54 (LP)
occupation	Dave Gahan Martin Gore Alan Wilder Andrew Fletcher
production	Depeche Mode, Gareth Jones, Daniel Miller, David Bascombe
Studio (s)	Westside, London and Hansa Mischraum , Berlin
Location (s)	London, Berlin
chronology Some Great Reward (1984) Black Celebration Music for the Masses (1987)
Single releases February 10, 1986 Stripped April 14, 1986 A Question of Lust August 11, 1986 A question of time October 22, 1986 But not tonight

Chart positions Explanation of the data

Albums

Black Celebration   DE 2 March 31, 1986 (33 weeks)   AT 26th 05/15/1986 (4 weeks)   CH 1 03/30/1986 (18 weeks)   UK 4th 03/29/1986 (11 weeks)   US 90 04/26/1986 (26 weeks)

Singles

Stripped   DE 4th 03/03/1986 (14 weeks)   CH 8th 03/02/1986 (10 weeks)   UK 15th 02/22/1986 (8 weeks) A Question of Lust   DE 8th 05/05/1986 (17 weeks)   CH 12 05/18/1986 (7 weeks)   UK 28 04/26/1986 (7 weeks) A question of time   DE 4th 08/25/1986 (13 weeks)   CH 9 09/07/1986 (7 weeks)   UK 17th 08/23/1986 (7 weeks)

Black Celebration is the fifth studio album by British pop band Depeche Mode . Like its two predecessors, it was produced in the Hansa Studios in Berlin and also by Westside Records, London .

style

Black Celebration is also one of the darkest and most melancholy Depeche Mode albums. According to the title, German “black mass”, the band said goodbye to the pop synth sounds of the early years and instead tended more and more towards the dark wave environment. Due to the arrangement of the partially merging songs, the album is reminiscent of a concept album .

Due to the less popular style, Black Celebration and its singles could not match the chart successes of their predecessor internationally, but at least in Germany all singles reached top 10 positions, the album reached number two.

Track list

1. Black Celebration - 4:57
2. Fly on the Windscreen (Final) - 5:19
3. A Question of Lust - 4:21
4. Sometimes - 1:53
5. It Doesn't Matter Two - 2:49
6. A Question of Time - 4:09
7. Stripped - 4:17
8. Here Is the House - 4:16
9. World Full of Nothing - 2:47
10. Dressed in Black - 2:32
11. New Dress - 3:42
12. Breathing in Fumes - 6:07 ¹
13. But Not Tonight (Extended) - 5:13 ¹
14. Black Day - 2:36 ¹

¹ These titles are bonus tracks on the later released CD.

All lyrics are from Martin Gore, he wrote Black Day together with Alan Wilder and Daniel Miller. Martin Gore sings four pieces on Black Celebration ( A Question of Lust , Sometimes , It Doesn't Matter Two , World Full of Nothing ) - more than any other Depeche Mode album. The later CD version also included Black Day , an acoustic version of Black Celebration sung by Gore . Dave Gahan sings the remaining pieces.

US version:

1. Black Celebration - 4:57
2. Fly On The Windscreen (Final) - 5:19
3. A Question of Lust - 4:21
4. Sometimes - 1:53
5. It Doesn't Matter Two - 2:50
6. A Question of Time - 4:11
7. Stripped - 4:17
8. Here Is The House - 4:17
9. World Full of Nothing - 2:48
10. Dressed in Black - 2:33
11. New Dress - 3:45
12. But Not Tonight - 4:15

Single releases

• Stripped - February 10, 1986
• A Question of Lust - April 13, 1986
• A Question of Time - August 11, 1986

After the experience with Master and Servant and its provocative text, Stripped was not published in the USA. Instead, But Not Tonight appeared there ; Stripped was included as a B-side on the single.

For Stripped and A Question of Lust the then unknown Flood produced remixes for the first time . Flood later produced their albums Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion with Depeche Mode .

The video for the single A Question of Time is the band's first collaboration with Anton Corbijn , who has shot numerous videos and designed album covers and sets for them to this day.

Setlist of the Black Celebration Tour 1986

1. Christmas Island / Stripped (Intro)
2. Black Celebration
3. A question of time
4. Fly On The Windscreen
5. Shake the disease
6. Leave in silence
7. It's called a heart
8. Everything Counts
9. • It doesn't matter two
   • Somebody
10. A Question of Lust
11. Here is the House (only played three times during the tour)
12. Blasphemous Rumors / Somebody
13. New dress
14. Stripped
15. Something to Do
16. Master and Servant
17. Photographic
18. People Are People
19. Boys Say Go!
20. Just Can't Get Enough
21. More than a party

Re-release

On 23 March 2007, a re-release was published by Black Celebration as SACD and DVD. In addition to the eleven original album songs in multi-channel sound and the documentary Depeche Mode 1985–86: "The songs aren't good enough, there aren't any singles and it'll never get played on the radio", it also contains the following bonus tracks :

• Black Celebration (Live in Birmingham, April 1986)
• A Question of Time (Live in Birmingham, April 1986)
• Stripped (Live in Birmingham, April 1986)
• Shake the disease
• Flexible
• It's called a heart
• Fly on the windscreen
• But not tonight
• Breathing in Fumes
• Black Day
• Christmas Island

Trivia

• Black Celebration is the third of four Depeche Mode albums whose title is taken from lyrics (the others are Construction Time Again , Some Great Reward and Playing the Angel ). However, it is the only one that contains a song of the same name.
• The voice at the beginning of Black Celebration belongs to Daniel Miller . He says "a brief period of rejoicing" ( a brief moment of joy ) and is quoting from Winston Churchill's speech on the surrender of the German Reich on May 8, 1945.
• About the piece New Dress Martin Gore said later: "I regret this song to have written. In the song of the Princess of Wales, I accuse the Princess of Wales quite bluntly of just walking around in beautiful new clothes in complete ignorance while the country sinks into chaos around her. At that time I knew little about her social commitment. Little did I know that when I wrote this song in the mid-1980s, she was the only member of the royal family interested in becoming a patron of future AIDS foundations that didn't even exist in Britain at the time. I didn't know she was an opponent of fox hunting. Little did I know that she was taking her three-year-old son William with her to the homeless shelters to show him that it was also part of the country he was to become king of. I didn't know anything about her. I did her profoundly injustice with New Dress . "
• The song Fly on the Windscreen has already been released as the B-side of the single It's Called a Heart , but has been revised again for Black Celebration ("final" version). In the US series Miami Vice he ran in the chase in the episode El Viejo .
• In 1998 Rammstein produced a cover version of Stripped for the Depeche Mode tribute album For the Masses and released the song as a single. It reached number 14 in the German single charts.
• There is a mastering error on the first American CD version. At the beginning of A Question of Time there is a repetition of the intro.

Web links

• Black Celebration , Stripped , A Question of Lust and A Question of Time on the official band homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Depeche Mode in the German charts on OfficialCharts.de
2. ↑ Depeche Mode in the Austrian charts on austriancharts.at
3. ↑ Depeche Mode in the Swiss charts on Hitparade.ch
4. ↑ Depeche Mode in the Official UK Charts (English)
5. ↑ billboard.com: Depeche Mode on the US Billboard 200 album charts
6. ↑ Text of Churchill's speech at Wikisource (English)
7. ↑ Q Magazine 5/1995
8. ↑ musicline.de: Rammstein in the German single charts ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.