Songoftheday 4/17/14 - It's obvious you hate me though I've done nothing wrong, I've never even met you so what could I have done?...

Depeche Mode - "People Are People"
from the album Some Great Reward (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #13 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10

Today's Song of the Day comes from the British new wave group Depeche Mode, who started out in the beginning of the 1980's after schoolmates from Essex and friends Vince Clarke, Andrew Fletcher, and Martin Gore recruited singer David Gahan. After hooking up with electronic music pioneer Daniel Miller, who was starting Mute Records, they released their first single "Dreaming Of Me" in 1981, which was a minor hit at #57 on the UK singles chart, and would eventually make the American dance club chart in Billboard magazine as well. Their next 7", the frenetic "New Life", did greatly better, almost reaching the top-10 in Britain at #11. While they released their first album Speak & Spell, their third effort, "Just Can't Get Enough", finally cracked the top-10 at #8, though at the cost of lead songwriter Vince Clarke, who left the Mode just as they were getting their legs, first to form Yaz with Alison Moyet, then with Andy Bell for Erasure.

The seemingly shy Gore took over most of the songwriting duties from then on in, and their second album, A Broken Frame, showed a real musical progression to more expansive soundscapes, even though first single "See You", which went to #6 in the UK, was based on the simplistic keyboard melodies that dominates the first album, though with an ominous minor key to start. By the time their third album came around, the band, with added keyboardist Alan Wilder, were even more developed in their lyrics as well as organic in their factory-style production sound, and the high point of the album, "Everything Counts", matched their peak at #6 in the UK while making the top-20 of the American dance chart for the first time.

In 1984 the band recorded what would be there true breakthrough outside of England, their fourth studio set Some Great Reward. The first single from the project, "People Are People", was an atypical straightforward mantra on human existence that was able to cut through the din of American pop radio at the time...

"People Are People" became Depeche Mode's first American pop hit, reaching the top-20 on the Hot 100 in August of 1985, while surprisingly only making it to #44 on the dance club play chart, since it was a major floor-filler back in the day. Internationally, the single topped the singles chart in Germany, as they went top-ten in places like Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In their native England, the single reached #4, which shockingly (again) is the highest they would ever be on the British singles chart (they would tie that mark two more times way later on).

Although it would take another five years for the quartet to return to the US top-40, their popularity in the States far surpassed their chart fortunes. In that time they would be huge, filling stadiums and winning converts like myself to their catalog of music.

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Here's the band live with the song...

...and another concert take from London in 1986...

In 2004, drag queen star RuPaul covered "People Are People", taking it to #10 on the Dance Club Play chart in Billboard...

That same year, experimental rock act A Perfect Circle also recorded a version of the song...

Up tomorrow: a soul family inquires on her whereabouts.