Robbed Hit of the week 4/25/16 - Depeche Mode's "Strangelove"...

"Strangelove" - Depeche Mode
from the album Music For The Masses (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #76 (in 1987), #50 (in 1988)

This week's 'robbed hit' comes from the British new wave band Depeche Mode, who had garnered a fanbase large enough to fill the Rose Bowl stadium, but was still a musical delicacy on American pop radio. They managed to break through in the summer of 1985 with the top-20 hit "People Are People", but were passed over by stations on their (in my opinion best) album Black Celebration the following year. In 1987, the group put out the ambitiously-titled Music For The Masses album, and the first single was the Bond-esque dance track "Strangelove". While the song became their first #1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart in the U.S., and peaked at #16 in their native Britain, it pooped out at #76 on the American pop Hot 100.

After a couple more singles from Music..., including a reworked version of album track "Behind The Wheel" mixed with "Route 66" that was pretty popular and made it to the middle of the pop chart in America, they (or, rather, Mute Records) brought back "Strangelove" to the States, this time in a remix done by cut-and-paste masters Bomb the Bass, who had a top-10 British hit with "Beat Dis" that year...

This time around, "Strangelove" did a bit better, but stopped short of the American Top-40 at the halfway point on the Hot 100 in October of 1988. The new mixes re-appeared on the dance chart at #24.

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Here's the band performing "Strangelove" in their legendary concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena...

...and again, from a show in 2009...

...lastly, when the new remixes were released on 12" the B-side, "Nothing", also made the dance chart as a tag-along, but it's just as much a worthy part of their work...