Review: Depeche Mode, The Best Of, Volume 1

The new Bond film premiered last night in London. More on that later. What was missing on the red carpet was a band: Depeche Mode. Somehow, the Bond producers never got it - there has never been a group whose music so perfectly meets the special needs of their franchise - whose every song has always fused sex, violence, technical precision and strange passion - in short, pop songs for the age of everyday psychopathology.

Perhaps what makes almost every one from critic to mogul to man in the street, in the UK, somehow underestimate DM is that, in a secular climate, their heat is partially generated by the frisson of Deep South Bible Belt spanking.

"Personal Jesus" is a good place to start. It opens their best of (18 tracks, only one new, "Martyr). The song broke DM in America in a way that has never happened, say, for Robbie Williams (a blessing). It became the template for later Depeche Mode songs, even albums, and remains their most striking and frankly disturbing work - DM meet the devil at the cross-roads and erect a cross instead - it seems they've tried to sell their soul and eat it too. This Kraft-Ebbing / Kraftwerk / Good Works mix makes DM strictly unique - no one else crawls to Calvary on knees and wearing a gas mask.

Songs like "Master and Servant" and "Strangelove" - sublime hymns to the deviant uses of language and the body, expose and also perversely endorse, the complex relationships between desire, faith, sin, pain, power, love and redemption.

It's never been entirely clear, as in "Shake The Disease", whether, like Kierkegard, their negative theology is mostly based on fear, or trembling - or either / or. Steeped in the erotic gap that opens when religion and rubber intersect, they propose a gnostic journey that travels to the One via the Many. Depeche Mode wittily festishize (as Donne did) the way that church and sexual beloved can be praised in equal terms - and both know that sometimes love is not enough.

Is this a seamless, delightful listening experience, say like the albums Violator or Music for the Masses, their masterpieces? No. But it does represent an impressive 25-year-old career (!) and establish a solid canon, and thus a basis for later serious interpretation and study of work that deserves the attention accorded to Joy Division or Madonna, two other decadent, intelligent and often religiose acts; indeed, DM find themselves exactly between those two thieves (one saved) on the spectrum of style and strategy.

A vaguely jarring schism has opened, between their earlier material, which is lighter, optimistic and pop-oriented ("People Are People") and their sordid, sleazy latter-day Texas-synth pop, which of course swaggers with a crucifix between the teeth like a tooth pick. What emerges is that later singles and minor hits, like "Dream On" and "Suffer Well" are not simply poor cousins to the major songs, but actually compare favourably.

Their tastes may be catholic and their lifestyles hedonistically protestant, but at heart Depeche are lost souls, aiming to find truth, beauty and pleasure's release somewhere below heaven, just west of Death Valley. One day Bond may realize they were his salvation all along.

Four specs out of Five.