DEPECHE MODE - PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE

Released : March 12, 1984

Charted:  UK: #4    US: #13 

"People Are People" is a song released as the lead single from the band’s 1984 fourth studio album “Some Great Reward”. This was Depeche Mode's breakthrough hit in the United States; they had several chart hits in the UK to this point. 

Written by band member Martin Gore, this song is a call for people to put aside their differences and work toward unity. Gore said on Record Mirror: "Although it's a song about racism, that's just one example of people not getting on. It's about all sorts of differences between people." This song I t's unusual for Depeche Mode because the lyrics are so blatant and leave little to the imagination. The song earned them a great deal of freedom, allowing them to create more music on their terms.

Martin Gore told in 1986: Usually we spend two or three days before recording just sampling sounds. Then we sample as we go. If somebody has a good idea, we just stop recording and do some sampling. Sometimes we use old favourites — like one sample which we first used on 'People Are People'. It’s a Hank Marvin-type guitar sound, an acoustic guitar plucked with a 50-pfennig piece. We’ve used that three or four times. 

Gareth Jones told in 2007: Martin made a demo for 'People Are People' — it was also the first time the band had done a pre-production session — and this had one ambient sound that he'd recorded with a Walkman on an airplane; a bit of laughter and noise. He looped this up on the demo, and we decided to somehow recreate that sound, but it was impossible to recreate because it was a 'found sound', full of texture and rhythm, so we ended up using what was on the demo.

Dave Gahan told in 2017: This was the first song of ours that made a dent, really, into popular radio. We were using all these tape loops to create rhythms and the technology was quite advanced, but it wasn't anything like it is today, the things that you can do. It's not one of Martin's particular favorites, this one, and I don’t think we've done it live since the mid '80s. It's quite literal, very poppy, all major chords — something Martin doesn't like so much these days. But the song really propelled us into a new cosmos at that particular time.