A hymn that refused to stay seated
A guitar figure, unusually naked for this group, walks in before the drums decide to be a club. Dave Gahan does not soar. He states. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm, and the melody treats that claim as both a vow and a flirtation. Enjoy the Silence, the single that opened the public life of Violator in 1990, is a devotional with a kick drum. The pads glow at the edges. Nothing begs. The quiet in the title is the one thing the arrangement will not grant.
Martin Gore wrote it as a slow ballad, sat at a harmonium, a small wounded song about the relief of not speaking. He brought it to sessions that Depeche Mode were making with Flood, moving between Logic in Milan and Puk in Denmark, with later work in London. Alan Wilder heard a different body in it. With Flood he pushed the tempo, set a drum machine under the confession, and let Gahan sing it as a dance record. Gore disliked the change at first. The finished track proved the ballad had been a sketch of a larger room. The single reached the British top ten and became, in America, one of the songs that carried them out of the cult.
Anton Corbijn’s video gives the thesis a costume. Gahan as a king, robe and deckchair, wandering hills and snow as if silence were a territory you could claim by sitting down. The image is almost comic, and the song is not. Live, the track thickened into a set-piece, guitars louder, the crowd singing the line about words doing harm while using as many words as possible. The studio version keeps a cooler pulse. Gore’s guitar is the human smear on an otherwise electronic devotion. It is the sound of someone failing, gently, to take his own advice.
Alan had this idea to speed it up and make it a bit more disco, which I was really averse to at first. Serenity doesn’t go with the disco beat. I was sulking for two days for no reason.
(Martin Gore, BONG, 1998)
Violator made the group enormous without making them cheerful. This song is the door. People who never cared for synthesisers learned the chorus anyway, because the feeling is older than the gear: the wish to stop explaining a love before explanation ruins it. On the album it sits among colder neighbours and warms them by contrast. On the radio it sounded like a single that had wandered in from a church and decided to stay for the night.
What remains is the argument between the lyric and the beat. Words do harm, says a record that cannot stop being eloquent. The king in the video never finds a quiet bench. Enjoy the Silence still moves at the speed of a slow dance and the certainty of a hymn, proof that a ballad can be right and still not be finished until someone has the nerve to make it sweat.
