Born on July 23: Martin Gore, the hit machine from Dépêche Mode

He was born in London in 1961. Despite his discretion, his role within Depeche Mode proved to be crucial.

For it was he who penned the masterful songs "Enjoy The Silence," "Strangelove," "Black Celebration," "Everything Counts," "Dream On," "Personal Jesus," "People Are People," and a host of other well-known choruses.

Martin was raised in a modest family. Before moving to Basildon, his mother and stepfather worked at a Ford factory. The stepfather later became a truck driver, and Martin himself started working in a bank at the age of 16.

Driven by music, he invested his first earnings in the purchase of a Moog Prodigy (less expensive than the miniMOOG produced at the same time), a monophonic analog synthesizer produced in just over 10,000 units between 1977 and 1984. This instrument, now a museum piece, embodied a sort of Holy Grail in the eyes of the pioneers of English synth-pop. The sour sound it produced constituted, in a way, the aural signature of the album "Speak & Spell," Depeche Mode's 1981 debut. On this album, however, Martin Gore remained in Vince Clarke's shadow and composed only two tracks, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and the instrumental "Big Muff." After Vince Clarke left to found Yazoo with Alison Moyet, he refined his writing and became the driving force behind the quartet.

While his personal career is limited to a handful of releases ("The Third Chimpanzee" in 2021 is the latest), Martin no longer hesitates to occasionally swap keyboards for a guitar—most often a Gretsch White Falcon—and, on stage, to grab the microphone for "Strangelove."

Now a resident of Santa Barbara, California, since the early 2000s, Martin Gore celebrates his 64th birthday today.

(MH with Stéphane Soupart / Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: In September 1987, Depeche Mode stopped in Brussels to promote the album "Music For The Masses." From left to right: Alan Wilder, Dave Gahan, Andy Fletcher, and Martin Gore