Depeche Mode

However much we fancy that rock & roll is a thoroughly modern milieu of endless innovation, the vast majority of today’s bands still employ the same basic ingredients – guitar, bass, drums, singer – taken up by the founders in the middle of the last century. So it was of no small cultural import that, in the early days of 1981, an 18-year-old London DJ called Stevo hooked technopop into the grid with the release of Some Bizzare Album, a watershed compilation that introduced future stars Depeche Mode (or Depeché Mode, as the band initially mispronounced the name nicked from a French fashion magazine), Soft Cell, The The, B Movie, and Blancmange, all of whom relied on, or at least used, synthesizers to carry their tuneful creations.