Legendary – My (life in) music lists

Eighties’ best 100 redux: #80 Depeche Mode “People are people” (1984)

If you’ve been around this blog before, you’d know that I’ve written about the legendary synth pop band originally from Basildon, England many times over. So instead of treading and retreading over familiar ground, I’ll tell you a story*. (Mind you if you are looking for more words about the band and this song, have a gander at the post on my top five favourites of their songs from the 80s.)

Nearly forty years ago, just as I was starting high school, I got my first job, if you can call it that. I took over delivering flyers to the houses in my neighbourhood from one of my friends for a company called Davcar Distributing. If you’re of an age that you don’t recognize the term, ‘flyers’ were printed advertisements that were like mini catalogues, printed on newsprint**, ranging any where from one to twelve pages, providing the weekly sales for grocery stories like A&P and Dominion and other commercial enterprises like Sears and Canadian Tire. It was piece work, getting pennies per flyer delivered. There were two or three hundred houses on my route and there were typically five to seven flyers to be delivered each week. The route took me a few hours to do on a Friday night and I would get $10 or so for my efforts.

Every few weeks, Carol***, one of the proprietors of the company, would ask if I would take on one of the nearby routes when the regular delivery kid wasn’t able to, and it would mean a bit more money that week, but also cut into more of my prized weekend time. At some point, I was asked if I would be interested in taking over all the down routes**** in my small town and after some cajoling and promises of help from my mother, I agreed. It meant that a walk on Friday night turned into a whole weekend endeavour. I would be responsible for 10-12 routes on any given week, sometimes more, and I figure that at some point over the two years that I delivered these flyers that I probably walked up to the door of every house in Bowmanville.

We quickly had it down to an art though. Friday nights after dinner, we would put on a movie or two and sort out the flyers, unbundling stacks, and fitting each flyer within in each other so that they were ready for delivery and stow them in black plastic Knob Hill Farms baskets*****. My mother had a road map of the town, on which she highlighted each route to which we delivered in a different colour marker and we knew exactly how many houses were on each route and so, how many flyers needed to be delivered. She would drop me off at the beginning of each route, loaded down with two paper carrier bags loaded with pre-sorted flyers, one on each shoulder, and pick me up at the other end, where she waited in our little silver chevette reading a Harlequin romance novel. Then, while she drove off to the start of the next route, I would refill my bags with the exact amount of flyers needed.

This is the job where I gained my love/hate relationship with walking and my very real fear of dogs. Don’t laugh. I was once chased by a massive Dobermann pinscher for 200 metres or so, on a Sunday night at dusk, after a whole weekend of deliveries, from the front porch of a heritage house over an overgrown lawn and over a five foot wide drainage ditch and into the front passenger side door of my mother’s car, which she luckily had the foresight to open for me as she saw the chase ensuing. It was like the Chopper scene in Stand by me, in slo-mo and everything, but the danger was very real. My mother had to get the car washed the next day to erase the dog slobber froth from the passenger window.

And I could tell many other stories from those days – from the odd people I ran into on the streets and the conversations, to the different lifestyles of Bowmanville’s residents, their possessions and collections, and the relationships to their pets****** – but this post would end up like War and Peace in length. Instead, I’ll get back to the point. What does this job have to do “People are people” by Depeche Mode?

Well, as you can imagine, all that walking alone would afford lots of time to think and have conversations with oneself and before I was able to save up for a Walkman, sing songs to oneself as well. One of these songs was Depeche Mode’s “People are people”. I will never be able to tell you now where I first heard the songs, whether on the radio or at a school dance, but those chorus lines stuck with me. “People are people, so why should it be / You and I should get along so awfully?” These were the only lines I knew and sang them over and over again. They resounded for me. They were words that had meaning. And applying them to my own experiences thus far in life, I gave them my own meaning.

When I later discovered the author of these words, I became a fan of Depeche Mode. “Some great reward” would be the first album I would own by the band, mostly because of “People are people”, buying it on cassette, with money earned from a different job. And I’ve never looked back… except of course, to remember singing those chorus lines over and over while walking sidewalks burdened by loads of flyers.

Original Eighties best 100 position: n/a

Favourite lyric: “Now you’re punching, and you’re kicking, and you’re shouting at me / I’m relying on your common decency / So far, it hasn’t surfaced, but I’m sure it exists / It just takes a while to travel from your head to your fist” These lines always made me laugh.

Where are they now?: Despite losing band mates, near deaths, deaths, and dealing with a host of other trials and tribulations over the years, Depeche Mode are still going strong, now just a duo, after 45 years. They released their 15th studio album, “Memento mori”, back in 2023.

*One of which I’ve hinted at pieces at least twice in two previous Depeche Mode related posts.

**Some companies still print them and deliver them directly to mailboxes through Canada Post but many just make them available online.

***I believe that was her name.

****Down routes were all the routes that didn’t have a regular carrier.

*****Those who know, know.

******I’ll never forget the pet raccoon that would pull the flyers from me as I was feeding them into the mail slot in the front door.

For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.

Eighties’ best 100 redux: #81 Leonard Cohen “Everybody knows” (1988)

<< #82 | #80 >>

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be Mark Hunter, aka “Hard Harry”. Much like the character portrayed by Christian Slater in the 1990 film “Pump up the volume”, I spent most of high school painfully shy and socially awkward. And though working with the high school drama club did draw me out of my shell, especially during my fourth and fifth years, I still identified with the character and found the story appealing.

In the film, the teenaged protagonist creates the persona of “Hard Harry” out of boredom and starts to broadcast a pirate radio show out of his parents’ basement. It starts out all fun, crude teen jokes and self-amusement, not knowing whether or not anyone was listening. But in truth, he was gaining listeners amongst his peers in his small, sleepy suburban town. During the shows, he reads and responds to letters that start to arrive in the P.O. box he sets up and things begin to turn serious when one of his listeners asks whether or not he should kill himself.

When it comes out the next morning that the listener actually went through with the suicide, things start to unravel. Mark realizes people are listening and that his words have weight and consequences. Of course, school staff, the police, and the FCC realize it too and the witch hunt begins. The rest of the movie is an internal struggle on whether to give it up or continue on, all with a love interest in Samantha Mathis (with dyed black hair) thrown in for good measure.

The reason I dredge up this long forgotten film treasure* today is because, amongst all the great music played and hinted at through shots of record spines and posters, the 1988 Leonard Cohen track “Everybody knows” was used by Mark Hunter as his show’s theme music and of course, the song was played prominently throughout the film**.

Leonard Cohen should need no introduction to most. The Montreal-born poet and folk singer/songwriter started his music career in the late 60s and he immediately contributed a number of future classics to the folk canon. In 1988, Cohen released his 8th studio album, “I’m your man”, which saw the musician further evolve his sound from his strictly folk and organic sound to something more austere and synthetic, allowing him to put even more emphasis on this words. “Everybody knows” was the fifth single to be released off “I’m your man” and was decently received at the time. But its use in “Pump up the volume” exposed the song and its performer to a wider audience. It certainly was my first exposure to Cohen, at least the first exposure that I was conscious of.

“Everybody knows” is five and a half minutes of haunting and driving synthesized strings and a seemingly synthesized Spanish guitar flitting about, while Cohen does his sing-speak poetry reading thing in his deep, deep voice. Frequent collaborator Sharon Robinson adds female backing vocals at the chorus, harmonizing and bringing a human touch to the otherwise, otherworldly sound. The words are intelligent and biting, as Cohen’s lyrics frequently are, marked by a repetition of the song’s title and what it actually is that everybody knows.