It was forty years ago today …

It isn’t every day that you realise you know exactly what you were doing forty years ago, but today I do. It is forty years to the very day since Depeche Mode released their 11th single, Master and Servant.

And I know that I went to Sounds Right in Walthamstow market to buy the 12″ single version of it during the summer holidays.

The cover of Depeche Mode’s Master and Servant 12″ single

The reason I know this so precisely is that I have long remembered this as the first time I had officially entered “music fandom”. I got the bus and went to the market aged 12^* and bought the single with my pocket money on the day it came out, without having heard it on the radio first, because it was Depeche Mode and I knew I would like it.

Over the years I’ve bought lots of records on the day of release (or in later years downloaded them or streamed them) but this purchase – not the first Depeche Mode record I’d bought or the first 12″ I’d bought – but the first time I spent money on music on faith alone has always stood out in my mind. Forty years ago today …

I must have had 100s of these Sounds Right plastic bags at some point, all landfill now, and this is about the best picture the internet can throw up

^*Crikey, the lyrics. I was 12.