What '80s band would you consider copycats of other bands? I'd say The Fixx and Frankie Goes to Hollywood are Duran Duran ripoffs.

what?

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Not Frankie Goes To Hollywood. They definitely had their own thing goin' on. Blondie was notorious for copying and blending other band's styles. And don't forget the whole Ray Parker Jr./Huey Lewis law suit about the Ghostbusters theme and I Want A New Drug ripoff.

Not the Fixx either. They were much craftier and more cerebral than Duran Duran ever was (and I say that as a D2 fan). The Fixx also had much more of "rock" foundation. Essentially, they were a rock group that used a lot of synths. Cy Curnin also put toghether early line-ups of the Fixx in the mid-'70s as a teenager. Athough "Reach The Beach" has the Fixx's best single songs, I'd say "Shuttered Room" was a much more comprehensive album.

IMO, FGTH didn't have much going for them, other than Trevor Horn.

Camouflage was definitely a Depeche Mode copy cat

Not the Fixx either. They were much craftier and more cerebral than Duran Duran ever was (and I say that as a D2 fan). The Fixx also had much more of "rock" foundation. Essentially, they were a rock group that used a lot of synths. Cy Curnin also put toghether early line-ups of the Fixx in the mid-'70s as a teenager. Athough "Reach The Beach" has the Fixx's best single songs, I'd say "Shuttered Room" was a much more comprehensive album.

IMO, FGTH didn't have much going for them, other than Trevor Horn.

Camouflage was definitely a Depeche Mode copy cat


What category would you put DM in? I've always thought they were VERY similar to New Order.

What category would you put DM in? I've always thought they were VERY similar to New Order.

Depeche Mode was New Wave if anything, synth pop was a subgenre of New Wave.  Like a lot of artists, DM took advantage of synthesizers, which only became both facile and inexpensive in the mid '70s. Depeche Mode cited Kraftwerk as "the grandfathers of everything we do." Kraftwerk themselves were pigeonholed as part of the "Progressive Rock" movement of the '70s, and lumped in with inferior electronic outfits, such as Tangerine Dream and Synergy. I'd say Kraftwerk was the first "synth-pop" band. Kraftwerk may be the single most sampled artist in the history of sampling. Whereas Tangerine Dream, Synergy, and Heldon/Richard Pinhas* were using  synths to build spacy soundscapes, Kraftwerk (starting on the 1975 album "Radioactivity) started using uptempo beats and electronic percussion sounds.

When the first line-up of Depeche Mode (with Vince Clarke, without Alan Wilder) released "Speak & Spell" in 1981, Kraftwerk was what they sounded most like. Of course, their svengali-producer Daniel Miller had already recorded all-synth as The Normal and Silicon Teens, and fostered the synth-oriented post-punk performance artist Fad Gadget). Still, it was more Kraftwerk-influenced than anything.

By 1983, Martin Gore (and Fad Gadget) was under the influence of the definitive "industrial" group, Einsturzende Neaubauten. Where as E/Neubauten hauled contrived scrap-metal percussion devices on stage, Depeche Mode recorded the clanging and banging of metal objects and kitchen crockery, and then processed these sounds electronically. This is part of a whole genre of music called "electroacoustic music" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroacoustic), though I doubt the word ever crossed Martin Gore's mind.

By the time "Depeche Mode 101" came out in 1988, the DM was too busy touring as one of the world's most popular bands to have much time or interest to put the creativity of their earlier albums into use. Thus, IMO, they became less interesting by the time of "101," and had also started using guitars, which was a disappointment.

Thus, Depeche Mode at their best 1982-1987 were a New Wave band with industrial/electroacoustic leanings.

I was also a fan of New Order, but except for the fact that they used lots of synths, I didn't think the two sounded much alike.

Depeche Mode had alot of very "dance-y", dance-pop style stuff. Not the Pet Shop Boys, but still clubby, particularly in their Violator era.

Almost every genre had 'em, at least to some extent. Especially in the hair metal category from 1988-91. Winger, Warrant, Trixter and Danger Danger were essentially just second rate Bon Jovis and Van Halens.

BTW, do you think Duran Duran was a copycat of Culture Club at all? Of course they released "Girls on Film" in '81, but their synonymous new wave/teenybopper stuff came out from, say mid '83-85, just after CC got popular.