Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode did not hire a video director. They hired their photographer and handed him everything.

Anton Corbijn first shot the band in 1981, for an NME cover, when they were four teenagers from Basildon. By 1986 he was their creative director in all but name: the videos, the album artwork, the stage sets, the tour films. Seven of the videos on this page are his, and they include the two that fixed how the band looks in most people's heads — Personal Jesus and Enjoy the Silence, the one with the deckchair carried across a mountainside by a man in a crown.

The reach of that arrangement is easier to see from outside it. Corbijn had photographed Joy Division in 1979 and made their Atmosphere video; nearly thirty years later he directed Control, the film about Ian Curtis. He shot U2's Pride (In the Name of Love), three clips for Echo & The Bunnymen, and Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box. He was the visual author of a whole strand of British and Irish music, and Depeche Mode got more of him than anyone.

The clips he did not make are worth noticing too — the early ones by Clive Richardson, when the band still looked like a synth-pop act rather than a stadium one. The difference between those and Personal Jesus is roughly the difference Corbijn made.