Going Backwards

“***Going Backwards***” is the opening track to Depeche Mode’s fourteenth studio album *Spirit*. It was released as the album's second single on 23 June 2017. The cover art was designed by Anton Corbijn. A physical CD and vinyl release was released on 15 September 2017. A live video was released on 22 June 2017. According to Martin Gore’s interview with *The Sun*, the song sums up the theme running through the album that the human race has lost its spirit:

> *You can’t get away from the constant wrongs that are going on. There’s the Syrian crisis, the issues in the gay, lesbian and transgender communities, and there was a period when you couldn’t turn on the news without seeing another black person getting shot by the police. The whole race thing in America is crazy. It seems like it hasn’t really come on at all since the Civil Rights. What did Civil Rights really achieve? The Spirit is trying to point out to people that somehow we’ve lost our way. But it is also calling out to them to think and make a change, trying to find our way back to a path. That’s why I liked Spirit as the album title, as it asks where has our spirit gone? We need to re-find it.*
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Gahan declared in a 2017 interview for *Rolling Stone*:

> *If we want things to change, a revolution, we need to talk about it and about caring about what goes on in the world. It doesn’t seem the way things are in London. We seem to be going in another direction, and I think Martin felt like he needed to express that.*
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Martin Gore also told *The Sun*:

> *You can’t get away from the constant wrongs that are going on. There’s the Syrian crisis, the issues in the gay, lesbian and transgender communities, and there was a period when you couldn’t turn on the news without seeing another black person getting shot by the police. The whole race thing in America is crazy. It seems like it hasn’t really come on at all since the Civil Rights. What did Civil Rights really achieve?*
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Martin Gore told *Amazon*: *"An album starts taking shape, for me, really, when you have about four songs together, and we had gone down a cynical path. And I thought, "Okay well, maybe I just gotta go with this." Well as I said, it was definitely one of the first songs that I had written, and I think it was actually one of the first songs that we had started working on in the studio. And I think that from an early point we all deep down knew that it would be the first track on the album, so it was an important track. Even though we never regarded it as a single or anything like that, it was more of a statement."*

When Neue Zürcher Zeitung hypothesised that "'***Going Backwards***' is about a civilizational regression where society and technology are developing as fast as never before", Martin Gore replied: *"Yes, but that's just a reason for decay. I have long believed that new technologies would bring the world together - the world would be united by them. We were all enthusiastic about the Arab Spring, when people started organising themselves with social media and fought for their freedom. But then everything went wrong: the Middle East seems to be falling apart."*

Hotmix radio asked Andy Fletcher about his favourite song of 'Spirit', and he replied: *"I think it would be '[Going] Backwards'. I don't know why. I've never really given it enough attention, because I do like '**Cover Me**' as well, but we open our set with 'Backwards', and it really sounds good."*

## Lyrics

We are not there yet

We have not evolved

We have no respect

We have lost control

We're going backwards

Ignoring the realities

Going backwards

Are you counting all the casualties?

We are not there yet

Where we need to be

We are still in debt

To our insanities

We're going backwards

Turning back our history

Going backwards

Piling on the misery

We can track it all with satellites

See it all in plain sight

Watch men die in real time

But we have nothing inside

We feel nothing inside

We are not there yet

We have lost our soul

The course has been set

We're digging our own hole

We're going backwards

Armed with new technology

Going backwards

To a caveman mentality

We can emulate on consoles

Killings we can control

With senses that have been dulled

Because there's nothing inside

We feel nothing inside

We feel nothing inside

(We feel nothing, nothing inside)

Because there's nothing inside

## Bibliography

1. https://dmlive.wiki/wiki/Going\_Backwards
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going\_Backwards
3. https://genius.com/Depeche-mode-going-backwards-lyrics