“What’s dangerous about someone like Richard Spencer is, first of all, he’s a cunt - and he’s a very educated cunt - and that’s the scariest kind of all. This guy’s got some weight behind him. I don’t like that…”

That was lead singer Dave Gahan, responding through the pages of Rolling Stone to white supremacist think tank leader, Richard Spencer, declaring Depeche Mode ‘the official band of the alt-right’.

“Over the years there’s been a number of times when things of ours have been misinterpreted...” Gahan added. “If anything, there’s a way more sort of socialist - working class, if you like - industrial-sounding aesthetic to what we do. That’s where we come from so I don’t get what he was saying.”

What the execrable “Always A Fan” Spencer had to say was this: “Depeche Mode is a band of existential angst, pain, sadism, horror, darkness and much more.”

In recent social media postings, he also cited New Order as an example of a “fashy 80s electropop band” and picked ‘National Front Disco’ as his favourite Morrissey song.

If ever there was a case of trying to achieve glamour through association, this is it.

Depeche Mode might sound a bit Wagnerian at times, but on their current album Spirit, they veer sharply to the left. “They manipulate and threaten,” Gahan sings on ‘Where’s The Revolution’, “With terror as a weapon/ Who’s making your decisions?/ You or your religion?/ Your government, your countries?/ You patriotic junkies.”

LOSERS AND FOOLS

Gahan, of course, isn’t the first rocker who’s issued unwanted right-wing fans with cease and desist orders.

“Stop saying you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it,” was Johnny Marr’s response to David Cameron saying that him and Samcam are both majorly into their Morrissey. Paul Weller was similarly irked to discover that the man who bequeathed us Brexit is also ‘into’ The Jam.

Allegedly.

“What part of ‘Eton Rifles’ didn’t he fucking get?” Weller spat. “If anyone was a fan of The Jam and wanted to go into politics, I would have thought they’d have gone completely the other way. Tory politics… it doesn’t compute with me.”

Meanwhile, as a direct response to 31-year-old civil rights activist, Heather Heyer, being murdered at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Apple, LinkedIn, Spotify, Google, Go Daddy, Facebook and Twitter have all pledged to remove neo-Nazi content from their services. “We must not witness or permit such hate and bigotry in our country, and we must be unequivocal about it,” says Apple CEO Tim Cook. “This is not about the left or the right, conservative or liberal. It is about human decency and morality.

“I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights. Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans.”

Apple have donated $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who’d previously flagged 37 of the ‘hate bands’ that Spotify have stopped streaming.

These include Battlecry, Blood Red Eagle, Freikorps, Legion Of St. George, White Knuckle Driver and Tattooed Mother Fuckers, who more than live down to their “Drunken bastards, losers and fools/ We’re hooligans and thugs who break the rules” clarion call.

Several of the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville wore t-shirts in memory of the mass murderer Wade Michael Page, a member of Dallas skinhead punk collective, Hammerskins, who in 2012 shot dead six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin before turning the gun on himself.

The organisation’s goosestepping claw hammer logo is misappropriated from Pink Floyd’s 1982 film, The Wall, which has not suprisingly greatly irked Roger Waters. There’s also a significant far-right – some prefer to call it ‘ethnic pagan’ – metal scene spearheaded by the likes of Thor’s Hammer, Nokturnal Mortum, Temnozor, Absurd, and Der Sturmer, whose pathetic ‘Sieg Heil’ is considered a classic of the genre.

CULT FOLLOWING

Controversies like this are not entirely new. Chiswick, the Irish-owned indie label that gave Kirsty MacColl, Billy Bragg, Simple Minds, Shane MacGowan, Motörhead and The Radiators From Space early leg-ups, looked to have pulled off a bit of a coup in 1977 when they signed Blackpool punks Skrewdriver.

Chiswick’s delight at the likes of ‘You’re So Dumb’ and ‘Antisocial’ charting soon turned to horror as lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson started expressing his support for the National Front and the British Movement.

“It’s a shame that the name was dragged through the gutter like that,” rues Chiswick’s Roger Armstrong. “The other three guys in the band were really pissed off too. Grinny the drummer came from solid northern socialist stock. When they made records for us, Ian Stuart Donaldson showed no signs of fascism. The skinhead image was a - maybe in hindsight misconceived - fashion thing. It was cooked up by a bunch of us, including the band’s then-management.”

Allying himself with other such deeply unpleasant acts as The Dentists, Brutal Attack, Sudden Impact and No Remorse, Donaldson helped form the self-styled Blood & Honour collective, which despite his death in a 1992 road accident, still endures.

The singer was a big fan of Johnny Rebel, the recently deceased Moss Bluff, Louisiana country man, whose trademark tunes included ‘Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)’, ‘Stay Away From Dixie’, ‘Coon Town’ and ‘Nigga Hating Me’.

Whilst such overt racism is nowadays a Nashville no-no, the likes of Colt Ford, Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley and Trace Adkins are still happy to incorporate the Confederate flag into their good ol’ boy shtick. “To me, the battle flag represents remembrance of my Southern lineage,” Adkins remarked recently.

Of course, racism isn’t just a male preserve. California twins Lynx and Lamb Gaede enjoyed considerable naughties success with their Holocaust-denying brand of acoustic guitar pop.

Gigging across the country as Prussian Blue – the name is a reference to the distinctive colour of Zyklon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers - they grinningly posed in Adolf Hitler smiley t-shirts and were the subject of a 2004 Louis Theroux documentary in which their neo-Nazi activist mother, April, said: “I find other races annoying. I don’t like their chattering in other languages, I don’t like the way they look. I mean, 99% of them, they’re just not pretty. I don’t want to be around them. I don’t like the fact they seem to make everything just dirty and messy wherever they are. I don’t like to be around them. I want to be around all white people.”

In an Aryan riposte to Avril Lavigne’s ‘Sk8er Boi’, the tweens warbled: “Skinhead boy, standing fast, not afraid to kick some ass/ Skinhead boy, it’s no disgrace to stand up proud for your race/ Oi oi oi skinhead boy, you’re my oi boy.”

Nowadays, Aryan pop kids are more likely to be listening to Cybernazi, one of the clutch of fashwave acts popular with the same online gameing community that Steve Bannon tapped into to help win Trump the Presidency. Slickly produced tunes like ‘Right Wing Death Squads’, ‘National Social Network’ and ‘Galactic Lebensraum’ have earned the American producer a massive cult following, but sadly not the ire of Bandcamp and YouTube, who were this week continuing to host his music.

There have also been close to half-a-million YouTube views of ‘Make America Great Again (TRUMP SONG)’, sKald’s Daft Punk-esque sampling of The Donald who, on the other side of the Atlantic, is the subject of Xurious’ ‘Hail Victory’.

Xurious’ latest online release, ‘New Machine’, is probably the first techno banger to pay homage to British Union of Fascists leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. As for the true calibre of these people, we refer you to Dave Gahan’s earlier comment!