The album was promoted by the singles "Stripped", "A Question of Lust", and "A Question of Time". In the US, "But Not Tonight" was released as a single instead of "Stripped". In support of the album, Depeche Mode embarked on the five-month-long Black Celebration Tour across Europe, North America, and Japan, which ran from early to mid-1986.
After touring through July 1985 in support of their previous album Some Great Reward (1984). Depeche Mode released two compilation albums in late 1985, The Singles 81→85 in the UK in October, and Catching Up with Depeche Mode in the US in November. Both albums included two new tracks which were both issued as singles, "Shake the Disease" (single released April 1985) and "It's Called a Heart" (single released September 1985). On a personal level, singer Dave Gahan married his partner Jo Fox, songwriter Martin Gore was still living in West Berlin with his girlfriend Christina Friedrich, and Andy Fletcher and Alan Wilder had moved in with their girlfriends, Grainne Mullen and Jeri Young, respectively, in London. However, after their exhausting year of touring and recording, the band found themselves at odds when they reunited. Tensions within the band and their producer Daniel Miller had already come up during recording sessions earlier that year for "Shake the Disease".
Said Gahan, "If we were ever going to split up the band it was at the end of 1985. We were really in a state of turmoil. Constant arguing. Very intense. We weren't really sure where to go [musically] after Some Great Reward, so we decided to slow things down. But it left us with too much time on our hands. So we spent most of our time arguing. Sometimes, it seems incredible that we came out of that period with the band and our sanity intact." The inter-personal conflict within what was normally a tight-knit group led Gore to hide away with a friend at a farm for a week, with Gore later saying "I freaked out. I had to go away for a few days." Ultimately, the band agreed to reconvene in London in November to try to record their new material.
Depeche Mode entered Westside Studios in London in the first week of November 1985 to start recording their new album. In starting to work on the new album, producer Miller said that he "was a bit frustrated because [he] couldn't get the guys to think about working in different ways," and to that end, Miller asked the band to attend the studio every day to work on the production to "live the album", wanting "a kind of intensity". Miller was inspired by the history of German film director Werner Herzog, saying that Herzog had made historical films "and [the people involved in production of the movies] really lived the films, and it was a very intense way of working." The band agreed to this approach, and Gore moved back to London from West Germany, where he had been living since the Some Great Reward recording sessions of 1983–84.
Typical of Depeche Mode's previous few albums, Gore arrived at the sessions with demos of new songs for the album, and, determined to make their new album "a lot heavier, harder and darker [than their previous album]", brought in demos that were less structured and formal than he had in the past. Miller and the band's label, Mute Records, upon hearing the demos, were concerned about the morbid, slow demos, and worried that they lacked any radio-friendly singles. After a week-long standoff, Miller and the label relented, allowing the band to "make the record you want to make." This stand-off preceded a tense 120 days in the studio, with the band and producers working 14 hours a day to complete the album, with few days off. Adding to the tension was that both Miller and Gareth Jones returned in their production roles from the band's previous album, but alongside them was now Alan Wilder, who had grown into production responsibilities for their music over the past few years. With three co-producers sharing space at the production desk, Miller said "Alan [Wilder] was becoming very adept in that studio-bod role which I'd filled before. That left my own position less defined but I still had a very strong point of view. I think that created a lot of tension."
In addition, the entire group worked under tight timelines, intending to finish recording and mixing all their material, as well as completing all artwork for their album and singles, by Christmas 1985, although they missed this deadline and ended up working into the first few months of 1986. Years later, Miller remembered that the Black Celebration sessions "turned in a nightmare ... There was definitely tension in the studio" as a result of the "live the album" ethos of recording. Alan Wilder said that the way the album was made, combined with Miller's brooding and Gore's dark songs, resulted in an "underlying darkness" in the material they created. In an attempt to cope with the stress of the album's production, the band and production crew smoked a lot of marijuana while recording the album, and this instilled a feeling of paranoia in the sessions.
The band continued to use new, bespoke sampled sounds while recording Black Celebration, fed into the Synclavier the band had used on their previous two albums. Andy Fletcher said "we had this theory at the time that every sound must be different and you must never use the same sound twice."
By the end of their recording sessions, the band and producers Jones and Miller had moved back to Hansa Studios in West Berlin. Despite all the tension, Wilder later said that "the album's claustrophobic feel was probably down to the tension. I think it did add a chemistry to the sound of the record, more than any others we have done. It's one of my favourite records we have ever made."
One of the first songs the band recorded was "Stripped", which, according to Wilder, was one of the few songs that was "easy" to record for the album. "Stripped" incorporated the sound of Gahan's idling Porsche 911 and of a bottle rocket,
Wilder spoke about the way they approached sampling for the album, using the track "It Doesn't Matter Two" as an example: "There are a lot of choir samples on that. It would have been very easy to take just one sample and play it back polyphonically. But instead, we took a different sample for each choir note, so each note is slightly out from the others. It gives it a very realistic feel. We spent a long time getting that to work, so that it sounded human. That goes for all the stuff we do, not just that one track." Lyrically, Gore summarized "It Doesn't Matter Two" as a "very desperate [song]. Very very morbid." Of "Sometimes", he described it as "about someone who questions their surroundings and ends up becoming tiring and embarrassing and over apologetic." "Fly on the Windscreen", which was the b-side to Depeche Mode's previous single, "It's Called a Heart", was deemed by the band to be "too good" to remain just a b-side, so it was re-mixed and included on the album. Title song "Black Celebration" started with Miller's distorted voice saying the phrase "A brief period of rejoicing", taken from Winston Churchill's 8 May 1945 speech after the surrender of Germany to end World War II in Europe.
By 19 November 1985, the band was recording "A Question of Lust", one of four Gore-sung songs on the record, an all-time high for any Depeche Mode album to date. Alongside "Lust", Gore sang lead vocals on "Sometimes", "It Doesn't Matter Two" and "World Full of Nothing", saying "we've noticed that my voice is more suited to the softer and slower songs than Dave's [Gahan]". After a single day off for New Year's Day 1986, the band returned to the studio, and on 14 January 1986 they had mixed the album track "World Full of Nothing" as well as recorded and mixed one of the album's B-sides.
The album continued to be a transition album for Wilder, whose final songwriting credit with the band was the instrumental B-side "Christmas Island"; after Black Celebration Wilder continued to transition to spend more time arranging and performing songs and producing and engineering the band's sound. Years later, Wilder said he stopped songwriting for the band because it didn't come naturally to him, and he struggled with the lyrics, saying "My interest is more about atmosphere and production and editing and all the other things."
The title "Black Celebration" was not a reference to Black mass or rituals of the Occult, but rather, it was meant to "[describe] the daily boredom of a dreary life without climaxes or hope for improvement." Said Gore, "Our songs from Black Celebration capture the idea: Make the most of what you have, and find consolation whereever you can." Gahan elaborated, "it's a common thing: at the end of a working day you go out and drown your sorrows no matter how shitty you feel or how bleak your future looks."
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