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FAITH,
HOPE AND DEPRAVITY
[Select,
December 1990. Words: Andrew Harrison. Pictures: Ed Sirrs / Kevin Westenberg.]
"As if experiencing a simultaneous Pavlovian response to minor chords and sonority, they hold their cigarette lighters aloft in suspension - at least five thousand of them swaying in blackness, for all the world as if this were a Barry Manilow show. "When everything's dark, it keeps us from the stark reality," intones Gahan and the lighters sway away, illuminating the fans' home-made banners. One of them declares, Martin You Are My Personal Jesus."
Summary:
Awestruck
piece on the World Violation Tour and the development of Violator. The
article paints a picture of the euphoric fan reaction in a Depeche Mode concert
while boggling over exactly how the band had come to create such an intense
reaction and following. Martin is interviewed with regards to the changes in
style and recent theories on the band's contribution to house music. Violator
era veterans may be left either misty-eyed or grinning from ear to ear. [3052
words]
View pages: cover page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 tour advert
Try
also: "Strangers" introduction, 1990
"Old Grave Of New Dave"
[NME, 26th April 1997]
"Basildon
Bondage" [NME, 26th September 1998]
"Cleaning Up" [Q, November 1998]
This article is part of the Devotion Trail [previous item] [next item]
David Gahan is waiting for the night to fall. His band Depeche Mode have been onstage at the Dortmund Westfalenhalle for some 20 minutes now, before 17,000 feverish people in a towering sports stadium that resembles the torture chamber at the end of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
Yet far from being dwarfed by the vast size of the venue, Depeche Mode's spartan bedroom electronics and bass imperatives have stretched out to fill the place, to subdue it and make it theirs. With 'World In My Eyes' and 'Never Let Me Down Again' the damage has been done. Now it's time for a change of pace.
As photographer / video director Anton Corbijn's monochrome images of stars and planets appear on the screens behind them, 'Waiting For The Night', the sepulchral centrepiece from their current 'Violator' LP, floods into the Westfalenhalle on a rich, black tide. It's a song of faith in oblivion, a drumless and insidious wash which surrounds Gahan's voice like the gathering darkness itself. A sharp contrast to the upbeat singles that opened the show.
For many fans, this is the side of the band that they really want to hear, the one that takes a host of half-formed teenage nihilistic fixations and replays them with Depeche Mode's characteristic veneer of detached sophistication. Yet as Gahan sings "I'm waiting for the night to fall / I know that it will save us all", something peculiar takes over the young German audience.
As if experiencing a simultaneous Pavlovian response to minor chords and sonority, they hold their cigarette lighters aloft in suspension - at least five thousand of them swaying in blackness, for all the world as if this were a Barry Manilow show. "When everything's dark, it keeps us from the stark reality," intones Gahan and the lighters sway away, illuminating the fans' home-made banners. One of them declares, Martin You Are My Personal Jesus.
It's touching. They do it again later when the band perform the incomparably darker 'Black Celebration's "Let's celebrate the fact / That we've seen the back / Of another black day". But it sure isn't Depeche Mode. There's no doubt about it - Gahan, Martin Gore, Alan Wilder and Andrew Fletcher have come an appallingly long way since the microprogrammer days of 'The Meaning Of Love' and 'Just Can't Get Enough', when the papers laughed and said they looked like a bunch of hairdressers from a Carry On film.
These days they're totems of teenage sexual neurosis in Ray-Bans, corrupters of international youth and the only people to sell the vaunted sonic metal disco sound of the mid-'80s and still retain their credibility. Some people believe they invented house music. They have arrived, but the question is, arrived where?
A grubby town wreathed in the accumulated smog and gunge of its steel industry, Dortmund is to Germany what Widnes is to England. This weekend it heads the second and third dates on the European leg of Depeche Mode's World Violation, the tour that, with the astonishing 'Violator', finds them finally and undeniably admitted to the Premier Division of international acts.
'Violator' has already shifted four million copies worldwide, and trebled Depeche Mode's usual British album sales. World Violation's two months in the USA saw the band's previous cultish appeal translate into almost two million sales of the LP, and a million of its entrancing single 'Enjoy The Silence', which was still in the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-October, six months after its release.
So quickly did Depeche Mode's American underground go overground that it even took the band by surprise.
In April they did a low-key record store promotion in Los Angeles to coincide with the albums' release, expecting maybe a couple of thousand fans to turn up. Instead some 15,000 autograph-hungry Depechlets appeared, creating frightening prospects of a crush. The band were terrified to see that the sheer weight of their fans was enough to make the store's plate glass window bend inwards. Finally, local police (who estimated the crowd at an astonishing 30,000) cleared the area.
On the other side of the Atlantic, fans snapped up tickets for the 40 European dates of World Violation while the ink was still wet, and though Depeche Mode arrive in Britain on November 19, their six British dates likewise sold out instantly. In 1990, three Depeche Modes would not be enough to sate the demand, and the band are accordingly in high spirits.
As if to match their increasing stature, Depeche Mode on the road has become much more of a rock 'n' roll affair. The band's aptitude for hard partying is no secret, but to the apparent embarrassment of British friends and colleagues from Mute Records (the independent label which has been home to Depeche Mode since their first single, 'Dreaming Of Me', in 1981), they have of late increasingly found themselves surrounded by an unwanted coterie of hangers-on, plantpots and users from foreign record companies and promotion agencies. At least one such character inveigled himself into their company on the Dortmund weekend, in search of a little reflected glory, and, polite Basildon lads that they are, Depeche Mode weren't inclined to see him off.
More than ever, the fans too have grown fanatical, staking out every hotel in town and seemingly able to smell an Englander a mile off.
This slow and unwilling gravitation towards Spinal Tapism is a quaint irony given Depeche Mode's ancient connections with the supposedly 'anti-rockist' new pop of the early '80s, and their subsequent alignment with the equally guitar-free avant garde metal noise brigade. There is even a sizeable meathead contingent 'down the front' these days, much given to chanting "Dee-pesh!" in terrace style and giving the support band Electribe 101 a hellish time.
The band has acknowledged its new status as the portable Donington of the Casio generation by dressing its roadies in an official T-shirt which reads DEPECHE FUCKIN' MODE.
Yet membership of the top flight has its privileges. Chief among them is the ability to play fast and loose with the international press. You get what you're given with Depeche Mode, and for MTV Europe that means the opportunity to film 30 seconds - 30 seconds - of the second Dortmund show. Try editing that into broadcastable shape.
Reporters get a pretty fair 45 minutes with whichever band member feels like talking. Today it's Depeche songwriter Martin Gore, a relaxed but slightly evasive man with a bleach-blond Eraserhead haircut and a preternatural golden suntan, who opens his hotel room to the world.
"Who said this life isn't glamorous?" he smiles, gesturing at the sodden cityscape outside his window. It looks like bad news.
"Dortmund on a rainy Sunday. It's so much more enjoyable playing in America cos you've got generally nicer weather and usually somewhere interesting to look at, rather than this place in the middle of a motorway - there isn't even a hotel shop.
"But it's funny really," he muses. "I've noticed that the European audiences are much more responsive than the Americans this time..."
Responsive is hardly the word. Obsessive, more like.
"Yeah, it's obviously very flattering but it's worrying too," Gore replies. "People feel that they have a very special relationship with us, particularly in America where we have...not a small following, heh heh, but certainly a cult one. We've always got our airplay from the college stations and the alternative broadcasters.
"Americans more than anyone have suffered from ten years of Toto re-runs, and I suppose we came along at the right time with a new sound. Plus they didn't have the preconceptions of us that English people, who know us from 'A Broken Frame' when all our youthfulness was on show, have.
"I think it's down to the intimacy of the music. People feel that the songs are personal to them. And though there is an element of contradiction when you play a concert like last night's, with 17,000 people going made, that intimacy is still there. People still feel moved by it, they feel that it's theirs.
"Me and Andy did a phone-in at a Top 40 station in New York this summer, and one of the callers asked, What are you doing on this station? They don't have the right to play your music, this is a tacky station!
"They still feel that Depeche Mode is their cult thing, that the music shouldn't ever go mainstream no matter what it sounds like and no matter what we do."
Three years ago, before 'Violator', they might have been right. Gore confesses that the band's previous studio album, 1987's 'Music For The Masses', was the end of the line for one particular kind of Depeche Mode - the one that generated pre-House iron-foundry dance music in the vein of continental experimentalists like Einsturzende Neubaten and the British metal-bashers Test Department.
The sound had been caricatured as callow pop dilettantism, but it yielded at least three pearls of singles in 'Master And Servant', ' Everything Counts' and even 'People Are People'. Depeche Mode's lyrical purview had shifted as well, from the concerns of the Just 17 problem page to, well, Skin Two. Out went unrequited love, in came "You on top and me underneath."