A Taste Of Rock-Beast Behaviour A La Mode
[The Independent, 8th August 1993. Words Ben Thomson.]
The National Sports Centre in Crystal Palace is an outdoor music venue that is under-used. Not just because the crowd gets to touch (well, through a plastic sheet) the hallowed gravel where Donna Hartley and David Coleman have trod; it’s also the approach routes. You sweep up and down grassy slopes and modernist walkways and the stadium squats in the valley beneath like a huge beetle preparing to scuttle off. Depeche Mode, the new-town dream made flesh, can only flourish here.
The purity of the Basildon quartet’s aesthetic is not quite what it was. Fortunately, the sombre clarity of their sound is not compromised by the intervention of guitars, real drums, and even a string section. Only Dave Gahan’s formula rock-beast behaviour detracts from the tinny grandeur. Depeche Mode have rocked up the tone a lot, but Gahan’s mid-Atlantic yowl does not convince, and there is something incongruous about a man shouting “Yeah! All right! Let’s see those muthafuggin’ hands!” while standing in front of a pile of synthesisers.
The crowd, uniformly attired in newly purchased T-shirts, do not think so, and clap and sing along with plenty of commitment. The celebratory atmosphere might seem to be out of tune with the miserabilist tendencies of latter-day Mode, but there certainly is pleasure to be had from the skill with which this show has been designed. The tools of the group’s trade perch starkly atop square video walls while the nattily self-conscious video imagery of Anton Corbijn flickers beneath, Their old simpler virtues remain even as newer songs reach out for big themes with varying success. The debaucher’s apologia of “Walking In My Shoes” might be unintentionally comic – “the Lord himself would blush!” – but there’s no denying it has a nice tune.
They don’t do quite enough hits – a gothed-up “New Life” would have been fun – but under the moonlight a new suppleness and strength emerges in much of the more recent material. Depeche Mode’s attempts to grow up in public have made them an easy target for ridicule, but at least (unlike, say, the Cure), they have made the effort. Sometimes they try too hard. There is an ugly flash of misogyny in “Stripped”, but for a band whose main songwriting talent left more than a decade ago, they are not doing too badly. [1]
[The Independent, 8th August 1993. Words Ben Thomson.]
The National Sports Centre in Crystal Palace is an outdoor music venue that is under-used. Not just because the crowd gets to touch (well, through a plastic sheet) the hallowed gravel where Donna Hartley and David Coleman have trod; it’s also the approach routes. You sweep up and down grassy slopes and modernist walkways and the stadium squats in the valley beneath like a huge beetle preparing to scuttle off. Depeche Mode, the new-town dream made flesh, can only flourish here.
The purity of the Basildon quartet’s aesthetic is not quite what it was. Fortunately, the sombre clarity of their sound is not compromised by the intervention of guitars, real drums, and even a string section. Only Dave Gahan’s formula rock-beast behaviour detracts from the tinny grandeur. Depeche Mode have rocked up the tone a lot, but Gahan’s mid-Atlantic yowl does not convince, and there is something incongruous about a man shouting “Yeah! All right! Let’s see those muthafuggin’ hands!” while standing in front of a pile of synthesisers.
The crowd, uniformly attired in newly purchased T-shirts, do not think so, and clap and sing along with plenty of commitment. The celebratory atmosphere might seem to be out of tune with the miserabilist tendencies of latter-day Mode, but there certainly is pleasure to be had from the skill with which this show has been designed. The tools of the group’s trade perch starkly atop square video walls while the nattily self-conscious video imagery of Anton Corbijn flickers beneath, Their old simpler virtues remain even as newer songs reach out for big themes with varying success. The debaucher’s apologia of “Walking In My Shoes” might be unintentionally comic – “the Lord himself would blush!” – but there’s no denying it has a nice tune.
They don’t do quite enough hits – a gothed-up “New Life” would have been fun – but under the moonlight a new suppleness and strength emerges in much of the more recent material. Depeche Mode’s attempts to grow up in public have made them an easy target for ridicule, but at least (unlike, say, the Cure), they have made the effort. Sometimes they try too hard. There is an ugly flash of misogyny in “Stripped”, but for a band whose main songwriting talent left more than a decade ago, they are not doing too badly. [1]