Autogahan!
[NME, 3rd October 1998. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Roger Sargent.]
A whiff of tragicomic self-parody hangs heavy over Depeche Mode’s mammoth outdoor bash on the wooded fringes of Berlin. This 20,000-seater amphitheatre is, after all, where Hitler played warm-up shows for stadium gigs like Nuremberg. Just across the road stands the imposing stone clocktower through which the Fuhrer made his grand entrances to the 1936 Olympics. And behind the stage, above the trees, a vast power station belches smoke into a darkening sky. You know the German word for power station? Kraftwerk. No kidding.
So here we find the Mode, almost 20 years and 40 million albums down the line, playing the second of two sell-out Berlin nights on their monster post-1986 hits roadshow. No longer a quartet, now a trio with a couple of spare musicians. No longer drug-crazed, mentally deranged rock pigs. Still massive in former dictatorships and countries with high suicide rates. Still wearing black.
The angel on our shoulder loves the Mode. After all, they escaped the naffest concrete town in Thatcherite Essex, reinvented chart pop as something sleek and electronic and European and sexually ambivalent, then sold it by the truckload to middle America. They went up against smelly-socked, sweaty-cocked rock on its own terms and won. They spawned the Prodigy and Garbage and unwittingly predicted the techno boom, even if they were heading in the opposite direction when it finally arrived.
The devil on our shoulder, mind you, wonders what they lost along the way. He notes that Dave Gahan’s LA rocker waistcoat and libidinous swagger are pure Michael Hutchence. He witnesses the processed glam rock stomp of “Personal Jesus” and the lumbering synthetic blues of “Barrel Of A Gun”, reflecting ruefully how the Mode conquered rock but then allowed rock to colonise them in return. Did they really rewire the pop rule book nearly two decades ago just to end up playing stadium jamborees like this with guitars, drums and spangle-dressed backing singers? Isn’t this a betrayal, or did they want to be Led Zeppelin all along?
But bollocks to both angels and devils, we say. Because even if Depeche Mode ever had souls to sell, they have long since been replaced by a sure sense of bombastic spectacle allied to songwriter Martin Gore’s enduring gift for boomingly universal anthems. We surprise ourselves with just how many of these throbbing monoliths we recall by heart, and just how magnificent the melancholy twangs of “Policy Of Truth” or the burly punishment beats of “It’s No Good” sound played through crystal-clear speakers half the size of Finland. New single “Only When I Lose Myself” holds up well too, all pneumatic shudders and weightless bleeps.
Sure, not every one’s a winner. There are dragging lulls when you yearn for a dash of New Order’s spunky cheek or Marilyn Manson’s confrontational theatre. But when Gahan submerges himself in the mile-wide river of gushing electro-gospel that is “Condemnation”, or when Gore croons a tremulously tender “Home”, 20,000 spines tingle in unison at the naked vulnerability pouring from the stage.
Gore is back on the mic again for the first encore, “Somebody”, an even more heartbroken piano ballad in which he pines for a lover who resembles a passive, docile, obedient Stepford wife. He seems to mean it too. Creepy. [1] Then Gahan gets to play the Wagnerian rock lizard once more on a wheezing, snorting “I Feel You” – Mr Sex Messiah, still rocking the Pasadena Rosebowl inside his head.
But all sins are forgiven with a final, triumphant, bouncy gallop through the Mode’s 1981 toytown techno smash “Just Can’t Get Enough”, way off the tour agenda and all the more welcome for being so. It feels like a release, a reward, a reminder of innocent times. Futurist vaudeville with the emotional depth of a microchip? Maybe, but in a torchlit Berlin forest full of arm-waving Eurogoths bent on recreating the totalitarian mass devotion of Queen’s “Radio Gaga” video, it all makes a stirring kind of sense.
Depeche Mode have survived self-destruction and transcended self-parody. They are still with us, and still worth celebrating.
[NME, 3rd October 1998. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Roger Sargent.]
A whiff of tragicomic self-parody hangs heavy over Depeche Mode’s mammoth outdoor bash on the wooded fringes of Berlin. This 20,000-seater amphitheatre is, after all, where Hitler played warm-up shows for stadium gigs like Nuremberg. Just across the road stands the imposing stone clocktower through which the Fuhrer made his grand entrances to the 1936 Olympics. And behind the stage, above the trees, a vast power station belches smoke into a darkening sky. You know the German word for power station? Kraftwerk. No kidding.
So here we find the Mode, almost 20 years and 40 million albums down the line, playing the second of two sell-out Berlin nights on their monster post-1986 hits roadshow. No longer a quartet, now a trio with a couple of spare musicians. No longer drug-crazed, mentally deranged rock pigs. Still massive in former dictatorships and countries with high suicide rates. Still wearing black.
The angel on our shoulder loves the Mode. After all, they escaped the naffest concrete town in Thatcherite Essex, reinvented chart pop as something sleek and electronic and European and sexually ambivalent, then sold it by the truckload to middle America. They went up against smelly-socked, sweaty-cocked rock on its own terms and won. They spawned the Prodigy and Garbage and unwittingly predicted the techno boom, even if they were heading in the opposite direction when it finally arrived.
The devil on our shoulder, mind you, wonders what they lost along the way. He notes that Dave Gahan’s LA rocker waistcoat and libidinous swagger are pure Michael Hutchence. He witnesses the processed glam rock stomp of “Personal Jesus” and the lumbering synthetic blues of “Barrel Of A Gun”, reflecting ruefully how the Mode conquered rock but then allowed rock to colonise them in return. Did they really rewire the pop rule book nearly two decades ago just to end up playing stadium jamborees like this with guitars, drums and spangle-dressed backing singers? Isn’t this a betrayal, or did they want to be Led Zeppelin all along?
But bollocks to both angels and devils, we say. Because even if Depeche Mode ever had souls to sell, they have long since been replaced by a sure sense of bombastic spectacle allied to songwriter Martin Gore’s enduring gift for boomingly universal anthems. We surprise ourselves with just how many of these throbbing monoliths we recall by heart, and just how magnificent the melancholy twangs of “Policy Of Truth” or the burly punishment beats of “It’s No Good” sound played through crystal-clear speakers half the size of Finland. New single “Only When I Lose Myself” holds up well too, all pneumatic shudders and weightless bleeps.
Sure, not every one’s a winner. There are dragging lulls when you yearn for a dash of New Order’s spunky cheek or Marilyn Manson’s confrontational theatre. But when Gahan submerges himself in the mile-wide river of gushing electro-gospel that is “Condemnation”, or when Gore croons a tremulously tender “Home”, 20,000 spines tingle in unison at the naked vulnerability pouring from the stage.
Gore is back on the mic again for the first encore, “Somebody”, an even more heartbroken piano ballad in which he pines for a lover who resembles a passive, docile, obedient Stepford wife. He seems to mean it too. Creepy. [1] Then Gahan gets to play the Wagnerian rock lizard once more on a wheezing, snorting “I Feel You” – Mr Sex Messiah, still rocking the Pasadena Rosebowl inside his head.
But all sins are forgiven with a final, triumphant, bouncy gallop through the Mode’s 1981 toytown techno smash “Just Can’t Get Enough”, way off the tour agenda and all the more welcome for being so. It feels like a release, a reward, a reminder of innocent times. Futurist vaudeville with the emotional depth of a microchip? Maybe, but in a torchlit Berlin forest full of arm-waving Eurogoths bent on recreating the totalitarian mass devotion of Queen’s “Radio Gaga” video, it all makes a stirring kind of sense.
Depeche Mode have survived self-destruction and transcended self-parody. They are still with us, and still worth celebrating.
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