I first heard Depeche Mode around 1986-87, close on the heels of secretly embracing the Pet Shop Boys and New Order. The girl I was dating at the time introduced me to songs from Some Great Reward – Blasphemous Rumours, People Are People, Master and Servant – and I enjoyed them well enough.
My freshman year of college at Bowling Green, though? Depeche Mode was a core part of the fall 1989-spring 1990 soundtrack in our bloodstream, me and my newest, closest friends hanging out long hours, cold days, dizzy nights in close quarters, heading to Alternative Nights at Uptown, playing rummy, sitting on the edge of bunks or desks eating cafeteria sandwiches – good lord, what did we do with all that free time and can I have some of it back please? Yeah: Lots of Depeche Mode and The Cure and Cocteau Twins and Alphaville – and holy fuck, was it a big deal when Violator came out that March, most of the way through the year when there was what seemed then like a lot of emotionally churned water under our bridges.
A few years later, I moved to Florida, where I met Jenn. She was also an alternative music kid, and made me a mixtape including James and Voice of the Beehive and Blake Babies, and sometimes we’d go dancing at Visage, an alt-club where Jenn once memorably threw her black-booted feet around at a particularly elevated level when an unknown young woman was apparently dancing too close to me.
Jenn & I got married, moved to Ohio, raised a wonderful human, and I kind of stopped paying attention to Depeche Mode very much for awhile, except for the nostalgia trips from time to time and then their presence in many of my synthpop streaming music collections when those became a thing.
Over the past few years, Jenn and I started really making an effort to see musicians whose work we enjoy, particularly those we’ve missed out on over the years – bands like Duran Duran, The Cure, and They Might Be Giants. And then last year Andy Fletcher died, and this year Memento Mori came out, and Jenn and I nabbed Depeche Mode tickets for Cleveland as soon as we could.
Depeche Mode live was everything I wanted: Incredible stage energy, vocals that still deliver a punch to the heart, a wide-ranging set that mixed what I think are the best parts of Memento Mori with 15 songs from their 1981 (Speak & Spell) to 1993 (Songs of Faith and Devotion) catalog.
Best surprise? Martin Gore’s acoustic “Strangelove.” (Pictured above.) It’s my favorite Depeche Mode song, and they’re rotating it in and out of the set, so I didn’t want to get my hopes up. But when I heard the familiar keyboard intro plinking gorgeously from the synthesizer – I don’t know how else to describe it when you program an electronic keyboard to sound like a traditional piano – well, things got a little dusty in my locality of the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse for those three minutes. Second best? “Black Celebration.” Again, one that isn’t being performed at every show, but which nestles darkly and cozily against my insides.
There’s also something incredibly Depeche Mode about seeing this band at this moment in time, decades into a career spent creating music known for its appeal to a joyfully melancholy twilit crowd of goths and new wavers and synthpulsers and weird kids. I’m not saying that sad music created in your twenties isn’t valid and true and real – I’m just saying that stuff hits different coming from a couple sixty-year old guys who have (like all of us of A Certain Age) seen some shit in the past 40+ years. It seems likely this is a final go-round for them – and if it’s not, that’s totally OK, too – but if it is, then wow, guys: Thanks for a hell of a goodbye.
John Booth Writes 