In The Posters Came from the Walls, the entertaining 2007 documentary by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams about Depeche Mode fans around the world, a Russian devotee who translates their lyrics into poetry said they were like “prophets without honour at home”. Going by the packed arena for their latest world tour, the Basildon-born boys are hardly on their uppers in the UK although the black-clad but jovial crowd – a swagger of PVC trousers, waistcoats and fingerless, studded-leather gloves – was markedly pan-European.
Yet despite being the most successful electronic band in the world with 100 million record sales under their belt and a fundamental influence on the Eighties synth revival, name-checked by younger acts from Arcade Fire to La Roux, Depeche Mode are still dwarfed in prestige by more intellectual groups like Kraftwerk. Compared to the austere, Lutheran approach of the Germans towards machine-made music, Depeche Mode have always been lustily Catholic, ramping up the human drama of sex, death and damnation along with lashings of rock, industrial and, on their 13th album Delta Machine, blues influences.
And as such this was a high mass for committed believers rather than any johnny-come-lately kids. Loaded with album tracks from the latter, less chart-troubling phase of their career, the now-threesome were firmly staking out their territory, far from their early-1980s incarnation as a synth-pop boy band, where across the river in Canning Town they had caught the ear of Mute records. Here were men who had survived bad fashions, band implosions, drug abuse and near death. In Dave Gahan’s case, you could only conclude the 51-year-old had made a pact with the devil, in such rude health did he appear. With plenty of Elvis and Jagger in his snake-hipped thrusts and twirls, Gahan mimed out the band’s well-worn catechisms like Essex’s answer to Jacques Lecoq.
Flanked by the more sedate figures of Alan Fletcher doing Tai Chi over his keyboards and Martin Gore’s still sweetly boyish face looking forever on the verge of tears, they made a simple but visually compelling trinity, bolstered by muscular drumming. With enigmatic background films of dogs and semi-naked women doing impressive backbends the band could certainly teach younger stadium acts a trick or two about staging and sound.
The faithful lapped it up, including ballads from Gore, but for the layman it was like listening to Latin – exotically mysterious at first, wearying after two hours with only a fantastic Policy of Truth to break up the industrial dirge.
Those who stuck with it were consecrated at the end with a smattering of the transcendent hits that have kept the band going for 30-odd years – Enjoy the Silence and a version of Personal Jesus that morphed into Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. But by the time they finished on crowd favourite Never Let Me Down, I, unlike the ecstatic believers, really had had enough.
