A triumphal arch dominates the stage set of Depeche Mode’s tour. The giant M stands for Memento Mori – the title of their 2023 album, widely hailed as a return to form. But that monumental M is also for Mode. Two years ago they were a band under existential threat, when founder member and keyboard player Andrew Fletcher died of heart failure. Eye-wideningly, much of the latest album’s concern with death had already been established by chief songwriter Martin Gore some time before Fletcher’s passing.
Now, Depeche Mode are on their second year of a tour of the world’s stages, pummelling audiences with caustic earworms about our flawed human nature once more. On night one of leg four, they seize their day with vigour. Singer Dave Gahan, in fine voice, often spins around on the spot, his emphatic shirt cuffs recalling the Damned’s Dave Vanian’s, but with a far more salubrious couturier.
Comfortingly mohicaned, Gore also sports his customary black nail varnish and swaps between keyboards and a low-slung semi-acoustic. Also on stage are keys player Peter Gordeno and drummer Christian Eigner, the latter perhaps a little too keen on stadium rock fills. It takes a while for an actual memento mori – a reminder that death comes to all – to appear. But giant projections of skulls covered with glitter (pace Damien Hirst) spin around during Enjoy the Silence from 1990’s Violator album, daubed with the word “enjoy”.
Better than the heavy symbolism, though, is the song’s unexpected progression tonight from a tune that recalls New Order to house piano rave breakdown, one that could have gone on for far longer. The visuals for the magnificent Everything Counts, meanwhile, elegantly enhance the song’s anti-greed message. A video of a mime with gloved white hands enacts the lyrics, like an arty sign language interpreter.
The two hours of Mode music that plays out on the Greenwich peninsula, just 30 miles from the band’s native Basildon, rewards fans with a retrospective from across the band’s eras, from start to end. In with the new: the song Ghosts Again may have taken top billing as Memento Mori’s calling card, but tonight the machine hydraulics of set opener My Cosmos Is Mine and the clean lines of My Favourite Stranger stand prouder.
Depeche Mode go out with the old too. “Are you ready to have a bit of fun?” asks Gahan in the encore. It’s a prelude to 1981’s Just Can’t Get Enough, a holdover from the long-ago Vince Clarke era, rendered as glorious synth-pop with added polyrhythms. The US, where the band reinvented themselves as glowering electronic rock beasts, may not remember them when they were Spandau Ballet with a dungeon in their basement, but SE10 clearly does.
What we are witnessing, though, besides an assured greatest hits set, is a kind of rock Jenga in real time. What happens when you knock a support out from under a structure? The remaining struts either take the load – or don’t. In other words: construction time again. It has been a hallmark of this album campaign that the pact to continue has brought Gore and Gahan closer together after decades of arm’s length diplomacy, often with Fletcher as middleman.
Gore was the band’s sole songwriter between the 1981 departure of founder member Clarke and the 2005 détente that marked Gahan’s increased creative input to the band. Tensions between Depeche Mode’s two most valuable players (who live on opposite coasts of the US) had contributed to the departure of Alan Wilder in 1995. A former dependency on alcohol (Gore) and heroin (Gahan) had not helped matters either; neither did Gahan’s multiple brushes with death.
The newly minted power of two is borne out tonight by the affection and bonhomie the survivors show each other. There are broad smiles and praise from Gahan for Gore’s “beautiful, angelic tones” after a couple of Gore-fronted numbers; backslaps throughout and hugs at the end. Fletcher is remembered – as a giant, subtly morphing black and white image – when the band play World in My Eyes, his favourite Depeche Mode song.
That big proscenium M could stand for Martin as well. Gore downs tools to sing a moving, pared-back rendition of 1987’s Strangelove, accompanied only by Gordeno. He follows it up with Heaven, a 2013 song that faintly recalls Portishead’s Glory Box. Both provide some breathing space from Default Mode: the thunderous sulks about relationships, religion and vice.
If their set closer, Personal Jesus, covers that middle ground, two other canon highlights hold up the ends. Never Let Me Down Again is a compelling portrait of dependence that leads to a bout of manic arm waving from the crowd. Most assured of all, though, is I Feel You, from 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion – an unrelenting love track that swings at the same time. More than any other tune, new or old tonight, it captures Depeche Mode’s enduring lust for life.
