The Atriumphal arch dominates the stage set for Depeche Mode’s tour. The huge M stands for Memento Mori, the title of their 2023 album, which is largely regarded as a return to form. However, that enormous M also stands for Mode. When founding member and keyboardist Andrew Fletcher died of heart failure two years ago, the band’s existence was jeopardized. Surprisingly, much of the latest album’s focus on mortality was set by primary songwriter Martin Gore prior to Fletcher’s death.
Depeche Mode is currently in its second year of touring the world, bombarding audiences with caustic earworms about our faulty human nature. On night one of leg four, they grasp the day with zeal. Singer Dave Gahan, in good voice, frequently spins around on the spot, his forceful shirt cuffs reminiscent of the Damned’s Dave Vanian, but with a considerably more refined couturier. Gore is comfortably mohicaned, wears black nail polish, and alternates between keyboards and a low-slung semi-acoustic. Peter Gordeno, the keys player, and Christian Eigner, the drummer, are also on stage, albeit the latter may be a little too eager on stadium rock fills. It takes a while for a true memento mori – a reminder that death comes to everyone –
The US may not remember them when they were Spandau Ballet with a dungeon in their basement, but SE10 clearly does
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 performed on the Greenwich peninsula, roughly 30 miles from the band’s hometown of Basildon, provide fans with a retrospective of the band’s eras from beginning to conclusion. In with the new: while Ghosts Again may have been Memento Mori’s calling card, tonight the machine hydraulics of set opener My Cosmos Is Mine and the crisp lines of My Favourite Stranger stand out more prominently. Depeche Mode Go out with the old, too. “Are you ready to have some fun?” asks Gahan during the encore. It serves as a forerunner to 1981’s Just Can’t Get Enough, a throwback to Vince Clarke’s era that has been transformed into gorgeous synth-pop with polyrhythms. In the United States,
