Although the tour has been expanded to have more shows, including at least one that would have been easier for me to get to, my wife bought tickets for the Memento Mori Depeche Mode concert in Chicago back when there were very few shows. That's OK. Because it was Wednesday of the week of Good Friday, I took a few days of vacation and turned a three day weekend into a five day weekend, and we just spent some time in Chicago doing Chicago things. It was fun for a while, until sleeping in an admittedly pretty bad hotel bed (don't know why it was so hard, and why we ended up on a queen instead of a king... and why they didn't have any extra pillows, or... well, anyway. Big city stuff.)
We both were pretty exhausted by the end of it due to poor sleep. My wife tends to get a migraine when traveling if she's not careful anyway, and it started hitting her on Good Friday. By Saturday, she was pretty much out of luck when it came to having energy to do anything except eventually travel back home. Frankly, I was kind of tired too, but more importantly, I was over being in Chicago, being stuck to places that I could walk to or having to take an Uber, the noise, the smell, the concrete, the crowds, the racist ranting of some black power group on the sidewalk, etc. I am fundamentally not an urban guy.
Anyway, needless to say, the Depeche Mode concert was the night of our first full day in Chicago, so I wasn't tired of being there yet, or tired in any sense. It was kind of exciting still at that stage. The Depeche Mode audience is kinda funny. Although I did see some younger people there, by far the majority of the people with tickets were at least 40 years old, and the average age may well have been around 50. (I just turned 51 a couple of months ago myself, and my wife will turn 50 later this year. Our average age is right there too.) Depeche Mode themselves, now that they're down to officially two members and two live musicians, are both 61, I believe. Christian Eigner (the live drummer) and Peter Gordeno (the live keyboard player) have both been playing with Depeche Mode since the late 90s in their live show (the Ultra era, basically) and are probably about the same age too, give or take a few years. Wikipedia lists Gordeno's age as 59, and doesn't list one for Eigner.
Anyway, I was concerned that with their age, the show would feel kind of tired and... well, old, quite honestly. Luckily, that wasn't the case. Dave isn't as athletic as he was in the 80s, or even the mid 00s when I saw the Playing the Angel tour, but he's still pretty spry and charismatic on stage. Nobody else has ever had much of a stage presence to speak of anyway. Martin is just kinda there, walking around slowly and singing and playing in the background. When he does his solos, he just stands there and sings them and counts on the merits of the song to carry him through. Fletch never did much on stage either. He played a keyboard, and clapped and did some background dancing a bit and vocals here and there, I guess. Curiously, on stage, he wasn't missed. Nobody replaced him, so either his parts (usually the baseline, I gather) were recorded and played that way, or Gardeno or someone else could play them in addition to what he was playing already. Although it might seem gauche to say it after he passed away unexpectedly last year, but it brings up the specter even more starkly that people had been asking for years; what exactly did he do for the band? It did seem like some of the background vocals were missing, but I think the mixing of Gardeno trying to sing them just wasn't good, and I couldn't hear it very well.
I read a review on Amazon for the book Stripped by Jonathan Miller, which is the definitive history of the band. I read at least part of the book myself a couple of years ago, although as we got past the Violator era, I was much less interested. If I read a blow by blow, as best it could be constructed, of why Alan left in the middle of the 90s, I don't remember any details of it, so I'm left with the stuff that I already knew. In his statement, he mentions working conditions and workload distribution, which is widely seen as a polite yet pointed way of suggesting that he was doing a lot of work, Fletch wasn't pulling his weight, and maybe they just didn't really get along all that well. The review I read, which was written in 2019, before Fletch died, suggested what I've always believed that Fletch was kind of arrogant and dismissive about Alan leaving. Possibly brought on by a kind of insecurity or "imposter syndrome" given that clearly Alan was contributing much more than Fletch was, and I can't believe that Fletch didn't know that. If anything, in the fanbase, that sentiment has reached exaggerated proportions, and Alan's contribution has become this kind of mythical legendary utopia. Depeche Mode fanboys are as likely to be Alan Wilder fanboys as anything else, and frequently suggest that the band is a shell of what it used to be since he left.
This isn't exactly what I think, but I also think that there's something to it. If you listen to Martin Gore's demo of "Enjoy the Silence", where it's just him singing it like a dirge over a stripped down organ accompaniment, it's not really very interesting. It's the same song as the one we're more familiar with... but also not at all the same song. Martin Gore is a good song-writer, a notable songwriter of his generation, even. But sometimes that isn't sufficient in and of itself. Without Alan Wilder to interpret the songs, they may or may not amount to much. I've said earlier that other producers and partners could also do what Wilder used to do, and do a credible job, but do they have the force of personality to do so, especially when they are hired guns who are not nearly as big a name as Depeche Mode themselves are? That's debatable. Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones could do that, in part because when they worked with them, Depeche Mode were younger and less experienced. Alan could do it. The story of him and Flood convincing Martin to do "Enjoy the Silence" the way that they did is a prime example of it. I think that the role Alan Wilder, Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones played in developing Depeche Mode's sound is understated. Miller in particular was on board from the beginning and didn't step back until Music For the Masses. Gareth Jones rebuilt their sound and technological approach through the trio of Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration. And Wilder, who came on board during the A Broken Frame period quickly learned and dived heavily into the production and arranging side of things, working very closely with Miller and Jones until he didn't need to anymore because he could do it himself.
Wilder was still around for Songs of Faith and Devotion, though, where the band transformed itself, or at least picked up a lot of early 90s pop culture detritus, and the band second-guessed who they were, for at least a time. While I'm not a fan of the direction SOFAD went, it does feel that the albums after that were a bit more lifeless, even when they returned (somewhat) to a more familiar sound. But since Wilder left, most of the tracks released sound like filler tracks, honestly. The ratio of good to filler has plummeted. For most albums, Angel admittedly excepted, it's good if there are one or two memorable tracks on the album. I don't know if Gore is phoning it in on the writing, or if he really does need Wilder to interpret his songs into something better than mediocre for most of them. I could imagine both scenarios being true.
Anyway, I'm getting rambly about the history of the band, so I'll cut it short, put an old picture of the band up for visual interest and move on. Basically, I'm just establishing context that I greatly prefer earlier Depeche Mode. Violator was the last Depeche Mode album that I really liked, although I'll admit that there have been some really good top tier songs that have come out since Violator, like "Wrong" and "Precious" and I wasn't unhappy with the fact that they played a few songs from the new album, mostly the better songs like "My Cosmos Is Mine", "Wagging Tongues" and especially "Ghosts Again." Essentially, my ideal setlist wouldn't be all that different from the 101 setlist, except maybe take away "Something to Do", "The Things You Said", "Nothing", and "Pleasure Little Treasure" and replace them with "Enjoy the Silence", "Personal Jesus", "Wrong", "Precious" and "Ghosts Again." Maybe to surprise us, we could get the two Ultra tracks that were played, or if they really wanted to surprise us, I'd love to have heard "The Sun & The Rainfall" or "But Not Tonight." So, I didn't get my ideal setlist, but mostly the setlist wasn't bad.
A Broken Frame, Some Great Reward, Exciter, Delta Machine, and Spirit all had no tracks in the setlist. Honestly, though, only Some Great Reward was kind of surprising there. When I last saw Depeche Mode in 2005, they still played "Somebody", and I thought that they considered that one of their real classics and a must-play.
The setlist had a kind of momentum to it. I don't know that my wife was really enjoying it all that much until the second half, honestly, but she's not as big a fan as me, and knows few songs post Violator. But even me, and it feels like the audience energy in general, picked up as the set went on, and certainly peaked with some of the real classics of the 80s and earliest 90s; all Violator or earlier tracks, especially "World In My Eyes" (which benefits from the emotional tug of being dedicated to Fletch and having his image on the big screen), "Enjoy the Silence", "Never Let Me Down Again," "Just Can't Get Enough" and "Personal Jesus." A bit earlier in the show, the energy around "Everything Counts", "Precious," and "Ghosts Again" was pretty high too. Smack in the middle of those tracks was "John the Revelator" which didn't really wind the audience up much, and "Condemnation" which got some cheers, but mostly felt like the audience was enduring rather than enjoying. I really quite enjoyed "Wrong" but the audience reaction was a bit muted. I don't think many people know the lyrics, and it's not really a very danceable tempo is the explanation, though.
Anyway, it was a good show. Expensive as all get-out; our mediocre seats went for something like $200 each. But let's be real. At this point, it's likely that this is the last time I will ever attempt to see them. I'm glad that I did, and I'm glad that I saw Angel some 18 years or so ago too. I don't regret going. What I regret was that I didn't go earlier when I had the chance in the late 80s or early 90s. I was probably too young for the Masses tour for my parents to have let me go in '88, but I could probably have swung the Violator tour if I'd thought that I'd wanted to, and I could certainly have swung the SOFAD tour; heck, my little brother went, and I could have gone with. But the masses tour is the one that I'd most want to have seen.
UPDATE: I've also decided where to place Memento Mori in the forced rankings. Here is the updated chart for that over here on the side too.
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