Depeche Mode 101: By Mary Valle
Published by: Bloomsbury Academic
Release date: 30/05/24
33⅓ revisits the Pasadena Rose Bowl in 88 and a live album whose influence would change the trajectory of alternative music.
Like all true music fans I’m a love fool for a delirious crowd roar, and to this day there’s something about the primal scream that ushers in the opening notes of “Just Can’t Get Enough” on Depeche Mode’s “101” live album, that gives me what Lester Bangs once summed up as ‘an erection of the heart’. For writer Mary Valle the connection is probably a lot more powerful, given that she was actually in the audience that night in Pasadena.
Her tale is a mixture of the historical and the personal. The backstory to DM’s “101” concert is fascinating. How an English DJ called Richard Blade on radio station KROQ championed the band, six albums into their career and yet to command real stadium status in the US. Valle traces both the rise of electronic music and KROQ in Los Angeles and the minutiae of Depeche Mode with a painters eye, yet she is also keen to analyse just why she adored the band in the first place, taking us back to her teenage world of existential crises looming in the background and volume busting Walkmans. From the threat of imminent nuclear war ( Valle references “The Day After” where we in the UK had “Threads” ) to listing bands she hated in a notebook (The Eagles, Supertramp and REO Speedwagon all get it ), it’s a typical teenage manifesto with a twist. It’s a tale of kinship and alienation on both sides. Depeche Mode after all in the eighties were still a band on the margins. Sniffed at by UK critics and yet to really break America. Although things as Valle points out were about to shift dramatically.
It just so happened that the stars would align perfectly in 88. The Concert For The Masses tour had sharpened Depeche Mode’s armoury significantly and they were a band who were note perfect by the time they landed in Pasadena, possessing a lead singer in Gahan not afraid to channel his inner Shiva. Valle builds up to that triumph, describing a shifting landscape in pop culture whilst concluding that her love of DM was based on a sense of danger. “They gave me permission to feel bad,” she says, which is the ink in the tattooed heart of rock and roll rebellion. It’s difficult to think of another stadium act that was quite as subversive as Depeche Mode. Valle succinctly points out that most successful British acts in the US ( from Billy Idol to Bono ) were steeped in American lore and still stuck on a kind of spiritual route 66. Whilst DM flirted with that themselves, their sheer strangeness easily outweighed such cultural jingoism. They were singing about S and M, marauding around Berlin and rocking up in leather skirts. They should have failed. Traditionally when the British got weird ( minus Bowie ) American audiences just shrugged and moved on to something less, well, subterranean.
And yet despite all this, Depeche Mode conquered. Valle describes their crowning moment in Pasadena with obvious affection. The “Silicone teens had become silicone men,” she gushes and writing of that night in the Rose Bowl she is suddenly a teenager again. From the picturesque stadium half buried and surrounded by the Sierra Madre mountains to the zooming acceleration of the future accentuated by Gore, Gahan and Co. Reading this book you begin to realise that perhaps DM’s greatest gift was dismissing that old rock clique of authenticity, the idea that electronic music was somehow not really part of the rock and roll canon. As Valle points out, Gahan would burst into tears directly after the show, safe in the knowledge that the eighties were breaking apart culturally but also tinged with regret that things would never be the same again. He was kind of right too. They were part of the corporate stadium roadshow from then on in. It would be left ( with KROQ’s help ) to a certain band from Seattle to take up the alternative mantle.
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Words by Craig Campbell, you can read more book reviews at his author profile. He also tweets here
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