For a rare occasion at the concert he gave last night at the Bell Centre, singer Dave Gahan addressed the audience, just before the encore: “Come on! Let me hear you sing! “And the public to answer him:” All I ever wanted / All I ever needed is here in my arms / Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm “. Enjoy the Silence closed almost two hours of industrial synth-pop-rock nostalgia, as Depeche Mode returned to Montreal, six years after its last visit.
The last time, Dave Gahan and Martin Gore still relied on their faithful keyboardist and bassist Andy Fletcher, who died suddenly in May 2022. The survivors offered a sober tribute to their former colleague, displaying on the giant screen serving as a backdrop a black and white photo of a young Fletcher, for the powerful interpretation of World in My Eyesduring the last stretch of the evening which did not sparkle, but which managed to immerse the 15,700 spectators present in their memories of youth.
Depeche Mode, in truth, did not come out of the starting blocks explosively; the instrumental and noisy introduction dragged its feet until My Cosmos is Minethen in Wagging Tongue, two songs taken from the new album. Gore busy behind his keyboards, the slender Gahan in his sequined black jacket clutching his microphone, the group was on stage, but not yet in the saddle. That’s when Gahan threw a nice ” good evening Montreal! that the crowd woke up, instantly recognizing the first notes of walking in my shoesone of their last real popular hits, taken from Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993).
In three songs, we already had the plan for the evening: to sprinkle the great songs of the Depeche Mode repertoire by trying to pick some from each album, and to grant an enviable portion of the show to those of Memento Mori. It gave two hours of a good show, but a jagged show during which the public jumped up to sing with Gahan Everything Counts (very successful, with its vintage 1983 electro groove since taken from Construction Time Again), the lugubrious ballad Speak to Me offered in the middle of the evening, or I Feel You. Between these darlings, the public sat down for the time of a forgotten ballad or a more obscure one (they still delighted the fans of the first hour, this was the case for Stripped) which lacked tone.
If Dave Gahan seemed in good shape, the theatrical gesture and the undulations of the body distinguished, the rest of the orchestra played with the restraint often commanded by the melancholy and taciturn songs of Depeche Mode – the drummer finally seemed to fun on more rock songs, for example In Your Room (Songs of Faith and Devotion). For a dancing pop sweetness like A Question of Lust (of Black Celebration1986), the band applied with a dispensable such as Ghosts Again from the last album, with its rather cliché images where Gore and Gahan reenact the chess scene in The Seventh Seal by Bergman.
The stage was very bare, the four instrumentalists arranged in front of a single LED screen, in the center of which was carved the letter M; there was a little little used footbridge, first by Gahan, then by Gore when he took his solo singing time (A Question of Lustof course, then the piano-voice ballad soul with me from the last album). Mega tour, reduced means, but anyway, to see them there, still alive, with their songs, compensated for the lack of artifice. But still, did they sing all our favorites? We would have swapped John the Revelator (of Playing the Angelpublished in 2005 then quickly stored in the bottom of the cupboard) against Policy of Truth (from the classic Violator1990) or any of Music for the Masses (1987). Can you believe they didn’t even play one of that, not even strangelove ?
Which brings us to the killer question: Was this concert worth the exorbitant price Ticketmaster and Live Nation were charging to attend? The controversial practice of dynamic pricing, which causes the price of a ticket to fluctuate in real time according to demand, has inflated the price of certain seats to more than $2,000, as we reported last October. We don’t know how much it cost to seat this lady behind us, at the end of a row, who danced all evening with her eyes closed, immersed in her memories. After I Feel You, she also dried a tear. Of happiness, we wish her, and not because she came to understand that at the price of her place, she could have attended four or five better shows than that of Depeche Mode yesterday.