When a band like Depeche Mode moves their stage from the stadium to an intimate auditorium, this is a special situation. On March 17, Depeche Mode will present songs from their new album "Spirit" to several hundred guests in the broadcast hall of the old GDR Funkhaus in Berlin's Nalepastraße and garnish them with older songs. The closeness that the band allows is highly unusual. But it's revealing.
Depeche Mode still has the smell of a pop group thrown truckloads of teddy bears at its feet. The fact that singer Dave Gahan, guitarist/keyboarder Martin Gore and keyboarder Andrew Fletcher are inveterate avant-gardists who have had the rare luck of landing millions in their 35-year career is easily out of focus. Early on the English electronics engineers had oriented themselves to groups such as CAN, Kraftwerk, Suicide or Sparks. The sometimes very radical, sometimes even noise-dominated single B pages speak a different language than the radio hits. But does one always have to exclude the other? At the latest since "Black Celebration" (1986) each of their records had at least subliminally the character of concept albums, and on "Violator" (1990) they finally left the synth-pop of their early years behind.
The latest album "Spirit" focuses more than ever on political and social issues. One day after the approachable appearance Andrew Fletcher asks for an audience in a Berlin noble hotel. He sits enthroned at the window front of a huge hall, it takes half an eternity to penetrate from the door to the silhouette in the back light. In the corner of the room a representative of the record company watches over the course of the conversation. The closeness in the crowd gives way to distance in the personal encounter.
