Rendering 15. Music.

            The article “Depeche Mode, O2 Arena” was published by Bernadette McNulty on May 29, 2013. It discussed  that The Basildon synth pioneers' lusty stadium show is strictly for the faithful, writes Bernadette McNulty.

            Speaking of this article, it’s necessary to say, in The Posters Came from the Walls, the entertaining 2007 documentary by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams about Depeche Mode fans around the world. Going by the packed arena for their latest world tour, the Basildon-born boys are hardly on their uppers in the UK although the black-clad but jovial crowd was markedly pan-European.

            Yet despite being the most successful electronic band in the world with 100 million record sales under their belt and a fundamental influenc

e on the Eighties synth revival, name-checked by younger acts from Arcade Fire to La Roux, Depeche Mode are still dwarfed in prestige by more intellectual groups like Kraftwerk.

            In addition, Depeche Mode have always been lustily Catholic, ramping up the human drama of sex, death and damnation along with lashings of rock, industrial and, on their 13th album Delta Machine, blues influences.

            It’s important to point, Loaded with album tracks from the latter, less chart-troubling phase of their career, the now-threesome were firmly staking out their territory, far from their early-1980s incarnation as a synth-pop boy band, where across the river in Canning Town they had caught the ear of Mute records. Here were men who had survived bad fashions, band implosions, drug abuse and near death

            The faithful lapped it up, including ballads from Gore, but for the layman it was like listening to Latin – exotically mysterious at first, wearying after two hours with only a fantastic Policy of Truth to break up the industrial dirge.

            To conclude, those who stuck with it were consecrated at the end with a smattering of the transcendent hits that have kept the band going for 30-odd years – Enjoy the Silence and a version of Personal Jesus that morphed into Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. But by the time they finished on crowd favourite Never Let Me Down.

            I can say I have never been a fan of music articles because, as highlighted here, they are always subjective rather than objective. Rather embarrassingly though, here we have someone who is paid an inordinate amount of money, writing ineptly about something of which that person clearly has little understanding.