Review: Depeche wears nostalgia just fine

Geoff Carter

Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001 | 8:35 a.m.

I grew up in Southern California listening to KROQ, one of America's first and best alternative rock stations. By the time I got to KROQ, the Pasadena-based station was only playing two artists: Oingo Boingo and Depeche Mode. Sometimes it would alternate; sometimes it would play in blocks; sometimes its music would play interspersed with songs by lesser KROQ artists, such as Tears For Fears and the Bangles and U2.

A Los Angeles Times referred to the station as "Westworld" -- a place where less-popular New Wave artists could come to live the fantasy of being megastars. That's how it happened that Depeche Mode, at the height of its Golden State popularity (around 1986) could play its KROQ hits in front of 95,000 screaming Southern Californians at the Rose Bowl, while it played medium-sized sheds (at best) in the rest of the country. The band's live album "Depeche Mode 101" documents the dumb wonder of one such show: four English lads overwhelmed by Western hospitality.

Fifteen years later Depeche Mode can still bank on that affection. Its show at the Hard Rock Hotel's Joint Wednesday night drew a capacity crowd, and while its number fell more than 90,000 short of that long-ago Rose Bowl gig, those that could get in were as happy to see the band as they would be if Depeche Mode had enjoyed a real hit since 1993. Even though this was the guitar-heavy Mode favored by vocalist Dave Gahan, the Hard Rock crowd treated it as gingerly as a fading radio station -- leaning to and fro as need dictated, trying to hold the signal.

For most of the show the band came through clear -- and loud. Guitarist/keyboardist Martin Gore indulged glam rock tendencies I didn't know he had, washing down "I Feel You" and "Personal Jesus" with reverb and fuzz -- wasn't Depeche Mode a synthesizer-based pop band, once? No matter. Wednesday night it was Brain Eno-era Roxy Music with more tattoos, playing lean and low to the ground, being stingy with its hits (it dug back no further than "Black Celebration," 1986) and trying to overcome the image that built it.

For the most part, it worked. I would have enjoyed Depeche Mode immensely if I knew nothing beyond its 1990 monster hit "Violator" -- but being part of that brainwashed KROQ generation, I had hoped it would turn down the ballast and turn up the kink. Many of Depeche Mode's finest moments are intimated, not broadcast: the covert sexuality of "Behind the Wheel," the exuberant pacing of "Strangelove" and "People are People," the hypnotic rush of "Enjoy the Silence" (marred by an unnecessary drum solo).

So it goes. "Westworld" is more or less closed: Nirvana knocked bands such as Depeche Mode off KROQ, and popular music has twisted far enough around to render even the most lascivious of the Mode's lamentations fit for SUV commercials. But by Wednesday night's performance, Gahan, Gore and company proved that they're at least willing to pretend: If you act like a crowd of 95,000, we'll be a band that can play to that number. So few 1980s bands are willing to live that illusion, which is why the Mode is spinning circles around it -- even some 400 miles from the epicenter of its biggest blowout.