My first introduction to Depeche Mode was in 1983 when I saw a performance of Everything Counts on Top of the Pops during a family visit to the UK. The song was completely different from anything I'd heard to that point, a sound driven by a combination of synths, xylophone, melodica, vocals, and... an oboe? What's more, they were singing about... contracts? What? The band themselves had a really eighties look to them, a lot of earth tones to be honest, but there was something that set them aside. Maybe it was Alan Wilder playing a stand up drum kit, or Dave Gahan rocking a suit and tie. Maybe it was Andy Fletcher, spiked red hair like a New Wave Archie Andrews, or Martin Gore, bare-chested and absolutely refusing to mime the song. I really can't say what it was specifically, but cumulatively it all came together in a way that intrigued and interested me greatly.
Over the next few years Depeche Mode released a handful of singles and a couple more albums, all of them improving and building on the sound of Everything Counts, refining their style. People are People, Master and Servant, Blasphemous Rumours, so many great songs that demonstrated further development and maturity not only as songwriters and performers, but as sonic architects crafting a unique and distinct sound all their own. But it was Stripped, an advance single taken from the "Black Celebration" album at the start of 1986 that really sealed the deal for me, a seemingly random blend of samples, synths, metal sheeting, and Dave Gahan's sexiest ever vocal all coming together as one of the best singles of the last thirty five years. Stripped is an absolutely phenomenal song and to deny the sheer perfect awesomeness of it is nearly impossible.
A few months after the release of Stripped, "Black Celebration" came out and it proved to be an incredible collection of music that represented the best work the band had done to that point. In addition to releasing the album a tour was also announced that would include a show in Toronto as part of the Kingswood Music Theatre $5 Concert Series for that summer. Kingswood was an outdoor venue at an amusement park outside of the city called Canada's Wonderland. They used to host live shows all summer long, and the idea was that you would pay to get into the park to ride roller coasters and eat funnel cakes and shit and then you'd go to the concert in the evening. The pairing of live music with an amusement park was a pretty genius idea, and over the years I ate a lot of funnel cakes and saw a lot of concerts there.
Let us pause for a moment here and also reflect on the $5 price of this
show. Think about it. I saw Depeche Mode on the Black Celebration tour for
$5. Nowadays you can't buy lunch for $5. There are coffee drinks that
cost more than that show, and I can say with all honesty that there has
never been a coffee drink that was anywhere near as awesome as seeing
Depeche Mode live in 1986. Truly this was the best $5 I ever spent.
Anyway, Depeche Mode announced a show and my friends Jack, Kirsteen, Dave B., Jodi, and Dave H. and I all decided we should go. I had no idea about how to get tickets, but Dave B. had it all worked out and if memory serves me correctly he skipped school and lined up
at Hillcrest Mall in Richmond Hill to get tickets for all of us. Dave B. had edge like that. My memory also fails me about how we got there, I suspect that one of the Daves drove us, but I'm hard pressed to imagine that all six of us fit into a car together, did we? I really can't remember, but we got there early enough in the morning to spend the day riding roller coasters and eating funnel cakes and shit like we were expected to do, and it was all pretty great. I think that Jodi was far more interested in roller coasters than the rest of us, but I'm pretty sure that I was the one who was most interested in funnel cakes. I mean, roller coasters are cool and all, but a good funnel cake is something really special.
After we'd gotten our fill of amusement park thrills, we headed to the theatre and the show started promptly at 8pm with openers Book of Love. They had a song called I Touch Roses that was getting a fair bit of radio play at the time so I had a passing familiarity with them and they were pretty cool. They were quite literal in their presentation and threw rose petals into the crowd during the single, and in hindsight I kind of love that. It's a bit on the nose but it's also kind of awesome. Good job Book of Love!
After that a curtain was drawn across the stage obscuring our view of what was happening, and I'll admit that I was kind of perplexed by what that was all about. I've seen a thousand sound checks and between-set guitar techs doing their thing since then, but at the time I had no idea what was going on and I was really curious about what was going to happen. Were the band particularly shy, and refused to be seen by their fans? I mean, was that even possible? And if that were the case, how would we even know it was them playing the music? I was pretty worried and my concern continued to grow for about fifteen minutes until finally the lights went down and an intro tape began. And if you've ever been to any live show in your life then you know that the crowd went crazy at that point even though the fucking curtain stayed firmly in place and I couldn't see anything.
You can tell that at the time I clearly had no sense of the dramatic entry...
The intro music played for a few minutes, spotlights dancing across the curtain, and everybody's anticipation kept rising. Slowly out of the soundscape you could hear the opening to Black Celebration begin. On the album it kind of builds up from a bubbling synth line for a minute or so before the vocals kick in, but at the show they let that synth line play longer to let the excitement grow.
Then a few minutes into the build up, with the stage still obscured by the curtain, Dave Gahan's vocals rang out with the opening line of the song, "Let's have a Black Celebration..." and the curtain STILL DID NOT FALL!!! You could hear the rest of the band start playing and soon the song was in full swing but there was no movement from the curtain, and I'll admit that I started suspecting that there may have been a reason that tickets were only $5. By the time the first verse had almost finished I was just about to express my concerns to Dave H., when all of a sudden the chorus hit, the curtain fell (!), and there were the band! All of the audience's earlier excitement grew exponentially and the crowd pretty much erupted in orgasmic ecstasy at that point. And this was only the first song. To say that it was an incredible opening would be a tremendous understatement.
Over the next two hours Depeche Mode played their hearts out and the audience loved every fucking minute of it. Or at least I loved every fucking minute of it, I have no idea what the rest of the audience thought because I was in a trance bordering on ecstasy. They played Master and Servant, A Question of Time, A Question of Lust, Stripped, Everything Counts, and more. They had a large metal sheet that Martin Gore hit like a gong during Shake the Disease. They played Blasphemous Rumours, and Somebody, and People are People. They played an amazing future shock version of Photographic, and they closed with More Than a Party. I don't think they've ever played More Than a Party since then. And when the last encore was done and the lights came up, my life was changed. There was something about live performance, a perfect blend of passion and talent and music and magic that I'd never experienced to that point, and it struck me at the time that it was the most amazing combination of elements I had ever seen. I would never be the same again.
Since then I've seen Depeche Mode a bunch of times and a few things come to mind as I think about this particular show. It was still pretty early in the band's career so Martin Gore wasn't playing guitar yet and they didn't have a live drummer or back up singers, but despite that they still had a really full sound, a really defined musical presence. I don't recall there being any videos, though there might have been for a couple of songs. Really it was a pretty sparse show compared to what they do these days. But in some ways maybe it's best that it was such a simple presentation because it let me focus on the performance, and really that's what's at the heart of every concert. It's interesting too that although the band were still in their early days, most of the significant elements of later shows were already present. Given that A Question of Time debuted on this album I would expect that Dave Gahan's patented spinning mike stand trick had it's introduction on this tour, but I expect he'd been doing his whole hip shaking thing for a while by that point because there is no doubt that he was pretty good at shaking his hips that night. I would go so far as to say that he looked sensational doing it. And while we're talking about looking sensational, Martin Gore was rather dashing wearing a dog collar and leather lederhosen, but he also looked fairly nervous and maybe even a little shy when he took the mike to sing two songs at mid set. I guess it takes a different kind of bravery to wear lederhosen than it does to sing in front of an adoring audience. I can respect that.
All in all everything came together perfectly to make it an outstanding night, pretty much the perfect concert experience, and as we filed out of the theatre when the show was all done I had a huge smile on my face. Seeing Depeche Mode that early summer evening in 1986 with my friends was something resonant and connective that's stayed with me ever since, opening me up to a whole new world of musical enjoyment. That was the moment when I fell in love with the concert experience, and it's a love that remains with me to this day...
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