by Sam Taylor, taken from The Observer, 27th September 1998 (UK)

Depeche Mode,
Waldstadion, Berlin

To many Brits, Depeche Mode will always be a joke. No matter how many nearfatal heroin speedballs Dave Gahan ingests in LA hotel rooms, no matter how many black Chicago house producers testify to the band`s infulience on Nineties dance music, no matter how many bleakly impressive albums they make... in our mind`s eye, they will always be those peculiarly dressed Basildon boys tapping away at synths on Top of the Pops in 1981.
How wrong we are. Seeing them in Berlin, their spiritual hometown, is an upbraiding and slightly scary experience. Here, as throughout the rest of the Continent, there is a tribe that worships them above all others - yes, even above The Cure. Go ahead and laugh, fickle British swine, but the Euro-goths are powerful and growing. One day soon, you will learn to fear their black leather jackets, their magenta mohicans, their motorbike boots and painted-on eyebrows.
Last Saturday, in an outdoor amphitheatre called the Waldstadion, 21.000 Euro-goths came to see their heroes for the first time in five years. As the sun sets, the silhoueted forest looms darkly over the stage, an elegant scarlet-and-silver ensemble created by Anton Corbijn in the image of a peepshow. The air is still, the sound perfectly clear; you can see why Hitler chose to rehearse his rallies here. At one point, the floodlights are turned on the audience, and the stadium is transformed into a pink, fleshy sea of waving arms. Anyone passing in an aeroplane might mistake it for a gigantic capasized millipede.
The music is suitable stern and straight-backed. On "A question of time" and "Never let me down again" the massed synths churn and warble, the drums pound doomy dance tattoos, the guitars sound like the wailing of tortured souls; you might believe this was Kraftwerk tackling Götterdämmerung, were it not for Dave Gahan baiting the crowd with his Shakin`Stevens hipshakes and yelling "That`s right!" every few seconds.
When songwriter Martin Gore sings "a question of lust" and "home" you glimpse the band Depeche Mode might have become had Gahan not survived his druginduced heart attack at the Chateau Malmont two years ago. Small, blond and madeyed, Gore sings like a corrupted choirboy, with a solemn heartache ideal for the songs. Yet as a frontman, he is decidiedly anaemic. There is a whisper of relief when Gahan swaggers back on.
He is, truly, Basildon`s own Michael Hutchance - with half the charisma and twice the self-destructive streak; yet somehow, he is not only alive, but a bigger star than Hutchance ever was. I guess he`s just lucky. He`s certainly fortunate to be in the same band as Gore. On stage, it`s clear how much they need each other. Gore alone is an anonymous wisp; Gahan alone a trite rock pastiche. Together they are oddly convincing.
Depeche Mode used to be a great pop singles band; they aren`t any more - there are only a couple of songs on their new singles collection (1986-98) that you could hum-but their music has a layered dynamism that you only really appreciate when it is played live. Tracks like "In your room" and "useless" mix hard, semi-slow rhythms with mournful piano chords, soaring gospel-infused backing vocals and a confused air of hopeful melancholy. These are songs about lying in bed and feeling depressed, yet they are rendered as epics in the Mitteleuropa (hey, that`s German, it means middle Europe :-) ) gloaming, their depraved sincere, angstridden aura a truer soundtrack to millennial EU lives than anything dreamt up by U2 on Achtung Baby.
Or, as Dietmar puts it later on that night: "Depeche Mode kicks U2`s ass!" By now we are in a big underground nightclub at a Mode party - one of three on offer to the citizens of Berlin (For true zealots, there is even a weekly Mode club called "Our Darkness".) There must be 1500 people here, and I am the only one not in black.
I ask Dietmar why Germans love Depeche Mode so much. He screws up his face in thought. "I suppose they have German minds", he says. But they are from Essex, I protest. "Ja, but they are not so British. They are influenced by Kraftwerk, Can, bands like those. They are honorary Germans."