"It's a lot like life, this Depeche Mode package. Not in a privileging of the lyric way whereby we hear about life in a series of couplets that invariably rhyme "soul" with "dole", but in a holistic way. The Pet Shop Boys, hyper-aware that those who purchase their records are resident in the sticks, sing paeans to observations of "Suburbia". In Realist Text days, Sham 69 and The Members wallowed stoically, parochially, a bit of geo-politics thank yew, thank yew. No such meta-pop prepositions or punk-pop preoccupations for Depeche Mode. They’re it. Dave Gahan is the youth club show-off, the lad who dared wiggle his bum at the disco; Fletch is the tall kid with ginger hair who kicks his legs up a bit and kids everyone he learned Karate; Martin is the little one who got hold of a book about the Bauhaus, liked the pictures, and did A Level Art at the Tech.

It should all go embarrassingly wrong, of course. It should’ve ended years ago when they looked like legs of pork in knickerbockers and danced like Virgil Tracy. Or when they were co-opted by Left lyric watcher after singing "People are people, so why should it be, that you and I should get along so aw-fully." So why was I stomping my feet for a second encore?

Vastly underrated is the power of melody. We whistle "When I Fall In Love" while penning manifestos about sonic assault, atonal onslaught and the imminent death of structured structure. It’s tough writing about melody though, and much easier waxing lyrical about "difficult" musics, musics that fundamentally aren’t. The pleasure afforded by recognition of a melody by its familiarity is so universal it feels banal even to think quietly about it. It’s quite a thing to admit to. Depeche Mode are a Good Tune Band, using Ennio Morricone pentatonics with the odd discord thrown in.

Their gift is the ability to make each tune big enough to remember, big enough to sound like you’ve listened to it more times than you’d care to admit to. Perhaps they’re stored in the Easy To Remember section of the brain, the I’ll Name That Tune In One department. Perhaps they fit into the "Ooh, I keep singing that awful song, I hate it, that’s the thing" syndrome, the insidious, the subliminal. Not entirely.

As recognisable as the melodies are the treatments, or rather The Treatment. I’ll name that tune in one noise. Isolated clatterings are greeted by whoops from us all, key signatures not like on the records, but metonymic capsules for the night, each suitably similar and different. "Resonant" in the keyword for Depeche Mode: Dave’s voice, closer to Rick Astley’s than Blixa Bargeld’s [of Einstürzende Neubauten], Alan’s sheet metal banging, more Dead Or Alive than Test Department, Fletch’s keyboarding more, oh what shall we say, Ron Mael than Marty Rey, ditto Martin’s, all sound like they’ve been put through a Resonator Tube, given body.

Their harmonies no longer resemble a thin version of Steeleye Span’s "Gaudete". I’m reminded of adverts for Brylcreem and Bounce dog food, and words like Rubber Room. Quite a step for the skeletons that were "Just Can’t Get Enough" and "Dreaming Of Me", that blushed with hiatuses.

But I come not to praise Depeche Mode as Artists-Now-Mature, nor as Golden Shit. More like something between the two. A bit like the suburbs, in fact. A bit of them eager to crash in the parameters (usually signalled by Mark [sic] coming to the front and singing) a bit of them eager to just have a laugh when Fletch moves forward and claps his hands above his head), a bit of sex appeal exudation (when Dave thrusts his groin), a bit of prudery (when the others positively don’t). Suburban lads, not afraid to expose their feminine side every now and then. But not too much. Like I say, a lot like life. The most fun you can have with your feet on the ground. You only sing when you’re winning."

Andy Darling
Melody Maker, January 1988

"Tonight the Mode-ettes, the gangly school of dancing girls whose musical virginity was lost to Depeche Mode’s early singles, have got it all. They’ve got the sweet side of Depeche Mode, a band of pop idols whose normally lusty, perverse undertones are overshadowed tonight by a superbly twee series of disposable melodies.

For tonight Depeche Mode, whose charm has always been their inarticulate combination of filth and fun, turn the tables and show us their true rock superstar colours. After all, they reason, everyone needs heroes, even if they do appear to be a cross between Elvis Presley and a pinhead, or an over-bejewelled Gene Wilder.

And perhaps this is their real achievement, the embodiment of the sexual fantasies of a legion of Traceys and Sharons. Perhaps here, in the combination of four inconspicuous yet somehow utterly typical lads, lies the emotional fulfilment of a subculture.

Depeche Mode are an immaculate contradiction, the child’s party piece as subversion, but then they have always been contentious. They are the unseen guerillas in the machinery of pop, continually turning its ephemeral sweetness back on itself with each song.

And it’s all pretty hard stuff. From the sexual perversion of "Behind The Wheel" or "Master And Servant" (a dead giveaway) to the gripping power struggles of "Grabbing Hands" ["Everything Counts"] or "People Are People", it’s all about control. The twee melody disguises nothing and Depeche Mode, the ultra safe synthpop band are seen for what they are, subversive molesters of our pop sensibilities.

For Depeche Mode have abandoned pop’s trivia, the chart blandness pioneered by Stock, Aitken, Waterman. They’ve gone where their hearts have been right from the start, the extremes of the avant-garde.

Tonight, however, they don’t quite make it, don’t quite manage to balance the vitriol of Laibach with the throwaway lyric, the offensiveness of Throbbing Gristle with the diminutive smile, or the mental adventurism of Neubauten with the bland sarcasm of Wembley itself. Tonight, what should have been a nursery rhyme in razors becomes merely a playlist priority as Depeche Mode continually fail to cut through the aural stodge of today’s pop mentality.

Collaborators in Depeche Mode’s emotional recreation, the Mode-ettes remain unaware of their idols’ inherent deceit until they, too, are sucked into a labyrinth of perverse sexual relationships. They’ve got exactly what they wanted and there’s even a certain amount of voyeuristic pleasure in watching the inevitable happen."

Sam King
Sounds, January 1988

"THE whole world is getting smaller, except for Los Angeles. That seems to get bigger every time I see it." The stewardess is getting wistful as the 747, entering its tenth hour of flying time from Heathrow, breaks through the mountains and affords the wide-eyed LA virgins our first sight of the city. The unreality starts here.

Or maybe it started back in London when plans were first drawn up for Mute Records’ tenth birthday party, to be celebrated by a gig featuring the label’s most successful artists, Depeche Mode, at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, coinciding with the end of the band’s world tour. The whole thing was to be filmed by D. A. Pennebaker, who’d previously made movies about Bob Dylan and David Bowie, and 100,000 people were to join in the party. Considering that Depeche Mode can walk down almost any British street without turning too many heads, their alleged West Coast megastar status seemed like an absurdly exquisite prank.

And yet, here we are, skimming above the suburbs of LA, clutching our concert tickets even as the philosophical stewardess assures us that the event isn’t a hoax. "Dee-pesh Mode? Sure, everybody’s heard of them. They’re real big here."

Everything is "real big" in Los Angeles, particularly the city itself. The first-time visitor is bound to feel unease, if not outright panic, as the plane flies for what seems like weeks over the entropic sprawl. Someone suggests asking the pilot whether we’ve in fact overshot the city and are going to land in Tokyo instead. A fellow journalist throws up assertively. The suburbs just keep on sprawling. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once envisaged the future of Southern California as a solid mass of buildings stretching through San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles itself. From the air it looks as if his vision has become reality.

THERE'S getting on for a dozen airports in Los Angeles, all specially designed to be as far away as possible from anywhere that you might wish to go. In our case its $60 away (in Los Angeles, you soon learn to talk of things in terms of cab fares rather than distances), $60 worth of white-knuckle terror as the quietly psychopathic cab-driver attempts to reorientate us by causing a freeway pile-up. Every day, six million cars tear along the network of freeways in a city that covers seventy square miles. That’s eight wheels for every vote likely to be cast in November’s elections. The cabbie is full of such facts, fuelled no doubt by the electronic Trivial Pursuit billboards that line the roads, waiting to entertain and educate during the inevitable traffic jams.

Piling weak-legged and shaky of bowel from the cab, we tumble into our hotel, the Mondrian, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It is inspired by said painter’s works, daubed outside in rectangular blocks of primary colour. The Mondrian is like Habitat on the inside and Butlin’s on the outside, but it’s the closest to culture we’re going to get all weekend.

Dee-Pesh Mode have opted for the traditional rock’n’roll haunt of the Sunset Hotel, most notable for having first floor windows out of which you can dive straight into the swimming pool. Apparently, rock stars do this a lot.

Our hotel receptionist tells us that the Sunset is "just down the street", but it soon becomes clear that her definition is couched in four-wheeled rather than two-legged terms. Rashly, and in a spirit of stiff-upper-lip bravado, I decide to disregard her advice and amble over there, stupidly assuming that some people must still walk. An hour later – after crossing roads as wide as raging rivers and spotting not one single passer-by – I return wearily to the hotel, having been treated to quizzical stares by drivers who looked at me as though I’d ventured out without my trousers. Gazing out of the window at the fabled Six Suburbs In Search Of A City, I can see Los Angeles growing in front of my eyes. Either that or I’m shrinking.

LATER, in the kitschy atmosphere of the hotel bar, where two doddery old people are doing cover versions of Beatles songs, a UCLA student explains that walking in LA is as outdated a mode of transport as the pogo stick. Certainly, UCLA students don’t walk anywhere – the overwhelming size of their campus guarantees that. It takes at least fifteen minutes to drive across the establishment, which may be a stone’s throw in LA terms, but still takes up valuable time which could be better spent kicking up a rumpus… something which UCLA students are renowned for doing.

Students from USC – LA’s other university and California’s answer to Oxford or Cambridge – are even more prone to boorish boisterousness. Yearly fees can reach as high as $20,000, and it’s this demonstration of wealth that motivates their every move. Their favourite button badge says, SELL THE HOUSE, MOM, I WANT TO STAY AT USC, and they’re given to waving their car keys, Loadsamoney-style, at any public gathering. These are the rich kids who provided the basis for Less Than Zero, but their real-life exploits would be considered too fantastic even for a Brat Pack novel. On one legendary occasion, the students scaled the Hollywood sign and attempted to replace it with the letters USC. They are also probably responsible for the slogan IN GOLD WE TRUST which is scrawled across a huge rock in nearby (two-and-a-half hours, or $300 away) Malibu.

The UCLA student assures me that both universities are to be well represented at the Depeche Mode gig, explaining that British synthesiser pop is hugely popular. He alerts me to the fact that the local TV stations have declared the week "Official Depeche Mode Week".

Sure enough, a glimpse at the TV, rapidly becoming the last benchmark of reality, confirms Official Depeche Mode Week to be an ongoing situation. This is heralded by a feature film-length interview with the boys, in which we learn that Depeche Mode are really glad to be in town and that they can hardly sleep with excitement. Much the same quotes are splattered liberally across most of the major papers, forcing me to think that perhaps the cause of my persistent insomnia isn’t jet-lag after all. I guess I’m just plain excited.

WITH excitement coursing like wildfire through our party, we’re desperately trying to come to terms with the fact that none of us knows where Pasadena, the venue for the gig, actually is. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of a chauffeur who drives us out to the Rose Bowl for the band’s dress rehearsal. He explains that, at the end of the day, anywhere in Los Angeles is two-and-a-half hours away from anywhere else. Our driver’s expert calculations prove to stem from his background as a fully trained engineer, a vocation he hasn’t been able to realise due to the fact, he says, that he’s Iranian and no-one will hire him. Racism is rife in LA, be it the gang fighting in the East of the city, the air-head Aryan values of the beach bums and the health freaks, or just the mad rantings of the everyday Joes. One 280-pound cab driver, in conclusion to his xenophobic rant, revealed that he’s studying at weekends to become a lawyer because he’d like to see the legal system changed.

At the rehearsal we’re introduced to a gaggle of Depeche Mode fans who’ve won a nationwide competition, the shaky rules of which seem to have inveigled the fans into sending videos of themselves to the band. A Greyhound bus circled the country, picking up the winners one by one and finally depositing the wild eyed, numb-bummed and raggle taggle bunch in LA. One young girl from Seattle is almost as excited as the rest of us about the whole proceedings, and explains the thing about Depeche Mode is that they’re "cool" and "better than most of the American shit". A tall, heavily made-up boy in a long white skirt and sporting a blonde mohican concurs, but appears to be rather more interested in the girl from Seattle. Indeed, most of the young people from the bus are busy spending their time sorting out seat arrangements for the ride home. Only when Depeche Mode turn up to say hello and pose for pictures do they remember the real purpose of their visit. I feel a deep empathy with them at this point.

THE rest of the day stretches expansively before us, so we decide to visit Venice Beach – where, we’ve been told, all human life can be found. The promise turns out to be something of an understatement. Sure, there’s all human life, but there’s also a considerable number of people who would appear to have just drifted in from another planet. We saunter along the beachside strip, while all around us wide-eyed natives do the same. They must be marvelling at the ability their fleshy stumps have suddenly approximated for that age-old art of walking. Immediately, a large bearded gentleman on rollerskates joins us and sings a song about Jesus being on a rocketship, strumming his battered guitar all the while (the bearded man, not Jesus). We give him a handful of the local currency and he leaves, but not before herding us towards a gaggle of fortune tellers, one of whom claims to be able not only to read fortunes, but also prophesy forthcoming events by looking at the soles of your feet. He proves to be unnervingly accurate, revealing, before I’ve even got my thermal socks off, that I’m English. A cursory examination of my chilblains nearly throws him off the scent (so to speak), but he recovers well and predicts that I’ll be leaving LA soon. This astounding information lies somewhere between a flash of inspiration and a naked threat.

Sprinting casually down the beach we learn that there’s a special Father’s Day Show going on, an event which appears to be celebrated by thousands of youths miming falling off their skateboards. We clap frantically, shout "bravo!" a couple of times and move to the real entertainment of the day – the street performers. On any given weekend, the majority of Los Angeles’ out-of-work performers will gather to peddle their artistic desires and pass the hat round, while the rest of the population watch with admiration. There’s the usual glut of jugglers and body poppers – albeit infinitely more talented than anyone you’re ever likely to see in Covent Garden – but the highlight proves to be a curious, coarse comedian. He comes on like Eddie Murphy, cracking lines bluer than the Pacific skies which backdrop his performance, and buildings his act towards an extremely scatological examination of the AIDS problem. Suddenly, however, he reveals that he himself is infected with the virus, adding a powerful edge to his demonstrations of human fallibility. Strangely moving.

Not as strange, however, as the body builders a couple of hundred yards away on the section known as Muscle Beach. It’s here that the hardcore fitness freaks gather inside a wire cage to flex their muscles, lift weights and show the world exactly how ugly the finely honed body can be. Many of them appear to have whole turkeys stuffed inside their upper arms and thighs. They grunt about low cloud cover, look glumly at popping arteries and regularly disappear into a small shed to be deflated. It’s all a bit like Chessington Zoo.

CALL it excitement, call it jet-lag, but the next thing I know, it’s tomorrow and the hitherto deserted Rose Bowl is swarming with 100,000 people the colour of walnuts. [It has been estimated that between 65,000 and 70,000 fans attended the Rise Bowl show - BB] In fact, given that odd sense of perspective you get in giant stadiums, the people even look the size of walnuts. To be standing in 94-degree heat, watching 100,000 walnuts scream, is extraordinary. To hear them all singing along to support act Thomas Dolby’s "She’s An Airhead" is almost enough to propel you towards some form of fringe religion.

Instead, we propel ourselves towards the backstage with intentions of talking to the band – blithely expecting that the old Blighty twang will open every door. Unfortunately, we soon find it doesn’t open as many doors as a rectangular piece of pink plastic with our photos on. Despite assuring the burly bouncers that we already know what we look like, we’re despatched to the Press Box, a glass eyrie approximately two-and-a-half hours (see!) from the backstage enclosure. Sneaking out the back I try to quiz a passing fan on the twilight appeal of Depeche Mode, only to discover that she’s a groupie trying in her own quiet way to discover the twilight appeal of a moustachioed policeman. Another fan deigns to hurl out a few words, telling me that Californians like Depeche Mode "because they’re really cute and they communicate really well".

Communicating is very important to these people, even if it takes the form of a deliberately synthesised sound. Depeche Mode do it better than most, but one can’t help feeling unease at the fervour with which the walnuts lap up the plinks and plonks. Nevertheless it’s an impressive and hugely grossing show. Everybody who came to see the Rose Bowl paid an average $12 a head on merchandising – a new record, beating even Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd’s recent shows.

After the show we finally find somewhere that approximates backstage and desperately search for an unfamiliar face in the crowd of semi-celebrities paying homage to Depeche Mode’s new megastatus. A guy who looks about 35, wielding a camera, turns out to be D A Pennebaker himself. He’s in fact over 60, and ought to consider spilling the beans to the world on the secret of eternal youth. But he prefers to chuckle at the absurdity of today’s situation.

"The way that the show comes to town one day and leaves the next. Meanwhile all these kids have come along, spent daddy’s money and given a band three quarters of a million dollars out of the community. There’s something about that that’s wondrous… in a sense."

THE post-gig party is held at the latest hip dive, a club by the name of Lhasaland. From the outside it looks, as do many of the clubs in Los Angeles, like a cashpoint machine. Inside it belongs to the youth club-meets-House Of Commons school of interior design, the industrial clang of the music bouncing off a largely bored looking crowd. The kids from the bus are going positively ape, although part of the reason for their enthusiasm looks to be the copious supply of free drink. The girl from Seattle says she’s never been to a club like it, but then she’s probably never been to an English end-of-term disco, either.

Pennebaker’s Depeche Mode film, due to be released sometime in the next year, is something of a move away from his previous rock forays in that it will, albeit obliquely, attempt to examine the new American psyche – a culture in which money is very nearly all. The LA segment should prove to be the most interesting, since Los Angeles, more than any other city in America, seems to have lost its grip on any kind of traditional human values. The shells may be as glorious as they ever were – pastel pink buildings, vast Art Deco constructions and Hollywood Boulevard’s unabashed glamour – but the people who inhabit them have become mindless, heartless zombies. Perhaps the reason for Los Angeles’ determined expansion is an anthropomorphic desire to escape from an increasingly rotten core.

On the way back to the airport, we look in vain for the Hollywood sign up in the hills. Our first sighting turns out to be a small white condominium, the second a lump of birdshit on the windscreen. By the time it finally looms into view, we’re asleep. The world is too small already.