One year ago today...

DEPECHE MODE 2009 TOUR

   Somewhere out there, standing proudly, is the ultimate travel magazine review of one of the world's most popular destinations I've never read, pondering the city's intellectual movements and -isms, bridges and buildings, the best place to find a sandwich and coffee at 1 A.M., last call.  "That ain't me."  Only dropping in to say that one year ago today, I was in Paris at Stade de France watching the 2009 Depeche Mode tour, the best concert I've ever seen (CLICK FOR SETLIST AND VIDEO).





   How they can bring all that energy to bear for scores of concerts is beyond me.  I guess it's like an act in Vegas or Broadway, you do the same show for a few months and move on to your next project.  I do get it now, how concerts have to be cancelled on the way because someone's ruptured his larynx of they're just exhausted. 

   The whole damn place shook during "It's no Good," 15 or so rows back, house-sized speakers delivered compressions that made my insides felt like they were going to cave in, and my chest was getting pissed at me.

   I'm always, always happy when I think about that trip, that journey.  I'm very fortunate to have been able to live it.  



   CD players came around early high school, and then music seemed to be more accessible. I remember the first kid strutting in class with a portable CD player - instant cool. I remember picking up my first player a year or so later and a Nine Inch Nails CD one night after rock climbing in Grand Rapids. I didn't have many cassettes; I must've listened to a lot of radio. I listened to the hell out of that little CD player. Soon after, we'd be scouring the bins in dingy little college record shops and listening to this "techno" stuff on the lower dial, my friends were picking up Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, I think I bought Stone Temple Pilots off a friend from soccer and asked for New Order - Republic for Christmas. My music "anthology" was more or less a blank slate; I can't even remember what I liked so much, but harmonic synth and the new romantic movement had staying power. I was standing in the shower today drawing connections on the migration from this post-punk phenomenon to these kids that favor the withdrawn thing or the black garbed thing, the vamp thing - is it a movement favoring traits that seem to appear in DM and other NRs, like yin, introspection, is that it? 

   I remember Angela, Caroline and I talking in French class about how bad we wanted to see Depeche Mode.  That was a fun class, a handful of seniors up to no good in the back of French I with all the freshmen. So definitely within my first five or so CDs I was back up at FBC picking up The Cure - Live in Paris - for the hit Lovesong, but really came to like A Letter to Elise, and Charlotte Sometimes (I've known a French Elise and search this blog for the Charlotte story), both which had strong connotations of a someday trip to France for me, travelling, putting pen to paper, expression.  Live albums took some time to grow on me, but the vibrance of the living, breathing fans pulls in the significance. Depeche Mode 101 came soon after, a two-disc album similarly dark and passionate thematically like The Cure.  From my perspective, information about your favorite bands, tours, and their cultural penetration wasn't maybe as accessible? as it is today, and I surely wasn't reading any Rolling Stone at the time.  While you're grasping for information, you cruise the shops, looking for maybe a foreign live album (probably too expensive), waiting for something new to come along.  You'd have maybe two or three albums to choose from, little did we know about others.  With DM,  I only ever saw Violator and 101, 101 was it for me for a long time.  And now, instead of hearing David Gahan yelling, "Good evening, Pasadena!!!" on 101 and imagining the full stadium, I can see this sort of thing recorded, and I was there. 


The quality of this video wasn't the greatest, but you can tell how disjointed the bass makes you feel up front, (not a complaint, just a test of endurance).

   So you might spend time reading album liners over and over, taking in the tone, reading magazines in the library.  You'd find your way into new music through borrowing your friends' stuff, genre radio shows, or often just grabbing something off the used rack and going with it.  I don't know, cultural transmission seems so different.  Knowledge is more easily obtained and often more disposable.  I have learned exponentially growing tons of shiate about 80s music since starting hanging out at my college radio station, grabbing a paycheck, and an internet connection. 



   Today, I'd like to be able to tell the gals the dream was realized to see the band with the French name, the pillars of the new romantics, in freaking Paris, in a sea of people.  Wondering if a live album will be realized from this spectacular date, like that famous album from The Cure. 

More reading on New Romanticism:

1. "The New Romantics,"  Squidoo, last accessed 27JUN10.

2. "New Romanticism," Wikipedia, last accessed 27JUN10.