DEPECHE MODE

DEPECHE MODE (Sheffield Arena, Yorkshire)

THIS IS High Mass for the godless. Depeche Mode come back from 101 American nights with longer hair, louder guitars, and devotional imagery. Flesh, and devilry.

‘I Feel You’ is total art assault on the sense in broad Wagnerian gothic. Dave Gahan’s tattooed torso writhes and prostrates as his stark b/w Warhol video-frame multiples burn in arms-spread crucifixion, as Martin Gore in ludicrous leather shorts strikes heavy guitar-hero poses with a solid-bodied Eddie Cochran Gibson.

On the album its nagging guitar repetition sounds to be a sample – rumoured to be lifted from U2 – but live, Gore milks its minimal potential to maximum effect, while Alan Wilder hijacks a full rock ’n’ roll drum kit for the first time. The sound climbs in electronic layers building in dense emotive swathes as lush red and purple lighting lurids the voluptuousness and carnal religiosity of the flimsy libretto, and adoring hands extend in obsessive Southern Spiritual Revivalist exhortation, until Gahan ruptures the spell by hurling the mike-stand away, high wide and contemptuously . . . leaving charged video images of praying hands, a single candle, a cross.

Oddly, their second encore is ‘Everything Counts’, their early naïve anti-capitalist single from August 1983, the purity of its message sabotaged only slightly by Gahan’s elaborate strip-tease, throwing his t-shirt into the mass of predatory fan hands. But from such simple sperm morphed this information super-highway as powerful as a shot of ‘E’ injected directly into the pleasure centres of the grey lobes. From the start – with huge shadow figures looming behind horror-movie drapes (for ‘Higher Love’), then exploding into a split-level stage; Gahan cavorting and crotch-grabbing in front of nine fold-out video screens on which the three Kraftwerk-style keyboards operate (‘Policy Of Truth’) – the visuals punch out the sound in exact balance.

“I wanna see those hands” are the first words directed at the masses. There are few to follow. But when the Speak & Spell Anton Corbijn co-ordinated crawl of fetishistic bird-headed figures start slo-moing across the screens from one to the next (for ‘Walking In My Shoes’) and the dense sheets of wrap-around sound envelops, they’re no longer necessary. It’s enough just to ‘reach out and touch faith’.

Gore takes three vocals, clear, high and surprisingly strong, but Gahan works the dramatics, the sound enriched by the gospel infusion of Samantha Smith and Hildia Campbell through ‘Behind The Wheel’, ‘Condemnation’ and ‘Personal Jesus’.

‘Stripped’ loops a sampled rusty car-exhaust thrum while framing a huge navel on all videos and the two tall film screens above. Each stomach systematically graffiti’d as the number gains momentum. And then ‘In Your Room’ with nude figures entwined like a high-gloss safe-sex ice cream ad. Depeche Mode can at times seem like fleshy devilment, torment and ecstasy, sound and sensuality, pomp and pretension. And stupid fun.

A black celebration for the Masses.

A High Mass for the godless.

• Andrew Darlington