The music was such a new sound, unlike anything we had heard before, and Martin (Gore)’s lyrics just touched our hearts and made us happy. “We have always been under some kind of regime, whether it be the Ottoman Empire or the Soviets, so we always look for something else to lead us. He listened to the song “Work Hard” on a bootleg tape copied by a friend of his older brother, and by his teen years he’d become a “real fan”, translating all their lyrics from English into Hungarian and travelling 150 miles each way with his friends in order to attend Depeche Mode discos put on by the country’s fan club at Petőfi Hall in Budapest – at their height, these attracted over one thousand people.īut why did Depeche Mode’s records speak to him and his friends in Hungary so much? “I’d say we are a little bit melancholic,” he says. Gabor Suller, a 38-year-old superfan originally from Tiszaújváros in Hungary and now living in Budapest, says he first heard the band’s music as a very young child in 1983. Something was very clear – fandom of the band had become a subculture in its own right in the Eastern Bloc. It helped that the band’s style of synthesiser and drum machine-driven electronic music transferred a lot more clearly than scratchy punk guitars when it was bootlegged. Against the odds, they’d managed to get their hands on copies of Depeche Mode records and had completely devoured them. In Hungary specifically, groups of fans that referred to themselves as ‘Depeches’ waited for hours for band members Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Andy Fletcher, and Alan Wilder outside their hotel – dressed exactly like them – and then surrounded them.Īt the concerts, the fans sang along to every word. The group were unable to walk the streets in these two cities without being mobbed. The phenomenal response they received, as illustrated in Trevor Baker’s 2009 book Dave Gahan: Depeche Mode and the Second Coming, completely staggered them. And if anybody did actually turn up to see them live, they wouldn’t even make a profit for their live performances – at the time it was illegal to take money out of Poland and Hungary. The British synth band had, for the first time, been able to arrange concerts in Warsaw and Budapest – but with their records banned behind the Iron Curtain, they had no record of sales to judge their popularity. Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville, Conn.When Depeche Mode first touched down on Eastern European soil in 1985 as part of their Some Great Reward tour, there was no way of judging what reaction they’d get. Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico City (1/0) Mid-America Center, Council Bluffs, Iowa (1/0) (1/0)Īrena at Gwinnett Center, Duluth, Ga. Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, N.Y. Wells Fargo Arena, Des Moines, Iowa (1/1) Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, Mich. RankĮnergySolutions Arena, Salt Lake City (1/0)
The performances occurred during the period of July 28 through Aug. The eight Beacon shows, promoted by Live Nation, grossed over $2.8 million with attendance topping 20,000. Totals reported from those shows combined with the duo’s eight-show run at the Beacon Theatre in New York place the veteran rockers at No. Steely Dan has kicked off the second leg of their “Rent Party Tour” with two performances at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on Oct.
Combined attendance for both shows in the nation’s capitol city was 88,380. 1 was followed by two shows in Mexico City at the Foro Sol outdoor baseball stadium on Oct.
A sold out arena show in Guadalajara’s Arena VFG on Oct. Promoter OCESA/CIE has reported totals from two venues in Mexico for Depeche Mode, placing the English band among the top 10 on our tally.
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