Depeche Mode on Letterman Mon March 11
 

Thought this might be of interest to some.

Depeche Mode has probably influenced the music I've created over the last 30 years more than any other band I can think of. Watching David Letterman has been a ritual of mine since I was a kid.

So, when the two come together, it's of great interest to me, might be to some other folks here.

Cool, at last david is getting a decent musical guest for a change...they usually suck big time Lol.

Hehe.. it can be hit or miss for sure. Mostly up and coming types, and those tend to be not very good. Maybe once or twice a year a musical guest will really get my attention.

Just got through watching it -- I think that might have been one of the only times I've ever seen a Virus TI on stage on that show :) The KB player on the left (not sure his name, he replaced Alan Wilder) had one on top and I couldn't tell what below it.

I couldn't tell what Fletch was playing, the two boards looked like they might have said Alesis on them? Maybe a midi controller driving soft synths? I was watching in HD on a 55" TV and still couldn't make out the letters (he might have obscured it on purpose). Anyone know what they were?

Looking at it again on the PC, looks like they might say "Roland" on end of them.

(@ around 3:55)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87WTU...layer_embedded

A blues single! I'm curious about the mood of the new album.
Maybe Delta in the album title refers to Mississippi too.

I read somewhere that song (Heaven) is very different from the rest of the album. I personally wasn't that taken by that particular song; I always thought Alan Wilder was such an important part of the group that things weren't the same after he left. But still, given a choice between a broken Depeche Mode versus a lot of stuff out there..... well you know :)

Yes, I saw that too and being originally from Indiana, I have fervently watched Letterman for years as well! Depeche Mode's last release, 'Songs of The Universe' is very good and have learned to never judge ANY particular release by anyone I may be a fan-boy of by their "single', as more often than not, I tend to love most of other music that never reaches the airwaves. That's where Amazon is great in you at least can peruse a couple minutes of each song on album. Did that with Garbage's new release, "Not Your Ordinary People" and it's brilliant like their first two albums!
I think big name groups have gotten smart about not advertising in hiding their synth's manufacturer's name because after all, if they are not getting paid to advertise said synth but rather their music, it makes sense in this litigious world.

Yeah, I personally would put tape over it if I were them and not being paid to promote, but I've also noticed that lots of folks don't do that anymore, at least on Letterman (honestly other than a once or twice a year live concert I go to with the girlfriend, I typically don't see what's going on at live shows outside watching Letterman or Kimmel). Oddly enough though most of the type when you see a larger more established band on Letterman, they are usually using a workstation or sample based synth from Yamaha, Roland, etc. if they are R&B, or if they are a newer pop band you tend to see something like a Nord lead or just a MIDI controller (Novation, MAudio etc) plugged into a laptop. Very rarely a Virus. Very rarely modulars either for that matter unless its Radiohead :)

Yeah, you are right. However, I know in saying this, it is just my personal taste and opinion but Radiohead's lead singer gives me a headache. It is just MY opinion and sardonic humor in saying a goat connected to electroshock therapy could replace Radiohead's lead singer and not many would notice difference. However, I think the instrument playing musicians do some interesting stuff, but without the goat. Being originally an Indiana farm-boy, feel qualified to make that assessment. HA!

There was always something about his appearance that reminded me a little of Martin Short playing his Ed Grimley character, but then again a band's appearance, and the impact on music sales from looks since the advent of music videos have really been one of the downfalls of modern music, IMO. Prior to MTV, bands were judged on their sound rather than visual style. I always thought Radiohead was one of those bands that brought back the importance of substance over style. It would have been challenging for a lot of folks to pull of a role of front man with such a prominent birth defect (drooping eye), and I think a lot of folks react negatively to that when they see him. But, some of their tunes became instant classics the moment they hit the airwaves.

One of my all time favorites: (might want to listen rather than watch :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKd06s1LNik

Thanks for sharing that. Please know I was not commenting on the lead singer's 'appearance' , as am way too open-minded to judge anyone by their outward appearance, beauty, defects, et al; it's more of his voice BUT that song was more melodic than what I 'listened to' when they were live on Saturday Night Live late last year. Thanks again! How's it going with the Ultra Nova? Been away for a bit and am in last few weeks of some intense dental work that military quacks did shoddy job of and have taken a $1300. hit to my savings, as Medicare nor the VA **never** pay for dental anything!:twisted:
I too have been highly influenced by Depeche Mode and to this day I still love "Fly On A Windshield" from 'Speak and Spell'. However, was never a fan of the band 'Erasure'...once had a roommate that played that and MADdonna way too much...eeek!:rolleyes:

Yeah I didn't mean necessarily that you were referring to his looks. Personally I like his voice is good and has a distinction that makes it recognizable. They are like any other band in that even fans probably aren't wowed by every single song. If you're ever inclined, I recommend listening to the album "The Bends" from beginning to end. There are a number of tracks on that one I like, but here's another one that got a lot of airplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BciOfJsqh7M

I liked Erasure, even tho some of their tunes were a little too upbeat and spunky, I just loved the synth aspect of the music and Vince could do some great things with melodies. Old Yaz was good too. Never was a Madonna fan although many of her tracks were extremely well produced from a technical perspective back in the day.

I'm going to answer the question about the Ultranova over in that thread just to keep everything written so far in one place.

YAZ was definitely brilliant! I have the best of Yaz and that reminds me of period of time in life I was also listening to Romeo Void....love the 80's!

Don't u mean Yazoo? Yazz was some model that Coldcut hooked up with & had a #1 in the UK with 'the only way is up'...as far as I remember.
What about the early human league stuff, john foxx, ultravox, japan...I could go on ;)

I think it was a North American thing that "Yaz" was the more common name, while it remained Yazoo in the UK. I don't remember what the story was behind that one, but for example the cover of Upstairs at Erics said "Yaz", so many people heard them by that name first on this side of the pond.

Strange a group with 2 different names????????? It's like calling Duran Duran...Duran! Or Spandau, Flock of :)

Yes, here in USA it was Yaz! You would never guess this but it indeed had to do with legalities and some tiny USA non-signed band name called Yazoo, if I recall. I am NOT kidding! Fracking lawyers! Only in USA and Mexico was name different.
Yes, all those groups mentioned above are in my CD collection right beside my Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Icehouse, and even Go Go's!!:cool: Always had kind of a crush on Belinda Carlisle and her voice!
Yaz is the group I will always point people to listen to when they want a great example of Sequential Circuit's Pro One Monophonic Analog monster synth sound--whether to emulate it or when considering a Mopho. However, not to try to feed your gearlust, but the DSI Mono Evolver Keyboard can sound more like the Pro One than the Mopho can when isolating the analog osc's....it has actually become my favorite synth next of course to my Virus:p ! Yaz's "Upstairs At Erics" is a masterpiece and is actually done with minimal instrumentation. I have some of the lead singer's solo work as well (this early in morning my brain cannot recall her name)...AHH...that's it; Allison Moyet! What a voice!! When music was music, men were men and so were the woman!:shock:

The legal story sounds correct now that you mention it. The real story is funny to me, I always thought it the name got shortened/refined for the US market because Yazoo sounds sort of like a sneeze/yodel combination, or that the mainstream music market would have rejected buying the records in stores because the name sounds a bit backwater or country. Yaz always sounded more contemporary/new wave to me, which I thought would be a better marketing choice. But then it turns out people were fighting over "Yazoo"! lol

I see, very interesting. As I said earlier Yazz was a completely different pop star in the UK back then.
Not sure about the men being men, I seem to recall a lot of guys wearing a lot of make up in the 80's :)

Yaz in the USA and Yazoo in U.K were one and the same New Wave musical duo...you can buy Import CD's with the 'Yazoo' name, but it's the exact same band and tracks.

yeah us brits all know you yanks can't spell properly, Lol.

HA! Let me tell you that since I have been reading synth and device user manuals from German Waldorf, spanning to Sweden's Elektron MonoMachine Mk1, the translation to English has in-fact affected my brain when various spellings of say realization can also be realiSation--yes, my brain is a bit warped and thank goodness for internet explorer 10 now having built-in spell check for most common of words, with Yaz completely out of parameters!:p
In my undergrad, as a non-traditional, older student, found myself actually tutoring those in Masters in writing thesis and English as a second language. I think the military's latter half as an Officer coupled with the plethora of meds I take for chronic health issues admittedly affect me, not least the fact I have peripheral neuropathy in hands/fingers from spent uranium shells, which is the very reason decided more mellow ambient approach to music was pragmatic rather than giving-up just because really cannot do fast scale exercises as used to previously.:shock:
I heard it mentioned on Letterman last night that the full streaming Depeche Mode LONG performance is free to watch but I was not recording on DVR the source address and wondered if you obtained that?

http://www.cbs.com/shows/liveonlette.../depeche-mode/

You'll see the Virus get a little more love in that one :)

..enjoy..

Thank you so very much!:D

Nice Virus Porn displayed here! Thanks again SO much for sharing the link!!! Playing along here and there as my ear still can pick-up things amazingly...just like a bicycle, you may get rusty but never forget!!!:D
(I am a huge CURE fan as well)

Nice one man, that was soooooo much better than the short DL performance. They are sounding more like a rock band than the synth pop outfit they started out as but in a good way, double kick rock drummer & all. Total class throughout & showing what a great front man Dave Gahan really is.
Thanks again :)

Something I only learned after some recent research: When Alan Wilder left Depeche Mode, he was offered a gig with The Cure and turned it down! Damn... I mean for respect in the synth world, DM was the place to be but if you have to leave it would be hard to find a better offer.

Yeah their music really started to change toward the later 80s/early 90s. I could be mistaken think Martin actually learned to play guitar after they were already very successful as a synth-only band. In the early days they were 100% synths with no drummer on stage, which I guess got a bit awkward :)

But overall I think their music has evolved in a direction that makes a lot of sense for them. With them it has always been more about their melodies than necessarily what was used to create them. Dave's signature voice is critical to the band, so if he ever left it would be tragic, but I think losing Alan Wilder was tragic in a less obvious sort of way. I always think of that instrumental song "Nothing to Fear" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GztQLHanQc), which if listened to on a proper sound system is a mind bogglingly good synth tune, I think he wrote that one. They were still good after he left but it left a noticable scar, IMO. They even used to refer to him as the wizard behind the band in a lot of interviews, and I think he's one reason their sound post-Vince Clark was so different.

On the other hand they've done some good stuff after he left.. I liked a lot of songs on Playing the Angel (2005 I think).

This thread got my mind going down memory lane tonight. I remember once watching some MTV video about Depeche Mode. DM was already legendary before MTV went all stupid and forgot what the M in MTV stood for and started playing non-music related reality shows about dopey roomates and shit.

In the video, one of the Depeche guys, it may have been Wilder or Gore, was screwing around on the keyboard and started playing a riff from one of their songs, I don't remember which, but he was tapping out 16th notes at moderate tempo (with perfect timing) and singing at the same time, and it sounded good enough that someone should have captured to master (I think it was on an Oberheim something or other but not sure about that). He was showing how he could hit a delay to compensate if he needed to drop back to 8ths! My point is, HOW MANY PEOPLE EVEN TAP OUT 8THS LIVE THESE DAYS? Nobody... Most modern artists don't even have the hand-eye coordination and timing skills to keep tempo with that even when they are 15 yrs old. I'm not going to call myself a modern artist, but I promise you I will be using an arpeggiator for that if I needed it today :) The joys of modern technology (to be fair, they had the technology back then and probably employed it in the studio... but it is impressive to see someone do it well live).

I remember being in a popular resort area around 1988, and a buddy and myself walked by a T-Shirt airbrush artist on the strip that was selling existing painted shirts and offered to do custom work. He had apparently airbrushed his hair, too, he was kind of a Bon Jovi lookalike. I thought his painting was impressive, so trying to be friendly (in my own misaligned way), as I looked at all his shirts, which were mostly depicting bands like Metallica, Megadeath, etc....I said "love the work but where's the Depeche Mode shirts" (being that I was somewhat fucked up after a night of underage boozing, I guess I knew I would get a reaction)....

....I really wasn't being an ass with the comment, if he had stepped up, I would have gladly paid him to paint a truly unique-on-the-planet Depeche Mode shirt, but was mostly gauging his interest...

...He clearly took immediate offense, and said "Depeche Mode? Wonder what happens at their concert, a bunch of guys with synthesizers come out and stand around pushing buttons?"

And I said "you know what you never see at a Metallica concert? Someone hitting 16th notes in realtime".... he looked at me like a deer in headlights, no clue what I was even talking about.

I did not buy a shirt. Shame, by the looks of what he had on display, he did some fine things with an airbrush. Bet he does tats now. Probably limited to the hairband market. lol

After watching Depeche Mode, I too had an audio stroll down memory lane and dug into my 400+ CDs and started playing Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, OMD (did you know OMD has a new CD coming out in April?) [Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark for younger crowd-FYI] Then Ultravox...oh my, call me old (will be 50 this year), but some of my fondest memories are of the 80's and when I when stationed in USAF at Keflavik, Iceland for a year and half (my choice, as I love geological stuff and wild weather with New Zealand being my next vacation hopefully), and whilst in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, there was a free concert at this open square that non other, The Sugarcubes (Bjork), before they had even released USA CD...and I still love her voice and layered sounds. I also literally ran into Souixie and The Banshies one late night stuck in Philidelphia in midst of a garbage/sanitation worker's strike, where trash was pilled up everywhere, had missed my flight, so was out on town...cool times...and Depeche Mode is still very relevant and can PACK HUGE arenas ANYWHERE they tour...if they come here I am sure to get ticket and finally see them live...now, where's that black leather skydiving suit and eyeliner at again? Just where I left it last!!:D

As I was watching that earlier video, I was amazed at how DM was able to play such a small venue as the Letterman show at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in NYC and act like it was just par for the course. That is an extremely small venue for them, and I think folks have to wait to get tickets to Letterman, but ultimately pay zero for the tickets themselves to sit in on that audience (not including the expensive hotels and restaurants of the area to stay there of course).

I remember seeing the documentary 101 about Depeche Mode... They sold out the freakin' Rose Bowl Stadium.. 60,000 people in the crowd that night just to see them!!

The folks who were in the Letterman audience that night were some very lucky people, and I don't mean that as a dig at Dave, because in his field of satire, he is equally as epic as DM is to music. They were lucky people all the way around. Kind of a shame Mayor Bloomberg was the guest that night, lol.... On the nights following they had Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey, both of whom were freakin hilarious.

Here's a great bit of video of Depeche Mode's "Sounds of The Universe" tour, probably the closest to the Virus Ti's one will see of their set-up and having discovered that youtube channel, The Virus Channel, it seems, there's some really other cool Virus and Depeche Mode related stuff on there...very good PR for Access:D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zomJg_odX4

How would you like to be the guy that tunes Martin's guitars for him? Did you see how many different guitars he went through just during the 45 minute Letterman set? I lost count! lol

I know! Been trying to find the source and think it was some back issue of keyboard Magazine, where am *almost* certain that Martin was primarily a guitar player and when Vince or was it Andy(?) left early-on, Martin needed to move more to synths to fill void...until find source, not certain. Do you recall ever seeing Dave Gahan playing synth or otherwise (other than his fraking fantastic voice/instrument)?

Hmm.. not sure, but the very early DM stuff was all synth, and I don't think they used a guitar on a DM record until Music for the Masses. I know Martin and Vince had a band before DM (a little research indicates they cited The Cure as the influence for that band). Martin may have been a guitarist prior to DM, but I was thinking that he was not (possibly wrong). I believe Vince was indeed a guitarist in the early days, supposedly Fletch was too. I don't ever remember seeing Gahan play an instrument, but as you say his contribution to their sound has never been in question.

I DO recall Dave having a tambourine in-hand on some footage from Depeche Mode 101 or from those early days when MTV actually meant MUSIC Tele-Vision, rather than "reality-frakin-this"...sour note for me because I ALSO enjoy *great SciFi* and whomever must have purchased parent company that had the SciFi Cable Channel Network, decided to cancel even re-runs of Dr. Who, let alone a creative series, and was responsible for canceling even the newer Battle Star Galactica in midst of it's 4th season when the story was really developing...and now, the even have ghost hunting this (Blair Witch moving camera around-making-one-want-to-heave), AND WRESTLING!!!??? On SciFI???? Same goes for MTV or the other one--they have gone this way of entertainment for walking meatheads! Sorry...kind of had a few synapse snap there in a rant!
So yes, have seen Dave doing the tambourine thing along with that beautiful voice!

Getting back to Radiohead for a moment, I don't know if you get Palladia (music cable channel, I guess its the new MTV). They've got a show on there right now as I type this, "Radiohead : King of Limbs". I can definitely relate to what you were saying about Thom Yorke's voice on certain tunes. Some of their tunes can get *REALLY* abstract....a little too much for my liking... and there were times I wanted to change the channel because of his singing. Yet on other songs he sings great. Odd.

Yeah, kind of like a cat being stepped-on with cleats! :rolleyes:

Have a listen to In Rainbows. A seriously deep record that is by far my favourite Radiohead album, and probably in the top ten all times for me. I really admire their ability to construct songs that shift and move through different sonic and emotional space without sounding disconnected or contrived.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nTFjVm9sTQ lovely clip also.