The circus of Depeche Mode fans throwing shoes during live sets: “There was a phase”
If there’s one thing to be learned from bands like Depeche Mode, it’s that fan phenomenon is something nobody can predict until it’s happening.
Then again, nothing to do with Depeche Mode could be considered conventional. After all, their accountant thought they’d only last three years, judging the usual time frame most groups their age enjoy before it all fizzles out. As we know, Depeche Mode exceeded that and then some, raking in the kinds of sales figures over decades that most bands can only dream of.
As with most bands that have lasted beyond the expected three-to-five-year run, Depeche Mode’s fans have made everything possible. So much of music marketing and consumption nowadays relies on siloes fans have established, to the point where musicians themselves let it guide much of what they do, from the entire aesthetics of an era to trends that occur organically during live sets.
With Depeche Mode, the fans are about as loyal as it gets. Countless people have tried to capture what this actually means, including just how expansive their loyal fanbase is. But few have come closer to how that came across in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams’ project backed by the band themselves, which sought to platform stories from fans from all over the world. The project wasn’t released immediately, but that didn’t stop Deller from shedding some pretty revealing light on why Depeche Mode’s fans are different from most.
“The fans appropriate the band, they do their own thing and have a laugh; it’s not clean, it’s messy and it’s chaotic,” he said. He also went into some of the reasons why it never made it to the screen, one being the usual fandom dramatics, whereby some fans come across as far too invested in the band to the point where it turns other fans off. A common occurrence, but one that likely factored into the idea that Our Hobby is Depeche Mode might not have pulled off the lighthearted fandom culture they were aiming for when they first started working on it.
But the band’s fans are, by and large, some of the most impassioned on the planet. And that comes across during their live sets, too. One largely considered to be the best-ever concert film, 101, made it feel the monumental moment it was because of the fans. Even D. A. Pennebaker felt compelled by their loyalty, later saying, “I found the audience very rapt; they were there for that band. Not any band would do.”
The fact that they’ve made their own microcosm that consists of lore beyond the parameters of the band itself means that sometimes something happens that nobody understands, except them. For instance, there was a period of time when, in their efforts to show their love, they’d throw shoes on stage during performances – a move no one in the band actually understood. This wasn’t restricted to just shoes, but the frequency of that as an item choice certainly didn’t go unnoticed.
“Yes, there was a phase,” Dave Gaham reflected to The Guardian back in 2015. He went on: “I don’t know what that was all about. I remember one particular gig in the early ’90s with Jane’s Addiction, where Perry Farrell caught a shoe smack in his fucking face.”
This energy has been there practically since day one. In 1982, Andy Fletcher said that they’ve moved beyond providing music to becoming “an event”. Their fans, he reflected, were already so loyal that when they made mistakes, “they don’t seem to care”. A blessing and a curse, though more a blessing, in the grand scheme of things. Especially considering just how much of a phenomenon themselves they became, beyond anything anybody will ever be able to comprehend.
